The Eternal Man and the Cosmic Cycles

The specificity of man between evolutionary hypothesis and involutionary perspective: immersed in the cycles of the Cosmos, yet perennially equal to himself.


di Michael Ruzzai
updated version of the article "The Original Man and the Beginning of the Paradise Age", originally published on Heretics Mind
supplementary notesย (*) curated by Marco Maculotti

In the previous article [The end of the Primordial Age and the Fall of Man[ "Integral traditionalism" (also defined "Perennialism") such as Julius Evola and Renรฉ Guenon, but also names such as Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, Frithjof Schuon, Titus Burckhardt, partly Mircea Eliade and others.ย The qualifying perspective of this current of thought - it is useful to remember - assumes as an essential starting point the fact that at the beginning a cognitive legacy was manifested, precisely a "Primordial Tradition", of essentially non-human origin, that our ancestors they haven't invented either built, but essentially received from forces and reality divine to them transcendent.

If knowledge and the deepest sources of metaphysical and cosmological truths - one Philosophy perennis et universalisย - therefore they do not represent anything humanly accumulated, it is easy to understand how another of the most characterizing elements of traditionalist thought is the decisive rejection of the evolutionist view - biological and cultural at the same time - at least in its most common meaning, that is that of a general process that from a "minus" leads to a "plus", or from a "bottom" proceeds to "the top" ( contrary to the true etymological meaning of the term which comes from the Latin I will be back, that is, unroll, unwind and that therefore it should rather express the unfolding of the possibilities of existence which are already all contained - without proceeding, step by step, one from the other - in the totality of Being); but these are all concepts that will be explored in a future article (โ€œWhich Evolution?โ€).ย The traditionalist perspective therefore invites us to consider man in a radically different light compared to the Darwinian one, with reflections that can involve several levels.

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Peculiarity and "genericity" of Man

First of all, that interesting line of thought that can be traced back to the distant past has distant roots Protagoras, Platonic dialogue in which the myth of the creation of man by the two Titans brothers is narrated, Prometheus and Epimetheus: the latter creates the different animal species by equipping them with various defense organs, but inadvertently leaves the man naked and helpless. An aspect, in hindsight, quite incongruous if interpreted from the evolutionist point of view of a continuous improvement and of a man seen as the "pinnacle" of the biological world.

Similar themes were subsequently touched upon by Pico della Mirandola, Herder and Schopenhauer up to the more recent "philosophical anthropology" of Max Scheler and Arnold Gehlen: man appears to you as a being morphologically detached from the surrounding environment (with therefore few holds to offer to natural selection), then "Lacking", "lacking" and "unskilled", as opposed to the animal that is intrinsically conditioned to it. A morphological genericity which, however, on the other hand, Alain de Benoist also remembers accompanied by the possession of characteristics and attitudes typical of very different species and which make man a unique subject for such varied abilities, a fan possessed like no one. other living form.

Animality therefore stands out as intrinsically "more homogeneous" for the neurobiologist Alain Prochiantz, but also consequently more limited and partial, leading to a singular concordance of very different thinkers such as Meister Eckhart - who framed animality as a partial reality and man instead as a complete microcrocosm - and Konrad Lorenz, who pointed out that there is practically no living species that can, in terms of physical performance, realize the diversity of exercise that even the average man, by virtue of his "non-specialization", is capable of . Therefore the "environment-biology" couple is not able to provide man with univocal behavioral data and therefore, notes the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, it is evident how man lives in a real "information gap": a gap which, consequently, must be filled by drawing from other sources (ie, in ethnological terms, from its "culture").ย 

It is therefore above all from the point of view of a "closure" of a loss of the fullness of the existing omnidirectional and "totipotential" possibilities ab origine (a "primitivism" that is to be interpreted in a completely different perspective than that of an evolutionary backwardness) that the mechanism of morphological specialization of a given form should be reread; reducing the scale, this occurs for example in an organ with initial more generic characteristics through the hypertrophy of some functions at the expense of others (which according to โ€œDollo's lawโ€ is an irreversible fact). The data of the morphological specialization can therefore be read in a completely different way with respect to Darwinist views: if Giorgio Manzi notes that in the class of mammals there are groupings (for example cetaceans or bats) that present decidedly peculiar characters compared to primates, in the amidst the latter, according to the biologist Max Westenhofer, the same man could even be framed as the most ancient of mammals since, of all, the one that seems to have been less distant from their hypothetical prototype.

Other researchers (for example Klaatsch, Dacquรจ, Samberger, Frechkop) even go so far as to hypothesize for the human line a completely separate phylogenetic path, such as to overcome that of the order of primates or even, surprisingly, that of mammals. For times closer to us and in a less broad perspective, the geneticist Giuseppe Sermonti underlines how most of the characters of today's man are to be considered "primary", that is, close to the typical conformations of the order, present at least in the most ancient fossil primates and placing it, contrary to what should be expected according to evolutionist theory, in a phylogenetic position compatible with that of a mammal of the highest antiquity: among all, even according to Sermonti, perhaps the least distant from a hypothetical initial "prototype".

The human form would seem to be the first among all those of mammals as it would show a much less marked specialization; and this not only in relation to, for example, current monkeys, but also in relation to those who one would like to be our hypothetical precursors, namely the Australopithecines, homo erectus and enable. On the contrary, these species would instead seem to denote characters extremely adapted to precise ecological "niches" (and indeed, according to Vittorio Marcozzi, already decidedly directed in directions - in some cul de sac - morphologically too divergent to represent our ancestors) compared to other forms closer to the current human ones. From the latter, in fact, the African hominids would have maintained their erect position - which therefore would present a very great antiquity - but this, indicating their derivation from a more original and "central" trunk, already existing from much more ancient times than previously suppose.

In this respect, other interested indications can be drawn from the conformation of the human fetus. It has in fact been observed that this manifests in an even more evident way the general characters of the order to which the species belongs, and it is for this reason that it is morphologically very similar in all the representatives of this same zoological classification (for example, the fetus of a chimpanzee or a gorilla are almost identical to the human one): but this only because it is still free from "secondary" characters that will be acquired at a later time. A not very specialized species, such as the human one, in fact highlights its "primariness" precisely in the similarity which, in the adult, is maintained with the stage of fetus and newborn, which instead is not observable in other forms considered close to us: these, soon, with the growth of the individual take on their own organic "superstructures".

Is that eternal childhood which prompted authors such as Louis Bolk to frame the somatic characteristics of man as fetal conditions that have become permanent even in adulthood.ย It is the general phenomenon known as "Neoteny"ย in which, alongside the aspect linked to the elements connected to "fetalisation" there is also that of "pedomorphosis" which includes, for example, also the data, absolutely characteristic of our species, of prolonged educability for several years since Homo Sapiens comes to light. Also significant is the fact that the biologist Adolf Portmann frames the human "defectiveness" (in line with the aforementioned philosophical elaborations) also in the light of the child's first year of life, which would represent a real "extrauterine pregnancy": only at the end of this period the man acquires the erect stature and a rudiment of language that are vital elements for his survival and that instead other species of mammals, in proportion to their characteristics, present immediately, as soon as they are born.

These are all elements that therefore seem to point in a very specific direction: man does not seem to be derived from ancestral animal forms, but rather they are the ones that represent lateral, derived and senile lines of development. The primordial characters, instead of being of the "bestial" type, they are the fetal ones, those of pristine youth.ย Rather, it is the animal that is the product of an "involution" starting from man - almost one of his "illnesses" - as Plato himself also hypothesized who, for example, saw in the apes the humans of a remote past, decayed for having lost the "sacred spark" (*). Probably in the same direction one can read Julius Evola himself when he recalls the animal potentialities that the primordial human principle he would have brought in himself and that, significantly before settle down of the race of mortals, the Roman thinker frames it in terms of a real struggle that took place between a divine impulse and another one of teratomorphic, animal-like direction: a direction that, however, the most central current would have "left behind" when it came to manifest itself in the most appropriate forms to also provide him with a biological garment.

(*)ย In this regard, it is curious to note how even the Mesoamerican tradition, both Mayan and Aztec, remembers how, following one of the cataclysms that put an end to an era preceding the current one, the members of humanity of that time they were literally transformed into monkeys. In the Nahuatl (Toltec-Aztec) tradition this tradition refers to the era of the Second "Sun", ruled by Quetzalcoatl. At the end of this cycle, when men on Earth stopped being grateful to the gods, they were transformed into apes by Tezcatlipoca, god of judgment and magic, and Ruler of the First "Sun". But Quetzalcoatl, who loved men despite their shortcomings, grieved over their lot, and blew all the apes off the earth with a terrible hurricane, thus ending the Second "Sun" and starting the Third. This "blank slate" of the world was followed by the mythical episode of Quetzalcoatl's descent to the Underworld, to steal the bones of the dead mankind and make him be reborn renewed by immersing him in his own blood [cf. M. Maculotti, A cosmogonic reading of the pantheon of the Mexica tradition, in a perspective of religious syncretism]. The reader will be able to judge for himself the correspondence between this mythology and that of the "renewal" of the human race from cycle to cycle, from Manvantara to Manvantara.

Although not precisely in terms of a conflict of an internal character but from a different perspective, that is, as the unfortunate outcome of a rebellion by a subordinate entity towards a higher Principle, one can recall concepts which, in the final result, seem analogous: for example those that, according to the Talmud or the Koran, would see the birth of simian and imperfect forms as a consequence of the rejection of Lucifer to prostrate before Adam, or the various hints present in the Native American myths that remember deformed beings born as the result of attempts to imitate the human figure, ideally generated by a Creator Spirit, by a clumsy trickster, the Coyote; if not the memory that those who are today animals were once completely similar to human beings and only later acquired those characteristics that distinguish the different species.ย 

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So from ancient myths, passing through Plato and gradually through subsequent thinkers, such as Joseph de Maistre, Wilhelm Schmidt (whose "Vienna school" formulated the distinctly anti-evolutionist idea of โ€‹โ€‹a Urkulturย human now disappeared that would also have a unitary religion, theUrmonotheismus) up to the "perennialists" of our times, an idea that seems to be opposed to the classic one of "evolution" from bottom to top, is configured and consolidated more and more, but is rather linked to a general concept of "fall" and "involution". But this idea can be further developed taking into account two other more specific aspects: one more focused on the analysis of the links existing between the various biological forms, and another more intertwined with the chronological development of planetary history.

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The relationships between living forms

The first aspect necessarily refers to a question, well highlighted by Roberto Fondi, paleontologist at the University of Siena, who notes a point of particular importance: this relationship of derivation of the different animal forms starting from man, cannot be understood in directly biological terms, but only in a typological and supershistorical key. This observation is largely acceptable, even if it leaves room for some further integration that we will try to develop. In fact, we know that traditionalist authors highlight the paleontological weaknesses of Darwinian macro-transformism by highlighting the absence of an unbroken graduated chain of forms that now, even in front of about 250.000 fossil species, it presents a documentation that does not support the idea of โ€‹โ€‹a continuous evolutionary transition of living beings; however, it should also be noted that it does not seem logical to propose a reverse direction that would always remain, problematically, short of "missing links". Therefore, in general terms, the transformation of a very large scale, that is the so-called "macroevolution" postulated in the Darwinian framework must be subjected to severe criticism regardless of the chosen direction of travel, from man to animality or vice versa.

And this even if, it should be emphasized, within the species there is no problem in admitting the so-called "microevolution", which however biologists almost unanimously remark to be a phenomenon of a completely different scale and could never explain the generation of new ; so to speak the "microevolution" corresponds to the possibility of stabilizing variations which correspond to the so-called "breeds" (techniques known for some time and used, for example, also in farms), or "sub-species" whose genetic diversity, however, does not compromise the possibility of mutual crossing between these, with the generation of fertile hybrids. The question that, if anything, may arise is about which laws regulate the intermediate orders of magnitude between the largest and the smallest scale, as well as whether those of the species are to be considered truly impassable boundaries, or instead subject to a certain elasticity. Questions that can legitimately arise when, for example, we learn from the most recent paleogenetic analyzes how a small but significant part of the current Sapiens DNA seems to derive from different strains (the Neanderthal or the Denisova) thus confirming the idea of โ€‹โ€‹a certain inter-fertility that would have necessarily had to exist between different forms in order to lead those remote molecular traces to us. Perhaps then we must admit that the precise boundaries beyond which "microevolution" cannot go and how much weight the concept of "stability" of the biological species actually has are not yet completely clear.

It follows that it seems appropriate to keep a balance point between two opposing instances. If on the one hand the total and incessant "fluidity" of living forms conceived by Darwin (who never saw individual types, for him only conventional entities) should be criticized, from the latest paleogenetic data we see on the other hand that the concept seems less and less sustainable of a rigid "fixism" of the species, assumed coming above all from a literalist approach to the biblical text. If anything, it may appear more convincing the idea of โ€‹โ€‹a certain plasticity of the living, not absolute but relative, which would be expressed through a range of possible "variations on the theme" around a certain number of main "types", already branched out in a "subtle" area and still far from the biological level but which on this, almost like on a cinema screen, would have projected the areas within which to unfold all the possible sketches of each of them: but in any case without ever going beyond at the borders of what is taxonomically defined "family" and which for us corresponds to the "hominids". It also seems plausible to think that within each of these "fields of variation" there may be a more central and directly related form what could be a immaterial archetype of reference, and others more peripheral and lateral, perhaps connected to this archetype precisely through the central form: thus coming to presuppose, in these cases, an effective relationship of phylogenetic derivation between lateral and central forms.

As for the man, in this light Sapiens would therefore not be, as in the evolutionist view, the ascending culmination of an uninterrupted temporal chain of forms increasingly distant from animality, but would rather represent this central point of synthesis: synthesis between the anthropogenetic impulse coming from an overlying existential level and which would find in it, in the perfectly perpendicular meeting between the vertical axis of fall and the horizontal cosmic plane, the best possible physicalization in the world of life.ย Therefore, if it is the Sapiens form that constitutes the central point and intermediary, within the zoological family of the Hominids, between the supra-biological level and the other more peripheral species, we can therefore come to imagine the origin of the current monkeys, and also of extinct hominids, starting from a very similar, if not nearly identical, form to ours. In fact, this could be the key to understanding, for example, the data of the lower number of mutations in human mitochondrial DNA estimated by AR Templeton (only 13, against 34 of the chimpanzee) compared to that of a hypothetical common ancestor, from which it would be inferred that the present man would have strayed far less than his simian cousin from the initial starting point. This would go in the same direction as Louis Bolk observed, according to whom the development of man appears as "conservative" while that of the monkey as "propulsive".

A fact that is also consistent with Morris Goodman's deductions, which he confirmed a much slower evolutionary speed in the human line than that of the chimpanzee, thus inferring that the common ancestor must have been much more similar to man than to ape. In fact, it must be remembered that no particularly ancient fossils of chimpanzees, gorillas or orangutans have been found, as evidence of their scarce antiquity compared to forms that instead would denote a much deeper dating of the erect position; while instead they would seem not negligible, even if official paleoanthropology does not like to talk about it because it cannot be explained in its evolutionary horizon, the elements supporting a strong antiquity of the Sapiens form, which surprisingly would come to aย  pdepth of time even on the order of a few million years. To name just a few of these findings: in the island of Java in Trinil, in California in Calaveras, in Argentina in Buenos Aires, Monte Hermoso and Miramar, in Kenya near Lake Turkana (skull "KNM-ER 1470"), in Tanzania with the famous footprints of Laetoli, in Spain in Burgos, in England in Ipswich and Foxhall, in France in Abbeville and Clichy, in Switzerland in Delemont, and finally also in Italy in Castenedolo and Savona.

But, leaving the perimeter of the hominids, the relationships between the various species - those on a larger scale - could instead be of the type mentioned by Fondi, that is, of an actually typological and supershistorical character. This would be the area that would see the aforementioned archetypes "disarray" from each other, probably also proceeding according to a hierarchical process that would gradually "leave behind", as Evola said, some animal possibilities, in order to keep in a central direction that specifically human. However, animal possibilities would always be "informed" by their particular image which would give ontological basis to the concept of "species", which, as Renรฉ Guรฉnon reminds us, is precisely analogous to the "form" of the Scholastics and to that of the Platonic ideas: that is, essential and "qualitative" principles of the manifested entities.

For the philosopher Edgard Dacquรฉ, in fact, the animal species would descend involutively from a humanity that it is not tout court identifiable to the current one, but which corresponds to a primordial and non-corporeal stock - defines it prehistoric manย - from which the materialized man, while distinguishing himself from it, nevertheless constitutes its "perpendicular" and more direct heir, as in the image described above.ย Here then today's man, with his biological and rational faculties, which would represent the closest and closest "precipitation" of this original Man, which it is not by chance that Plato also emphasized that he is endowed with a nature that is profoundly different from the current one. The concept of "species", therefore approached to that of "Platonic ideas", is the first term of the Hindu binomial "nama-rupa"(Name-appearance), ateidos Greek intended as an exemplary form that would have performed an archetypal function and which, we mention only in passing, in many of the theological elaborations of the Christian context is connected to the theme ofimage of God: from the Alexandrians (Clemente Alessadrino, Origen, S. Atanasio, etc ...) to Gregorio di Nissa, to Giovanni Scoto Eriugena, this element does not refer so much to the biological part of man, but to the spiritual one, to the I. To what for Renรฉ Guรฉnon is basically the all-encompassing Universal Man of all his potential (in fact even prior to the Adam-Eve split of the biblical myth) in relation to which we, Homo Sapiens, we would only be fallen ones: indeed even a sort of "second image" of an even lower level than the First Principle, absolutely transcendent with respect to the Cosmic Manifestation, which through theimago Dei shaped such primeval Man. But from whose most central impulse, as mentioned, present humanity was born as a sort of chemical "precipitate", along a perfectly vertical line of fall from a higher plane of existence.ย 

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The time factor

The second aspect to which, in relation to the concept of "involution", was previously mentioned, is, as mentioned, more connected to the chronological development of planetary history, according to its own dynamics which, however, may certainly have intertwined with the lines " typological "of broader scope described in the previous paragraph. This is the perspective according to which it is above all the origin of the more or less "lateral" hominid forms with respect to the Sapiens line that could be traced back not so much to a supershistoric reason, as pointed out by Fondi, but above all as a function of an element temporal, due to the fact of deriving from cycles previous to ours. I'm cycles that would have concerned previous humanity - of which the aforementioned Sapiens finds of very ancient dating - e which would correspond to what Hindu tradition defines "Manvantara" (a concept that, as we will see later, is used by Renรฉ Guรฉnon but not by Julius Evola). The Manvantara is that is the complete life cycle of a humanity, which in the Guenonian interpretation has a duration of about 65.000 years and which in turn is divided into sections of a lower order, in the Eastern world called "Yuga" (in total 4: Satya, Treta, Dvapara and Kali Yuga), and in the Hellenic tradition of Hesiodic setting, instead, "Age" (and here in total there are 5, hence the imperfect superimposition of these with the Hindu Yugas: Age Gold, Silver, Bronze, Heroes and Iron).

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In any case, the separation between Manvantara by rather clear temporal caesuras, the "Pralayas", would lead to an absolutely discontinuous trend of human Prehistory, which, moreover, in the biological fallout could go in the same direction as hypothesized by Fondi himself, who in fact postulates an involutional process that is not gradual but developed "by leaps". A trend also imagined by Giuseppe Sermonti who takes as an example the rapid metamorphosis, for example, of the butterfly from the caterpillar or of the frog from the tadpole. That is, the inexorable conclusion of a cycle could have led to a sliding of relative humanity towards lower levels: traumatic events such as psychic mutilations then overturned on the physical level, prevarications that ended tragically, anthropophagous practices and so on, are for example remembered in various Tibetan, North American and Siberian myths as a point of origin of subhuman stocks, Sasquatch and pythecanthropes. Therefore, once their cycle of competence ended, these populations already Sapiens would have lost their biological "centrality" by falling traumatically, not gradually, in forms more or less dominated by animality. A dynamic that would have produced, perhaps even repeating itself - and therefore worsening - in the succession of the various Manvantara, those species genetically more distant from ours, but which would still be characterized by a relative zoological relationship identifiable in the common belonging to the Hominid family. In other words, here at the base there would be the same "archetype" (and not the even more radical divergence, the typological one of Fondi, that is connected to the fact of having different reference "archetypes"): but the modalities of "biologization" of this would have been progressively compromised and conditioned by the time factor, as in an ever-increasing number of โ€œdeforming refractionsโ€ that occurred.

Furthermore, even a further regressive possibility should not be excluded, this instead entirely internal to Manvantara itself, that is, starting directly from the biologically Sapiens humanity in force at the moment, as an involutional danger always ready to re-emerge under particular conditions: the explanation could be found here. of the birth of strains phenotypically quite different from Sapiens, but not too dissimilar from it with respect to the lines remaining from the previous Manvantaras. It is a theoretical hypothesis in which to include, for example, the "degenerative" hypotheses of the biblical Cainites (progeny of Adam, therefore belonging to present humanity) as outlined by Attilio Mordini in his interesting "The mystery of the Yeti". From the genetic point of view, however, these aberrant lines would have been placed in a position not so far from the starting Sapiens stock as to compromise a certain mutual inter-fertility, precisely due to the fact that this dynamic would have occurred all within the same human cycle. . This could be the explanation, for example, oforigin of the Neanderthal types (Piveteau, for example, leads them back to convoluted Sapiens) and Denisovians, of which the aforementioned literature has now ascertained the presence of significant molecular introgressions within our genome: ultimately a sort of "feedback" towards the lineage from which they would have formerly, and perhaps repeatedly, moved away.

It is not easy to imagine thing in general it can pass from one Manvantara to the next: according to Renรฉ Guรฉnon very little if at all, since he even hypothesizes the "volatilization" and the abandonment of this manifested plane of any material residue related to it. In the particular interpretation of him, the French metaphysician remembers the "ancient kings of Edom" as a trace of the humanity of the previous cycles, after which they would have ended in one modality, but only extracorporeal, of the present Manvantara. For Guรฉnon, therefore, every single humanity in its time would start from a sort of "blank slate", with its own Golden Age, Silver Age and so on, and there would be no "residual" populations (as instead, by the way, it might seem in the Evolian reading, for example, of the origin of the southern "savages") able to overcome the physical-temporal limits of one's Manvantara to access the next one; at least not on the level of material manifestation. Or, alternatively, perhaps also yes - interpreting in this sense the aforementioned Platonic passage on monkeys - but only at the very hard price of an animalization with no return (**).

(**) Nonetheless, this conception is much older than Guรฉnon and the "traditionalist" or "perennialist" current of the twentieth century: already Hesiod in "The Works and Days" mentioned how, following the cyclical end of the various eras, the respective humanity of the previous cycles were transformed into "demons", that is to say de-corporealized entities, dwelling in subtle planes of manifestation, different from ours, and yet in a certain sense maintained the possibility of influencing the life of the corporeal humanity of the next cycle. For example, men of the golden age are told that โ€œโ€ฆ after the earth covered this race, they became demonsโ€ฆ benign on earth; guardians of mortal menโ€ฆ ยป. And, on the "silver race": "And then, when this race too had covered the earth, they were called by mortals" blessed underworld ", inferior geniuses ...ยป.

But the Guรฉnonian one is a position that seems problematic, if accepted in the broadest terms, precisely in the light of presence of finds referable, due to their very high dating, to humanity preceding ours and which are still present in the stratigraphic levels of the planet.ย However, the temporal caesura of the Pralaya among the various Manvantaras, which could significantly find interesting scientific confirmation in the fortissimo "Genetic bottleneck" that present humanity seems to have crossed between 60 and 70.000 years ago, perhaps in conjunction with a contemporary climate disaster, that one "Catastrophe of Toba" on which current prehistoric research is also thinking. However, on the other hand, the traditional theme of a certain "common thread" linking the various Manvantara together does not seem secondary, which for example in the Hindu Tradition itself is remembered in the figure of the White Boar, a central symbol not only of the present human cycle. , but of the whole Kalpa or "day of Brahma" (composed of 14 Manvantaras, of which we are currently experiencing the final stages of the seventh): ultimately the general development of a World and which, in our case, is called Shweta-varaha-Kalpa, or "Cycle of the White Boar".

If therefore, perhaps also in anthropological terms, there may be a "common thread" between the various Manvantaras, at the beginning of ours, this must have been very thin and it is certainly not easy to understand whether this may have implied the physical passage, from the previous cycle, if not of a humanity as a whole, at least of a very small number of Homo Sapiens still remaining spiritually "central". Or if instead with the Pralaya this human โ€œdistillateโ€ may have undergone (as in fact Guรฉnon believes, which however broadens the theme of volatilization to all previous findings, even those actually found in our sedimentary levels) a kind of sublimation, becoming the germinal substrate of the future cycle: substrate on which a new "archetypal" and "restorer" intervention from above would then act. Perhaps, in fact, an intermediate solution may be plausible: always in fact, in the Hindu Tradition the very few "saved" of the previous cycle by that figure - Satyavrata - who will also become the future Universal Legislator of the new Manvantara, the Manu Vaivaswata, are mentioned. The "basic material" (perhaps also genetic?) That will be somehow transfigured by the new transcendent rectification of the beginning of the cycle and will represent the point, but also the new "synthesis", from which the next humanity will start. A new "form", renewed but ancient - and perennial - at the same time.

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Towards a new cycle

Julius Evola, unlike Renรฉ Guรฉnon, does not appear to have ever used the concept of Manvantara as a general "frame" of a complete and concluded human cycle. However, although he is closer to a perspective of human origins that could be defined as "polyphyletic" (in this, perhaps, following the lines of the German-Dutch researcher Herman Wirth) it is interesting to note how at least in a couple of passages he significantly recognized in that primordial unitary race Hamsa, mentioned in the Hindu myth, the condition of "prior to any subsequent human differentiation". Furthermore, in another passage he points out - in analogous terms - that, despite the latent duality, there is a clear underlying unity of the generating principle that nourished the two twins Romulus and Remus, so opposite (the first devoted to the male, celestial and solar, the second to the feminine, chthonic and lunar ones), but still born from the same Lupa and Evola remembered as the interpretative key of the same "human origins". The Roman thinker, therefore, did not close the door to the possibility of an authentically unitary moment at the dawn of the human cycle.ย 

Notoriously much more than Evola, Renรฉ Guรฉnon was able to insist on this point: for example, he underlined the inexistence of any absolute irreducibility already on the cosmological level, denying a dry dichotomy between the first of all dualities, that is, the one that polarizes Being Universal in "Essence" and "Substance". Essence and Substance to be understood as concepts analogous to Heaven and Earth, whose separation, on the now anthropological level, clearly corresponds to the polarization of that unitary and primordial entity which was the Platonic Androgyne (on which we will be able to return) in the two separate subjects - male and female - in the biblical tradition identified in Adam and Eve. This constitutes the first step towards human diversification, which implies the manifestation of the various modes of existence which, starting from a single root, will find its manifestation through the birth of the various races of our species.

But, as we have already mentioned, the French metaphysician reinforces this approach, which tends to be more โ€œmonophyleticโ€ than the Evolian one, also through the concept of Manvantara. And, in relation to this, another element seems particularly significant: the almost total absence of finds attributable to Homo Sapiens in the time span between 65.000 and 52.000 years ago, or in its very first phase.ย It is a fact that will be better highlighted in a future article, "Discontinuity in our Prehistory". This interval should in fact correspond to the truly primordial moment of present humanity and perhaps it is no coincidence that the absence of archaeological sites covers a period of about 13.000 years, or what, as we said above, has been defined as the "Great Year", equal to exactly 1/5 of the total duration of the Manvantara. The Great Year corresponds to the middle of the terrestrial precessional cycle and, as Guรฉnon recalls, in the various traditional mythologies it often assumes a particularly significant importance.ย 

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The total or almost total absence of finds dating back to between 52.000 and 65.000 years ago, in addition to perfectly overlapping the First Great Year of our cycle, also corresponds to the exact first half of the Satya Yuga: it is not unlikely that this data could find an explanation. just with the existence of that prehistoric man - the primordial human form, on which we will return again in the future - practically impossible to find in fossil form as it has not yet been physicalized according to today's canons. An event that would have occurred only later, even if - it must be emphasized - well into the same Edenic-paradisiacal age.ย It is obvious that this last assumption presupposes a more articulated and dynamic idea of โ€‹โ€‹the Primordial Age (the Satya Yuga, in fact) than what, in the reference literature, it seems almost always to be taken for granted, that is to have represented this , a static moment, a parenthesis without history.ย 

A few brief and preliminary notes of a more general nature at this point seem useful to us to provide an introductory framework and to accompany the considerations that, later on, we will try to develop on human genesis.ย In fact, as Guรฉnon always reminds us and as deriving from some interpretations of the Hindu Puranas, the Satya Yuga would have lasted for about 26.000 years, a very long duration for which, on closer inspection, a total absence of internal discontinuity seems difficult to sustain. ; on the other hand, it is no coincidence that the French metaphysician on various occasions was able to underline how, in each of the various ages of the Manvantara, there is the possibility of making further significant internal subdivisions, starting from the basic one in the two relative halves. The Satya Yuga, therefore, does not escape this rule and indeed it is remarkable that it is made up of exactly two "Great Years" of almost 13.000 years each.

Moreover, it has been noted that the transit from one Great Year to the next is always marked by a violent cataclysm which therefore, due to the Edenic age, must necessarily have taken place at its half, around 52.000 years ago (***). Also from considerations related to "Avataric cycle" of Vishnu (cycle that divides the total Manvantara into ten equal parts of 6.500 years, each connected to a particular "descent" on earth of the Principle for the re-establishment of divine law) the same traumatic event is remembered at the precise moment of the passage from the second Avatara (Kurma), to the third (Varahi), when important changes in the boreal geography had to occur, a shift of the Center from the Arctic pole towards a more north-eastern area (the earth of Beringia?) and, as Gaston Georgel also hypothesizes, a very first wave of migration towards less northern areas of the planet.ย  ย 

(***) It is interesting to note that also in the Andean tradition the various cosmic eras that follow one another, called "Suns", are in turn divided into two equal parts by a large caesura that occurs towards the middle of each "Sun": both the median caesura of the various "Suns" that the caesurae between one "Sun" and the next are traditionally called Pachakutiย [cf. M. Maculotti,ย Pachacuti: cycles of creation and destruction of the world in the Andean tradition].

What followed gave rise to what Guรฉnon believes the seat of the primordial spiritual center of this Manvantara, the aforementioned Varahi or "Land of the Boar", with marked characteristics sun care: the fact, however, that it is connected not to the first but to the third Avatara of Vishnu, makes us suppose it is more correct to place Varahi not in the auroral and indistinct phase, truly initial, of our human cycle, but instead in the Second Great Year, that is between 52.000 and 39.000 years ago. But the particular relevance of Varahi is perhaps due to the fact that it was the first land inhabited by our own human form, while previous locations, literally polar, must have been connected to that more frankly primordial phase - la prehistoric man by Dacquรฉ, the platonic Androgyne, the supercasta Hamsa - which strictly speaking was superhuman.ย  ย 

But these are all considerations that will be deepened in future writings.ย 


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