Devolution

All traditions are unanimous in not teaching evolution but devolution. This is one of the most important ways in which modern man differs from his ancestors. The modern worldview is in fact in total opposition to the traditional one. Modern man sees history as formed by evolution and progress. From primordial soup to beast, from beast to man and from man to god. This idea of progress encompasses all areas of existence, not just technological but moral and social as well, and even religious. This idea derives the higher from the lower and ultimately implies that there is no Absolute and that everything is changeable. In this sense, it is a prime example of inversion. All traditions on the other hand, looked back upon the past with the remembrance of a certain lost state of paradise. All the ancients knew that mankind had regressed from a previously more perfect state and had experienced some kind of Fall.

“From originally higher states, beings have stooped to states increasingly conditioned by human, mortal and contingent elements. This involutive process allegedly began in a very distant past.” ¹Evola, Revolt against the Modern World, – p. 177.

Basically, the traditional worldview is entropic. It sees downward movement, degeneration from a more perfect state instead of evolutionary. The material plane of manifestation is entropic by definition; whatever manifests in the material world from the unseen world cannot but degenerate and eventually die. Interestingly, this means that the Christian worldview is cyclical as well, since Christian eschatology has always expected the world to be remade as well at the end of time, with the creation of new heavens and a new earth. That future manifestation must inevitably decline as well.²The Nicene Creed declares: Et exspécto resurrectiónem mortuórum, et vitam ventúri sǽculi. Amen. I expect the resurrection fo the dead and the “life of the coming world/age.” The world saeculum is definitely tied to the material world, in both space and time, like its Greek and Hebrew counterparts αἰών and עולם.

• The Biblical Garden of Eden story speaks for itself. In the beginning Adam (man) walked with God in the garden, then after the Fall mankind was shut out of paradise and condemned to work the earth.
• In Sumerian myth, the Creation took place in the land of Dilmun, which bears striking parallels to the imagery of the biblical Garden of Eden.³Source: Myth of Enki and Ninhursag, online translation here.
• In classical, i.e. Greek and Roman, times the myth of the past golden age was well known. The earliest attestation is Hesiod, and the most well-known writer is Ovid, whose work was standard literature in European education for centuries.Hesiod, Works and Days, – ll. 106-201; Ovid, Metamorphoses – ll. 89-⁴Hesiod, Works and Days, – ll. 106-201; Ovid, Metamorphoses – ll. 89-150
• Though the Mesoamerican myth of the five suns does not explicitly contain the theme of devolution, the concept does occur in the Popol Vuh, where the early ancestors of man were wise, all-knowing and far-seeing, until the gods  “blew mist into their eyes, which clouded their sight as when a mirror is breathed upon. Their eyes were covered and they could see only what was close, only that was clear to them.”⁵Popol Vuh – 3.II. Link here (pdf)