“A thousand years before Christ northern invaders had entered Italy, subdued and mingled with its inhabitants, borrowed civilization from them, and with them, through eight centuries, had built a new civilization. Four hundred years after Christ the process was repeated; the wheel of history came full turn; the beginning and the end were the same. But the end was always a beginning.”—Will Durant, The Age of Faith

  I’ve used this quote before and stumbling upon it again I just couldn’t help myself.

  “But the end was always a beginning,” Durant wisely wrote. 

  But he overlooked something… something to do with ends and beginnings. 

  You see, when he refers to the northern invaders who had poured down into Italy a thousand years before Christ he is writing of the Hallstatt Iron Age Celts. They were a northern ‘Indo-Aryan’ offshoot who like the Achaeans (think Trojan War) and then Dorians (think Apollo) in Greece and the Vedic Aryans in India flooded down from the wildlands stretching across the incredibly vast untamed Eurasian land mass. China too was inundated and fertilized again and again by hardy patriarchal warrior peoples tempered in the wilds of the north. 

  “Four hundred years after Christ the process was repeated,” continues Durant. Here he is referring to the Angles and the Saxons, the Franks and the Allemanni and numerous other warrior tribes including the later Normans and Vikings that poured over a collapsing Greco-Roman world. 

  He is referring to us in short, and the ‘beginning’ he is talking about is our Western Civilization that has spread across the entire world and has now after five hundred years of expansion begun its protracted retreat. 

  Only… this time is different. 

  The Mongols and then the Turks from say 1200 to 1600 AD were the very last of the northern waves. If there is to be a new ‘beginning’ it will be solely up to us, meaning all humanity. There are no untamed energetic prodigiously fecund northern peoples anymore. The wildlands bounding ‘civilization’ have all been mapped, domesticated, even citified. 

  A New Age is upon us, whether we wish it or not. 

  Durant’s as well as a great many historians’ ‘wheel of history’ is breaking down. The facile allusion doesn’t work anymore. 

  We are entering a new phase…

  Are we ready….?