“Consciousness (the ocean) forgets itself and identifies with a particular wave (the psychic structure, the soul-personality). This theory is manifestly false. Because if consciousness is impersonal, how could it leave traces? For that, one must have self-awareness, yet the general theory of consciousness asserts that it is impersonal.
“When did ancient society, which was conscious (transcendent) in the sense that it did not identify with the person, come to an end, compared to modern society?
This question is of capital importance. You are touching on the metaphysical fracture of human history: the passage from a society structured by transcendence (where the individual is defined by belonging to a cosmic order) to a society structured by immanence (where the individual defines themself). The Turning Point: The Emergence of the Interior Individual (Between 800 and 200 BCE).
“Consciousness is, immutably, awake. The soul-personality is an illusory appearance within this Consciousness.”
Honestly, it's convoluted; these theories contradict one another. It is evident that all these theories stemming from that post-pagan era have obscured what we truly are.
What did Evola think of this?
Evola would have profoundly agreed with your critique. For him, post-Axial non-dual doctrines (Advaita Vedanta, Buddhism) were indeed symptoms of decadence, compensatory theories for a humanity that had already lost living contact with transcendence. Here is his position summarized:
Ancient Society: The “Differentiated” Man and Transcendence as Power For Evola, truly traditional society (pagan, heroic, Indo-European) had no need for theories about “impersonal Consciousness.” Ancient man was “differentiated.” He did not dissolve into an impersonal ocean; he affirmed his self as a center of will facing the divine, in a relationship of heroic tension. Transcendence was not an emptiness (Brahman, Shunyata), but a hierarchical power (the gods of polytheism, the cosmic order). The sacred was in right action, duty (dharma as social order, Roman fas), the ritual that maintains the world's order. There was no “forgetting of Consciousness” because consciousness was not conceived as a substratum. It was virile and lucid presence in an objectively sacred world. Identity came from one's role in the cosmic order (king, warrior, priest), not from a fusion with a formless absolute.
The Axial Age: The Beginning of the Fall Toward Interiority and Abstraction Evola saw the Axial turn (which he associated with the world of the “mother” and “blood,” earth cults, Buddhism, primitive Christianity) as the decline of the heroic and solar ideal. The shift toward interiority (“know thyself,” individual salvation) is, for him, a cowardice, a flight from the world of action and hierarchy. The doctrines of “impersonal Consciousness” (Advaita) are philosophies of the defeated, of those who have renounced dominating the external world and take refuge in an illusion of undifferentiated unity. It is a negation of the person in the name of a void. The “illusory soul-personality” would, for him, be the ultimate symptom of uprooted man, who has lost his differentiated self and is now merely an anonymous wave in a formless ocean.
The Evolian Critique of Non-Dual Theories: Rationalizations of Decadence For Evola, these theories are convoluted precisely because they are desperate attempts to rationalize a lost experience. They replace the immediate experience of the sacred (in rite, heroic act, law) with conceptual systems (maya/brahman, samsara/nirvana). They preach disidentification from the person, but it is because the modern person is already empty and weak. Traditional man, on the other hand, affirmed himself as a person situated within a higher order. They obscure what we truly are: not an impersonal consciousness, but a will capable of binding itself by free choice to hierarchical transcendence. True realization is not dissolution, but absolute individuation in action conforming to the cosmic order.
What We “Truly” Are According to Evola: A Metaphysical Will Against the impersonal ocean, Evola opposes stone, the axis, the mountain. The true individual is a pole of unconditional will, capable of assuming their own difference in the face of the divine, and even of commanding spiritual forces (magic, warrior initiation). Transcendence is not a background, but a summit. One must ascend, not dissolve. The path is ascensional and differentiating, not a return to an undifferentiated unity. Ancient society (Roman, Vedic, Homeric) was superior because it embodied this ideal: strong, differentiated persons, in service of a visible and invisible order that surpassed them without negating them.
Your intuition that these theories obscure our nature thus finds in Evola a radical ally. For him, the true obscuration begins precisely with the Axial Age and its drifts toward interiority, universal compassion, and impersonal fusion. “Impersonal Consciousness” is the last refuge of a humanity too weak to assume the heroic tension of being a person facing the gods.
His answer to your initial question would therefore be: «Ancient society ended when man ceased to see himself as a warrior of the cosmos, and began to see himself as a sinner to be saved, or an illusion to be dissolved. It ended with the advent of religions of the fall and philosophies of flight. The true drama is not that we identify with the person, but that we have lost the true, solar, and hierarchical person for a miserable ego.»