The Primordial Civilization

When I took to studying the ages and cosmic cycles, I started from the renewed interest of modern astrophysics in the behavior of time, a topic that embraces innumerable disciplines (mainly metaphysics but also philosophy, religion, archeology, astronomy, geology, and many more) and a mystery whose solution, even partial, could help us unravel, almost in their entirety, the great enigmas that have intrigued science since it became interested in them again.

Concerning this, an enigma which does not belong in the field of astrophysics, but is to me as meaningful as the ones above, is the fact that the ancient civilizations were all familiar with the knowledge that time unfolds in a circular way. This poses the first and most important question in relation to the problem: namely, how could these civilizations also know, for instance, about the space–time relativity or the current expansion of the universe, when it is generally believed, particularly in the “advanced” countries, that ancient people were ignorant and superstitious - while science itself has fully corroborated so many other historical and scientific data contained in old treatises?

Elsewhere I have suggested that the numerous correlations and analogies among the various traditions, as well as the universality of certain esoteric knowledge, can only be explained if a common origin is admitted for them all; and in other posts I have reviewed the countless coincidences among different traditions in the matter of ages and cycles, all of them elements whose study, along with the study of certain archetypical universal forms, might help us trace back such origin.

To this end, I will start our quest from the scheme of seven eras or “Worlds”, earths that become manifest in a successive or chronological way but offer a connotation that is at the same time, and primarily, spatial. This can easily be appreciated in the correlations, for example, with the seven dvipas o “continents” (literally “islands”) of the Hindu tradition, regions that manifest themselves consecutively without the remaining six – which wait, so to speak, in a dormant state – disappearing because of it. (An interesting analogy may help clarify this point: within the cycle of cell renovation of the human body, which as a whole develops along seven years, not all cells are born at the beginning of that cycle, nor do they die at the end thereof; but some, mainly due to their diverse life spans, do so while the others await their turn to appear.)

I have also mentioned another very important connotation: this one with the Pole Star, as suggested by the Islamic tradition, which refer to seven Qutbs or “Poles” that would have ruled seven successive skies. This tradition is obviously related to the one quoted by historian Berosus – whom I have referred to in a previous post – according to which several generations before the Flood – which would be the Mesopotamic one, in about 4000 BC – there emerged from the ocean seven beings of great wisdom, «animals endowed with reason», the first of which was Oannes, the Babylonian Noah, a instructor of the people. The earliest precedent of this tradition, which actually is 2,000 or 4,000 years older, would be certain Assyrian cylindrical seals that date back from 1000 to 800 BC, quite possibly associated to the Ursa Minor constellation; wherewith it appears that we are getting somewhere in our quest, as these very sages are found in Egypt: they are the seven wise men of the goddess Mehurt, or Hetep-sekhus, who came out of the water and, like falcons, ascended to heaven to preside the sciences and literature along with Toth, who counts the stars and measures and numbers the Earth. Now Toth, or Hermes, is the «savior of the knowledge existing prior to the cataclysm»; at times he is identified with Enoch, who in turn is equated to Tenoch, the founder of Tenochtitlan, deified by his people; and on the other hand, both of them, Enoch and Tenoch, are supposed to have been the progenitors o populators of the Earth, like Brahma, Abraham, the different Manus of the Hindu tradition, etc. Furthermore, the seven Egyptian wise men are said to represent the Ursa Major. Finally, the seven stars mentioned at the beginning of Saint John’s Revelation (I, 16 and 20) are considered to very likely represent the said constellation as well.

Let me refer now to the “sapta–rksha” of the Hindu tradition, a Sanskrit term that means “seven bears”, although “rksha” also means “star”, “light”, and “sapta–rksha” might therefore be translated as “the dwelling of the seven rishis or “wise men”, the seven “lights” by which the wisdom of the preceding cycles was passed down to the current cycle. Now, the fact that such term was not applied later on to the Ursa Minor but to the Pleiades, also seven, considered as deities by various cultures – e.g. the Incas – denotes, according to Guénon, that at a given moment the tradition was transferred from a polar constellation to a zodiacal one; and here we have another clue towards solving the problem. But anyway, it is clear that what is designated as the seven successive “Poles” or “Earths” are the seven stars of the Ursa Major, to which at a certain moment the projection of the Earth axis would have successively pointed as the period of the precession of the equinoxes progressed on its circular course, thus especially favoring certain regions of the Earth or "dvipas". An example will help us understand this: some 13,000 years ago, the celestial position of the North Pole was occupied by Vega, and exactly the same will occur 13,000 years from now; at present such position is occupied by Polaris, although due to the greater tilt of the Earth axis, the current path is through the stars of the Ursa Minor.

In my next post I will deal with the quaternary cycles and other clues that will hopefully help us locate where the primordial civilization was situated. Stay tuned please.

(First published on Qassia 25 June 2008)