The Primordial Tradition was not always hidden. There was a time — remembered in every culture as the Golden Age — when the sacred was the open law of the world, when the temple stood at the center of civilization, and when the knowledge of the divine was not the province of specialists but the common inheritance of humanity.
That time ended. What followed was a long, slow catastrophe: the fragmentation and concealment of the one tradition, the forgetting of the ancient knowledge, and the descent of humanity into a condition of spiritual amnesia so profound that most people no longer even know they have forgotten anything.
This page traces that fall — not the metaphysical Fall of the soul's separation from God, but the historical fall: the loss of the tradition itself across the ages of the world.
The Stages of the Forgetting
The First Catastrophe: The Flood
Every ancient culture remembers a great deluge that destroyed the old world. In the Hebrew tradition, it is the Flood of Noah. In the Sumerian, the flood of Ziusudra. In the Greek, the deluge of Deucalion. In the Hindu, the flood from which Manu escapes.
Whatever its historical basis — and there are strong geological arguments for catastrophic flooding at the end of the last Ice Age — the Flood functions archetypally as the first great rupture. The antediluvian world, with its direct knowledge of the divine, is swept away. What survives does so only through the foresight of the Keepers — Noah, Enoch's pillars, the Apkallu — who preserved the essential teachings through the catastrophe.
After the Flood, the tradition must be reconstructed from fragments.
The Fragmentation Across Civilizations
As humanity spread across the earth and the post-diluvian civilizations arose — Sumer, Egypt, the Indus Valley, China — each preserved a portion of the original wisdom, but no single civilization retained the whole. The one tradition became many traditions. The same truths were expressed in different mythic languages, different symbolic systems, different ritual forms.
This fragmentation was not entirely a loss. Each civilization brought its own genius to the tradition, developing certain aspects with extraordinary depth — Egypt mastered the science of death and resurrection, Sumer the arts of kingship and cosmic drama, Persia the theology of light and darkness, India the cartography of consciousness. But the unity was lost. The branches no longer knew they were branches of one tree.
The Closing of the Mysteries
As the ages darkened further and the Bronze Age gave way to the Iron Age, as the Kali Yuga deepened the tradition was increasingly restricted to initiates. The mysteries were closed. What had once been the common knowledge of a spiritually literate civilization became the guarded secret of priesthoods and esoteric schools.
This was not arbitrary elitism. It was a response to a real danger: as the general level of consciousness declined, the sacred teachings became liable to misunderstanding, misuse, and profanation. The priests veiled the truth in symbol and allegory, requiring initiation as the price of admission. The exoteric religion became more and more degenerate and increasingly open to egoic distortions. The tradition went underground because the world was no longer capable of receiving it openly.
The Destruction of the Ancient World
The final blow came with the destruction of the ancient temple civilizations themselves:
- The burning of the Library of Alexandria — the greatest repository of ancient knowledge in the Western world — destroyed an incalculable treasure of sacred texts, philosophical works, and scientific treatises.
- The closing of the Eleusinian Mysteries by the Christian Emperor Theodosius in 392 CE ended nearly two thousand years of continuous initiatory practice.
- The suppression of the Egyptian temples under Roman and then Christian rule silenced the oldest priesthood on earth.
- The persecution of Gnostic and Hermetic communities by the institutional Church drove the mystical currents of Christianity underground.
- The destruction of the Druidic tradition by Roman conquest eliminated the oral repository of Celtic sacred knowledge.
By the end of the ancient world, the Primordial Tradition had been driven almost entirely underground. What survived did so in fragments — in alchemical manuscripts, in Kabbalistic oral transmission, in Sufi poetry, in the symbolic architecture of the cathedrals, in the ritual forms of Freemasonry.
The Materialist Turn
The final stage of the forgetting is the one we are still living through: the rise of scientific materialism, the reduction of reality to matter and mechanism, the systematic denial of the invisible world. This is not merely the loss of one tradition among many — it is the loss of the capacity to recognize tradition at all. When a civilization no longer believes in the existence of spirit, soul, or the sacred, the tradition becomes not just hidden but inconceivable.
This is the deepest point of the exile. The nadir.
And yet — the fire never went out. At every stage of the forgetting, guardians arose to preserve what they could. The Keepers of the Flame ensured that the tradition survived, however attenuated, however encoded, however far from its original fullness.
The alchemists preserved the Hermetic science in their laboratories and symbolic art. The Kabbalists preserved the oral Torah in secret transmission. The Templars, the Rosicrucians, and the Masons carried the temple mysteries into the modern world. The Romantic poets and the Transcendentalists kept alive the sense of the sacred in an increasingly materialist culture. And in the twentieth century, the tradition began to surface again — through the Theosophical movement, through the Golden Dawn, through Jung's rediscovery of alchemy, through the publication of the Nag Hammadi texts and the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Within the Royal Art Opus
The Great Forgetting is the historical counterpart of the Fall in the Arc of the Prince. Just as the Prince falls from the Kingdom into exile and amnesia, so humanity as a whole fell from the Golden Age into the Iron Age, from open communion with the divine into spiritual darkness. The Royal Art is the anamnesis — the remembering. It is the conscious act of recovering what was lost, reassembling what was scattered, and restoring the tradition to wholeness.