We end with the piece de resistance of the eonic effect, the genre of tragedy as a double eonic emergent (?!). Is its modern reappearance, Shakespeare, Racine, etc, in the early modern chance? We find once again the mystery of the stream and sequence sifting of myths for eonic transformation, here the charming Icelandic corpus with its ur-Hamlet. This one is elegant, but may set you off on the wild goose chase of the ‘tragic view of life’, which is not indicated at all (although worth considering for its history). Let us look again at our stream analysis of the Greeks:

An independent stream, e.g. Indo-European Greeks

A mideonic entry into a diffusion field, e.g. Mycenaeans

A transitional time-slice, e.g. the Archaic Greek period

A post-transitional oikoumene

Now transpose this to the modern transition:

An independent stream, e.g. European streams

A mideonic entry into a diffusion field, e.g. Medieval Europe

A transitional time-slice, e.g. the early modern

A post-transitional oikoumene

We noted the interior placement of Greek tragedy, and can easily find the similar literature in the Euro-stream, once again sand-banked inside the transition. But can we find stream entry materials corresponding to this? In fact, as noted, we can and the result is quite elegant, since it contains a buried ‘eonic myth’ of New Ages.

Consider again the idea of the ‘aesthetic state’. The basic idea is the misperception of the Greek transition and the honorable, but dangerous, ambition to reconstruct its vanished moment. We should note that the idea of constructing an aesthetic state would make a good plot for a tragedy!

Attempts to reconstruct the tragic genre are a distinct outcome of the modern transition itself, just at the divide, note the work of Hegel and Schiller, and are quite different from the real thing. Hegel wishes a repetition of the Greek mode, but rapidly sees this is not going to happen, and our system never quite repeats itself in the same way, although it almost seems to in this case. It proceeds here with dispatch and is done by the seventeenth century. Our distinction of eonic determination and free action is alone able to handle this subtle transition from ‘aesthetic state’ in the eonic mainline to ‘aesthetic state’ as deliberative free action, with disastrous results.

Note how Nietzsche and Wagner attempt to replicate an aesthetic movement to match the Greeks, but clearly, almost dumbfounded, we see once again the obvious post-divide deficit of eonic determination and free action. Wagner’s gesture is an honorable failure, of almost heroic proportions, fascinating, but he cannot manage to replicate the tragic idea or reproduce the scale of a transition (quite obviously, but what a gesture!). The whole experiment backfires, although such a gesture qualifies as prime eonic data in the transition from eonic evolution to history, in our sense. This example should convince us of the almost mathematical precision of the eonic mainline, and the way our consciousness can barely detect what it is doing. Needless to say the idea of an ‘aesthetic state’ is a bit artificial and tries to reduce a transition to questions of art, but the Greek Archaic is something, of course, much broader than this. That the final piece of this effort was Hitler’s attempt at the ‘aesthetic state’, we should conclude with a reminder that composing tragedies, as free action without eonic determination, can be a tragedy in action! Be wary of the ‘tragic view of life’. You may get your wish. It has fallen into the hands of devious Machiavellians, and we see the gross misuse of the ‘tragic view’ to perpetrate further horrors of history.

We have given the confusions of the Great Year a wide berth, but it is interesting to relent for one thought from the thesis of de Santillana and Von Duchend in Hamlet’s Mill. Twice the Indo-European myth structures give birth to a tragic genre as our stream cultures cross the eonic mainline. Yet it is unfathomable by what unconscious brilliance Shakespeare finds and transforms the ancient Icelandic tale of Amlothi into the quintessentially modern Hamlet. For the deepest archetype of cycles lies buried in the myth of the Maelstrom as Amlothi’s Mill, The Whirlpool :

Tis said, sang Snaebjorn, that far off, off yonder mere, the Nine Maids stir amain the host-cruel skerry-quern, they who in ages past ground Hamlet’s meal. The good chieftain furrows the hull’s lair with his ship’s peaked prow. Here the sea is called Amlothi’s Mill.[i]

Our system scans its stream entry materials, and here we see this bit of Icelandic pop out into the open. How strange our quite modern existentialist, Hamlet, should have a cyclical myth up his sleeve. But then he was a brilliant fellow, a version upgrade, the expected Fourth Richard. We are left, after our non-causal correlation of events with zones and periods, with a basic question still unresolved, near overwhelming evidence that historical transformation is eonic, the strange appearance nonetheless of an historical system of quite spectacular properties. We get an eerie glimpse behind the scenes as our system computes the potential of will and this echoes in the redemptive and tragic myths that arise in the Axial concert. The balance of our evidence passes now toward the threshold of ‘historical evolutionary system, type unknown’, but with the symptoms of mystery, in the ‘tick tick tick’ of our mysterious drumbeat. Perhaps it’s a problem in optics or Fourier analysis. But it does art also, before a politics of Richard the Fourth, after a Third. The rest is silence.

 It is remarkable therefore that the tragic genre reappears in the early modern. Our timing shows this is not chance. More we cannot say. Soon the idea of progress will be born. Once again, like the crocus in spring, the idea of tragedy comes first, flowers, and is gone.