29

Tradition and Antitradition

THE AMERICAN CYCLE AND THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN CYCLE

For obvious reasons I cannot include in the present work a metaphysics of history of the main ancient civilizations. I will limit myself to pointing out some of their most characteristic aspects and meanings, thus providing a common thread to those who want to pursue their own special research in any one of them.

In any event, my scope will be confined to the Western world, since outside our hemisphere the great majority of civilizations retained, in one way or another and until recent times, a traditional character (“traditional” in the widest sense of the term, which includes all of the previously described forms of civilization and associates them in a common opposition to the “humanist” cycle of the last ages), which they eventually lost due to the eroding action exercised upon them by Western countries that had themselves fallen victim to a degenerative process. Thus, in order to understand the processes that played a decisive role in the genesis of the modern world, it is necessary to look at the West.

The traces of the Northern and solar spirituality can be found in historical times mainly in the area of the Aryan civilizations. Considering the abuse that has been made of the term aryan in some contemporary milieus, such a term should be used with some reservations; in other words, it should not be made to correspond to a merely biological or ethnic concept (in this regard it would be more appropriate to talk about a boreal or Northern-Atlantic race, depending on the case at hand), but rather to the concept of a race of the spirit, whose correspondence to a physical race has varied from one civilization to another. “Aryan” corresponds more or less to “heroic”; the connection with the origins still exists as a dimmed legacy, but the decisive element is the tendency toward inner liberation and the reintegration in an active and combative form. The fact that in India the term ārya was the synonym of dvīja, “twice-born” or “regenerated,” supports this point.^[1]

Concerning the area proper to the Aryan civilization there is the interesting testimony of the Aitareya Brāhamaṇa. This text relates that the struggle between the deva, the luminous deities, and the asura, the enemies of the divine heroes, began in the four regions of space. The region in which the deva triumphed and that received the name of sa-eśa dig aparājita, or “unconquered region,” was the region situated between North and East, which corresponds to the direction of the Northern-Atlantic migration. On the other hand, the South has been considered in India as the region inhabited by demons, by the forces hostile to the gods and to the āryas; the “southern fire,” of the ritual of three fires is aimed at exorcising these forces.^[2] As far as the Western world is concerned, a reference can be made to the so-called battle-axe cultures that are usually associated with the megalithic culture of the dolmen. To the profane sciences, the original seat of these races still remains shrouded in mystery, like the seat of the first races that were clearly superior to Neanderthal man and who have been called the “Greeks of the Paleolithic.” There is a connection between the appearance of the “battle-axe cultures” of the Neolithic and the more recent expansion of the Indo-European populations (“Aryans”) in Europe; they are believed to have originated the political and military institutions and forms of government that opposed the Demetrian, peaceful, communitarian, and priestly type of culture and that often replaced it.^[3]

Other civilizations in addition to the Aryan ones have displayed traces of the primordial tradition up to historical times. To follow closely the interplay of the two opposite themes of South and North, however, with reference to an ethnic element, would take us too far afield and cause us to formulate uncertain hypotheses.

In any event, with regard to pre-Columbian America, we must consider first of all the archaic substratum of a telluric, Southern cycle of civilization related to the Atlantean cycle. In this cycle we find the civilizations of the Maya, the Tiahuanac, and the Pueblo as well those of other stocks or minor centers; its traits are very similar to those that can be found in the prehistoric traces of some sort of Southern belt extending from the Pelasgian Mediterranean to the vestiges of the pre-Aryan civilization of Mohenjo-Daro (India) and to analogous traces in predynastic China.

Such a civilization is prevalently of a Demetrian, priestly type; solar symbols survive together with a strong chthonic component, though in altered and weakened forms, so much so that one would search in vain for elements that are traceable to the principle of spiritual virility and Olympian superiority. This applies also to the civilization of the Maya where we find prominent figures of priests and deities who assume the insignia of supreme sovereignty and royalty. There is a very characteristic Mayan figure in the Dresden Codex of the god Kukulcán, adorned with the insignia of royalty and with a priest kneeling before him, performing a bloody and mortifying ritual on himself. The Demetrian principle thus leads to forms of a “religious” type, in which fasts and bodily mortifications characterize the fall of man from his original dignity. Though the Maya built an empire called “the Kingdom of the Great Snake” (nachan was a frequent and highly representative symbol of this civilization), it had a peaceful rather than a warrior and heroic character; the priestly sciences were highly developed, but once the empire reached a high stage of opulence, it slowly but increasingly degenerated into the forms of a hedonistic and Aphrodisticcivilization. It seems that among the Maya originated the figure of the god Quetzalcoatl, who was a solar Atlantean god who came to be worshiped in an emasculated type of cult that was of a peaceful, contemplative, and self-mortifying nature. According to a tradition, one day Quetzalcoatl left his subjects and withdrew to the Atlantic seat whence he had come.

This should probably be related to the invasions of the races of the Nahuatlans, Toltecs, and finally of the Aztecs who overcame the Maya and their crepuscular civilization, forming new states. These are races that retain in a more distinct way the memory of Tula and Aztlan, that is, of the Northern-Atlantic seat, and thus can be considered part of a “heroic” cycle. Their last creation was the ancient Mexican empire, the capital of which (Tenochtitlan), according to a legend, was built on the site of an apparition of an eagle holding in its claws a snake. The same can be said of those Inca stocks who were sent as conquerors by the “sun” and who created the Peruvian empire after subjugating races of lower types of civilizations and their animistic and chthonic cults (which had survived in the lowest strata of society).^[4] There is a very interesting legend about the race of the giants of Tiuhanac—whose heaven included only the moon (lunar cycle with its Titanic counterpart)—a race that killed the Sun’s prophet only to be massacred and turned into stone by the ensuing apparition of the Sun; this legend can be related to the advent of the Incas. Generally speaking, there are numerous legends concerning the American white stocks of supernatural conquerors credited with creating various civilizations.^[5] In Mexico, the following pairs of contrasting elements are very revealing: (1) a solar calendar opposed to a lunar one, which apparently belonged to the more ancient stratum of the aboriginal civilization and was mainly employed by the priestly caste; (2) an aristocratic and hereditary system of property that was opposed to a communist, plebeian type; and finally, (3) the opposition between the cult of fierce warrior deities, such as Uitzilopochtli and Tezcatlipoca, and the surviving traces of the cult of Quetzalcoatl. In the most distant memories of these civilizations we find again—as in the Edda—the theme of the struggle against the giants and a recent generation affected by the Flood. At the time of the Spanish invasion, the warrior civilization of these races showed a characteristic degeneration in the direction of a special and sinister version of Dionysism, which may be called frenzy of blood. The themes of holy war and heroic death as a sacrifice that confers immortality, which were found among the Aztecs as well as among northern European stocks or Arab people, in Central and South American civilizations were mixed with some kind of frenzy of human sacrifices; these sacrifices, even in the form of collective slaughters, were performed in order to maintain contact with the divine but with a dark, fierce exaltation derived from destroying life, the likeness of which is to be found nowhere else in the world.

As in the case of the Incan empire, other factors of a general degeneration coupled with internal political strife brought about the collapse of Mexican civilizations—which undoubtedly had a glorious and solar past—at the hands of a few groups of European adventurers. The vital and inner potential of these cycles had been depleted for a long time, and thus we cannot verify any subsistence or revival of the ancient spirit in the times following the conquest.

Nevertheless, morainic fragments of the ancient heritage endured for a longer time in the spirit and in the race of some North American stocks. In these tribes too, the heroic element was altered, thus generating forms of unprecedented cruelty and harshness. Nevertheless, for the most part, it is possible to subscribe to the view of Frithjof Schuon, who spoke about the

singularly complete human type of the American Indian: his dignity, his pride, his moral uprightness and strength, his generosity and his heroism, which are all dimensions of an inner beauty represented both by the sun and by the eagle, command our respect and bespeak a spirituality without which these virtues would appear unintelligible and lacking a sufficient reason.^[6]

A similar situation can be verified during the late Neolithic in Europe, with regard to warrior stocks that may appear somewhat barbaric when compared to the societies of a Demetrian and priestly type that they swept away, subdued, or absorbed. In these stocks, notwithstanding a certain involution, there are visible traces of the formative action of the previous cycle of Nordic spirituality; this is also the case, as I will try to document, of the epigones of several northern people during the age of the invasions.

As far as China is concerned, the ritual retained traces of an ancient dynastic transmission following the feminine line that was radically opposed to the spirit of the cosmocratic view, according to which the emperor embodied both the functions of male and of pole vis-à-vis the forces of the demos and of the world, and the spirit of one of the most rigorous types of paternal right ever seen. Even the recently discovered vestiges of a civilization similar to that of the Maya, which had a linear type of writing and was considered to be the unsuspected underground and most archaic stratum of the Chinese civilization, seem to suggest that a Demetrian-Atlantean phase^[7] was followed by a solar cycle (how such a thing could have happened still needs to be determined) that was not able to erase all of its traces. We find an echo of this phase in the following elements: (1) those metaphysical views that show traces of the archaic idea in the assimilation of “Heaven” to a woman or mother, which was conceived as the original source of life; (2) the frequent recurrence of the primacy of the “left” over the “right” and in the opposition between a lunar and a solar calendar; (3) the telluric element of the popular cult of demons; (4) the shamanic ritual with its disorderly and frenzied expressions; and finally, (5) the practice of magical techniques, which were originally the almost exclusive prerogative of women, in opposition to the nonmystical and almost Olympian austerity of the official Chinese patrician and imperial religion. From an ethnical perspective, in the Far Eastern regions it is possible to recognize the encounter of two opposite currents: the first, which came from the North, was endowed with the characteristics of Ural-Altaic populations (in which there was a strong Aryan component), while the second originated in southeastern and austral regions. The periods in which the elements of the first current predominated, also corresponded to the periods of China’s greatness; these times were characterized by a marked propensity toward war and by territorial expansion, both of which played a similar role in the Japanese cycle. An in-depth investigation would easily bring similar data to light. In ancient China the polar symbol of centrality played a prominent role; it was connected both to the view of the Middle Empire, which was underlined by local geographic elements, and to the recurrence of the ideas of the “middle way” and of “equilibrium” in views that influenced the ethical plane and that originated a special (clear and ritualistic) attitude toward life. Just like in ancient Rome, the Chinese representatives of power embodied a religious type too: the type of the “priest” appeared only in a later period and in relation to exogenous cults. The foundation of the Chinese wisdom tradition, namely the I Ching, was attributed to a mythical king, Fo-hi, just like the main commentaries to this text were believed to have been written by princes and nobles rather than priests. The teachings found therein—which according to Fo-hi himself are traceable to a very ancient and not easily individuated past—were the common foundation of two more recent doctrines (Taoism and Confucianism) that seem to have very little in common, considering the different dimensions they address. These two doctrines represented a spiritual revival in a period of latent crisis and sociopolitical disintegration; Taoism contributed to the revival of the metaphysical element through initiatory and esoteric developments, while Confucianism helped to revive the ethical and ritualistic element. Thus, a regular traditional continuity was preserved in China in stable forms until relatively recent times.

The same holds true for Japan. Its traditional national form, Shintoism, exemplifies an influence that rectified and raised to a higher level a cultural milieu that partially derived from a primitive stratum (nothing relevant can be deduced from the presence of the isolated white stock of the Ainu). In historical times, at the heart of Shintoism we find the imperial idea and the identification of the imperial tradition with the divine tradition. “Obeying a command, I have descended from heaven,” it says in the Ko-gi-ki about the founding father of the Japanese imperial dynasty. In a commentary by the prince Hakabon Itoe it is said:

The sacred throne was created when Earth became separated from Heaven [that is, at the time of the dissolution of the primordial unity of the earthly and the divine realities—an echo of which is also found in the Chinese tradition; thus, quite often the ideograms representing “nature” and “heaven” are synonymous]. The Emperor descends from heaven; he is divine and sacred.

To the emperor was also attributed a “solar” principle, though with a confusing transposition of the feminine principle: his descendence came from the goddess Amaterasu Omikami.

On this basis the act of governing and of dominating formed one thing with the cult—the term matsurigoto signifies both government and “pursuit of religious affairs”; in the context of Shintoism, loyalty—unwavering faithfulness to the ruller (ciughi)—assumed a religious meaning and was at the basis of its ethics. Any reprehensible, low, or criminal deed was not thought of as a transgression of an abstract, “social” law, but rather as a betrayal, an act of disloyalty, and a disgrace: there were no “guilty” people in Japan, but rather “traitors,” or people without honor.

These general valuesreceived a particular emphasis in the warrior nobility (bushi or samurai) and in its ethics (the bushido). The orientation of tradition in Japan was essentially active and even militaristic, but its counterpart consisted of an inner formation—the samurai’s ethics had a warrior and ascetical character—and also sacred and ritual features; it remarkably resembled the elements typical of the feudal and knightly European Middle Ages. Besides Shintoism, Zen, which is an esoteric form of Buddhism, played a role in the formation of the samurai and also in the traditional formation of various aspects and customs of Japanese life, including the arts and crafts; the presence of sects that have practiced Buddhism in its most recent, weakened, and religious forms, such as Amidism (a devotional version of Buddhism), have not substantially modified the predominant character of the Japanese spirit. In Japan, together with bushido we also find the traditional idea of the warrior’s sacrificial death, exemplified by the kamikaze, the suicide pilots of World War II.

Until recently, Japan has offered an example, unique in its kind, of the coexistence of a traditional orientation with the adoption, on a material plane, of the structures of modern technological society. In the aftermath of World War II, a millenary continuity was shattered and an equilibrium lost, thus marking the disappearance of the last state in the world that still recognized the principle of the “solar” regality of pure divine right. Because of the “Dark Age” and its laws, wherein technological and industrial potential as well as organized material power play a decisive role in the clash of world powers, the fate of this tradition has been sealed with the outcome of the last war.

As far as Egypt is concerned, it is possible to gather some data on the primordial history of its civilization. The tradition relative to a very ancient dynasty of “divine departed ones,” who are confused with so-called Followers of the Ancient Horus (Shemsu Heru) and represented by the hieroglyphic of Osiris as the Lord of the “Sacred Western Land” and who was believed to have come from the West,^[8] may reflect the memory of a primordial civilizing and conquering Atlantic stock. According to the title bestowed on divine kings, Horus is a god made of gold, like Apollo; in other words, he is connected to the primordial tradition. In Egypt we also find the symbolism of the “two” inimical brothers, Osiris and Set, and of their struggle. In the Egyptian tradition there is some evidence that would allow us to see in this struggle an ethnical counterpart, namely, the struggle between two stocks that at that time represented the spirit symbolized by each god. While Osiris’s death at the hands of Set, in addition to the “sacrificial” meaning I discussed in the first part of this work, may express on the historical plane a crisis that brought an end to the first age, called “Age of the gods,” (θεοὶ)^[9]—Osiris’s resurrection as Horus could represent a restoration connected to the second Egyptian age, which the Greeks called “Age of the ήμιθεοὶ,” which corresponds to one of the forms of the “heroic” cycle mentioned by Hesiod. According to Tradition, this second age ended with Manes; the title Hor aha, “fighting Horus,” which was bestowed on this king, may underscore this meaning.

The crisis that was initially overcome by the ancient Egyptians, however, must have reemerged later on with disaggregating results. One of the indications of this crisis is the democratization of the notion of immortality, which can be observed as early as the end of the Ancient Empire (Sixth Dynasty); another sign of this crisis is the alteration in the character of spiritual centrality and in the “immanent transcendence” of the pharaoh, who tends to become a mere representative of the deity. In later times we can witness in Egypt, in addition to the presence of the solar theme, the emergence of the chthonic, lunar theme, which was connected with the figure of Isis, the “Mother of all things,” or the “Lady of the elements, who was born at the beginning of time.”^[10] In this regard, the legend in which Isis, who is conceived as an enchantress, wants to become herself “the Ruler of the world and a deity similar to the Sun (Ra) both in heaven and on earth,” is highly significant. For this purpose Isis ambushed Ra as he sat on the “throne of the two horizons”; she caused a poisonous snake to bite him and thus the god allowed his “name” to pass on to her.

This is how the shift to the civilization of the Mother occurred. From a solar god Osiris turned into a lunar god, a god of the waters in a phallic sense, and into a god of wine (that is, of the Dionysian element), just as, at the advent of Isis, Horus degenerated to a mere symbol of the ephemeral world.^[11] The pathos of Osiris’s death and resurrection acquires mystical and escapist overtones in radical contrast to the impassive solar spirituality of the aristocratic cult of Ra and of “ancient Horus.” Often the type of divine woman, of which Isis is an archetype, mediated the resurrection and eternal life; these are figures of virgins who carry the lotus symbolizing rebirth and the “key of life.” This is reflected in ethics and in social customs in that Isis-like predominance of the woman and of the queen that Herodotus and Diodorus ascribed to the more recent Egyptian society and that found a typical expression in the dynasty of the so-called Divine Worshipers of the Nubian period.^[12]

It is significant that corresponding to this, the center shifted from the regal to the priestly symbol. Around the time of the Twenty-first Dynasty, the Egyptian priests, instead of yearning to be at the service of the divine king, attempted to usurp the regal power; the Theban dynasty of regal priests was established at the expense of the pharaohs. Thus, what emerged was a priestly theocracy in lieu of the divine regality of the origins; this was another typical manifestation of the Southern Light. From this time on, the gods were regarded increasingly less as embodied presences and thus became transcendent beings whose efficacy is essentially mediated by the priest. The solar-magical stage declined, followed by a new “religious” stage: prayer replaced command; desire and sentimentalism replaced identification and magical techniques. For instance, while an ancient Egyptian sorcerer could say: “I am Ammon, who fertilizes his Mother. I am the Lord of the Sword, and I possess a great power. Do not rise up against me—I am Set! Do not touch me, for I am Horus!”; and while a man who had been made into the image of Osiris could say things like: “I arise like a living god,” or “I am the Only One; my being is the being of all gods in eternity”; or, “If the Risen One wishes your death, O gods, you will certainly die; but if he wishes you to live, you shall live”; or, “You command the gods”; the last forms of Egyptian spirituality are marked by the emergence of the mystical élan and by supplications: “O Ammon, Lord of the Silent Ones, who heeds the call of the poor ones. I cry out to you in my torment ... Truly you are the savior.”^[13] Thus the Egyptian cycle ended with a decadence taking place under the aegis of the Mother. According to Greek historians, it was from Egypt that the main Demetrian and chthonic cults reached the Pelasgians first and the Hellenes later.^[14] In any event, Egypt was destined to play a role in the interplay of Mediterranean civilizations only as an Isis-type of civilization under the influence of a mostly “lunar” (as the Pythagorean) wisdom. Isis’s and Serapis’s mysteries and the royal hetaera Cleopatra were the best Egypt had to offer vis-à-vis the onslaught of Roman power.

If we go from Egypt to Chaldea and Assyria, we will find an even more distinct version of the theme of the Southern civilizations and of their materializations and alterations. In the more ancient substratum of those people, which was constituted by the Sumerian element, we find the characteristic theme of a primordial heavenly Mother ruling over various manifested deities as well as the theme of a “son” whom she generates without the need of father; this son was sometimes represented as a hero or as a “god” still subject to the law of death and resurrection. In the late Hittite civilization the goddess overcame the god and ended up absorbing the attributes of the god of war by presenting herself as an Amazonian goddess; in such a civilization there were also plenty of eunuch priests and armed priestesses of the Great Goddess. Chaldea lacked for the most part the idea of divine regality: with the exception of some minor influences from the Egyptian tradition, the Chaldean kings, even when they took on a priestly character, acknowledged themselves as being mere “vicars” of the deities and shepherds elected to watch over the human flock rather than divine natures. In that civilization the god of the city was given the title of king—either “my Lord” or “my Lady.” The human king was entrusted by the god to rule over the city on his behalf, and was made a prince in the sense of a mere representative. His title of en was mainly a priestly one: he was the priest, the shepherd, and the vicar. The priestly caste remained a separate entity and it eventually ruled over the other castes. The yearly humiliation of the king in Babel, when he laid down his regal insignia before the statue of the god, put on the robes of a slave, and implored the god’s mercy by confessing his “sins,” is characteristic of this dominance; he was even flogged by the priest who represented the deity. The Babylonian kings were often portrayed as the “Mother’s creation” (Ishtar-Mami); in Hammurabi’s Code the king received his crown and scepter from the goddess. Ashurbanipal even said to her: “I implore from you the gift of life.” The formula “Omnipotent Queen, merciful protector, there is no other refuge but Thee” was a characteristic confession of Babylonian spirituality and of the pathos with which it approached the sacred.^[15]

The Chaldean science that represented the highest aspect of this cycle of civilization, exemplifies for the most part the lunar and Demetrian type: its science of the stars, unlike its Egyptian counterpart, was mostly concerned with the planets rather than with the fixedstars, and with the moon rather than with the sun (to the Babylonians the night was more sacred than the day; Sin, the god of the moon, dominated Shamash, the god of the sun). Babylonian astrology was a science heavily influenced by fatalism and the belief in the omnipotence of a cosmic law or “harmony,” and characterized by little or no sense of an authentic kind of transcendence; in other words, it could not prescind from the naturalistic and antiheroic limitation in the dimension of the spirit. In the more recent civilization (the Assyrian), which descended from the same stock, we find characteristics typical of the Titanic and Aphrodistic cycles. In such a civilization, on the one hand we find the emergence of races and virile deities of a violent, coarsely sensual, cruel, and bellicose type; on the other hand, we find a spirituality culminating in Aphrodistic figurations such as the Great Mothers, to whom the male deities were subordinated. Although Gilgamesh represented the heroic, solar type who despises the Goddess and attempts to conquer the Tree of Life, his attempt failed: upon landing on the symbolic land ruled by Shamashnapishtim (the divine hero who survived the Flood), a serpent snatched away from him the gift of “perennial youth” that he had obtained (although with the intercession of a woman, the “Virgin of the Seas”) and that he intended to bring back to men, “so that they too may enjoy eternal life.” This may symbolize the inability on the part of a materialistic warrior race, such as the Assyrian, to ascend to a transcendent plane and thereby to be transformed into a stock of “heroes” fit to receive and to preserve the “gift of life” and to perpetuate the primordial tradition. Since the Assyrian-Chaldean calendar was lunar, however, as opposed to the Egyptian solar calendar, we also find in these civilizations traces of gynaecocracy of an Aphrodistic type. (See, for instance, the types like Semiramis, who was the real ruler of the kingdom of the Nile behind the effeminate Sardanapalus, almost as a reflection of the relationship between the divine couple composed by Ishtar and Ninip-Ador.) Even though it seems that in these races the woman originally played a dominant role and was only later overcome by man, this shift in power may be interpreted as the analogous sign of a wider movement that represented a further involution rather than a restoration. The replacement of the Chaldeans by the Assyrians in many regards marks the passage from a Demetrian stage to a “Titanic” stage, which was expressed more significantly in the Assyrian bellicosity and fierceness that followed the Chaldean lunar and astrological priesthood. It is very significant that a legend established a relationship between Nimrod, who was credited with the foundation of Niniveh and of the Assyrian empire, and the Nephilim and other types of antedeluvian “giants,” who with their violence, “filled the earth with wickedness.”

THE HEBREW CYCLE AND THE EASTERN ARYAN CYCLE

The failure of the attempt of the Chaldean hero Gilgamesh corresponds to the fall of Adam in the myth of another civilization within the Semitic cycle, the Hebrew civilization. Here we find a fundamental and characteristic motif: the transformation into sin of what in the Aryan version of the myth was regarded as a heroic, bold deed, often crowned by success, but that in Gilgamesh’s myth had a negative outcome only because the hero was caught asleep. In the context of Hebrew Semitism, the one who attempts to take possession of the symbolic Tree is univocally transformed into a victim of woman’s seduction and a sinner. The curse he has to suffer and the punishment that has been meted out to him by a jealous, terrible, and omnipotent god, follow him; there is no better hope, in the end, than that for a “redeemer” who will provide a vicarious atonement.

In the ancient Hebrew tradition there are also elements of a different type. Moses himself, though he owed his life to a woman of the royal family (i.e., pharaoh’s daughter, Exod. 2:5), was conceived of as having been “rescued from the waters”; likewise, the events described in the book of Exodus are capable of esoteric interpretation. Besides Elijah and Enoch, Jacob too was a heroic type, because he fought an angel and won; in relation to this, even the name “Israel,” which the angel gave him, conveys the idea of a “victory over the deity” (Gen. 32:29). These elements are still sporadic and reveal a curious oscillation, which is typical of the Jewish soul, between a sense of guilt, self-humiliation, deconsecration, and carnality and an almost Luciferian pride and rebelliousness. Maybe this could be explained by the fact that even the initiatory tradition, which is also found in Judaism (e.g., the Kabbalah) and which played an important role in the European Middle Ages, has some particularly involuted traits, which characterize it at times as an “accursed science.”

The Jews originally conceived the otherworld as the dark and mute Sheol, or as some kind of Hades without the counterpart of an “Island of Heroes”; not even sacred kings such as David could escape it. This is the theme of the “way of the ancestors” (pitṛ-yāna in Hinduism), which in this context has special relevance as the idea of an ever greater distance between man and God. Even on this plane, however, we find a double characteristic. On the one hand, according to the ancient Hebrews, Jehovah is the true king; thus, the Jews saw in the full and traditional understanding of regaldignitya disparagement of God’s privilege (whether historical or not, Samuel’s opposition to the establishment of a monarchy is very significant). On the other hand, the Jewish people considered themselves to be a “chosen people” and “God’s people,” who had been promised dominion over all the other peoples and possession of all the riches of the earth. They even derived from the Iranian tradition the theme of the hero Saoshyant, who in Judaism became the “Messiah,” retaining for some time the traits typical of a manifestation of the “Lord of Hosts.”

Not without relation to all this, in ancient Judaism we find a very visible effort on the part of a priestly elite to dominate and coalesce a turbid, multiple, and turbulent ethnical substance by establishing the divine Law as the foundation of its “form,” and by making it the surrogate of what in other people was the unity of the common fatherland and the common origins. From this formative action, which was connected to sacred and ritualistic values and preserved from the first redactions of the ancient Torah to the elaboration of the Talmuds, the Jewish type arose as that of a spiritual rather than a physical race.^[16] But the original substratum was never totally eliminated, as ancient Jewish history shows in the form of the recurrent betrayals of God and his becoming reconciled with Israel. This dualism and the ensuing tension help to explain the negative forms that Judaism assumed in later times.

For Judaism, as in the case of other civilizations, the time frame between the seventh and the sixth century B.C. was characterized by upheaval. Once the military fortunes of Israel declined, defeat came to be understood as a punishment for “sins” committed, and thus an expectation developed that after a dutiful expiation Jehovah would once again assist his people and restore their power. This theme was dealt with in Jeremiah and in Isaiah. But since this did not happen, the prophetic expectations degenerated into an apocalyptic, messianic myth and in the fantastic eschatological vision of a Savior who will redeem Israel; this marked the beginning of a process of disintegration. What derived, from the traditional component eventually turned into a ritualistic formalism and thus became increasingly abstract and separated from real life. To be aware of the role the Chaldean priestly sciences played in this cycle would allow one to connect to this source everything that was successively articulated in Judaism in the form of abstract thought and even of mathematical insights (up to and including Spinoza’s philosophy and the modern “formal” physics in which the Jewish component is very strong). Moreover, a connection was established with a human type, who in order to uphold values that he cannot realize and that thus appear to him increasingly abstract and utopian, eventually feels dissatisfied and frustrated before any existing positive order and any form of authority (especially when we find in him, though in an unconscious way, the old idea according to which the state of justice willed by God is only that in which Israel rules) so as to be a constant source of disorder and of revolution. Finally we must consider another dimension of the Jewish soul: it is like somebody who, having failed to realize the values typical of the sacral and transcendent dimension in the course of the attempt to overcome the antithesis between spirit and “flesh” (which he exasperates in a characteristic way), eventually rejoices wherever he discovers the illusion and the irreality of those values and wherever he ascertains the failure of the yearning for redemption; this becomes for him some kind of alibi and self-justification. These are specific developments of the original “guilt” motif, which acted in a disaggregating way as Judaism became increasingly secularized and widespread during the most recent Western civilization.

It is necessary to point out a characteristic moment in the development of the ancient Jewish spirit. The abovementioned period of crisis witnessed the loss of anything that was pure and virile in the ancient cult of Jehovah and in the warrior figure of the Messiah. Already in Jeremiah and in Isaiah there emerged a rebellious spirituality that condemned and disdained the hieratic, ritual element; such was the meaning of Hebrew “prophetism,” which originally displayed traits that were very similar to the cults of inferior castes, and to the pandemic and ecstatic forms of the Southern races. The figure of the “seer” (roeh) was replaced by the figure of the one obsessed by the spirit of God.^[17] Other features of prophetism were the pathos of the “servants of the Eternal,” which replaced the proud and fanatical self-confidence of being “God’s people,” and also an equivocal mysticism with apocalyptic overtones. The latter feature, once freed from the ancient Hebrew context, played a relevant role in the general crisis that affected the ancient Western world. The Diaspora, or the scattering of the Jewish people, corresponded to the byproducts of the spiritual dissolution of a cycle that did not have a “heroic” restoration and in which some sort of inner fracture promoted processes of an antitraditional character. There are ancient traditions according to which Typhon, a demon opposed to the solar God, was the father of the Hebrews; various Gnostic authors considered the Hebrew god as one of Typhon’s creatures. These are references to a demonic spirit characterized by a constant restlessness, by an obscure contamination, and by a latent revolt of the inferior elements; when this substance returned to a free state and when it separated itself from the “Law,” that is, from the tradition that had formed it, all these factors acted upon the Jewish substratum in a more dramatic and decisive way than in other people.

This is the origin of one of the main hotbeds of those forces that exercised an often unconscious, though negative influence during the last phases of the Western cycle of the Iron Age.

Even though it began relatively recently, I will briefly refer to another tradition, Islam, which originated among Semitic races and succeeded in overcoming those negative motifs. As in the case of priestly Judaism, the center in Islam also consisted of the Law and Tradition, regarded as a formative force, to which the Arab stocks of the origins provided a purer and nobler human material that was shaped by a warrior spirit. The Islamic law (shariah) is a divine law; its foundation, the Koran, is thought of as God’s very own word (kalam Allah) as well as a nonhuman work and an “uncreated book” that exists in heaven ab eterno. Although Islam considers itself the “religion of Abraham,” even to the point of attributing to him the foundation of the Kaaba (in which we find again the theme of the “stone,” or the symbol of the “center”), it is nevertheless true that (a) it claimed independence from both Judaism and Christianity; (b) the Kaaba, with its symbolism of the center, is a pre-Islamic location and has even older origins that cannot be dated accurately; (c) in the esoteric Islamic tradition, the main reference point is al-Khadir, a popular figure conceived as superior to and predating the biblical prophets (Koran 18:59-81). Islam rejects a theme found in Judaism and that in Christianity became the dogma and the basis of the mystery of the incarnation of the Logos; it retains, sensibly attenuated, the myth of Adam’s fall without building upon it the theme of “original sin.” In this doctrine Islam saw a “diabolical illusion” (talbis Iblis) or the inverted theme of the fall of Satan (Iblis or Shaitan), which the Koran (18:48) attributed to his refusal, together with all his angels, to bow down before Adam: Islam also not only rejected the idea of a Redeemer or Savior, which is so central in Christianity, but also the mediation of a priestly caste. By conceiving of the Divine in terms of an absolute and pure monotheism, without a “Son,” a “Father,” or a “Mother of God,” every person as a Muslim appears to respond directly to God and to be sanctified through the Law, which permeates and organizes life in a radically unitary way in all of its juridical, religious, and social ramifications. In early Islam the only form of asceticism was action, that is, jihad, or “holy war”; this type of war, at least theoretically, should never be interrupted until the full consolidation of the divine Law has been achieved. It is precisely through the holy war, and not through preaching or missionary endeavor, that Islam came to enjoy a sudden, prodigious expansion, originating the empire of the Caliphs as well as forging a unity typical of a race of the spirit, namely, the umma or “Islamic nation.” Finally, Islam presents a traditional completeness, since the shariah and the sunna, that is, the exoteric law and tradition, have their complement not in a vague mysticism, but in full-fledged initiatory organizations (turuq) that are characterized by an esoteric teaching (tawil) and by the metaphysical doctrine of the Supreme Identity (tawhid). In these organizations, and in general in the shia, the recurrent notions of the masum, of the double prerogative of the isma (doctrinal infallibility), and of the impossibility of being stained by any sin (which is the prerogative of the leaders, the visible and invisible Imams and, the mujtahid), lead back to the line of an unbroken race shaped by a tradition at a higher level than both Judaism and the religious beliefs that conquered the West.

If in India, which in ancient times was called āryavarṇab, “land of the Aryans,” the term (varṇaḥ) designating the caste also meant “color”; and if the serfs’ caste of the śūdras, which was opposite to the castes of the Aryans, the race of the “twice-born” (dvīja), was also called black race (kṛṣṇa-varṇa), the inimical race (dāsavarṇaḥ), and the demonic race (asura)—in all this we can see the memory of the spiritual difference existing between two races that originally clashed, and also of the nature of the race that formed the higher castes. Apart from its metaphysical content, the myth of Indra—called hari-yaka, the “blond god,” or “golden hair”—is liable to have a historical meaning. The god Indra was born despite his mother’s wish to the contrary; eventually abandoned by her, he did not perish but found a glorious path. The myth of this luminous and heroic god who exterminated the multitudes of black kṛṣṇa, who subdued the color dāsa by causing the fall of the dasyu who wanted to ascend to “heaven,” who assisted the Aryans, and who conquered ever greater territories with the help of his “white companions” is likely to have a historical meaning. Finally, in the feats of Indra, who fights against the serpent Ahi and the dreadful warlock Namuci (possibly an echo of the legendary struggle of the devas against the asura); in the fulguration of the goddess of the dawn “who wanted to be great”; and in the destruction of the demon Vṛtra and of his mother by Indra, who thereby “generated the Sun and heaven,” namely, the Uranian, solar cult—we find mythical events that may contain allusions to the struggle between the cult of the Aryan conquerors against the demonic and magical (in the lower sense of the word) cults of aboriginal Dravidian, paleo-Malayan races. Moreover, since popular epics mention a primordial solar dynasty (sūrya-vaṁṣa) that allegedly triumphed in India after it destroyed a lunar dynasty, this may well be an echo of the struggle against forms that are related to the Southern-Atlantic cycle.^[18] The story of Paraśu-Rāma, the sixth avatar of Viṣṇu, who is a hero wielding the Hyperborean axe, who exterminated (after several incarnations) the rebellious warrior class during an era (Tretā Yuga) in which the ancestors of the Hindus still inhabited a northern region, and who prepared the way for the race of brāhmaṇa^[19] from his northern seat; and even the tradition concerning Viṣṇu, also called the “golden god,” who destroyed the mlecchas, the degenerated warrior stocks who had become alienated from the sacred^[20]—are among the various themes that allude to the overcoming of degenerated forms and to the reaffirmation or restoration of a “heroic” type.

In historical India, however, we find traces of a modification that was probably due to the substratum of the autochthonous vanquished races. Thus, by virtue of a subtle action that undermined the original spirituality of the Aryan conquerors, and despite the subsistence of virile asceticism and heroic fulfillment, India eventually took the course of “contemplation” and of “priestly ways” instead of remaining rigorously faithful to the original regal and solar path. The period of greater tension extended to the time of Viśvāmitra, who incarnated the regal and priestly dignity and who exercised his authority over all the Aryan stocks living in the Punjab region. The following period, in which the Gangetic plains were invaded already marked a time of division.

The authority the priestly caste acquired in India may therefore be considered, as in the case of Egypt, a subsequent development, and it probably derived from the importance that the purohita (the brāhmaṇa working under the sacral king) slowly acquired as soon as the original dynasties decayed following the Aryans’ settlement in the recently conquered territories; these dynasties eventually ranked as a mere warrior nobility vis-à-vis the priestly caste. Popular epics recall a prolonged and violent struggle between the priestly and warrior castes for the control of lndia.^[21] The division, which took place in a later period, did not prevent the priests from having virile and regal traits or the warrior caste (originally called the regal caste, rājanya) from retaining its own spirituality, which in various instances triumphed over the priestly spirituality; in the warrior spirituality we often find specific traces of the original boreal element.

Moreover, the “Nordic” elements within the Indo-Aryan civilization were: (1) the austere type of the ancient atharvan, the “lord of fire,” he who “first opened the paths through sacrifices,” as well as the type of the brāhmaṇa, he who dominates the brahman and the gods through his formulas of power; (2) the doctrine of the absolute Self (ātman) of the early Upaniṣadic period, which corresponds to the impassible and luminous principle of Sāṃkhya; (3) the virile and conscious asceticism oriented to the Unconditioned that also characterized the Buddhist doctrine of awakening; (4) the doctrine of pure action and heroism expounded in the Bhagavadgītā, which was credited with a solar origin and a regal heritage; (5) the Vedic view of the world as “order”(ṛta) and law (dharma); and (6) the patriarchical right, the cult of fire, the symbolically rich ritual of the cremation of the dead, the caste system, the cult of truth and honor, the myth of the universal sacred sovereign (cakravartin). In all these elements we find the traditional poles of “action” and “contemplation” closely intertwined and elevated to a higher meaning.

In India, in much older times, the southern component was found in everything that betrayed, unlike the purer and more spiritual elements of the Vedic cult, a kind of primacy of the imagination and a chaotic and tropical effusion of animal and vegetal symbols that eventually came to dominate the greater part of the external artistic and religious expressions of the Hindu civilization. Even though the Tantric cult in its Shaivite trajectories was purified and transformed into a superior type of magic^[22] and into a doctrine of power, nevertheless, because of its deification of woman and its orgiastic elements, it represented the resurgence of a pre-Aryan and ancient root congenially akin to the Mediterranean-Asiatic civilizations dominated by the figure and the cult of the Mother.^[23] It is possible that this root encompassed all those features that in Hindu asceticism have a mortifying character; allegedly the same ideal orientation connected it with what emerged among the Maya and the civilizations of Sumerian stock.^[24]

On the other hand, the disintegration of the Aryan worldview began in India when the identity between the ātman and brahman was interpreted in a pantheistic sense that reflected the spirit of the South. Brahman was no longer conceived, as in the earlier period described in the Atharva Veda and in the Brāhmaṇas, as the spirit or the formless magical force characterized by an almost “mana-like” quality that the Aryan dominates and directs through his rite: brahman was instead conceived as the One and All from which all life forms proceed and into which they are redissolved. When it is interpreted in such a pantheistic fashion, the doctrine of the identity between ātman and brahman leads to the denial of the spiritual personality and is transformed into a ferment of degeneration and promiscuity: one of its corollaries will be the equality of all creatures. The doctrine of reincarnation, understood as the primacy of the destiny of a recurrent and yet ephemeral reappearance in the conditioned world (saṁsāra)—a doctrine not found in the early Vedic period—became predominant. Thus, asceticism aimed at achieving a liberation that had the meaning of escapism rather than a truly transcendent fulfillment.

Early Buddhism, which was originated by Prince Siddharta Gautama, an ascetic from a warrior clan, may be considered in many ways as a reaction against these views as well as against the purely speculative interest and the ritualistic formalism that had become predominant in so many brāhmaṇa circles. The Buddhist doctrine of awakening, by declaring that the view of the identification of the self with nature, with the All, and even with the divinity theistically conceived (Brahma) is proper to “an uninstructed average person, taking no account of the pure ones, unskilled in the dharma of the pure ones, untrained in the dharma of the pure ones,”^[25] firmly upheld the principle of an aristocratic asceticism oriented to an authentically transcendent goal. Thus, Buddhism represented a reformation that occurred at a time of crisis in traditional Indo-Aryan spirituality and was contemporary with the crisis that was manifested in other civilizations, both Eastern and Western. With regard to this we find in Buddhism a characteristic opposition, inspired by a pragmatic and realistic spirit, to the mere doctrine or dialectics that became “philosophical thought” in Greece. Buddhism was opposed to the traditional doctrine of ātman only inasmuch as the latter no longer corresponded to a living reality and had become an emasculated complex of theories and speculations of the priestly caste. By denying that every human being is endowed with an ātman; by denying the doctrine of reincarnation (Buddhism denies the existence of a personal nucleus that remains identical through various incarnations: according to Buddhism, what reincarnates is not a “self,” but “craving,” tanha); and by reaffirming the ātman as nirvāṇa, as a state that can be achieved very rarely through asceticism—Buddhism promoted a “heroic” theme (the attainment of immortality) over and against the echoes of a primordial, divine self-knowledge that had been preserved in various doctrines of the priestly caste; these doctrines, moreover, no longer corresponded to an experience for the majority of people, due to a process of decline already at work in those times.^[26]

A characteristic phenomenon of this situation in more recent times, as the expression of two opposite views, is the opposition between the bhakti doctrine of Rāmānuja and the Vedānta doctrine of Śaṅkara. The latter appears to be marked by the spirit of a strict and straightforward intellectual asceticism; nevertheless, it was essentially oriented to the Demetrian lunar theme of the formless brahman (nirguṇa-Brahma), in regard to which all determined forms are nothing but an illusion and a negation, or a sheer product of ignorance (avidyā), Thus we can say that Śaṅkara exemplifies the highest possibility of a civilization of the Silver Age. On the other hand, Rāmānuja may be considered as the representative of the following age, which was determined by the merely human element, and of the new theme that appeared at the time of the decadence of Egypt and among Semitic cycles as well: the theme of the metaphysical distance between the human and the divine, which further removes from man the “heroic” possibility and leaves him mainly with a sentimental and devotional attitude toward the deity. Thus, while Vedānta acknowledged God as a person only at the level of an “inferior knowledge,” and while the highest state of supreme unity (ekatabhāva) ranked higher than devotion, which was conceived as a relationship between father and son (pitṛ putra bhāva)—Rāmānuja attacked these views as blasphemous and heretic with a pathos similar to that of the early Church apologists.^[27] In Rāmānuja we find the awareness, which humanity had eventually arrived at, of the irreality of the ancient doctrine of ātman and the perception of the distance existing between the empirical self and the transcendent Self, or ātman. The superior and yet exceptional possibility upheld by Buddhism, which was admitted to a certain degree even in Vedanta inasmuch as it upheld the principle of metaphysical identification, was excluded in Rāmānuja’s theistic worldview.

Thus, in the Hindu civilization of historical times we find a play of forms and meanings that can be reduced respectively to the Aryan, boreal spirituality (to which I referred whenever I drew examples from India of “traditional spirit” with regard to doctrine), and to various distortions of this spirituality, which betray influences of the substratum of the defeated aboriginal races, their chthonic cults, their unleashed imagination, their promiscuity, and the orgiastic and chaotic manifestations of their evocations and ecstasies. Although in more recent times India appears to be a traditional civilization, since in it life is totally and radically oriented toward a sacral and ritual direction, it nevertheless embodies one of the two secondary possibilities that were originally subsumed in a higher synthesis: the possibility represented by a traditional contemplative world. The pole of asceticism as “knowledge” and not as “action” characterizes the traditional spirit of India, despite the presence, rather than the dominance, of many other forms in which the orientation proper to the inner race of the warrior caste arose again in a “heroic” form.

Iran appears to have remained more faithful to such an orientation, even though it did not reach the same metaphysical heights that India achieved by following the contemplative paths. The warrior character of the cult of Ahura Mazda speaks for itself, as do (a) the ancient Iranian cult of fire, part of which is the well-known doctrine of the hvareno or “glory”; (b) the rigorous patriarchical system; (c) the Aryan ethic of truth and faithfulness; (d) the view of the world as ṛtam and āśā, as cosmos, rite, and order, a view connected to that dominating Uranian principle that eventually led to the metaphysical ideal of the empire and the corresponding view of the sovereign as “king of kings,” once the original plurality of the first conquering stocks was overcome.

Originally, next to the three castes corresponding to three superior castes of the Hindu Aryans (brāhmaṇa, kṣatriya, and vaiśya), in ancient Iran there was no distinct caste of śūdras; it was almost as if in those regions the Aryan stocks had never met at all, or had never encountered as an important social stratum, the aboriginal element of the South that was responsible for the alteration of the ancient Hindu spirit. Iran shares with India the cult of truth, faithfulness, and honor; the type of the Mede-Iranian atharvan—the lord of the sacred fire, synonymous with the “man of the primordial law” (paoriyo thaesha)—was the Hindu equivalent of the atharvan and the brāhmaṇa in its original form, which was not yet a priestly one. Even within this aristocratic spirituality, however, there must have been a decline that culminated in a crisis and in the appearance, in the person of Zarathustra, of the figure of a reformer similar to that of Buddha. Even in Zarathustra’s life we may detect a reaction aimed at reintegrating the principles of the original cult—which were getting lost even in a naturalistic sense—in a purer and immaterial form, though they were not yet free, in several aspects, of a sort of “moralism.” There is a particularly meaningful legend found in the Yashna and in the Bundahesh according to which Zarathustra was “born” in the Airyana Vaego, the primordial boreal land, conceived in the legend as the “seed of the race of the Aryans,” and also as the seat of the Golden Age and of the regal “glory”; it was there that Zarathustra first revealed his doctrine. The precise era in which Zarathustra lived has been debated. The fact is that “Zarathustra,” like “Hermes” (the Egyptian Hermes) and other similar figures—designated more a given spiritual influence than a single individual and therefore may be a name referring to several people who in different ages incarnated such an influence. The historical Zarathustra should be considered a specific manifestation of this figure and of the primordial Hyperborean Zarathustra (hence the theme of his birth in the primordial seat of mankind), whose mission was to exercise a rectifying action paralleling that of Buddha in an era that approximately corresponds to that of the abovementioned crisis in other traditions. Interestingly enough, Zarathustra fought against the god of darkness who had assumed the semblance of a female demon, and during his struggle he offered prayers to the good waters of the Daitya River located in the Airyana Vaego.^[28] At a historical level we find mention of the bitter struggles Zarathustra waged against the caste of the Magi, who in some later texts came to be considered as emissaries of the daeva, namely, of the beings who are sworn enemies of the god of light, Ahura Mazda; this testifies to the involution and decadence the priestly caste had fallen into. Within the Persian tradition, the “dominating” characteristic of which was essentially Aryan and regal, a tension arose at one point that was caused by the hegemonic claims of the priestly caste, judging from the attempt of the priest Gaumata, who attempted to usurp the supreme power and establish a theocracy but was expelled by Darius I. This, though, was the first and only attempt of this kind in Persian history.

The original theme, almost as if reinvigorated from contact with altered traditional forms of other people, arose again in Mithraism in the form of a new “heroic” cycle endowed with a specific initiatory foundation. Mithras, the solar hero who overcame the telluric bull, and the ancient god of the luminous ether who was similar to Indra and to the Hindu Mitra, was a figure that stood alone, without those women and goddesses who usually accompany the Syrian gods and the decadent Egyptian gods in an Aphrodistic or Dionysian fashion; thus, he embodied in a characteristic way the Northern-Uranian spirit in its warrior form. Moreover, it is significant that Mithras was identified with Prometheus rather than with the Hyperborean Apollo, the god of the Golden Age; this refers to the luminous transfiguration through which the Titan was confused with a deity personifying the primordial spirituality. Mithras was born from a stone wielding the symbols of the sword and the light (a torch). In a theme also found in the myth of the Titans, we encounter figurations of Mithras using the leaves of a “tree” to cover himself before wrestling victoriously with the sun, becoming his ally, and eventually becoming identified with him.

An antitelluric spirit characterized Mithraism; unlike the views of the followers of Serapis and Isis, Mithraism located the abode of the “liberated ones” in the spheres of the pure Uranian light rather than in the depths of the earth; the blessed would arrive in this “heaven” after the journey through the various planets divested them of all earthly attachments and passions.^[29] We should also take notice of the almost universal exclusion of women from the Mithraic cult and initiation; the ethos of the Mithraic community, in which the hierarchical principle was upheld together with the principle of brotherhood, was radically opposed to both the promiscuous feelings proper to the southern communities and to the obscure emphasis on blood that is recurrent, for instance, in Judaism. Rather than being based on the mysticism of love, the brotherhood of the Mithraic initiates, who took on the title of soldiers (milites), reflected more that clear and strongly individuated brotl1erhood existing between warriors committed to the same enterprise. The same ethos later surfaced both in ancient Rome and in the Germanic stocks.

In reality, although Mithraism began to decline once Mithras was conceived of as a “savior” (σοτήρ) and a “mediator” (µεσἰτης) on an almost religious plane, nevertheless, in its central nucleus, it appeared historically (at a time of a deep crisis in the ancient world) as the symbol of a different direction that the Romanized West could have taken instead of the direction represented by Christianity, which eventually prevailed and around which various antitraditional and disaggregating influences crystallized. The last spiritual reaction of the ancient Roman world, represented by the emperor Julian, himself an initiate to the Mithraic Mysteries, drew inspiration from Mithraism.

We shall recall in passing that even after the Islamic conquest of the ancient Iranian regions some themes connected to the previous tradition eventually enjoyed a revival. Thus, from the reign of the Safavids (1501–1722) onward the official religion of Persia has been imamism, which is based on the idea of an invisible leader (imam), who after a period of “absence” will one day reappear “to defeat injustice and to reestablish a Golden Age on earth.” The Persian monarchs claimed to be the spokesmen of the Hidden Imam until the day of his return. It is the ancient Aryan-Iranian theme of Saoshyant.^[30]

Footnotes

1. For an overview of the notion of “Aryan,” see my Sintesi di dottrina della razza.

2. In the Ṛg Ved a the South is the direction of the sacrifice performed in honor of the forefathers (pitṛ-yāna); conversely, the North is the direction of the sun and of the gods (deva-yāna).

3. C. Dawson, The Age of the Gods.

4. According to an Inca law, every new king had the duty to increase the size of the empire and to replace the indigenous cults with the solar cult.

5. See L. Spence, The Mythologies of Ancient Mexico and Peru (London, 1914). Analogous legends are found in North America too. From scientific researches on the blood types applied to the problem of the race, it seems that among the Indians of North America and the Pueblos the blood remnants are more similar than that between Scandinavian people.

6. F. Schuun, Études traditionnelles (1949), 3.64.

7. See H. Schmidt, Prähistorisches aus Ostasien (1924), concerning the possibility of civilizing actions of a Western origin during the Neolithic in China.

8. E. A. Wallis Budge. Egypt in the Neolithic and Archaic Periods (London, 1902), 164–65.

9. The tradition reported by Eusebius mentions an interval of time following the “divine” dynasty, which was characterized by lunar months. There is also an undeniable relation between Set and the feminine element, both because Set was mainly conceived as a female and also because while Isis—who will be the chief goddess during the Egyptian decadence—was portrayed in search of the dead Osiris, by disobeying Horus she freed Set. See Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, 13.

10. Apuleius, Metamorphosis, 11.5.

11. Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, 33 (Osiris is associated with the waters); 41 (Osiris is associated with the lunar world); 33–34 (Osiris is associated with Dionysus and with the moist principle); 42 (Horus is associated with the terrestrial world). Osiris even came to be regarded as “Hysiris,” namely as the son of Isis (34).

12. The relationship was very different in ancient Egyptian society. Trovatorelli (Civilta’e legislazione dell’antico Oriente, 136–38) mentions the figure of Ra-em-ke; the royal woman is smaller than man, to indicate inferiority and submission, and she is represented prostrated behind him. Only in a later period Osiris assumed the abovementioned lunar character and Isis appeared as the “Living One” in the eminent sense of the word, and as the “mother of the gods.” Traces of the earlier period are documented by Bachofen (Mutterrecht, 68) and by Herodotus (The Histories, 2.35), according to whom there were no priestesses in the cult of male or female deities.

13. Texts quoted by K. G. Bittner, Magie, Mutter aller Kultur (Munich, 1930), 140–43 and by Merezhkovsky, Mystères de l’Orient, 163.

14. Herodotus, The Histories, 2.50; 2.171.

15. Egypt, unlike Babylon, ignored the notions of “sin” and “repentance”; Egyptians remained standing before their gods, while Babylonians prostrated themselves.

16. Originally Israel was not a race, but a people, or an ethnical mixture of various elements. This was a typical case in which a tradition “created” a race, and especially a race of the soul.

17. Originally the prophets (nebiim) were possessed people who, through a natural disposition or through artificial means achieved a state of excitement in which they felt dominated and guided by a higher power, superior to their own wills. When they spoke it was no longer themselves but the spirit of God who made utterances. See J. Reville, Le Prophétisme hébreux (Paris, 1906). Thus the prophets were regarded by the priestly caste as raving lunatics; opposed to the prophet (nabi) originally there was the higher and “Olympian” figure of the seer (roeh): “In former times in Israel, anyone who sent to consult God used to say: ‘Come, let us go to the seer,’ for he who is now called prophet was formerly called seer.” 1 Sam. 9:9.

18. Some recent archaeological excavations have brought to light the vestiges of a pre-Aryan Hindu civilization similar to the Sumerian, which supplied the main elements to the civilizations of the southeastern Mediterranean cycle. In relation to the Aryan element, in India the attribute used for salvific deities and heroes is hari and harit, a term which means both “the golden one” (in relation to the primordial cycle: Apollo, Horus, etc.) and the “blond god.”

19. Mahābhārata; Viṣṇu Purāṇa, 4.8.

20. Ibid., 4.3.

21. See for instance the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa. There is an interesting tradition concerning a lunar dynasty, which through soma, was associated with the priestly caste and the telluric, vegetal kingdom. This dynasty usurped the solar ritual (rājasūya), became violent, and attempted to kidnap the divine woman Tara; this caused the outbreak of a war between gods and asura. Viṣṇu-Purāṇa 4.6.

22. J. Evola, The Yoga of Power.

23. J. Woodroffe, Shakti and Shakta (Madras, 1929).

24. M. Eliade, Patanjali and Yoga (New York, 1975).

25. Majjhima Nikāya (The Middle-Length Sayings), 1.1.

26. For a systematic exposition based on the texts and on the historical milieu of the early Buddhist doctrine of awakening, see my Doctrine of Awakening.

27. The same type of involution occurred in many versions of Buddhism, notably in Amidism, which eventually became a “religion.”

28. Vendidad. 19.2.

29. The reason why the ancient Iranians did not practice cremation, unlike several other Nordic-Aryan stocks, was that they believed that the corpse corrupted the sacredness of fire. See W. Ridgeway, Early Age of Greece (Cambridge, 1901).

30. Vendidad, 19.5; Yasht, 19.89: “The fiend-smiter will come up to life out of the lake Kasava, from the region of the dawn, to free the world from death and decay, corruption and rottenness ... the dead shall rise and immortality commence,”