John David Ebert | Introduction to Oswald Spengler (2001) 

I get it 👍 I might try to use that now

Hey, dude! Nice to see you here. Yeah, I've always been frustrated his clips are broken into 10 minute sections, which I think is an artifact of RU-vid's old upload limits. That and the audio quality can be easily cleaned up in Audacity. So over time I'm planning to take some of his series I've found most valuable, edit them together and reduce the background noise. Also as a backup in case his channel goes down or he takes it down for some reason.

@@thegoldenthread Spengler was spot on with so many predictions coming to fruition it's crazy. Have the Gebser talk by chance?

@@JAMESKOURTIDES I will, eventually.

@@thegoldenthread I would love to hear the Gebser talk, too. I came to Spengler after Gebser and am immensely fond of both.

No.

@@thegoldenthread ok

​@@thegoldenthreadholy shit based department???

Spengler lumps the Eastern Romans in with what he calls the Magian civilization, which I don't think is exactly a credit to his taxonomy. A little awareness of the later science of complex organic systems might have helped Spengler's model make more sense...wouldn't have to shoehorn in certain traits to certain 'species' of civilization, and instead could recognize complex exchanges, displacements, successions, etc. Still find him tremendously insightful. And worth entertaining his thoughts, even with respect to the supposedly Magian spirit of the Roman East...Pageau has noted repeatedly that Constantinople drew many of its architectural forms from the Persian margin to their east, which obviously fits less awkwardly into the 'Magian' scheme. This passage from The Decline of the West reflects on the difference between Magian & Faustian architecture, manifesting the soul of the respective civilizations. "Compare with the Faustian spirit of these [Northern] churches - almost wall-less, loftily vaulted, irradiated with many-colored light, aspiring from nave to choir - the Arabian (that is, the early Christian Byzantine) cupola church. The pendentive cupola, that seems to float on high above the basilica or the octagon, was indeed also a victory over the principle of natural gravity which the Classical expressed in architrave and column; it, too, was a defiance of architectural body, of 'exterior.' But the very absence of an exterior emphasizes the more the unbroken coherence of the wall that shuts in the Cavern and allows no look and no hope to emerge from it. An ingeniously confusing inter-penetration of spherical and polygonal forms; a load so placed upon a stone drum that it seems to hover weightless on high, yet closing the interior without outlet; all structural lines concealed; vague light admitted, through a small opening in the heart of the dome but only the more inexorably to emphasize the walling in - such are the characters that we see in the masterpieces of this art, S. Vitale in Ravenna, Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Where the Egyptian puts reliefs that with their flat planes studiously avoid any foreshortening suggestive of lateral depth, where the Gothic architects put their pictures of glass to draw in the world of space without, the Magian clothes his walls with sparkling, predominantly golden, mosaics and arabesques and so drowns his cavern in that unreal, fairytale light which for Northerners is always so seductive in Moorish art. The phenomenon of the great style, then, is an emanation from the essence of the Macrocosm, from the prime symbol of a great culture. No one who can appreciate the connotation of the word sufficiently to see that it designates not a form aggregate but a form history, will try to align the fragmentary and chaotic art utterances of primitive mankind with the comprehensive certainty of a style that consistently develops over centuries. Only the art of great Cultures, the art that has ceased to be only art and has begun to be an effective unit of expression and significance, possesses style."

This could be why he didn't really have much to say about Russia.