If truth be told, the publication of The Mothers and Olympian Virility only met some of the goals I had envisaged. As I already mentioned, the publicai ion of this book contributed to reveal the lack of interest of the dominant culture in Italy for any such studies of origins, myth and spiritual history. While other people, in the years that followed the publication of the book, chose to discuss the work of Bachofen, they did so without any emphasis on Bachofen’s specific worldview and approach to myth - the very elements I had emphasised in my own work, and sought to apply to a broader context.
In the same period, for Longancsi, I prepared a translation of Oswald Spengler’s German book The Decline of the West. In my introduction to this volume, 1 discussed the relevance and limits of Spengler’s book, which had been received worldwide with a great deal of interest at the time of its first publication. Spengler is one of those writers who rejected progressive and historicist whims, and showed awareness of the degenerate nature of the limes in which we are living. In my introduction to The Decline of the West, I remarked that one of the greatest merits of Spengler was that of having contributed to the overcoming of the linear and evolutionary view of history, thus disclosing a vast, new intellectual horizon. The negative counterpart to this is Spengler’s embrace of pluralism and historical relativism. According to Spengler, there is no "civilisation’ in general: only many distinct and dis¬ continuous civilisations, each of which constitutes a closed unit that evolves like a biological organism following various stages: birth, youth, maturity, inevitable decline. This cycle, Spengler argues, is experienced by each and every civilisation following the same pattern. By contrast, I argued that a similar description is too simplistic, and that it only applies to the external and manifest side of each civilisation. Spenglerian morphology, I suggested, provides more of a psychological than a philosophical or metaphysical analy sis of civilisations, and focuses on much misleading and secondary evidence Yet, in my introduction to The Decline of the West, I also acknowledged dial what truly matters is to be aware of the essential duality behind the plurality of civilisations, which is to say: of the opposition between traditional and ‘modern’ civilisations (or between traditional and ‘modern’ phases within a given civilisation). This dualism - which I had already examined in Revolt Against the Modern World - is reflected in Spengler’s well-known contrast between Kultur and Zivilisation : where the first term describes the aspects or phases of a qualitative, organic, differentiated and living civilisation, and the latter, those of a rationalistic, urban, mechanistic, shapeless and dispirited one. While Spengler’s description of the physiognomy of Zivilisation (the degenerate, final phase of each cycle) appears rather convincing, his analysis of what defines Kultur — what I would term a traditional civilisation — proves partial and inadequate on account of both its lack of appropriate doctrinal points of reference, and its adherence to the very myths born of a Zivilisation (our own).
