Having ① a clannish [herb] (Polish coat of arms) on which a red field grounds a golden snake in the form of an analemma, and ② played a team sport which required players (against our desires) to be numbered on their jersey, which in our team’s case were also red, and so I chose ∞, it is with great interest that i read (again) :

Magus, Arabian. “The Analemma of History: A Spenglerian Philosophy of Universal History.” Spenglerian Musings, 9 August 2026

The use of inline symbols is a treat. Perhaps some magic is afoot.

Spenglerian Musings is dedicated to working with or through the thought of a most peculiar historian of doom, Oswald Spengler. Of whom I only have a passing relationship, and then in passing by I cannot help but keep staring at the car crash.

Now I have said all that before in different forms, repeated here as a introduction. Now I am just going to dive into various comments which the Magus’ post drives me to write.

Axial Age

My why we should blog opened with Karl Jaspers, originator of the term Axial Age for that period when iron debased the bronze age poetries, with the more common steel pens of literacy, and gave us all those great names and their thoughts, but who wrote nothing down because that skill was shared by their students and disciples and scribes at western gates. My take on Jaspers there was not about the term Axial age. My start with him was some accident.
Comment: yes I agree that we are in a similar time.

Oswald Spengler, historian of doom to the Addams Family

I have some family photos from 1930s Poland in which I can see cast members of the TV show, that style would have been close to those creatives designing the Gothic sensibility. One great uncle in a uniform even looks in bearing and expression a lot like Spengler.
Comment: I think this illustrates why I see Spengler’s work as a car crash. This is an emotional connection.

Spiral Time

Yep.

Kant and the trajectory read from fossilised footprints

Noumenal realm or collective un/conscious structures ?
I suspect that as the world does not care about these, but nods in appreciation that we make an effort to do them, and to undo them. I’ll just say that this Baroque tapestry is a bit over-wrought.
Comment: Now I do this purple prose too, so that’s not a criticism. My critical vector here is that the trajectory reads a story of our own invention, but with some world-sense we can develop a taphonomy of worlding (our worlding and selfing is somewhat kosmosphasic or world-blind, particularly when we self the world so emphatically and come up with things like god the maker as creator or the collective unconscious !)

Oswald Spengler, prophet of the parochial

He is critical of Enlightenment as a proto-emo writer, and the enlightenment’s claims of said enlightenment and progress (a dour romantic??). And that any such success that could be read as progress is quite localised and/or specific to civilisations in a certain place (or soil). As such, he champions a parochial sense of values and effort, and indicates that universalist claims (history for all peoples and all times) are no such thing, it’s just some local fashion. And yes there are other local fashions and those which are honest about this are in a golden summer, but just remember winter is coming. I.E. the ( I guess early Spengler) universalises the parochial, and that civilisations are incommensurate and incommunicative-able, while criticising the universalist claims of others as thus parochial. Go figure.
Comment:It’s as if he spent his whole life in a low dungeon of the Holy Roman Empire’s Germanic greatness. Must look up if he ever travelled anywhere. If he did make to Amerika to notarise the Addams family bible surely this face of doom would have been at least a bit sunburnt.

Spiral

The spiral dance arises when a Janus-faced god dances with others, the trajectories are then collection of vectors that carry us into eddies, parochially universal, and universally parochial. It’s the effort silly.

Big history

Yep. See [Grand strategy: the view from Oregon]

Comment: while empires care about their own universals, wise people see a interactive geography as a world not unto itself, despite the claims of the parochial, even the empire is a universal parish. A soul-centric thing is a worlding of the self doing the selfsame thing among others also selfing the world.

Maybe we should not grant to empire and its unbounded claims the same category as actual universalist claims (as some post-colonialisms definitely do).

Comment 2: interesting how the soteriological trajectory of (e.g. Christian) salvation methodologies of the soul can produce both the parish of the soul and once given to everyone (granted by the Empire’s City of God??) the universalist claims (Oikumene) become so beloved by empire or ‘civilisations‘.

BTW ‘trajectory’ as a collection of vectors, is my replacement for structures and unconscious whatsities.

geographic determinism

And yet geography also educates and widens experience beyond most parochial constraints of experience, empire is not the only outcome of worlding the self in travel or trade.

“the world” – has become a little star amongst millions of solar systems.” -Oswald Spengler

Comment: in my project, the world of selfing the world among others doing the selfsame thing (a soul-centric dance within world-centric acknowledgement), the world is all of that because, the world does not care about outcomes (parochial or universal) but that we make an effort. These efforts include both, say, space exploration and its critics, literacy and it’s phallogocentric critics, Aixial age (see what I did with a typo) and its refusniks. And it is thus with these efforts the world is maintained, a tool for everyone regardless of parish, station or civilisatoin, because, to repeat, the world as tool or otherwise does not care about the outcomes, even if we do, but that in caring we make an effort which hones that tool.

The result is a layer of different historical planes that presuppose one another, just like how a study of the history of the tree-world, as Spengler argued, would require an understanding of the geological stratification of the earth. But the mere connection between the two phenomena becomes one of mere facts, and with a lack of focus on the being and destiny of said phenomenon.

A taphonomy of worlding (rather than of history, history is just another outcome of worlding) would investigate all this, and the lack of focus need not then throw such pieces of animal grammar, like being… into the gap of our efforts, such sacrifices are not required.

As a personal project, the Analemma of History hopes to pave the way towards new speculative philosophies of history

Worlding is an analemma of the dance of survival that selects our efforts.

modernity

Like cyborgs, and the poor, modernity has always been with us, but make your efforts known, for even if you are wrong you will help maintain the world regardless of the parish, regardless of the universe.

Substack.com crosspost.