In the morphological model of great historical cultures, the emergence of cultures can be divided into three stages. The time has come to discuss the first of these stages in more detail. I have called it the Golden Age. But why? Gold is a symbol that evokes the living Nature: the shining locks of blond hair, the wheat field waving in the wind, and the brilliance of the sunrise. If we are to believe Giambattista Vico, this metal ultimately became a symbol of wealth and splendor because its color and glow are reminiscent of grain stored in granaries – one of the most ancient forms of wealth.

In common parlance, the term Golden Age often refers to a bygone, “good” era that someone likes and mourns from afar.¹ However, this is not my case. I am using this term for an era with more or less specific characteristics regardless of whether these characteristics please me and us here today or not.

A hard childhood

Of the specific characteristics mentioned, perhaps the most important one has already been defined in connection with the work of Giambattista Vico: the golden age is the era of figurative thinking. From the sensory experiences that flood the human mind at every moment, a fundamentally new worldview begins to be formed. This is how young children start to experience the world. From previously unseen and completely unknown light and sound phenomena, smells, tastes, and the characteristics of things touched, the persons of mother and father, siblings, food, blanket, water, day, night, and everything else slowly comes together. The process is largely unconscious. It emerges from the inherited and never understood layers of our mind, and we cannot fully control or regulate it.

During the figurative development of a child’s thinking, the little person in question receives a lot of support from his parents, his family, and his wider community. They can give ready-made answers to most everyday questions, and in addition – perhaps more importantly – they try to protect the children from any experience that would unnecessarily upset their forming world. In the case of cultures, however, the situation is different: instead of external support, we often encounter oppression from the outside. In this case too, ready-made answers often exist (the older neighboring culture is keen to provide them), but the constructive, helpful intention  is lacking. It is so lacking that in some cases we encounter exactly the opposite. The neighboring, advanced, urban civilization tends to spread false and harmful propaganda in the ignorant society of the nascent new culture due to sheer material interests. This is where we should actually look for the essence of the initial great crisis. Wars, waves of migration, and revolutions are merely symptoms of the chaos that reigns in minds. However, amidst the futile suffering, something certain and true shines forth – at first very faintly, then more and more vividly.

It is almost impossible to accurately convey this phenomenon in our modern Iron Age language. Words fail us. For us today, certain and true things are those that we can verify with our senses or our measuring instruments. Furthermore, they cannot be refuted by logical reasoning. However, we have already completely discredited the fidelity of our senses using our rational mind, therefore strictly speaking, no true and certain statement can exist. The only conceivable solution is to suspend rational thinking. Logical doubt must be forced into a dark and abandoned chamber somewhere deep in our soul with the door locked. Moreover, a constant guard must be placed next to the door to prevent any of it from leaking out even through the keyhole.

In the Golden Age, faith in the world – for that is what we are talking about, of course – appears completely different, because the communities suffering on the periphery, experiencing a great crisis, are too weak to contain the destructive doubt. The consciousness of futility breaks out of its cell, tears off its chains and cuts the throats of its guards. However, its rule does not last forever, because ultimately it also doubts itself. The complete catastrophe sweeps away the capacity for advanced logical thinking. It mercilessly maims, weakens or exterminates all the groups of people present that are capable of such thinking. The impoverished, fragmented, uneducated and disorganized societies that remain provide the breeding ground for the development of a new high culture. In the midst of adversity, the survivors abandon the search for truth, the reasoning, and retreat to the simplest possible way of life. This state of being and mind is beyond barbarism. It takes on an animalistic character, just as small children often resemble curious and untamed animals. Then and only then does it become possible for the meme of the great culture – or, as Spengler calls it: its prime symbol – to be found and embraced by this primitive people.

The newborn faith

The Golden Age is the age of faith, of wonder that is directed at the world with overwhelming power, a faith almost completely ignorant and blind. One can only guess its content, and cannot access the details yet. There is no tangible evidence, no irrefutable traces, only the unconscious and involuntary, and therefore directly real experience. Like the unicorn living in the fairy-tale forests, we can see it from the corner of our eye, but if we turn our head, it disappears. We can discover its trail, but if we crouch down, a breeze blows it away. We can smell it, but in an instant it vanishes into nothingness as soon as we notice it. According to legend, this wonderful creature can be trapped in only one way: hunters place a virgin girl in its path, because the animal cannot resist innocence. It will stop next to the virgin and rest in her hands. Legends also say that powder ground from the magical horn of a unicorn cures all diseases and makes poisoned water drinkable again.

By recalling these legends, we can perhaps get closer to the way Golden Age people saw the world. Any of us can imagine what it would be like to live in a fairy tale, walking through the forests in the footsteps of the elusive, yet surely present, and most valuable unicorn. At the same time, this world of legends also captures the difficulties of interpreting and analyzing the Golden Age of cultures. The people who lived at that time leave behind incomplete and confused memories, which most often testify to brutal and savage conditions. However, if we allow ourselves to be influenced by religious texts, heroic epics, and ancient temples, we can still sense something of what was comfort in this terrible world. Even in the thousand-year-old black bones dug up in the darkest, most terrifying forest, the magic of the unicorn remains.²

The primary pattern of the Golden Age figuration will be exactly what is most expected of social primates: people personify the phenomena they perceive around them. Man, gazing into an unknown world, feels that the unknown world looks back at him and that he can relate to this world as he does to his fellows, whom he more or less already knows. Gods, demons, nymphs, goblins, elves, and other magical beings surround him as inalienable parts and shapers of reality. This cultural era encapsulates the idea of ​​the living and acting world and the everyday knowledge about it in emotionally charged stories, from which a rich religious mythology can be compiled.

In today’s everyday life, perhaps the closest we come to this state of mind is when we want to interpret and analyze a beautifully resonant poem. Although not everyone enjoys school literature classes, most of us from time to time come across poems or song lyrics that win our favor and capture our imagination. The play with language, the rhymes and rhythms are nice and entertaining, but the meaning of the text written in an ornate form is often not self-evident – perhaps partly due to the limitations of the form. It is even more difficult to grasp what it is that we actually like about the poem in question.

Poem analysis is always on shaky ground. It is easy to slip into the discussion of what the author was thinking when he wrote this or that line. According to the old anecdote, the Hungarian poet János Arany heard such a treatise about one of his works and briefly said: “gondolta a fene” (approximately „what the heck”). I am convinced that this snort is not against a specific misunderstanding of the specific poem, but against the desecration of the essence of poetry. Poetic creation is only partly a creative act. The author does not create the poem out of nothing, he only gives it form, after having somehow received from somewhere the meaning that is the basis of the work. We call this reception inspiration. With their sensitive inner antenna, poets access a mysterious signal that no one else notices. This is where their pride comes from, and because of this they often dance on the verge of ridiculousness or madness. János Arany protested not because he had a different idea in mind in the specific case, and his purpose with the given line was different, but because the analysis in question reduced his art to mere industry, propaganda. If we want to communicate something out of interest, and we put it into an effective form, that is propaganda. If we follow our inspiration, that is poetry, even without ornate forms.³

In other words: in the analysis of poetry we must feel the inspiration on which the poem is based. And likewise: in the examination of the Golden Age we must tune in to the inspiration that lies behind the figurative images created then. Oswald Spengler summarized this endeavor in the concept of the prime symbol. In the age of faith, everyone is a poet, hence we must become one as well if we want to understand them. With this attitude, there is little chance of misunderstanding anything important, because the message of the Golden Age poets is not worked out in detail. There is no ready-made solution, and therefore – if we bridge the linguistic differences – it is very difficult to miss the solution, just as in the case of any poetic analysis.

In this era, the newly born culture shapes its sensory experiences into images and symbols that capture the imagination of the authors and their audience, evoke emotions, and stimulate action. They are summative, synthesizing, to the point that the original experiences dissolve in them. They pay little attention to the connection between cause and effect, and they tend to juxtapose logically contradictory phenomena if they are symbolically related. Jesus Christ told his future apostles that “I will make you fishers of men” for the world seemed to them as vague, dark, and dangerous as the depths of the sea. Saving the people floundering here is undoubtedly a task similar to catching fish from the sea. Why didn’t anyone ask about the consequences? Real fish would die in such a situation, and the fishermen would sell or eat them. Nobody asked about this because it does not belong to the symbol of dangerous and unpredictable water. And anyway, the malicious destruction of poetic images is exactly the activity of the uninspired person.

1. A similar nostalgic interpretation occurs in widely used historical terms. For example, in the Middle East, the centuries starting from 800 AD are also commonly referred to as the “Golden Age of Islam.” In the model here, this clearly falls on the Iron Age of the Crossroads culture. ↩︎
2. The association of the symbol of the unicorn with the Golden Age is based on a blog post by John Michael Greer: https://www.ecosophia.net/blogs-and-essays/the-well-of-galabes/the-unicorn-the-phoenix-and-the-dragon/ (access on 30 May 2025) ↩︎
3. Whether we like modern free verse poetry – that lacks any formal constraints – or not, it  illustrates this statement very well. ↩︎