23

The Golden Age

I will now engage in an ideal and morphological assessment of the cycles corresponding to the four traditional eras; further on I will discuss their geographical and historical trajectories.

First of all, the Golden Age: this era corresponds to an original civilization that was naturally and totally in conformity with what has been called the “traditional spirit.” For this reason, in both the location and the stock that the Golden Age is historically and metahistorically associated with, we find symbols and attributes that characterize the highest function of regality—symbols of polarity, solarity, height, stability, glory, and life in a higher sense. In later epochs and in particular traditions, which are already mixed and scattered, the dominating (in a traditional sense) elites effectively appeared as those who still enjoyed or reproduced the state of being of the origins. This allows us—through a shift from the derivative to the integral, so to speak—to deduce also from the titles and the attributes of those dominating strata of society some elements that may help us to characterize the nature of the first era.

The first era is essentially the era of Being, and hence of truth in a transcendent sense.^[1] This is evident not only from the Hindu designation of Satya Yuga (sat means being, hence satya or “truth”) but also from the Latin name “Saturn,” who is the king or god of the Golden Age. Saturn, who corresponds to the Hellenic Kronos, is a subtle reference to this idea, since in his name we find the Aryan root sat, “being,” together with the attributive ending urnus (as in nocturnus).^[2] As far as the era of Being or of spiritual stability is concerned, we shall see below that in several representations of the primordial site in which this cycle unfolded it is possible to find the symbols of “terra firma” surrounded by waters, or of the “island,” the mountain, or the “middle land.”

As the age of Being the first era is also the era of the Living in the eminent sense of the word. According to Hesiod, death—which for most people is truly an end that bequeaths Hades—made its appearance only during the last two ages (the Iron and Bronze ages). During Kronos’s Golden Age “mortal people lived as if they were gods” (ἱσóς τε θεoἰ), and “no miserable old age came their way.” That cycle ended, “but those men continue to live upon the earth [τοἰ μεν… εἰσι]” in an invisible way, “mantling themselves in dark mist and watching [ήέρα έσσαμένoι] over mortal men”;^[3] these words allude to the previously mentioned doctrine according to which the representatives of the primordial tradition, as well as their original site, disappeared. In the realm of Yima, the Persian king of the Golden Age, before the new cosmic events forced him to withdraw into a “subterranean” refuge (the inhabitants of which were thus enabled to evade the dark and painful destiny befallen the new generations), there was “neither disease nor death.”^[4] Yima, “the brilliant, the most glorious of those yet to be born, the sunlike one of men,” banished death from his kingdom.^[5] Just as in Saturn’s golden kingdom, according to both Romans and Greeks, men and immortal gods shared one common life, the rulers of the first of the mythical Egyptian dynasties were called θεoἰ, “gods,” or “divine beings.” According to a Chaldean myth, death reigns universally only in the postdiluvian era, in which the “gods” left death to men while keeping eternal life for themselves.^[6] Tir na mBeo, the “Land of the Living,” and Tir na nOg, the “Land of Youth,” are the names in the Celtic traditions of an island or a mysterious Atlantic land the Druids believed to be the birthplace of mankind. In the saga (ea) of Conall Cearnach where this land is identified with the “Land of the Victorious One” (Tir na Boadag), it is called “the Land of the Living, in which there is no death or old age.”^[7]

Moreover, the relationship that the first era always has with gold symbolizes what is incorruptible, solar, luminous, and bright. In the Hellenic tradition gold had a relationship with the radiant splendor of light and with everything that is sacred and great;^[8] thus anything that was bright, radiant, and beautiful was designated as “golden.” In the Vedic tradition the “primordial germ,” hiraṇya-garbha, was golden; it was also said; “For gold indeed is fire, light, and immortality.”^[9] In the Egyptian tradition the king was believed to be made of gold or of the same “solar fluid” the incorruptible body of the heavenly gods and the immortals was made of, so much so that the title “golden” applied to the king (“Horus made of gold”) and designated his divine and solar origin, his incorruptibility and indestructibility. Plato believed gold to be the distinctive element that characterized the nature of the race of rulers.^[10] From the golden top of Mount Meru, which was considered to be a “pole,” the original homeland of mankind, and the Olympian seat of the gods; and from the golden top of the “ancient Asgard,” which was believed to be the seat of the Aesir and of the divine Nordic kings located in the “Middle Abode”;^[11] to the “Pure Land” (ching-t’u) and to equivalent locations portrayed in Chinese traditions—time and time again we find the concept of the original cycle in which the spiritual quality symbolized by gold had its definitive and most eminent manifestation. We may also assume that in several myths that mention the deposit or the transmission of some golden object, reference is being made to the deposit or transmission of something closely related to the primordial tradition. According to the Eddie myth, immediately following the ragna-rokkr (“the twilight of the gods”) a new race and a new sun will arise; then the Aesir will be brought together again, and they will discover the mysterious golden tablets that they possessed in the time of the origins.^[12]

Equivalent ideas or further explicitations of the golden symbol during the first era are light, splendor, and the “glory,” in that specific triumphal meaning that I already explained when discussing the concept of the Mazdean hvareno. According to the Persian tradition, the primordial land (Airyana Vaego) inhabited by the “seed” of the Aryan race and by Yima himself, who was called “The Glorious and the Radiant One,” was regarded as “the first of the good lands and countries created by Ahura Mazda.”^[13] According to an equivalent figuration found in the Hindu tradition, the Śveta-dvīpa, the “white island or continent” situated in the north (just like Aztlan, the northern primordial seat of the Aztecs, which implies the idea of whiteness or brightness) is the place of tejas, of a radiant force, and inhabited by the divine Nārāyaṇa, who was regarded as “the light” or as “he in whom a great fire shines, radiating in every direction.” The Thule mentioned by the Greeks was characterized as the “Land of the Sun.” Someone said: “Thule ultima a sole nomen habens.” Though the etymology of the word Thule is obscure and uncertain, it still signifies the idea the ancients had concerning this divine region and it points to the solar character of the “ancient Tlappallan,” Tullan, or Tula (a contraction of tonalan = “the place of the Sun”), the original homeland of the Toltecs and the “paradise” of their heroes; it also points to the home of the Hyperboreans, since according to the sacred geography of ancient traditions, the Hyperboreans were a mysterious race that lived in an eternal light and whose region was believed to be the dwelling place and the home-land of the Delphic Apollo, who was the Doric god of light (ϕοȋβοV ἀπόλλον, the “Pure and the Radiant One”), who was also represented as a “golden” god and as a god of the Golden Age.^[14] There were stocks like the Boreads that were simultaneously priestly and kingly and who derived their dignity from the Apollonian land of the Hyperboreans.^[15] Here too there are plenty of references that can be cited.

Cycle of Being, solar cycle, cycle of light as glory, cycle of the living in an eminent and transcendent sense—these are the characteristics of the first age, the Golden Age, or the “era of the gods” found in the traditional memories.

Footnotes

1. Purity of heart, justice, wisdom, and adherence to sacred institutions are qualities that characterized every caste during the first age. See Viṣṇu Purāṇa 1.6.

2. Introduzione alla magia (Genoa, 1955) 2.80 ff.

3. Hesiod, Works and Days, 5.108–202.

4. Vendidad, 2.5.

5. Yasna, 9.4. Immortality in this context should be regarded as the condition enjoyed by an indestructible soul; therefore there is no contradiction with the longevity that in other traditions characterizes the material or physical life of men during the first age.

6. Gilgamesh, 10. In Gen. 6:3, a finite life span (one hundred and twenty years) appeared only at a given moment, thus putting an end to a state of tension between the divine spirit and mankind; that moment corresponds to the beginning of the “Titanic” cycle (third age). In several traditions of primitive populations we find the idea that one never dies because of natural circumstances, since death is always an accident and a violent and unnatural event that should rather be explained through the intervention of adverse magical powers; in this belief we find an echo of the memory of the origins, although in a superstitious form.

7. P. W. Joyce, Old Celtic Romances (London, 1879), 106–11.

8. Pindar, The Olympian Odes, 1.1.

9. Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, 13.4.7.

10. “The god who fashioned you mixed gold in the composition of those among you who are fit to rule, so that they are of the most precious quality.” Republic, 415d. The golden symbol was applied again (468e) to the heroes, with an explicit reference to the primordial race.

11. Odin’s royal palace in Asgard “shines like a room covered with gold, on the top of Gimle.” Voluspa, 64.

12. Gylfaginning, 52.

13. Vendidad, 1.3.

14. Callimachus, Hymn to Apollo, 34–35.

15. Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica, 2.11.