C H A P T E R 1
T H E F O U R A G E S O F M A N K I N D
«They lived like gods without sorrow of heart… when they died, it was as though
they were overcome with sleep…
The fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly... while they dwelt in
ease and peace upon their lands, rich in flocks...»
(Hesiod: Works and Days)
In
strict sense, the “myth” of the Four Ages of the World is assumed to have
originated in Greece around the eighteenth century BC, back in the days when the
country was plunged into desolation by the Doric people’s invasion. Around that
time the poet Hesiod, probably influenced by obscure legends about past
cataclysms and the happier times that preceded them, is said to have set to the
task of composing, in the solitude of the countryside, his Works and Days,
the most intriguing of the two famous poems attributed to him – the other being
his famous Theogony.
In the former, Hesiod
relates how, up until his time, the human race had lived four main ages – the
Golden Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age, with an additional
age, that of the Heroes, apparently inserted between the Bronze and Iron ages
only to accommodate the great heroes of the Iliad.
Within the same
tradition but many centuries later, the Latin poet Ovid (43 BC – 18 AD), in his
Metamorphoses, additionally alludes to the deluge that ensued at the end
of the Iron Age and from which were spared Deucalion and Pyrrha, who gave birth
to a new humanity.
So far the
classical version. In a broader sense, however, the tradition would have an
older, possibly Oriental origin. According to scholars, it would have originated
in the primitive peoples’ longing for a natural life, which coupled with
considerations about the recurrence and regularity of the disasters that afflict
the world, as well as the speculation inspired in such quaternary cycles as the
four yearly seasons, four phases of the Moon, four stages in the life of man,
and so on, would have crystallized in the “myth” of the Four Ages of Mankind
brought to light by Hesiod.
As to the place of
origin itself, some are inclined to believe it was India, considering the
manifest identity between the four ages of the Greek tradition and the
descending cycle of four yugas of the Hindustan tradition.
In this connection,
however, we would still need to determine whether this is also the origin of
many other myths in which the notion of four ages is equally prominent, such as
the Maya and Inca and many other traditions; and even of all other “myths of
return” where – irrespective of the number of ages – there stands out the
universal, most ancient belief in the “fall” of man, a tradition that evokes the
decline and alienation of mankind from a golden, paradisiacal condition to one
of total degradation – usually ending in a catastrophic deluge – a most familiar
and characteristic version of which can be read in the first pages of the Bible,
from the “fall” of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from Paradise to the events
that led to the Flood.
Curiously enough,
these multiple coincidences seem to have gone unnoticed to the majority of the
Western scholars – not to mention the layman, the common man of our times. So it
comes as no surprise that the notion of four descending ages, or for that matter
of any number of them, may sound unintelligible and absurd to the latter; and
not out of sheer ignorance, for he is sure to have read those biblical passages,
but because he has from his childhood been instilled the idea, exactly opposite,
of a sustained progress of mankind throughout history – and also because it has
always been confronted and fought by the Church. For example Origen the
patriarch of Alexandria (185 – 254 AC), a man of deeply-rooted Gnosticism and
seemingly familiar with the idea that the floods and conflagrations caused by
planetary influences can be calculated beforehand, wrote in Against Celso:
“We do not refer the flood or the burning of the world to the planetary cycles
and periods, but we declare that their cause is the widespread prevalence of
evil and its eradication by a deluge or conflagration.”
(Actually Origen assumed that the worlds follow one another in time just
like an equal number of schools in which decadent beings are reeducated, a
process which would have started with the “fall” of man, which was then followed
by the material world.) And in turn Saint Augustine, in the 12th book
of his City of God, questions the doctrine of cycles as a whole based on the
futility of an eternal wheel of creations and the absurdity of an endless death
of the Logos.1
But let us take a
look into the tradition of the Four Ages in its most familiar version, that of
the Greek poet Hesiod. According to him, in the Golden Age man lived in an ideal
condition of perfection and justice. An eternal spring prevailed, and so there
were no extremes of heat and cold. The fields, always green and flowery, yielded
spontaneously golden corn throughout the year and from the trees, perennially
vigorous, hung delicious, mature fruits, so that men were oblivious of hard
work.
There was no evil and
injustice, envy and greed, crime and depravation, war and hatred. Life was an
endless carnival and men were perfectly happy at the feet of their gods, who in
exchange for their blessings received veneration and obedience. Yet evil manages
to creep into this paradise and men turn their backs to the gods. They pay no
attention to their precepts, praise and sacrifice cease: the Golden Age draws to
an end.
The Silver Age, which
follows the Golden Age, reflects, in the view of some authors, the matriarchal
society of remote times when women were the centre of society and men worked the
fields on their side; it would, at any rate, signal a time when humanity was
beginning to focus on agriculture. In the Greek myth, it is in this age that men
begin to differentiate the seasons: to the spring, previously eternal and now
limited to short months, there follows a burning sun that dries and withers
everything on its passage. After the heat dissipates, pastures turn yellowish
and die, and the tree tops drop all their leaves. Heavy snow finally falls
covering the Earth with desolation, while freezing winds relentlessly yell on
the wilderness. No longer do the fields give food for free. To survive, men
learn to do painful work, and to shelter from the stormy weather they have to
build their own houses, as the caves in which they dwelled during the Golden Age
have become uninhabitable for them. Youth, previously eternal, ends; happiness
belongs to but a few; death arrives unannounced.
And since
mankind has gone on degrading, Zeus, from the Olympus, resolves to exterminate
it. The Earth is left silent and empty.
Let us now look into
the next or Bronze Age. According to the specialists, it probably corresponds to
the earliest Aegean conquerors whose last representatives were the warrior kings
from Mycenae, and would therefore signal the start of the first great
civilizations of Greece, including the Cretan and Mycenaean. In the Greek story,
when the gods get bored for lack of prayers or insults from men, they opt for
creating a new race, courageous and strong, a race of bronze, which will
populate the world and reverence them. Their trade will be war, Ares (Mars)
their main god, fighting their highest aspiration. These are times of war, of
incessant clash of swords, of wild struggle. Yet the tributes expected from men
do not materialize, and the gods resolve to wipe this race away from the memory
of the world.
Finally, the Iron Age
would match the period of supremacy of the Doric people – the Greek society that
begins towards the twelfth century BC, who already were familiar with iron and
destroyed the Mycenae civilization. According to Hesiod, the men of this time
were the worst that inhabited the Earth. Force, ambition, and excessive violence
are omnipresent now. A new metal emerges stronger than all others, iron, useful
to forge weapons and open the earth to remove the treasures hidden in it by the
gods – gold and silver, still more precious than iron, and the origin of all
dissension. Ambition for wealth and power respects nothing. No honor, honesty,
loyalty exist anymore: lying, violence and cunning are the only means used by
men to achieve their goals. The Earth is divided and marked; everyone wants
their part, and all attack one another to increase their possessions. Brutal
wars collect thousands of lives: the world is covered by blood. Fear spreads
everywhere; no one is safe; anguish precludes sleep. Division prevails: husband
and wife betray each other, brothers raise their hands against their brother,
sons kill their own father... From Mount Olympus, Zeus, beset with wrath,
resolves to do away with suffering by exterminating all that lives and breathes
upon the world. And the deluge comes to cleanse the Earth from such
abomination...
So far a
description of the ages. Let us now see the next logical step, i.e. determine
their lengths. In his Timaeus, Plato asserts that the seven planets, once
the time to balance their respective speeds has elapsed, return to their point
of departure. This revolution is a “perfect year” and, considering the great
significance it has for different traditions, it must somehow influence the
total length of a cycle of four ages. In turn Cicero, while recognizing the
difficulty in estimating the length of this vast celestial period, rates it as
12,954 common years, although the precise length appears to be 12,960 years (180
x 72) as certain concurring data suggest. And in effect, this latter period,
also called “great year” by both Greeks and Persians, is the exact half of the
great astronomical cycle known as the precession of equinoxes (or “Zodiacal
Year”), the length of which has been traditionally calculated as 25,920 common
years (360 x 72) and, as is widely known, is the one during which the projection
of the Earth’s axis, responding to the motions of rotation and oscillation or
“wobbling” of the planet along its orbit, describes a full circle at a rate of one
degree every 72 years and returns to the exact point of departure in relation to
the Zodiac constellations so that the equinoctial point, one of the two times of
the year in which the night and the day are of identical length, turns out to be the
same as it was at the beginning of the period.
Another consequence
of the slow circular motion of the Earth axis projection is that it will
successively point to a different Pole Star in the course of those 25,920 years.
Fig. 1 – The cycle of precession of the equinoxes
Although this cycle
is said to have been discovered in 139 BC by the Greek astronomer Hipparchus,
some authors believe the first to calculate its duration as 25,920 common years
were the ancient Egyptians, who would have come by this figure by matching the
equinox with the same Zodiacal sign during 2,160 years; and still others say the
first to know about it were the old Brahmins of India, which knowledge would
have been spread to Iran and Sumer and then to Egypt, where it was picked up by
the Greek Hipparchus. Be it as it may, the Egyptians, according to the hermetic
tradition, were trying to establish the length of the Divine Year, which was
then fixed as approximately 168 Zodiacal years (or “creation days,” as they used
to call them). This itself is extremely suggestive, as 168 times 25,920 is
4’354,560 common years, virtually the length of a Hindu cycle of four yugas
(4’320,000 common years), with a difference of “only” 34,560 years; however,
since the consideration of such a remarkable coincidence would take too long,
for the moment
I will just elaborate a bit on the Egyptian Divine Year.
Like most of the old
traditional cultures, the ancient Egyptians are known to have conceived a
universe built on mysterious numerical relationships in which the various orders
of magnitude matched each other both quantitatively and qualitatively. In this
way, they believed that the Divine Year of 168 zodiacal years consisted of three
“divine times of work” each divided in 56 zodiacal years (168 : 3); each “divine
time of work” consisted of four “seminal seasons” of 14 zodiacal years each (56
: 4); each “seminal season” consisted of two “divine conception weeks” –
equivalent to Day and Night – of seven zodiacal years each (2 : 2); and each
“divine conception week” consisted of seven “creation days” of 25,920 common
years each (7 : 7), this being, as we have just seen, the duration of a cycle of
precession of the equinoxes or Zodiacal Year. Thus was established a first
analogy between the Zodiacal Year and a “creation day.”
Additionally, they
divided the “creation day” of 25,920 common years in 12 “differential hours” –
equivalent to 12 zodiacal months – of 2,160 common years each (25,920 : 12),
i.e. the period during which the equinox coincides with the same sign of the
Zodiac.
Now, since the ascent
of every new sign is considered to be escorted by events that are catastrophic
or in some other way crucial to the Earth, this “differential hour” or zodiacal
month of 2,160 common years has received particular attention from the hermetic
tradition. For example, it is said that when the Age of Leo was coming to an end
and the one of Cancer was about to arrive, some 10,000 years ago, there took
place the downfall of Atlantis. In turn, the shift from Cancer to Gemini would
have witnessed the passage of an enormous comet that shook up the Earth. The
shift from Gemini to Taurus, about 6,000 years ago, is supposed to have marked
the start of new civilizations and the beginning of the worship of the bull –
and the goat – at several places of the world: the ox Apis in Egypt, the winged
bulls in Babylon and Assyria, as well as holidays associated to the spring and
procreation. In turn, the arrival of Aries, about 4,000 years ago, is known to
have concurred with the appearance of the paschal lamb, a symbol of Judaism.
Finally, the shift from Aries to Pisces would have heralded the appearance and
propagation of Christianity, the main symbol of which, at least at its
beginning, was, as we know, the fish.
Be it as it may, as a
“differential hour” within the “creative day” of 25,920 common years, and
continuing with the hourly analogy, the Egyptians divided the period of 2,160
years into 60 “minutes” of 36 common years each (2,160 : 60) and the “minute” of
36 common years into 36 “specific tasks” of one common year each (36 : 36), thus
establishing two important hourly analogies by matching, first, the common hour
with the “zodiacal month”; and secondly, each minute of that “hour” with a cycle
of 36 common years, equivalent to a half of a degree of the zodiac circle.
Finally, they divided the “specific task” or common year into seven “creative
aptitudes” of 52 weeks and fraction each (365 : 7) and the “creative aptitude”
into seven “human virtues” of seven days and fraction each (52: 7), which
established a correspondence between the common week and the Divine Year of 168
Zodiacal Years and fundamentally, although in this case by resorting to
imperfect divisions and fractions, between the common week and the seven
“creation days” of 25,920 common years each.
Whatever the
practical value of these latter calculations, it is clear that the ancient
Egyptians, as well as the Greeks, Persian and Chaldeans, dispensed a most
special relevance to this cycle of 25,920 years (or its half of 12,960 years),
which would very likely represent the length of a full cycle of four ages. If
so, what would be the length of each age?
According to the
hermetic tradition, the “Adamic race,” which we belong to, would have evolved
through four ages of 6,480 years each and would now be nearing the end of the
full cycle. These four ages, naturally equivalent to the same number of
“zodiacal seasons” of three “zodiacal months” each, would have been marked by
four key events: (I) Formation, from the start of the Zodiacal Year to the Sin
or “fall down” of man; (II) Sin, from the expulsion from the Garden of Eden to
Tribulation, which began with the Flood; (III) Tribulation, from the Flood to
Redemption; and IV) Redemption, consummated by Christ. Thus, while the sun draws
about to enter the first degrees of the Aquarius constellation – after
retrograding past the Taurus, Aries and Pisces constellations – the Zodiacal
Year would be about to complete its last cycle, and the “Adamic race” that of
its redemption and deliverance.
I would like to make
some remarks here. These periods or “seasons” – the description of which
certainly sounds a little bit fanciful – which some traditions automatically
round up as six thousand years, clearly correspond to a more general, and
therefore more extensive, cycle than the one made up by the ages depicted by
Hesiod, who was clearly talking about more local and contingent periods and
about cycles already concluded in his time. On the other hand, they strongly
crash, both in their magnitude and by their equal lengths, with the four
yugas of the Hindu tradition, which are of an incredible elaboration and
whose lengths, proportional to the scale 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 10, are amazingly
1’728.000, 1’296.000, 864,000 and 432,000 common years respectively, equaling a
total length of 4’320,000 years for the full cycle. Incidentally, it is most
significant that this scale, although reversed, is the same as the Pythagorean
Tetraktys expressed as 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10. Let me briefly address the
latter.
Among the Greeks who
exposed on the doctrine of cosmic cycles – great philosophers like Anaximander,
Empedocle, Heraclitus, and subsequently Plato and the Stoics – there clearly
stands out Pythagoras, whose intellectual interests were primarily mathematic.
It is said that his most transcendental discovery, which would signify a sort of
disclosure of the nature of the universe, was that certain intervals of the
musical scale can be arithmetically expressed as relationships among the numbers
1, 2, 3 and 4, which combined sum up 10, a symbol of the Supreme. Originated –
according to legend – in the pitch of the sounds issued by an anvil on which
hammers of different sizes were beating, this discovery demonstrated the
existence of an inherent order in the nature of sound and, moreover, a
mathematical organization in the formation of the universe, of whose structure,
harmonious and beautiful as music itself, time participates as a key element.
Now, in times of
Pythagoras, as well as later on, the Greek scholars used to make study journeys
to various countries, mainly Egypt and Mesopotamia, and even beyond, to India
itself, considered throughout history as the ultimate goal of the lovers of
knowledge. It is uncertain whether Pythagoras undertook such journey; but if he
did, it could explain the real origin of his famous Tetraktys, the “Hindu
version” of which I will deal with in the next chapter.
NOTE
1
In
this way the Church, almost from its inception, would systematically oppose the
doctrine of the Four Ages – among other reasons, because it affected the
Augustinian view of a history divided in three main parts or periods (in which
men live, first without laws; then under the laws, and finally in the time of
grace). Then in the course of the centuries, and in midst of a virtual
conspiracy of silence, the timeless doctrine gradually fell into oblivion as in
the West at least, and contrarily to what almost all the ancient traditions had
taught, the notion of a linear time indefinitely extending into the future
gathered strength.
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