Journey to discover the founding myths of the warrior and deeply religious nature of the people who over the centuries have traveled, occupied and inhabited the vast geographical area of โโTuran.
image: Scythian warriors depicted in Persepolis, Iran
The Roman Empire, born under the sign of the wolf (animal consecrated to the god Mars), defeated the Dacians which, in turn, were called "Sons of wolves" and whose territory (between the Danube and the Carpathians), according to the Romanian traditionalist Vasile Lovinescu (known under the pseudonym of Geticus through which he signed the series of articles on Hyperborean dacha in the Guenonians Traditional Studies), would have been the seat of a spiritual center of Hyperborean origin. In turn, the Turkic Mongols, according to the German naturalized Dutch scholar Herman Wirth, would be the direct descendants of the so-called "White Eskimos": groups of Hyperboreans who entered Eurasia from the east, bringing a purely initiatory shamanic tradition that facilitated contact with the esoteric forms of other traditions [2].
At this point, a clarification is necessary. The assimilation of the word Turan to the Turkish-Mongolian peoples it is not etymologically correct. It is connected to what is reported in the Shahnameh of Firdusi (the book of kings of the Iranian tradition). This monumental work was built in a historical context in which the Turanian space (the area of โโthe Central Asian steppes) it had already been occupied by the Turkish-Mongolian tribes. However, the Turanic world, in ancient times, was represented by the nomadic tribes and Indo-European warriors who tamed the horse and built the wheel and the chariot. The original Turan-Iran confrontation was simply a clash within the same Indo-European world between its nomadic component and the sedentarized one.
Only with the migrations of the Huns towards the west, masterfully described by Franz Altheim, the turanic space was occupied by ethnoi post-Indo-Europeans but with a similar nomadic culture. An analogy also found by the historian of religions Mircea Eliade who was able to study and deepen the similarities in the cultural and religious aspects between the ancient Iranians and the Turkish-Mongols. One of the characteristics common to these several ethnoi he was a deeply warrior nature. The Indo-European peoples in particular, which in the Turanian steppes had their area of โโorigin and diffusion, participated in a common system of beliefs and rituals relating to military initiation. The work ofย Georges Dumezil showed that there are traces of military brotherhoods with a religious-initiatory character both in pre-Zoroastrian Iranian cultures and in Vedic texts. Both the Christian Templars and the Ottoman Janissaries (linked to the Bektashi Sufi doctrine) can be counted as more recent examples of this tradition.
Now, among the Indo-European peoples of antiquity, military initiation consisted mainly of transfiguration of young warriors into wild beasts [3]. The would-be warrior denied his humanity forย turn into god of war and his potential combat death was simply interpreted as reuniting with the eternal. The warrior initiation rite was in fact already a detachment from the earthly dimension. Transforming himself into a beast, the young warrior emerged from himself and from his own time, becoming contemporary with the archetypal myth of the "carnivorous" ancestor, model, at the same time, of both the hunter and the invincible warrior. Reliving the myth, the young warrior repeated the primordial event at the origin of the lineage. Hunting, warfare and conquest were intrinsically part of this dynamic imbued with religiosity. These, in fact, were experienced as spiritual acts through which to found a new world. By chasing a sacred animal, for example, he discovered and conquered a new territory. The meaning of the initiatory-military rite at the foundation of the Indo-European warrior caste was that of โdying to obtain an undeathโ, that is, immortality. Among the ancestors of the Achaemenids there was a family known as saka haumavarka: those who turn into wolves as a result of the ecstasy caused byHaomaย [4]ย (drink of immortality associated with both the Vedic Soma and the blood of Christ contained in the Holy Grail of Celtic-Christian traditions).
True beliefs in lycanthropy were attested among the ancient Iranians, Indians, Greeks and Germans. The Greco-Latin authors called the nomadic tribes that inhabited the Iranian-Turanian space as Hyrcanoi (the wolves). L'Hyrcania it extended in the area around the Caspian Sea and was also called in Iranian Varkana (the land of wolves) [5]. A name that reflected both extremely archaic religious conceptions and the "living as wolves" (of robbery) of these people [6]. Names of the genus were extremely common throughout the area of โโdiffusion of the Indo-European peoples. The name of the Samnite tribe of gods Lucanians would derive from lycos (wolf). While their neighbors called each other Irpinia, from hirpus, Samnite name of the wolf. Names that derive from the ritual tradition, common to the Italic people, of Ver Sacrum (holy spring) [7].
This rite was celebrated in situations of contingent difficulty when, due to famine or drought, to avoid further problems, the community made the decision to expel the new generation, who had become adults, from its territory. This, however, was not left to itself. At the right moment, Mars took her under his tutelage and, showing himself under the guise of an animal consecrated to him (once again the wolf, but also the woodpecker as in the case of Picenia), he guided them towards a new territory to be conquered even at the cost of subduing the previous inhabitants [8]. A dynamic not unlike the one told inOghuznameh: the epic tale of the Turkish people who, following the gray wolf (incarnation of the guiding spirit Borteรงine), reached Anatolia. Without considering the myth underlying the migration of the Huns to the west: the pursuit of a sacred deer far beyond the Meozia swamps and as far as the lands of the Scythians.
Strabo reports that too the Scythians had the name of "come on"(Wolves). And a tradition reported by Hesychius of Miletus informs us that daos was the Phrygian name of the wolf. The Scythians, an Indo-European people with a deep knightly-warrior character originally from the Eurasian steppes, occupied the lands that in the past were gods Cimmerians, those who for Homer lived wrapped in clouds and fog. Typical of the Scythians was the use of intoxicating drinks during religious rites as well as the burial mounds known as "Kurgan". Another characteristic common to the Indo-European peoples was in fact the belief that stable abodes were the prerogative of the dead and not of the living. The Swiss anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen he underlined how in ancient times people built more for the dead than for the living. If for them there are enough houses in deciduous wood, eternity required a stone dwelling, a symbol of what is timeless.
One of the legends underlying the trifunctional scheme typical of archaic Indo-European societies, well described by the aforementioned Dumรฉzil, also belongs to the Scythians. According to this legend, one day, three divine gifts would descend from heaven: a cup, symbol of the priestly caste; an ax, symbol of the warrior caste; and a plow, symbol of the last caste of farmers / producers [9]. THE Sarmatians, great horse breeders who arrived after the Scythians to occupy the space between Eastern Europe and Central Asia, are still present today in Ossetia which was occupied by one of their tribes; that of Orange. The Alans had an alternating relationship with the Romans. And in the moment of greatest extension of the Empire they allied themselves with the Dacians against Trajan.
Strabo also reports that the name of the Dacians would also derive from the term "come on". The banner of the warlike people of the Dacians was indeed a wolf-headed dragon. An effigy that is found described in theย Shahnameh as a Persian military symbol and that, as reported Mircea eliade, appears depicted on a Turkestan mural. However, the most valiant among the inhabitants of Thrace, according to Herodotus, were theย Getae. According to the information gathered by the historian through the Greeks of the Hellespont and Pontus, they considered themselves immortal and believed that the one who disappeared was reunited in eternity with their godย Zalmoxis. A conception that reflects, once more, the purely โPlatonicโ character, understood in the sense of domination of the eternal over time and of the super-sensitive over the sensitive, of the Indo-European civilization in all its forms and components.
According to the Greek sources, spoiled by that classical prejudice that led the Greeks to give a Hellenic paternity to cultures sometimes much older than theirs, despite Plato was not afraid to bring back to the Timaeus that the Egyptians considered the Greeks as children, this Zalmoxis would have been a slave of Pythagoras from whom he would have learned the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. Doctrine that he would later spread in Thrace and especially among the Geto-Dacians. These, after a four-year concealment in an underground dwelling and after believing in his death, at the time of the reappearance of Zalmoxis, would be convinced of the divine character of the former slave of Pythagoras. However, Zalmoxis, despite what was reported by Greek sources, would have lived well before Pythagoras [10].
Now, regardless of the temporal collocation of the myth of Zalmoxis, it is important to underline that in this case there is a variant of another fundamental theme common to almost all Eurasian traditions: the theme of the concealment of the sacred [11] which has its brightest expression in Shiite Islam. The concealment and the epiphany of the divine have a profound initiatory sense. The retreat into an underground dwelling, a cave, represents the first act of an initiation rite. According to Tertullian, Pythagoras himself retired for seven years in an underground hiding place. While Porfirio, in his Life of Pythagoras, reports that the philosopher of Samos was initiated into the mysteries of Zeus in Crete where he descended into the cave of the Ida where he remained there for twenty-seven days. According to Diogenes, Laertius descended there in the company of Epimenides who fell asleep in that same cave at the moment of noon remaining in a condition of timeless existence for fifty-seven years (three times the metonio cycle of nineteen years, the largest Greek unit of time) from which came out unchanged in body but expert in divination and ecstatic techniques [12].
Armenian traditions speak of a cave where he used to seclude meher (Miter) and from which he only came out once a year. Hands, in turn, he announced that he would go up to heaven and stay there for a year before hiding inside a cave. The myth of Zalmoxis has profoundly marked the culture of the peoples of the entire Balkan peninsula. He was associated with Dionysus, with Orpheus and considered as a mythical prototype of the shaman. In fact, Zalmoxis was also associated with Abari [13]: priest of Apollo, originally from the country of the Hyperboreans, linked to that symbol of the arrow which had enormous importance both in the culture of the Scythians and in the Siberian shamanic traditions.
The theme of concealment connected to the myth of Zalmoxis has known a notable diffusion in the Carpathian-Danube area. The people of the gods settled along the eastern arc of the Carpathians Szekler (Siculi, Ciculi or Secleri) which traces its origins to the descent of the Huns towards Europe. This small fraction of the nomadic people who remained on European soil continued for centuries to nourish the hope for a future return, with an expressly messianic character, of Prince Csaba, the youngest of the sons of Attila, the Hun king protagonist of the myth of Gladius Dei (the divine sword whose discovery and possession would be an auspice of victory and universal sovereignty) [14]. Also in this region there is a widespread belief that the Moldavian voivodeย Stephen the Great (1433-1504) still lives in a condition of concealment of profound eschatological value. Vasile Lovinescu interpreted this myth as a manifestation of an initiatory spiritual center through the analysis of an icon of the Archangel Michael of the seventeenth century at which the voivode would be found, lying down and wrapped in a cloak inside an underground cavity. [15].
La cave, like the mountain, it has a precise symbolic value. Both are axial and polar symbols. Height corresponds to depth. The cave is more connected to the initiatory rite when the truth is hidden from the majority of men. The Pole withdraws from the top of the mountain towards the interior and the celestial world becomes an underground world. The symbol of the mountain, second Renรฉ Guรฉnon, is the triangle with the tip pointing up, while the symbol of the cave is the triangle with the tip pointing down. This, in turn, is also the symbol of the cup from which to drink the drink of immortality that is conquered precisely through the initiatory rite [16].
The symbols of the cave and the mountain have marked the imagination of the peoples of the Eurasian continent so much that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the thinker of the fulfillment of Western metaphysics, could not refrain from inserting them in his work, with a profound allegorical character, Thus spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche's Zarathustra lived his solitude in a cave and in the mountains. A loneliness to be understood not as segregation but as an authentic appropriation of one's self while awaiting awakening. Here, in the instant of noon, a sensitive image of the most luminous eternity, man is at the center of his itinerary between the animal and the superman and celebrates his departure in the evening as his highest hope since that is the way towards a new morning. It is in the brightest afternoon that Zarathustra sees for the first time his "guiding animals": the eagle (symbol of pride) and the snake (symbol of prudence).
Noon He affirmed Martin Heidegger interpreting Nietzsche's thought - is the luminous center in the history of humanity, a moment of transition in the serene light of eternity, where the sky is deep, and where before noon and after noon, they collide with each other and encounter the decisionย [17]. This decision is the choice between a life that denies itself and the possibility of a new beginning. And this new beginning is inseparable from the essential observation that only eternity is always absolutely new.
Note:
[1]ย A. Dugin, Siberiain Secret Russia, Editions under the banner of Veltro, Electrolibri series, Parma 2012.
[2]ย Ibidem.
[3]ย See M. Maculotti,ย Metamorphosis and ritual battles in the myth and folklore of the Eurasian populations, on AXISmundi.
[4]ย M. Eliade, From Zalmoxis to Genghis Khan, Astrolabio-Ubaldini Editore, Rome 1975, p. 12.
[5]ย Ibid.
[6]ย The initiatory period to which the young Spartans were subjected for a year was also associated with "living like wolves". During this period the young man had to live avoiding any kind of human contact.
[7]ย See A. Modena Altieri,ย Lupercalia: the cathartic celebrations of Februa, on AXISmundi.
[8]ย The condition of the exiles and fugitives was also associated with "living like wolves". Not surprisingly, Romulus had an asylum for exiles and fugitives built on the Capitol which Servius dedicated to the wolf-god Lucoris.
[9]ย See.ย A. Piscitelli, Cimmerians, Scythians and Sarmatians: the Iranian peoples of ancient Eurasia, on AXISmundi.
[10]ย From Zalmoxis to Genghis Khan, op. cit., pp. 27-28. On Zalmoxis, see also M. Maculotti,ย Deities of the Underworld, the Afterlife and gods Mysteries, on AXISmundi.
[11]ย See D. Perra,ย The myth of concealment in Eurasian traditions, on AXISmundi.
[12]ย K. Kerenyi, Myths and mysteries, Einaudi Editore, Turin 1950, p. 413. See also M. Maculotti (cur.), K. Kerenyi: The mythology of atemporal existence in ancient Sardinia, on AXISmundi.
[13]ย See M. Maculotti (cur.),ย Ioan P. Culianu: the Hyperborean shamanism of ancient Greece, on AXISmundi.
[14]ย C. Mutti, Imperium. Epiphanies of the Idea of โโEmpire, Effepi, Genoa 2005, cap. II Flagellum dei, Servus dei, pp. 49-52.
[15]ย See in this regard V. Lovinescu, Rex absconditus, Editions under the banner of Veltro, Electrolibri series, Parma 2012.
[16]ย R. Guรฉnon, Symbols of sacred science, Adelphi Edizioni, Milan 1975, pp. 190-191.
[17]ย M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Adelphi Edizioni, Milan 1994, pp. 282-283.
Very interesting
Very nice article
I've been following this site for a few months. Well done. Excellent indeed.
Greetings
Heartfelt thanks Marco
MM