Brief excursus along the historical, philosophical and religious path through which the theme of the concealment of the divine in the great Eurasian space developed: a theme that once again demonstrates the primordial spiritual unity of this vast inner continent
di Daniel Perra
article published on The Dissident Intellectual
and republished here with notes
image: Nicholas Roerich
Turan is a very ancient word. It is the ancient Iranian name with which the geographical space of Central Asia was identified. The term, of clear Indo-European etymological origin, indicates in the Avesta the "Land of the Tur": that is, of the nomadic people of the Tuirya, the enemy par excellence of the Iranians, sedentary and sedentary. Only with it Shahnameh of Firdusi the term βturaniciβ will begin to refer to the Turkish peoples; although there was no real connection between the Turanian culture and the culture of the ancient Turks.
In fact, Iranism and Turanism represent two different interpretations of Logos Indo-European. Turan is the homeland of the Indo-European nomadic culture. It is the eternal center from which the peoples who inhabit this immense spatial dimension have spread. Iran, on the other hand, is the land inhabited by tribes from the same Turanian space which, over time, have become sedentary, losing the original nomadic and pastoral characteristic of the Indo-European culture.Β [1].
Ibn Khaldun, in his monumental work al-Muqadimah, while referring mainly to the peoples of the Arabian Peninsula, showed how the nomadic populations, more disposed to acts of courage and a humble lifestyle far from luxury than sedentary ones, lived an existential condition of sharing in eternity and dimension of the sacred.
The existential space of the Indo-European peoples was in fact characterized by a spiritual conception of the world based on the interdependence between man and nature and between the physical and metaphysical order. In this dimension, death and evil did not exist. Man was a product of the Light that emanates from the Eternal and death was conceived only as a return to the original Light. The soul descended to earth only with a view to future ascension. Everything was verticality and hierarchy. A verticality widely expressed both in the tumulus tombs of the Kurgan civilization, well described and told by the Lithuanian archaeologist and linguist Marija Gimbutas, which in the same trifunctional scheme (Kings / Priests - Warriors - Peasants) through which Georges Dumezil described traditional Indo-European society. In this perspective, evil was essentially understood as a distance from good; as a rejection of the hierarchical order or as an exit from the caste system as regards strictly Hinduism identified by RenΓ© GuΓ©non as the tradition most similar to the primordial one.
Unlike the "turanic" vision of the world as an earthly hypostasis, extraneous to evil, of the eternal source of light, the Iranian cosmovision was based on a dualistic principle in which light and darkness, good and evil, contended for dominion over the man and the world. Therefore, evil not only existed and threatened man and the world with its flattery but, what is even more surprising, it, albeit temporarily, could even prevail over good.
It is through the Logos Iranian philosophical and religious (a real metaphysics of light) that time takes on the value of waiting and hope in the resurrection; in the definitive triumph of good over evil. The Zoroastrian myth of Saoshyant: he who in the final cosmic redemption will lead the hosts of good in the battle against the forces of evil and will lead to the renewal of the world. And this messianic-eschatological perspective will not just influence Jewish religious thought in the period of the Babylonian captivity.
And always along the Iranian existential horizon the idea developed, then the resumption of Christianity through the concept of Katekhon, of the Empire as a restraining power. The King / Priest, by tracing the boundaries and consecrating the space under his authority, re-establishes the relationship between physical and metaphysical order threatened by the appearance of evil in the world. In fact, the King, in the pre-Islamic Iranian tradition, belonged to the caste of the Magi and was at the head of it as endowed, by virtue of his royal solar glory, with a supernatural intellect. A characteristic that will unite him to the Imams of Shiism, political and religious leaders at the same time, capable of understanding what really is and not only of mere and illusory sensible forms.
These men belong to that metaphysical order whose center is found in the upper region of Being and which by its nature is opposed to the lower region of becoming. Their concealment represents not only an escape from the destiny of a world intrinsically pervaded by evil, but also the passage to immortal nature; to the sphere of intangibility which, as overworld, is the beginning and true life. They are subjects partakers of the divine, not subjects-exiles like mortal men. With their concealment, due to the momentary victory of evil, it is heaven itself that hides itself until the moment of final redemption.
The myth of the concealment of the divine has been common to several Eurasian traditions, from the West to the East, since ancient times. Zeus was born and lived the first moments of his life in diktheon andron of Crete, fed by the nymph Amalthea in goat form, so that she could escape the devouring fury of her father Kronos; titanic god of time and fertility, son of Uranus and Gaea, terrified by the prophecy that saw his throne shake at the hands of his own son. And in that same cave, a timeless sacred center within which no one else could be born or die there, the young man Epimenides, in search of his flocks, fell asleep waking up fifty-seven years later, unchanged in physical appearance by the subterranean timeless experienceΒ [2].
The idea of ββthe cave as a hiding place, as a place of existence out of time and superhuman events, clearly returns in the Christian era in the story of the seven sleepers of Ephesus. A story also reported by Jacopo de Varazze in his Caption Aurea, and to which Louis Massignon dedicated a particular and passionate study also by virtue of the important role given to this event in the Koranic sura of the cave.
During the persecutions of Christians under the Roman Emperor Decius (approximately 250 AD), seven young Ephesians were called upon to renounce their Christian faith before a court. Refusing to worship pagan idols, they were condemned but temporarily left free. So the seven boys, in order to avoid arrest, decided to hide inside a cave on Mount Celion from which only one of them, disguised as a beggar, came and went to get food. However, discovered by the authorities, the seven were walled up alive inside the cave in which they fell asleep awaiting death. They were awakened by some shepherds who broke through the wall with the aim of making room for a sheepfold. More than two hundred years had passed and the sleeping seven realized that Christianity had become the official religion of the Empire. They perished on the same day as their awakening and Emperor Theodosius II, to whom they appeared in a dream asking to remain in the cave until the day of the resurrection, had their tomb covered with golden stonesΒ [3].Β
The story, although the number of sleepers is not specified, is taken up in the Koran and is presented as a testimony of the future resurrection of the bodies in the sura al-Kahf (the cave) which played a crucial role in the doctrinal elaboration of Islamic eschatology. In fact, in addition to the story of the sleepers of Ephesus, this surah tells the story of Dhu'l al-Qarnayn (the Bicorne, identified with Alexander the Great and with the idea of ββhis "two cycles" and his "two ages"): a divinely inspired ruler who created an Empire, ruled through divine law and locked up within a wall the evil people of Gog and Magog. He is "the one who holds" and his imperial institution is catechonical. But how Dhu'l al-Qarnayn himself states:
βWhen the day promised by my Lord comes, He will grind the wall to dust, and my Lord's promise is Truth. "
an important Hadith reports that the Prophet Muhammad had a vision of a crack opening inside the wall and warned the Arabs against a great evil that was approaching. While another Hadith tells how God, at the end of time, will open the wall and let the evil hordes bring destruction everywhere. These "will drink the waters of the lake of Tiberias and dry it up, then they will drink the waters of the Tigris and the Euphrates". Finally, God will annihilate these hordes and wipe them off the face of the earth.
But the Sura of the cave is fundamental because the figure of also appears in it al-Khidr: guiding spirit who, after helping Moses as he was preparing to reach the βconfluir of two seasβ, will accompany him to discover the right path and the inscrutability of the divine will. Al-Khidr he returns again as Alexander the Great's companion in the land of darkness in search of the source of life. A journey that only he will be able to complete by condemning Alexander to remain trapped in a destiny of mortalityΒ [4].
Now, to emphasize once again the central role of the sura, another one Hadith narrates that the real reasons forconcealment of the twelfth Imam (the lord of time - Sahib al-Zaman) Muhammad al-Mahdi, who disappeared not by chance in a cave near Samarra in 874 AD (the year of the beginning of the minor concealment - ghaybat al-sughra - prelude to the great concealment - ghaybat al-kubra - startedΒ in 940), will be revealed only at the moment of his reappearance, as well as the reasons for the apparent ambiguous behavior of al-Khidr they were not immediately revealed to Moses.
The theme of concealment is taken up in the West in the Ghibelline tradition: what Julius Evola defined as a "splendid spring of Europe cut short in the bud"Β [5]. The myth, in this case, is linked to the "divine lineage" of the Hohenstaufen. Frederick I BarbarossaIn fact, he would continue to live wrapped in a "magical sleep" together with his knights while waiting to go back down to the valley from the symbolic Mount Kiffhauser, when the crows finish circling the mountain and the Dry Tree sprouts again, to fight the decisive battle that will bring about a new age of the world. In turn, Frederick II (as an expression of a power that curbed the advent of the Antichrist) also received, at the hands of the Priest Gianni, a ring that gave him the gift of invisibility. It's the same stupor mundi, during his trip to the Holy Land, he came into contact with Old Man of the Mountain (shaykhu'l-giabal) and that Ismaili sect of assassins whose name, according to the historian Pierre Ponsoye, derives from the Arabic word ass (guardian) and would call to their role as custodians of a traditional spiritual centerΒ [6].
Tree and mountain are two axial symbols of fundamental importance. According to some legends too Alexander the Great would have disappeared inside a mountain and then reappeared at the end of time. And a mountain was the background for the appearance of the Mahdi at Jamkaran in 984 AD, on a desert plain a few kilometers from Qom, through which the descendant of the Prophet, clothed in divine light, ordered an old man of the place to build a place of prayer. At the same time, the tree of heaven is associated with the Empire due to the natural relationship that exists between any true imperial manifestation and the primordial tradition. The "dry" attribute (the "displaced plant" seen by Dante in the earthly paradise) is linked to a period of decline that must be overcomeΒ [7].
This period of decline is what the German philosopher did Martin Heidegger, much closer to our times, he defined "The age of the world": an era marked by the inauthenticity of existence in which the divine has hidden itself due to the absence or perversion of a metaphysical vision of the universe. "The Imam went into hiding - stated the great Iranian and admirer and scholar of Heidegger, Henry Corbin - because men have become unable to see it " [8]. And the task of every faithful Shiite, as Imam Khomeyni never tired of repeating, is to be a co-worker of the hidden Imam in order to prepare his Parousia.
The Vedic tradition teaches that man must pursue the divine, the hidden light, the occult sun or Agni (divinity-divine act representing the forces of light) which is sometimes said to hide in its refugeΒ [9].Β The sacred number of seven is associated with Agni: in fact seven are the mothers and sisters and the rays of divine light which surround him. But the number seven is sacred to all Eurasian traditions. Seven are the gifts of the Holy Spirit in Christianity; seven are the seals whose breaking will announce the end of the world in the Apocalypse of John; seven are the arms of the Hebrew candlestick (menorah); seven are the fundamental attributes of Allah and seven are the heavens created by him and the words of the first sura of the Koran as well as the degrees of the esoteric interpretations of the Book; seven are the Imams of the Ismaili tradition which rejects the emphasis placed on the pleroma of twelve by the Imamites.
Such the "hunt" for Agni must be the search / preparation for the return of the Imam (mahdaviat). A true Shiite faithful, therefore, cannot remain idle waiting for the demonstration of the MahdiΒ [10]. This brief sentence contains the basic idea of ββthe lessons on the Islamic government and on the vicariate of the jurisconsult that marked the path and the triumph of that Iranian Revolution so deeply opposed by the apparatuses of Western nihilism.
Like Iran, it is only by rediscovering the intrinsic value of its roots and traditions that Europe can truly renew itself and overcome the profound state of decadence in which it floats as it waits to sink definitively into the abyss. As Heidegger once again stated [11]:
"The gods who once were there will return only at the right time, that is, when men, as far as they are concerned, will have turned to the right place and at the right time Β»
Note:
[1]Β A. Dugin, Introduction to Noomahia. Lecture III - Logos of Indo-European Civilization, its http://www.geopolitica.ru.
[2]Β In this regard, see K. KerΓ©nyi, Myths and Mysteries, Bollati - Boringheri, Turin 2010, as well as The mythology of timeless existence in ancient Sardinia, on AXISmundi.
[3] In this regard, see L. Massignon, Islamic apocalypse. The seven sleepers of Ephesus, Mimesis, Milan 2012.
[4]Β C. Mutti, Imperium. Epiphanies of the Idea of ββEmpire, Effepi, Genoa 2005, p. 38.
[5]Β J. Evola, Revolt against the modern world, Edizioni Mediterranee, Rome 1998, p. 350.
[6]Β C. Mutti, Introduction to A. De Stefano, The imperial ideal of Frederick II, Editions under the banner of Veltro, Parma 1978, pp. 19-24.
[7]Β Ibid.
[8] H. Corbin, The hidden Imam, SE Editions, Milan 2008, p. 68.
[9]Β AK Coomaraswamy, The philosophy of Christian and oriental art, Abscondita, Milan 2005, p. 140.Β
[10]Β R. Khomeini, The Islamic government, The Circle, Rimini 2007, p. 25.
[11]Β M. Heidegger, Holzwege - Wandering paths in the forest, Bompiani, Milan 2014, p. 627.
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