The mythical traditions from all over the world speak of an auroral golden age in which Man lived "in the company of the gods": this can perhaps be related to creation "in the image and likeness of God" and to tradition of the Platonic primordial Androgynous, homologue of the kabbalistic Adam Kadmon?
di Michael Ruzzai
article originally published on Heretics Mind
In the previous article The Eternal Man and the Cosmic Cyclesย we had advanced the hypothesis, with the help of some data of a mainly cyclical / macrocosmic nature, that the Edenic age was probably not a static and immobile moment in human history; this period, corresponding in the Hindu myth to the Satya (or Krita) Yuga, and lasted no less than four tenths of our entire Manvantara, indeed it must have highlighted a certain internal discontinuity which we will now try to investigate also on the basis of some notes of a more purely anthropological nature. In fact, if we dwell on the theme of the "initial condition" of man in primordial times (which generically by all peoples is remembered with extreme regret: the so-called ยซnostalgia for the originsยป, well investigated by Mircea eliade) we believe it is possible to make, similarly to the macrocosmic plane, a distinction between two different existential situations, which instead are very often confused and superimposed on each other.
A phase is that for which there is still memory of a relative ease in the contacts maintained between man and the divine forces, with which, on the one hand, one communicated for example by climbing a mountain, climbing a tree or a vine to go to heavenly spaces, while on the other it was the same gods who frequently came down to earth and met men; it is a situation that, however, had to stop at some point, generally due to what Mircea Eliade defines as "Ritual flaw". In our opinion, this phase would seem to imply, even when the connections with the supra-world were intact, the existence in any case of precise rituals and actions aimed "technically" to maintain them; therefore men and gods who, although in continuous contact, were in some ways already divided - constituting two different entities - by the need for ritual action which, at the same time, also established a reciprocal otherness. This is the phase in which Saturn-Kronos presumably reigned, โdiurnalโ ruler and โcivilizerโ par excellence, which in our opinion should concern the second half of the Satya Yuga (ie the second Great Year), or the period between 52.000 and 39.000 years ago [cf. A. Casella, Saturn, the Black Sun of the early days].
But there was also another phase, in all likelihoodย frontย to that of Saturn. Sometimes, in fact, the indistinct memory emerges of a moment of innocence and happiness, but also of freedom and power, a primordial state comparable, on the one hand, to an irradiating fullness, on the other, paradoxically, to that of the "emptiness Which occupies the Center of the Wheel, an โimmobile motorโ of Aristotelian memory: a spiritual and impassive pole not involved in the peripheral movement, but nevertheless necessary for it. Or it crops up in myths in which the boundary between human and divine still seems not to be well marked, or maybe the coexistence is so close and constant up to almost mutual identification. This is the first phase, auroral andย undifferentiatedย of our Manvantara - and therefore, in our opinion, relating to the first Great Year - which moreover, from the point of view of the Roman Tradition, would seem to be symbolized not by Saturn (Kronos) but by the god Janus, the god of the beginnings, an entity in some ways nocturnal, enigmatic [cf. M. Maculotti, The primordial and triple god: esoteric and iconographic correspondences in ancient traditions].
We will therefore begin to expose some considerations around the first Great Year of our Manvantara, relating to the period of time that, as we said, approximately elapsed between 65.000 and 52.000 years ago. We can already say that, if the question of which type of man / divinity can be considered the central subject of this period appears rather nebulous (a concept that we will address below), the cosmological characteristics of the "place" appear to be defined in greater detail. connected. In fact, what corresponds to it in the Christian tradition - that is, the Earthly Paradise - it is not located in a metaphysical "elsewhere", but, as Frithjof Schuon reminds us, it is located in the same corruptible dimension that we occupy ourselves; and in the light of a "boreal" approach, which is ours, it does not seem risky to us in the meantime to propose a first parallel between the vast land of Eden, described in the Bible as an immense and arid steppe (within which God plants a circumscribed garden), and the less hospitable northern tundra. To stick to the biblical tradition, it is the abode of Yahweh himself that is on a mountain "at the extreme limit of the northยป, while in Indian culture (Hindu and Buddhist) the supreme god Varunaย (i.e. Uranus, divine ruler prior to Kronos in the Hellenic Tradition)ย dwells on the summit of Mount Sumeru, which stands in the middle of an enchanting forest. Sumeru is the center of the primeval Paradise earth, Ilavrita (already mentioned in first article) and the residence of the divinity is candid, as completely white, the very high mountain itself is described, which in the Indian tradition is also called Meru.
It is probable that the descriptions of the forest, or of the garden planted by God, may have a symbolic character, as well as the candid aspect indicated for the northern mountains or even the fact that traditionally the point connected to the idea of โโcentrality is also white in color (at least seen from the outside and as the origin of the cosmic manifestation); However, we would not even feel like excluding, at a lower and immediate level, also a certain relationship of this chromatic characteristic with the white of the polar ice. The idea of โโabsolute centrality therefore refers not only to a land generally located at very high latitudes, but to that even more precisely defined by the same Polo, depicted as the "nail of the world" by certain Siberian populations, or by the Etruscans themselves imagined as the fulcrum of the planet and therefore considered the seat of the gods. It is evident that Guรฉnon is connected to this, when he remembers the particular geographical point from which in primordial times the sun could be seen making a complete circle of the horizon without setting - also citing Homer, who speaks of the hyperborean Tula placed there "where are the revolutions of the sunยป - or when it indicates that it is always the polar symbolism that precedes the generically solar one [cf. A. Casella, Stellar symbolism and solar symbolism].
But what kind ofย consciousnessย could the Being have been placed at the center of such a structured Cosmos? As hard as we may try to imagine, perhaps it was a consciousness that did not even involve subject-object or I-God separation; towards a divinity, that is, which as Evola often points out, is today almost always โtheisticallyโ conceived entirely external to itself. But a conscience of this type, so distant from today's one, cannot fail to recall the idea, as we said, of a Man radically different from the present one. It is no coincidence, in fact, that the Myth often speaks of "Immortals" who once stayed at the center of the world, while Mircea Eliade notes everywhere traditions according to which Man would become mortal only from a certain moment on in his history.
In fact, we already remembered how, in the Greek world, Plato pointed out that "once upon a time our nature was not at all identical to the one we possess now, but of a completely different kind" and for Hesiod the surprisingly long-lived Golden Age race "lived as gods"; the myth of a happy primordial humanity was superimposed on that of mythical people of the Hyperboreans, which for Perecides belonged to the race of the Titans, while Herodotus called them "transparent men". In Indotibetan cosmology, as Titus Burckhardt recalls, man was initially created with a fluid, changeable and transparent body, while in other myths it appears luminous and sonorous, in ancient times it flew above the earth and only later went down, becoming opaque. In China Li-Tze alluded to "transcendent men" and "weak bones", while also in Islamic gnosis the orientalist Henry Corbin emphasizes the presence of the hyperborean paradise theme, in which it is significantly called "Land of souls".
There are therefore many references to the fact that the corporeity of primordial Man of the beginning of Manvantara was different from the current one - something underlined by all the main traditionalist authors - as it has not yet "materialized" definitively and therefore impossible to find today in the form of fossil remains. The fundamental element, that is, is that the body was assumed only later, as recalls Julius Evola who, quoting Plotinus and Agrippa, highlights the audacity shown by Man in assuming a material garment, a moment from which, however, he sadly began to succumb to fear, falling from a previous phase of freedom and power.ย But is it possible to try to reconstruct, at least in broad terms, the paths that led Man from his first birth to this final result? It is certainly a question that is not without difficulties, which we will try to approach as far as possible by making a rapid excursus among the hints, in our opinion the most significant, present in the various traditions.
Starting from the Christian one, many of the considerations that we will propose will obviously take their cue, directly or indirectly, from the book of Genesis, in which, as is well known, the creation of Man is narrated in two different ways, once in the first, and a other in the second chapter. In the first, the creative act is carried out directly and "In the image and likeness of God", while, in the second, this takes place in an apparently less immediate way, that is molding it with dust from the ground and breathing in the breath of life. Beyond the meaning of this double narrative, to which we will return later, it is the concept of "divine image" which in our opinion can represent a useful starting point for some considerations, especially in relation to the theme of the corporeity of the first man. Among the various anthropological reflections of the main thinkers of a Christian matrix, the idea, already elaborated by the "Alexandrians" (Clemente Alessadrino, Origen, S. Atanasio, etc ...) seems particularly significant. Man - Adam - had been generated "in the image of God" not in his corporeal and mortal part,ย but in the spiritual and immortal one, defined in Greek as "Nous". Gregory of Nissa also followed a similar line, distinguishing two different creative moments: one precisely "in the image of God", unitary and relative to the"Intelligible man"ย - hence the analogy of this state with the angelic one - and another sexually diversified in the bodies and related to theยซsensitive man ", passionate and irrational creature.
Similarly, also for Jakob Bรถhme, Adam was born with two bodies, one of which was that of the angel (the celestial body) and the other, at least virtually, corresponded to that of the terrestrial man, which however manifested itself only at a later time; and it is evident that the earthly body can only be conceived in the duality of the sexes. Thinkers such as Meister Eckhart, Giovanni Scotus Eriugena, Honorius of Regensburg are also fundamentally located in the same path, while, in a context that is not purely Christian, it seems interesting to recall also similar Mandaean conceptions that refer to the archetypal image of man, corresponding to a " Heavenly Adam "who preceded the shaping of the" earthly Adam "by millennia. In fact it should be emphasized that the faculty of intelligible, or rather to "grasp from within without mediation", corresponds to the aforementioned element noetic, and it is the highest part of the human compound: it is here that the dignity of Man eminently resides and it is precisely in this "place" that he identifies himself with God.
So ultimately when we speak of the creation of Man "in the image and likeness of God" we are not yet referring, at least according to an important part of Christian thinkers, to a corporeal and grossly material Being, but to his superior spiritual principle. This Adam of the first chapter of Genesis, who crystallizes in himself a divine image, therefore plays a directly celestial role, and in fact it has been observed that he can be identified with the Uranos of the Greek tradition and Yahweh of the Hebrew one; but also to the Janus of the Latins, given its function asย Axis mundiย (with evident polar references) and from an original source of the subsequent human race. Also in Leopold Ziegler, primordial Man in practice corresponds to God himself, similarly to Jakob Bรถhme who sees in him the direct manifestation of the Creator and in whom Adam actually contemplated the same light as him.
A further essential feature of this first Adam, already mentioned between the lines, is that of his androgyny, stated in the famous biblical passage ยซmale and female he created them ". For Plato the original Being was spherical in shape and in Symposium he speaks of it as an entity which, having in itself both the male-Sun and the female-Earth, was placed under the intermediate protection of the Moon. Origen and Gregory of Nissa identified in theAdam Qadmon of the Jewish Kabbalah the being whose androgyny is subsequently lost due to the separation of Eve (another concept to which we will return later). In perfect analogy, the primordial caste is mentioned in traditional Hindu texts Hamsa, corresponding to the man still intact and only subsequently polarized in the two sexes. However, it is clear that this primordial bisexuality must be interpreted in a metaphysical and immaterial key, not trivially organic-corporeal, as explicitly underlined by Frithjof Schuon.
Also for Mircea Eliade that of the Androgyne was the state of primordial indifferentiation, prior to human individualization and the separation of Eve from Adam, which, in fact, can be well reconciled with the type of consciousness, "non-distinctive", which above we hypothesized for the Being of the beginnings. The Romanian scholar also points out how, significantly, up to the Australian mythologies we find the idea, basically identical to the Platonic one, of thespherical primordial man, as spherical was the shape of the ancestral totem "Kuruna" from which he came.
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Great essay!