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The Heroic-Uranian Western Cycle

THE HELLENIC CYCLE

When considering the Western world and in particular ancient Hellas, two aspects must be considered. The first is connected to meanings analogous to those I previously detected in the formation process of other great civilizations; these meanings point to a world that had not yet grown secularized and that was still permeated by the general principle of the “sacred.” The second aspect refers to processes that anticipate the last humanistic, lay, and rationalistic cycle; it is precisely because of this aspect that many moderns gladly regard Greece as the origin of their civilization.

Hellenic civilization also has a much older Aegean and Pelasgic substratum in which we find the recurrence of the general theme of the Atlantic civilization of the Silver Age, especially in the form of Demetrism, together with frequent accretions of motifs of a lower order inspired by chthonic and demonic cults. Over and against this substratum we find the typically Hellenic forms of that civilization created by the conquering Achaeans and Doric stocks and characterized by the Olympian ideal of the Homeric cycle and the cult of the Hyperborean Apollo. The victorious struggle of Apollo against the serpent Python, which was portrayed underneath Apollo’s temple at Delphi (prior to this cult at Delphi was the oracle of the Mother, Gaea, who was associated with the demon of the waters, namely, the Atlantic-Pelasgic Poseidon), is one of those myths carrying a double meaning: it describes both a metaphysical event and a struggle between a race practicing a Uranian cult and a race practicing a chthonic cult. We must also consider the effects of the reemergence of the original stratum, which caused the triumph of several varieties of Dionysism, Aphroditism, Pythagoreanism, as well as of other spiritualities connected to the chthonic cult and rite, including their corresponding social and moral forms.

This is also true on the ethical plane. From this perspective we can distinguish three strata. The first stratum is linked to remnants of races that were completely foreign to the races of the northwestern or Atlantic cycle and thus to the Indo-European races. The second stratum probably derives from the branching off of the Western-Atlantic race, which in ancient times reached as far as the Mediterranean basin. This stratum may be called “paleo-Indo-European,” though we should not forget the alteration and the involution that it underwent; the Pelasgic civilization is essentially connected with this stratum. The third stratum corresponds to the Hellenic populations of a northwestern origin that migrated to Greece in relatively recent times. This triple stratification and the dynamic of the corresponding influences were also present in the Italic civilization. As far as Hellas is concerned, it is possible that this stratification was reflected in the three classes of the Spartiates, Perieces, and Helots in ancient Sparta. The tripartition, instead of the traditional quadripartition, must be explained by the presence of an aristocracy that had simultaneously a warrior and a sacred character; this was the case with the stock of the Heracleids or of the Geleonts, “the Radiant Ones,” who claimed Zeus or Geleon as their symbolic forefather.

Prescinding from the hostile way in which the Greek historians described the Pelasgians and from the connection they often established between the Pelasgian and the Syrio-Egyptian cults and customs, the heterogeneity of the Achaean world, in comparison with the previous Pelasgic civilization,^[1] has nevertheless been acknowledged, even by modern researchers, who have also established the racial affinity and the similarities in customs and in the type of civilization of the Achaeans and the Dorians on the one hand, and of the Northern-Aryan stocks of the Celts, the Germanic tribes, the Scandinavian populations, and even the Aryans in India on the other.^[2] The following factors clearly illustrate what kind of forces clashed in ancient and prehistoric Greece: (a) the plain linear purity, the geometric and “solar” clarity, the essentialism and simplicity that signify liberation, power, and primordiality that was radically form and cosmos in the Doric style over and against the chaotic organicism and the employment of animal and vegetal symbols prevalent in the traces of the Cretan-Minoan civilization; (b) the luminous Olympian figurations versus the traditions concerned with god-snakes and man-serpents, demons with donkey heads and black goddesses with horse heads, and the magical cult of the subterranean fire or of the deities of the waters. One of the stories of prehistoric Greece was of the demise of the legendary kingdom of Minos, who was enthroned in the Pelasgic land in which Zeus was considered a chthonic demon and thus a mortal being;^[3] in which the black Mother earth was the greatest and the mightiest of all the deities; in which we find the predominant cult (still connected with the feminine element and probably related to the Egyptian decadence^[4])of Hera, Hestia, Themis, and of the Nereids; and in which the supreme limit consisted in the Demetrian, lunar mystery characterized by gynaecocratic transpositions in the rites and in the social customs.^[5]

On a different plane, a trace of the victory of the new civilization over the old one is found in Aeschylus’s Eumenides. In the assembly of the gods that is called to pass judgment over Orestes, who killed his mother Clytemnestra in order to avenge his father, the conflict between truth and virile privileges on the one hand and truth and womanly privileges on the other, is clearly exemplified. Apollo and Athena side against the nocturnal female deities (the Erinyes) who want to take revenge on Orestes. If in the Eumenides it is declared that it is possible to be a father without a mother (a reference to the symbolical birth of Athena and in opposition to the maternity of the primordial virgins who did not require mates), the purpose was to emphasize the superior ideal of virility and the idea of a spiritual and pure “genesis” free from that naturalistic plane in which the Mother’s right and status rule supreme. Thus, the absolution of Orestes marked the triumph of a new law, a new custom, a new cult, and a new right—such was the complaint of the Eumenides, who were chthonic female deities with snake’s heads, the daughters of the Night, and the symbols of the ancient pre-Hellenic era. It is significant that where the divine judgment took place in Aeschylus’ tragedy was the hill sacred to the warrior god Ares, located in the ancient citadel of the Amazons who were massacred by Theseus.

The Olympian conception of the divine was one of the most characteristic expressions of the Northern Light among the Hellenes; it was the view of a symbolical world of immortal and luminous essences detached from the inferior region of earthly beings and of things subjected to becoming, even though sometimes a “genesis” was ascribed to some gods; it was a view of the sacred associated by analogy with bright skies and with snowy peaks, as in the symbols of the Eddie Asgard and of the Vedic Mount Meru. The ideas concerning: (a) Chaos as the primordial principle and its early manifestations, namely, the Night and Erebus, as the principle of a further generation, including the generating of Light and of Day; (b) the Earth as the universal Mother who precedes her heavenly groom; and finally, (c) the entire contingency of a chaotic becoming, succumbing, and being transformed that was attributed even to divine natures—all these ideas, are really not Hellenic, but rather themes that betray the Pelasgic substratum in Hesiod’s syncretism.

Ancient Hellas knew both the Olympian theme and the “heroic” theme. Likewise, the “heroes” were perceived to be above mortal and human nature and were regarded as demigods who participated in the same Olympian immortality; the Dorian and the Achaean hero in many cases was defined and forged by action rather than by blood ties with the stock of the gods (that is, by an inherited supernatural status). His being was entirely epic, just as in the case of the types that are found in more recent cycles. His being did not know the mystical abandonments of the Southern Light, nor the return to the generating cosmic womb. Victory (Nike) crowns the Doric Heracles in the Olympian dwelling characterized by a pure virility that is “immune” from the Titanic element. The ideal type was not Prometheus—since the Hellenes regarded him as a vanquished foe of Zeus, the latter being the conqueror of Pelasgic deities^[6]—but rather the antigynaecocratic hero Heracles, who triumphed over the Titanic element; freed Prometheus after siding with the Olympian gods; destroyed the Amazons; wounded the Great Mother herself; took the Hesperides’ apples after defeating the dragon; rescued Atlas after assuming the function of “pole,” not as a penance but as a test; and after walking through “fire,” passed from an earthly existence to an Olympian immortality. Deities who suffer and die in order to come back to life as vegetal natures produced by the earth as well as deities who personify the passion of the yearning and broken soul were totally foreign to this primordial Hellenic spirituality.

In contrast to the chthonic ritual associated with aboriginal and Pelasgic strata, which was characterized by the fear of demonic forces (δεισιδαιμονἱα), and by an all-pervasive sense of “contamination,” of evil that must be warded off, and of tragedies that must averted (αποπομπαἱ), the Olympian Achaean ritual knew only clear and precise relationships with the gods, who were positively conceived as principles of beneficial influences and who were dealt with without any fear and with the familiarity and dignity characteristic of an attitude of do ut des in a higher sense.^[7] The fate (i.e., Hades) that awaited most people living in the “dark age” did not frighten this virile mankind, but was confronted in a calm and impassive manner. The higher hope of the “few” rested in the purity of fire, to which the corpses of heroes and of great leaders were ritually offered (in view of their definitive liberation) in the ritual of cremation, as opposed to the burial practices that symbolized the return to the womb of Mother Earth found among pre-Hellenic and Pelasgic stocks.^[8] The world of the ancient Achaean soul did not know the pathos of expiation and of “salvation”; it also ignored ecstasies and mystical raptures. Here too, it is necessary to differentiate the parts in what seems to be one bloc; it is necessary to restore to their respective antithetical origins what refers to each of them within the whole of the Hellenic civilization.

Post-Homeric Greece shows many signs of the reemergence and rebellion of the original subjugated strata against the properly Hellenic element. Chthonic themes typical of an older civilization reappeared, because of contacts with neighboring civilizations, which contributed to their revival. The peak of the crisis occurred between the seventh and the sixth century B.C. During this time, Dionysian spirituality became prevalent—a very significant phenomenon, considering that the feminine element prepared its way. I have already discussed the universal meaning of this phenomenon; therefore, in this context I will only point out that this meaning was preserved even in the passage from the wild Thracian forms to the Hellenized Orphic Dionysus, who was still regarded as an underground god and as a being associated with the chthonic Gaea and Zeus. Moreover, while in the frenzies and in the ecstasies of Thracian Dionysism the real experience of transcendence could occur in a flash, in Orphism we witness the slow but gradual predominance of a pathos similar to that shared by the “all-too-human” religions based on redemption.

Just as a Jew feels cursed because of Adam’s fall, which he conceives as “sin,” likewise the Orphic follower felt the need to expiate the crime of the Titans who devoured the god. Very rarely did the latter conceive of the authentic “heroic” possibility, preferring instead to await the gifts of health and liberation from the body from some kind of “savior” (who also was subjected to the same destiny of death and resurrection affecting plant gods and year god).^[9]

The “infective disease”—consisting of the guilt complex in conjunction with the terror of punishments in the netherworld and with an undignified yearning for an escapist liberation that is rooted in the inferior and passional part of one’s being—never plagued the Greeks during the better period of their history; such a “disease” was characteristically anti-Hellenic and it was caused by extraneous influences.^[10] The same applied to the increased emphasis on aesthetics and sensuality found in later Greek civilization and society as exemplified by the prevalence of the Ionian and Corinthian forms over the Doric ones.

The crisis of the ancient aristocratic and sacral regime of the Greek cities occurred almost at the same time as the Dionysian “epidemics.” A revolutionary ferment altered the nature of the ancient institutions, the ancient view of the state, the law, and even property. By dissociating temporal authority from spiritual authority, promoting the electoral system, and establishing institutions that became increasingly open to inferior social strata—to an “impure” aristocracy (e.g., the caste of the merchants in Athens and in Cuma), and finally even to the plebs protected by popular tyrants (in Argon, Corinth, Sicion, etc.)—this revolutionary ferment eventually engendered the democratic regime. Regality, oligarchy, bourgeoisie, and finally illegitimate rulers who derived their power from merely personal prestige and who leaned on the demos—these were the descending phases of the involution that took place in Greece, that occurred again in ancient Rome, and that are found on a grand scale in modern civilization.

Greek democracy, rather than a conquest of Greek civilization should be regarded as a victory of Asia Minor and of the Southern Hemisphere over the primordial Hellenic stocks that were too weak and scattered to react.^[11] The political phenomenon is strictly connected with similar apparitions that affect the spiritual plane in a more direct way, such as the democratization undergone by both the view of immortality and the notion of “hero.” Demeter’s mysteries at Eleusis may be regarded as a sublimation of the ancient pre-Hellenic and Pelasgic Mysteries by virtue of their original purity and aristocratic exclusivism; this ancient substratum arose and became predominant again once the Eleusinian Mysteries allowed anybody to partake of the ritual that “creates an unequal destiny after death,” thus planting a seed that Christianity was destined to develop fully. In this way, the strange notion of immortality arose and spread in Greece as if immortality were a quality any mortal being’s soul was naturally endowed with; at the same time, the notion of “hero” was democratized to the point that in some regions (e.g., Boeotia) the title of “hero” was bestowed on men whose only “heroic” deed merely consisted in having died.

In Greece Pythagoreanism represented in many ways a return of the Pelasgic spirit. Despite its astral and solar symbols (including a Hyperborean trace), the Pythagorean doctrine was essentially characterized by the Demetrian and pantheistic theme. After all, the lunar spirit of the Chaldean or Mayan priestly science was reflected in its view of the world in terms of numbers and of harmony; the dark, pessimistic, and fatalistic motif of tellurism was retained in the Pythagorean notion of birth on this earth as a punishment and as a sentence, and also in the teaching concerning reincarnation, which I have previously described as a symptom of a spiritual disease. The soul that repeatedly reincarnates is the soul subjected to the chthonic law. The doctrine of reincarnation exemplifies the emphasis Pythagoreanism and Orphism gave to the principle that is tellurically subjected to rebirth, as well as the truth proper to the civilization of the Mother. Pythagoras’s nostalgia for ideas of a Demetrian type (after his death his home became a sanctuary of the goddess Demeter), including the dignity that women enjoyed in Pythagorean sects where they presided over initiations and where the ritual cremation of the dead was forbidden, as well as the sect’s horror of blood—are features that can easily be explained on this basis.^[12] In this kind of context even the escape from the “cycle of rebirths” has a dubious character (it is significant that in Orphism the dwelling of the blessed is not above the earth, as in the Achaean symbol of the Elysian Fields, but rather under the earth, in the company of infernal gods)^[13] in comparison to the ideal of immortality that was proper of “Zeus’s path”; at the end of this path there was a heavenly region or a Uranian world dominated by the “spiritual virility of the light” and inhabited by “those who are,” namely, beings who are detached and inaccessible in their perfection and purity. Generally speaking, Pindar’s words, “Do not try to become a god” (µήµατέυη θεὀς λενέσθαι), already betray a gradual lessening of the tension of the ancient heroic impulse toward transcendence.

What I have mentioned so far are only a few of the many symptoms of a struggle between two worlds that in ancient Hellas did not come to a conclusive end. The Hellenic cycle had its “traditional” center^[14] in the Achaean Zeus, in Delphi, and in the Hyperborean cult of the light. Likewise, the Northern-Aryan spirit was preserved in the Hellenic ideals of culture as “form” and cosmos that prevails over chaos; it was associated with the heroic and solar myths and with an aversion for the indefinite, the limitless, the ἄπειρον. The principle of the Delphic Apollo and Olympian Zeus, however, did not succeed in creating for itself a universal body or in ultimately defeating the element personified by the demon Python (whose ritual slaying was reenacted every eight years) and by that subterranean serpent that appears in the oldest stratum of the ritual of the Diasian Olympic festivity. Parallel to these views of culture as spiritual form, to heroic motifs, and to the speculative transpositions of the Uranian theme of the Olympian region, we find (a) the inexorable unfolding of Aphroditism, sensualism, Dionysism, and aestheticism; (b) the prevalence of the mystic and nostalgic orientation of the Orphic spirituality; (c) the theme of expiation; (d) the contemplative Demetrian-Pythagorean view of nature; and (e) the “virus” of democracy and antitraditionalism.

On the one hand, although traces of the Northern-Aryan ethos were preserved in Hellenic traditionalism, on the other hand, in this context this individualism appeared as a limitation; nor was it able to withstand the influences of the ancient substratum because of which it eventually degenerated in an anarchist and destructive sense; this was destined to happen many times in Italy until the Renaissance. What developed from the same northern path trodden by the Delphic Apollo was Alexander the Great’s attempt to organize Hellas in a unitary fashion into an empire.^[15] In any event, the Greeks were not strong enough to uphold the universality that was intrinsic to the idea of the empire. The πόλις of the Macedonian empire dissolved instead of becoming integrated. In this πόλις too, unity and universality eventually had to confront that which paved the way for the first democratic and antitraditional crises; they acted in a destructive and leveling way instead of integrating that pluralistic and national element that provided a solid foundation for both the culture and tradition of individual Hellenic cities; it is here that the limitation of Greek individualism and particularism became especially evident. The reason for the caducity of Alexander’s empire, which could have been the principle of a great new Indo-European cycle, does not lie in a mere historical contingency. When this empire declined, the calm and solar purity of the ancient Hellenic ideal was only a memory of the past. The “torch” of tradition moved somewhere else.

I have already pointed out the simultaneous crises that broke out in various traditions between the seventh and fifth centuries B.C.; all of a sudden it looked as if new aggregates of negative forces had emerged to sweep away a precarious world and begin a new era. Outside the West these forces were neutralized for the most part by reforms, restorations, or by new traditional manifestations; conversely, in the West they apparently succeeded in breaking the traditional dam, rushing forward, and ushering in the definitive collapse. I have previously discussed the decadence displayed by Egypt, the Mediterranean-Eastern cycle, and Israel; this decadence was destined to affect Greece too. In Greece, humanism (a characteristic theme of the Iron Age) made its appearance as a result of the emergence of religious sentimentalism and the decline of ideals typical of a virile and sacral mankind. Humanism eventually affected other dimensions of Hellenic life; it marked the advent of philosophical thought and of scientific inquiry. No traditional reaction worthy of being remembered attempted to block the onslaught of these trends;^[16] what occurred instead was a regular process of development of a secular and antitraditional criticism that may be compared to the spreading of a cancer in all the healthy and nonsecular teachings that Greece still preserved.

Modern man may be unaware of it, but the preeminence of “thought” is only a marginal and recent phenomenon in history—though not as recent as the tendency to look at nature in purely physical terms. The figures of the philosopher and the “physicist” arose as the products of a degeneration that reached an advanced stage in the last age, the Iron Age. That process of decentralization, which by following the previously mentioned phases alienated man from his origins, was destined to end with the transformation of humankind from “beings” into “existences” whose center is “outside of themselves,” mere ghosts or “stumps” who nevertheless still nurture the illusion of being able to achieve truth, wholeness, and life through their own efforts. In Hellas, the shift from the plane of “symbols” to the plane of “myths,” with their personifications and latent “aestheticism,” foreshadowed the first stage of decadence. Later on, after the gods were reduced to the rank of mythological figures, they were turned into philosophical concepts, that is, into pure abstractions or objects of exoteric cults. The emancipation of the individual from Tradition under the guise of “thinker” and the affirmation of reason as an instrument of uninhibited criticism and profane knowledge arose on the margins of this historical development that found its early characteristic manifestations in Greece.

The abovementioned trend reached a complete development only much later, that is, after the Renaissance; likewise, it was only with the advent of Christianity that humanism in the species of religious pathos became the dominant theme within an entire cycle of civilization. In Greece, however, philosophy had its center not so much within itself but in metaphysical and mysteriosophic elements that echoed traditional teachings; moreover, it always accompanied—even in Epicureanism and in Skepticism—elements of spiritual formation, asceticism, and autarchy. Nevertheless the Greek “physicists” continued to engage in “theology”; only the ignorance of some modern historians could suppose that, for instance, Thales’ “water” or Anaximander’s “air” corresponded to the real material elements. Some, like Socrates, even attempted to turn the new hermeneutical principle against itself in order to attempt a partial reconstruction of the shattered order.

Socrates believed that the philosophical concept could help overcome both the contingency of particular opinions and the individualistic and disintegrating element of Sophism, and at the same time help people find universal and superindividual truths. This attempt was destined to go wrong, however, and lead to an even more fatal deviation: the replacement of the spirit with discursive thought and the representation as true Being something that, although an image of Being, still remained nonbeing, a human and unreal creation, and a pure abstraction. And while thought openly exhibited its negative characteristics in some writers,^[17] so much so as to represent the visible symptom of a fall rather than a danger, the most dangerous seduction and the most deceptive illusion consisted in thought seeking to situate the Universal and Being in the way that is proper to it (that is, rationally and philosophically) and to transcend through concept and rhetoric^[18] the particularism and contingency of the sensible world; this thought eventually became the instrument of that humanism and that profound and corruptive unrealism that centuries later completely seduced the Western world.

The “objectivism” that some historians of philosophy decry in Greek thought was the support this thought derived, whether consciously or unconsciously, from traditional wisdom and from man’s traditional attitude. Once this support collapsed, thought gradually became a reason unto itself, losing all transcendent and superrational references—until it eventually culminated in modern Rationalism and Kantian Criticism.

Here I will mention in passing another aspect of the “humanistic” upheaval found in Greece: the development of the arts and literature in a hypertrophic, profane, and individualistic sense. When compared to the strength of the origins, this development should be regarded as a degeneration and disintegration. The peak of the ancient world is found wherever, next to a coarseness of external forms, an intimately sacral reality was translated without expressionism into the greatness of a clear and free world. Thus, the best period of Hellas corresponds to the so-called Greek Middle Ages, characterized by its epos and ethos, and by its ideals of Olympian spirituality and heroic transfiguration. The civilized and philosophical Greece, “Mother of the arts,” which the moderns admire so much and completely empathize with, was a crepuscular Greece. This was clearly perceived by those people who still retained the same virile spirit of the Achaean era in a pure state, that is, by the original Romans; see for instance in the writings of Cato (234–149 B.C.) the expressions of contempt for the new breed of “philosophers” and men of letters.^[19] In many ways, the Hellenization of Rome, under this aspect of humanistic and almost enlightened development promoted by poets, literatary types, and scholars, was a prelude of its own decadence. Generally speaking this was true, notwithstanding those sacral and symbolic elements that Greek art and literature occasionally retained beyond the individuality of some authors.

THE ROMAN CYCLE

Rome was founded during the period of the crises that surfaced everywhere in ancient traditional civilizations. With the exception of the Holy Roman Empire, which was a Northern-Teutonic attempt to revive the ancient Roman ideal, Rome should be regarded as the last great reaction against such a crisis, and also as the attempt—successful for an entire cycle-to wrest a group of people from the forces of decadence at work in Mediterranean civilizations and organize them into a unitary whole, thereby realizing on a stronger and more grandiose scale that which the power of Alexander the Great succeeded in creating for only a short while.

The ultimate significance of Rome will elude us unless we first perceive the heterogeneity between what constituted the central course of its development and the traditions proper to the majority of the Italic populations among which Rome arose and affirmed itself.^[20]

It has been correctly pointed out that the pre-Roman Italian peninsula was inhabited by Etruscans, Sabines, Sabellians, Volscians, and Samnites, as well as by Phoenicians, Siculians and Sicani, Greek and Syrian immigrants in the south—when all of a sudden, without knowing how or why, a conflict erupted within all these populations and their cults, views of the law, and claims to political supremacy; a new principle appeared, powerful enough to subjugate everything in its path, to transform deeply the ancient customs and way of life, and which enjoyed an unrestrained and almost predestined expansion typical of the great forces of history. No one ever mentions the source of this principle and the only references to the origins, which still fail to explain this phenomenon, are confined to an empirical and sociological plane; therefore, those who stand in awe before the Roman “miracle” as an event to be admired rather than to be explained, do better than those who attempt to explain it through secondary causes.

Behind the greatness of Rome we can recognize forces of the heroic Aryan-Western cycle at work; behind its decadence we can see the alteration of these same forces. Naturally, in a mixed-up world far removed from its origins, it is necessary to refer essentially to a superhistorical idea, which is, however, capable of acting in history in a formative way; in this sense we can talk of the presence in Rome of an Aryan element and of its struggle against the forces of the South. Our research cannot be based merely on the racial and ethnic plane. It has been ascertained that prior to the Celtic migrations and the Etruscan cycle, nuclei that derived immediately from the boreal, Western race made their appearance in Italy; these nuclei, compared to the aboriginal races and the crepuscular by-products of the paleo-Mediterranean civilization of Atlantic origins, had the same meaning as the appearance of the Dorians and Achaeans in Greece. The traces of these nuclei visibly point to the Hyperborean cycle and to the “civilization of the reindeer” and “battle-axe.” Moreover, it is likely that the ancient Latins represented a surviving vein or a reemergence of these nuclei variously intermingled with other Italic populations; in any event, we must refer to the plane of the “spiritual race.” The type of the Roman civilization and the Roman man bear witness to the presence and power within this civilization, and also to the same force that was at the center of the heroic, Uranian cycles of Northern and Western origin. As dubious as the racial homogeneity of Rome in the origins may be, there is no question concerning the formative action this force exercised on the “material” to which it was applied, elevating it to and differentiating it from what belonged to a different world.

There are numerous elements that show the connection between both the Italic civilizations among which Rome arose and the residues of these civilizations in the early Roman world on the one hand, and the type of southern civilizations in their telluric, Aphrodistic, and Demetrian variations, on the other hand.^[21]

The cult of the Goddess, which in Greece was typical of the Pelasgic component, most likely played an important role among the Siculians and the Sabines. The greatest deity of the Sabines was the chthonic goddess Fortuna, who reappeared in the forms of Horta, Feronia, Vesuna, Heruntas, the Horae, Hera, Juno, Venus, Ceres, Bona Dea, Demeter—all of which are reincarnations of the same divine principle. The oldest Roman calendar was of a lunar type, and the early Roman myths had plenty of feminine figures: Mater Matuta, Luna, Diana, Egeria—moreover, in the traditions concerning Mars-Hercules and Flora, Hercules and Larentia, Numa and Egeria, as well as in other traditions, the archaic theme of the subordination of the masculine to the feminine principle was also present in the background. These myths derived from pre-Roman traditions such as the Etruscan saga of Tanaquil, in which we find the type of the regal Asian-Mediterranean woman that Rome attempted to purify from its Aphrodistic traits and transform into a symbol of all the maternal virtues.^[22] These transformations that the Roman world was responsible for with regard to everything that was incompatible with its spirit, however, still did not permanently remove from underneath the recent stratum of the myth an even older stratum that was connected with a civilization opposed to the Roman one; this stratum can be recognized in the regal succession through the female line or in women’s advent to the throne (these being typical features of primitive Rome), especially in relation to foreign dynasties and to kings bearing plebeian names. According to a legend, Servius Tullius, who achieved power thanks to a woman and became a champion of plebeian rights, was illegitimately conceived during one of the many orgiastic feasts celebrated by slaves who devoted themselves to the cult of Southern deities (chthonic Saturn, Venus, and Flora) and who celebrated the return of mankind to the law of universal brotherhood and the promiscuity of the great Mother of Life.

The Etruscans and the Sabines have left traces of a matriarchical system. Their inscriptions often reveal (as in Crete) filiation through the name of the mother instead of the father, and also the attribution of a particular honor, authority, importance, and freedom to women. Numerous Italic cities were named after women. The ritual of burial, as opposed to that of cremation (both of which were found in the ancient Roman world), was probably one of the many signs indicating the presence of two overlapping strata representing a Uranian and a Demetrian view of the afterlife, respectively; these strata were often mixed together even though they retained their unmistakable features.^[23] What in Rome was retained as maternal sacredness and authority (matronarum sanctitas, or mater princeps familiae), rather than being a Roman feature, betrays the pre-Roman and gynaecocratic component that in the new civilization was subordinated to the paternal right and thus put in its proper place. This did not, however, prevent the opposite process from taking place in other cases: while on the one hand the Roman Saturn-Kronos retained some of his original traits, on the other hand he was portrayed as a telluric demon, and as the husband of Ops, the Earth. The same was true for Mars and the often contradictory varieties of the cult of Hercules. In all probability Vesta was a feminine version (due to a Southern influence) of the deity of fire, who always had a prevalent masculine and Uranian character among Aryan populations; this version even led to the association of this deity with Bona Dea, who was worshiped as a goddess of the Earth and secretly celebrated at night. It is said that men were forbidden to participate in this cult and even forbidden to pronounce the name of the goddess.^[24] Tradition attributed to a non-Roman king, the Sabine Titus Tatius, the introduction into Rome of the most important chthonic cults such as those of Ops and Flora, Re and Juno Curis, Luna, the chthonic Kronos, Diana, and Vulcan, and even of the lares;^[25] likewise the libri Sibillini (or libri fatales), of Asiatic-Southern origin, which were sympathetic to the plebeian component of the Roman religion, were responsible for introducing the Great Mother and other deities of the chthonic cycle: Dis Pater, Flora, Saturn, and the triad Ceres-Uber-Libera.

The strong pre-Aryan, Aegean-Pelasgic, and partially “Atlantic” component, which can be detected from an ethnic and philological view in these populations that Rome encountered in Italy, still remains a fact to be reckoned with; the relationship between these populations and the original Roman nucleus was similar to that which occurred in Greece between the Pelasgian stocks on the one hand and the Achaean and Doric stocks on the other. According to a tradition, after being scattered, the Pelasgians often became slaves of other people; in Lucania and in Brutium they formed the majority of the Bruttians, who were subjugated by the Sabellians and by the Samnites. Interestingly enough, these Bruttians sided with the Chartaginenses in their struggle against Rome in one of the most important episodes in the conflict between North and South; following their defeat, the Bruttians were eventually sold into slavery. Just as in India the aristocracy of the ārya stood before the servile caste like a dominating stock stands before an aboriginal stock, in the same way in the Roman opposition between patricians and plebeians we may see an analogous phenomenon and thus consider the plebeians as the “Pelasgians of Rome.” The evidence suggests that the plebeians in Rome were inspired by the maternal, feminine, and material principle, while the patriciate derived its superior dignity from the paternal right. The plebs succeeded in becoming part of the state and even participating in the ius Quiritium, but never in the political and juridical institutions connected to the superior chrism of the patricians (the reader will recall the saying patrem ciere posse in reference to divine ancestors, the so-called divi parentes, who were the prerogative of the patriciate and not of the plebs, which instead was considered to be made up of the “children of the Earth”).

Even if a direct ethnic relationship between Pelasgians and Etruscans^[26] is not persuasively demonstrated, the latter people, to whom Rome, according to many scholars, was heavily indebted, display the traits of a telluric and at most lunar and priestly civilization that can hardly be reconciled with the central line and with the spirit of the Roman world. It is true that the Etruscans, like the Assyrians and the Chaldeans, in addition to the telluric world of fertility and of the various Mothers of Nature, also knew a Uranian pantheon of masculine deities ruled by Tinia. Nevertheless, these deities (dii consentes ) were very different from Olympian deities; they did not possess any real sovereignty and were more like shadows dominated by an occult power that cannot be named, which overshadows everything else and subjects everything to the rules of the dii superiores et involuti. Thus, Etruscan Uranianism betrayed the spirit of the South in the same fatalistic and naturalistic way as in the case of the Pelasgic view of the generated Zeus who was subjected to the Stygian king Pluto, ruler of the underworld. The subordination of all beings, even divine ones, to a principle that shuns the light like the womb of the earth and whose law rules supreme over those who arise from it into a contingent life, was typical of the spirit of the South. Thus, we find a return to the shadow of Isis, who warned: “No one will be able to dissolve what I turn into a law,”^[27] and to those Hellenic feminine deities, the creatures of the Night and of Erebus, who embodied the destiny and the sovereignty of natural law. At the same time the demonic and magical aspect that played a relevant role in the Etruscan cult through forms that contaminated the solar motifs and symbols reveals the role played in that civilization by the pre-Indo-European element, even in its lowest characteristics.

In reality, the Etruscans living at the time of the birth of Rome had very few redeeming heroic and solar characteristics. They could only view the world in a sad and gloomy way; besides the terror they had of the afterlife, they were so obsessed by the sense of an incumbent destiny and by expiation that they even predicted the end of their own nation.^[28] The union of the theme of eros with that of death is found among the Etruscans in a characteristic fashion: they enjoyed with a voluptuous frenzy a fleeting life, dulled by ecstasies dominated by the infernal forces whose presence they were reminded of all the time. The priestly leaders of the Etruscan clans (lucumoni) regarded themselves as the children of the Earth; a chthonic demon (Tages)^[29] was traditionally credited with founding the “Etruscan discipline,” or aruspicina. This discipline, the texts of which “filled with fear and horror” its students, was part of that type of fatalistic, lunar science typical of the Chaldean priesthood and that was eventually transmitted to the Hittites; the aruspicina show evident analogies with the latter science even from the technical point of view of some procedures.^[30]

The fact that Rome partially incorporated such elements into the augural science that was the privilege of the patriciate, and that it allowed the Etruscan haruspexes to practice their art and did not disdain to consult them, reveals not only the different meaning that things may have when they are integrated in the context of a different civilization, but also a compromise and an antithesis that were often latent in the Roman world and that sometimes were often actualized and made evident. In reality, the revolt against the Tarquinians represented a revolt of aristocratic Rome against the Etruscan component; the expulsion of that dynasty was celebrated every year in Rome with a feast similar to the feast with which the Persians celebrated the Megaphonia, which was the massacre of the Median priests who had usurped the regality after the death of Cambyses.

The Romans were always diffident to and fearful of the haruspex, as if he were an occult enemy of Rome. Among the many episodes concerning this uneasy relationship, we may recall the time when the haruspexes wanted to have the statue of Horatius Cocles buried because of their hatred toward Rome; however, when contrary to the haruspicium, the statue was erected on the most elevated place and happy events befell Rome, the haruspexes were charged with betrayal and after confessing, were executed.

Thus, Rome departed from the background of the Italic populations of its origins that were still connected to the spirit of the ancient Southern civilizations, thereby manifesting a new influence that can hardly be traced to its background. This influence, however, could only be exercised through a harsh struggle, both inner and outer, and a series of reactions, adaptations, and transformations. The ideal of conquering virility was embodied in Rome. This virility was manifested in the doctrine of the state and in the notions of auctoritas and imperium. The state was under the aegis of the Olympian deities (particularly the Capitoline Jupiter, who was detached, sovereign, ungenerated, and exempt from any naturalistic myths and generations) and originally it was not separated from the initiatory “mystery” of regality (adytum et initia regis) that had been declared inaccessible to ordinary people. The imperium (not in the hegemonical and territorial sense of the word) was understood in terms of power and the mystical and dreadful force of command that was the prerogative not only of political leaders (in whom it retained its immaterial character, beyond the often irregular and spurious variety of techniques used to attain it), but of the patricians and of the heads of households. The Roman symbol of fire reflected a similar spirituality, as did the strict paternal right and the articulations of a law that Vico did not hesitate to call “heroic law,” since it informed the Roman ethic of honor and faithfulness. This ethic was felt so strongly that, according to Livy, it eventually became a trademark of the Roman people; whereas lacking a fides and following the contingencies of fate characterized by those whom the Romans referred to as “barbarians.”^[31] The early Romans characteristically perceived the supernatural as numen (as sheer power) rather than as deus; this represents the counterpart of a peculiar spiritual attitude. Other characteristics of the Roman world included the absence of pathos, lyricism and mysticism toward the divine, the presence of precise law for the necessary and necessitating rite, and clear and sober views. In their reflection of a virile and “magical” attitude,^[32] these themes corresponded to the themes found in the early Vedic, Chinese, and Iranian periods and to the Achaean-Olympian ritual as well. The typical Roman religion had always been diffident toward the abandonment of the soul in God and toward the outbursts of devotion; it restrained, by force if necessary, anything that diminished that serious dignity proper to the relations between a civis Romanus and a god. Although the Etruscan component attempted to influence the plebeian strata of society by introducing the pathos of terrifying representations of the netherworld, Rome, at its best, remained faithful to the heroic view proper to early Hellas. Rome had personified heroes, but it also knew the imperturbability of mortal men who had no fear and no hopes concerning the afterlife, and who could not be dissuaded from a conduct inspired by duty, fides, heroism, order, and dominion. A proof of this consisted in the good reception accorded to Lucretius’ Epicureanism, in which the explanation of reality in terms of natural causes aimed at eliminating the fear of death and the gods and at freeing human life by bestowing upon it calmness and a sense of security. Even in doctrines like Epicureanism we find a view of the gods reflecting the Olympian ideal of impassive and detached essences that the wise regarded as models of perfection.

While next to other peoples such as the Greeks and the Etruscans the Romans may at first have appeared as “barbarians,” their lack of “culture” concealed (as in the case of some Germanic populations at the time of the barbarian invasions) an even older force that acted in a style compared to which all cultures of an urban type appeared as decadent and disaggregative. The first account of Rome that Greece ever had came from an ambassador who confessed that although he had expected to sit in the Roman Senate as if he were in a gathering of barbarians, he felt instead like being in the midst of an assembly of kings.^[33] Thus, although secret signs of Tradition appeared in Rome from the start in invisible ways,^[34] nevertheless, the very epics and history of Rome, rather than its cultural theories and assumptions, contributed to express the truer “myth” of Rome and to give witness in a more immediate way (almost as if through a series of great symbols sculpted by the power in the very substance of history) to the spiritual struggle that forged the destiny and the greatness of this “eternal” city. All the phases of Rome’s development represented conquests of the victorious Indo-European spirit; in the greatest historical and military tensions we find the best manifestations of this spirit, even when the life of Rome was already altered because of exogenous influences and plebeian unrest.

From the beginning the myth presents elements that contain a deep meaning and indicate the two opposite forces at work in Rome. There is an interesting tradition according to which Saturn-Kronos created Saturnia, which was regarded as a city and at times as a fortress and was supposedly located where Rome was eventually built; for this purpose, this god allegedly employed a hidden power (latens deus) that was present in Latium.^[35] Concerning the legend of the birth of Rome, in the story of King Numitor and Amulius we already find the theme of the antagonist couple; Amulius seems to embody the violent principle, evident in his attempted usurpation of Numitor, who in turn corresponds to a great degree to the regal and sacred principle. The duality is found again in the couple Romulus and Remus. Here we have a characteristic theme of the heroic cycles, since the two brothers were generated from an intercourse between a virgin in charge of tending the sacred fire and the warrior god Mars. Second, we find the historical and metaphysical theme of being “rescued from the waters.” Third, the fig tree Ruminal, under which the twins take refuge, corresponds to the universal symbol of the Tree of Life and the supernatural nourishment that it grants; in ancient Latin, the attributive ruminus was given to Jupiter, and it signified his role as “he who gives nourishment.” The twins were fed by a she-wolf. I have already described the double meaning of the symbolism of the wolf; not only in the classical world, but also in the Celtic and Nordic world, the themes of the wolf and the light were often intertwined to the point that the wolf came to be associated with the Hyperborean Apollo. Moreover, the wolf represents a wild force, an elemental and unrestrained power; in Nordic mythology the “Age of the Wolf” designated the age in which the rebellious elemental powers are out of control.

The duality latent in the principle that nourishes the twins corresponds to the duality of Romulus and Remus, Osiris and Set, Cain and Abel, and so on.^[36] Romulus marked the boundaries of the city with a sacred rite based on a principle symbolizing order, limit, and law. Remus was disrespectful of this delimitation and was killed by his brother. This was the first episode and the prelude of a dramatic, internal and external, spiritual and social struggle (partially well known, partially represented by silent symbols) on the part of Rome to generate a universal heroic tradition in the Mediterranean world.

The mythical account of the period of the kings of Rome indicates the antagonism between a heroic and warrior aristocratic principle and the element connected with the plebeians, “the Pelasgians of Rome,” and the lunar, priestly component (of an Etruscan-Sabine origin); this antagonism was expressed as well in geographical terms, namely, by the Palatine and by the Aventine. It was from the Palatine that Romulus saw the symbol, of the twelve vultures that bestowed on him supremacy over Remus, who had chosen the Aventine for himself. After Remus’s death, the duality seems to reemerge in the form of a compromise in the pair Romulus-Tatius; Tatius was the king of the Sabines, a people of a prevalently telluric and lunar cult. Following Romulus’s death, a war erupted between the Albans (a warrior stock of Nordic type) and the Sabines. Moreover, according to the ancient Italic tradition, it was on the Palatine that Hercules met the good king Evander (who had erected on it a temple dedicated to the goddess Victory) after slaying Cacus, the son of the Pelasgic god of chthonic fire, and after erecting in the latter’s cave, located on the Aventine, an altar to the Olympian god.^[37] The same Hercules, as “triumphal Hercules” and the sworn enemy of Bona Dea, was destined to play a significant role, together with Jupiter, Mars, and Apollo, in the theme of the Roman Uranian and virile spirituality and thus came to be celebrated in rituals from which women were excluded.^[38]

Moreover, the Aventine, the mountain of the slain Cacus and of Remus, was also the mountain sacred to the Goddess; on top of it was the most important temple of Diana-Luna, the great goddess of the night, which was founded by Servius Tullius, the plebeian king and the friend of the people. The plebeians who rebelled against the patriciate took refuge in this temple; in this temple slaves celebrated feasts in honor of Servius Tullius; on the Aventine other feminine cults were also established, such as those of Bona Dea, Carmenta, Juno Regina (392 B.C.)—a deity imported from the vanquished Vejo and of whom the Romans in the beginning were not very fond—or of telluric and virile cults, such as that of Faunus.

The succession of the legendary kings of Rome is a sequence of episodes in the struggle between two principles. After Romulus, who was transformed into a “hero” in the guise of Quirinus—the “undefeated god,” of whom Caesar considered himself an incarnation—we find in Numa the reemergence of the lunar type of the regal Etruscan-Pelasgian priest who was guided by the feminine principle (the Hegeria) and who anticipated the scission between the regal and the priestly powers.^[39] In Tullus Hostilius, however, we can see the symptoms of the reaction of the characteristic Roman virile principle against the Etruscan priestly principle; this king appeared as the type of the imperator and the warrior leader. Although Tully died because he climbed an altar and caused a thunderbolt to rend the sky (which was the prerogative of the priests), the symbolism of his gesture alluded to the attempt to reintegrate the Sacred within the warrior aristocracy. Conversely, in the Etruscan dynasty of the Tarquinians the themes of the woman and of a regality often favoring the plebeian strata against the aristocracy became predominant in Rome.^[40]

A fundamental event in the history of Rome was the revolt of the Roman patriciate (509 B.C.), which, after killing Servius, expelled the second Tarquin, put an end to the foreign dynasty, and broke the yoke of the previous civilization—almost at the same time as the expulsion of the popular tyrants and of the Doric restoration in Athens (510 B.C.). After this, it is of little importance to follow the development of inner struggles and the alternation of patrician resistance and plebeian usurpation in Rome. The center shifted from the inside to the outside. Rather than the compromise that some institutions and laws represented until the imperial age, we should consider the “myth” represented by the historical process of the growth of Rome’s greatness. Despite the endurance or the infiltration into Rome’s social network of a heterogenous and Southern element, the political structures in which this element took a firm hold were nevertheless affected; eventually, they were either inexorably destroyed or swept away by a different, antithetical, and nobler civilization.

To this effect, all we have to do is think about the unusual and significant violence with which Rome destroyed the centers of the previous civilization, especially the Etruscan ones, successfully wiping out all traces of their previous power, their traditions, and even their languages. Like Alba, so did Vejo (the city of Queen Juno),^[41] Tarquinia, and Lucumonia disappear from history. In this destruction we find the sense of a destiny fulfilled, being methodically carried out more than merely contemplated, by a race that always believed that its greatness and good fortune were due to divine forces. Next to fall was Capua, which was the center of Southern weakness and opulence, the personification of the “culture” of the aesthetic and Aphroditized Greece no longer under Doric influence; that civilization was destined to seduce and weaken a segment of the Roman patriciate. The two traditions clashed especially during the Punic wars in the form of political realities and powers. With the destruction of Carthage, which was (146 B.C.) the city of the Goddess (Astarte-Tanit) and the regal woman (Dido) who had tried to seduce the legendary forefather of the Roman nobility—we may say with Bachofen^[42] that Rome shifted the center of the historical West from the telluric to the Uranian mystery, from the lunar world of the Mothers, to the solar world of the Fathers. The original and invisible seed of the “Roman race” actualized an inner formation of life with an ethos and a law that consolidated this meaning despite the continuous and subtle action of the opposite element. Truthfully, the Roman right of the conquering arms, together with the mystical view of victory, was radically antithetical to Etruscan fatalism and to any contemplative abandonment. The virile idea of the state took hold in opposition to any hieratic, Demetrian form, nevertheless retaining in all of its structures the chrism proper to a sacred and ritual element. This idea strengthened the soul and made the whole life vastly superior to all naturalistic elements. The asceticism of “action” developed in the traditional forms that I mentioned before; it even permeated the articulations of the corporate organizations with a sense of discipline and military style. Gens and familia were organized according to the strict paternal right; the heart of society consisted in the patres, who were the priests of the sacred fire, the arbiters of justice, and the military leaders of their own People and of their slaves or clients, and the highly visible elements of the aristocratic Senate. The civitas itself, which was the embodiment of the law, was nothing but rhythm, order, and number; the mystical numbers three, ten, twelve, and their multiples formed the basis of its political divisions.

Although Rome did not succeed in shrugging off the influence of the libri sibillini (or libri fatales), which represented the Asiatic element mixed with a spurious Hellenism allegedly introduced by the second Tarquin (these books met the taste of the plebeian rite by introducing new and equivocal deities in the ancient and exclusive patrician cult), nevertheless, Rome reacted wherever the inimical element clearly manifested itself and threatened its deepest reality. Thus, Rome (a) fought against the Bacchic and Aphrodistic influences and banned the Bacchanalia; (b) was suspicious of Mysteries of Asiatic origin because they increasingly gravitated around an unhealthy mysticism; (c) tolerated exotic cults, among which we often find the chthonic and the Mothers’ themes, as long as they did not exercise a harmful influence on the social, virile lifestyle. The destruction of the apocryphal books of Numa Pompilius and the ban of the “philosophers,” especially of the Pythagoreans, were motivated by reasons that were more than political and not contingent. Just like the Etruscan remnants, Pythagoreanism too (which in Greece arose as a Pelasgic reemergence), despite the presence of different elements, may be considered an offshoot of a purified “Demetrian” civilization. It is significant that classical authors believed that a close relationship existed between Pythagoras and the Etruscans and that the banned commentaries of Numa Pompilius’s books tended to sanction this relationship and open the doors (behind the mask of an alleged traditional spirit) to the antithetical and anti-Roman Pelasgic-Etruscan element.

Other historical events that from a metaphysical view of civilization have the meaning of symbols were the fall of the Isis-like-kingdoms of Cleopatra and of Jerusalem, which marked the turning points in the inner Western life, and took place through the dynamics of the archetypal antitheses themselves reflected in the civil war. In Pompeius, Brutus, Cassius, and Anthony we may find the Southern theme in the tenacious but thwarted attempt to slow down and to overcome the new reality. While Cleopatra was the symbol of an Aphrodistic civilization under whose spell Anthony fell victim, ^[43] Caesar embodied the Aryan-Western type of the. conqueror. With the words: “The gens Julia can claim both the sanctity of kings, who reign supreme among mortals, and the reverence due to gods, who hold even kings in their power,”^[44] he foretold the reemergence in Rome of the highest view of the imperium. In reality, with Augustus—who in the eyes of the Romans embodied the numen and the aeternitas of the son of Apollo the Sun—the unity of the two powers was reestablished following a reformation that meant to restore the principles of the ancient Roman religion against the invasion of the exotic cults and superstitions. Augustus represented a state that justified itself with the solar-Olympian idea and that naturally tended to implement the ideal of universality. The idea of Rome eventually affirmed itself beyond all ethnic and religious particularisms. Once the imperial cult was defined, it respected and welcomed into some sort of “religious feudalism” the various gods that corresponded to the traditions of the different peoples that were incorporated in the Roman ecumene; above any particular and national religion it was given witness to by a superior fides, which was connected with the supernatural principle embodied by the emperor, or by the “genius” of the emperor, and symbolized by the Victory as a mystical entity and to which the Senate swore faithfulness.

At the time of Augustus, the asceticism of action characterized by an element of destiny had created a sufficiently vast body so that Roman universalism could also have a tangible expression and bestow its chrism on a heterogeneous group of populations and races. Rome appeared as the “genitrix of men and of gods”; as a city “in whose temples one is not far from heaven,” and which had made of different people one nation (fecisti patriam diversis gentibus unam).^[45] The pax augusta et profunda, as pax romana, seemed to stretch as far as the limits of the known world. It was as if Tradition were destined to rise again in the forms proper to a “heroiccycle.” It looked as if the Iron Age had come to an end and the return of the primordial age of the Hyperborean Apollo had begun:

Now the last age of Cumae’s prophecy has come. The great succession of centuries is born anew. Now too returns the Virgin; Saturn’s rule returns. Now a new generation descends from heaven’s height. O chaste Lucina, look with blessing on the newborn boy whose birth will end the iron race at last and raise a golden through the world: now your [brother] Apollo reigns… He will receive the divine life and see the gods mingling with heroes, and himself be seen one of them.^[46]

This feeling was so strong that later on it affirmed itself and turned Rome into a superhistorical symbol; even Christians said that while Rome was safe and whole-some the dreadful convulsions of the last age were not to be feared, but that when Rome fell, humanity would find itself close to the end.^[47]

Footnotes

1. Herodotus (Histories 1.56; 8.44) regarded the early Ionian inhabitants of Athens as Pelasgians and called their language “barbarous,” that is, non-Hellenic.

2. W. Ridgeway, The Early Age of Greece (Cambridge, 1901), 1.337–406; 407, 541. This work contains several valuable insights regarding the separation of the Nordic component from the Pelasgic component within Hellenic civilization, even though the author emphasizes the ethnic more than the spiritual opposition between these components.

3. Callimachus. Hymn to Zeus, 5.9.

4. Herodotus, Histories, 2.50. There are two traditions concerning the Pelasgian Minos: in the first he appears as a just king and as a divine legislator (his name has an interesting etymological similarity to the Hindu Manu, the Egyptian Manes, the Germanic Mannus, and maybe the Latin Numa); in the second he appears as a violent and demonic power ruling over the waters. The opposition between the Hellenes and Minos refers to the latter tradition.

5. Thus wrote Bachofen: “Gynaecocracy is part of the legacy of those races that Strabo (7.321; 7.572) regarded as barbarous and as the early pre-Hellenic inhabitants of Greece and of Asia Minor, whose repeated migrations began ancient history just as the migratory waves of northern populations during later times began the history of our times.” Mutterrecht, 43. Another historian, Domenico Mosso (Origini della civilta’ mediterranea, 128) showed that the priestesses of the sarcophagus of Hagia Triada were in charge of the most important functions of the priesthood, while men only had a secondary role in it. Mosso also indicated that the Minoan-Pelasgian religion retained its matriarchical character for a long time and that the privileged status of women, not only in the rites but also in social life (Escursioni nel Mediterraneo, 216, 221),characterized both the Minoan and the Etruscan civilizations.

6. The Olympian Zeus, after defeating the Titans and their allies, confined them to Tartarus or Erebus, which is the location where “Atlas” was kept prisoner and also the seat of Hecate, one of the forms of the Pelasgian Goddess.

7. See J.E. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Cambridge, 1903), 4–10; 120; 162. In this work there are several valid observations regarding the opposition between an Achaean Olympian ritual and a chthonic ritual within the Greek religion.

8. See Ridgeway, Early Age of Greece (506 ff.; 521–25), which shows the opposition between the cremation practices of northern Aryan origin and the burial practices of Greek-Pelasgic origin; this difference reflects the Uranian and the telluric views of the afterlife. The cremation of corpses was practiced by those who wanted to remove once and for all the psychic residues of the “deceased,” since these residues were regarded as baleful influences, or by those who imagined for the soul of the “hero” a dwelling totally removed from the earth; this dwelling could be reached only after the last connection with the living (i.e., the corpse) was destroyed as if through an extreme purification. The burial ritual expresses the return of “earth to earth” and the dependency on the origins conceived in a telluric fashion. In Homer’s times this ritual was virtually unknown, just like the idea of a “hell” and its torments.

9. Herodotus (Histories, 2.81) did not distinguish Orpheus from Bacchus; if Dio (Roman History) relates the modifications Orpheus allegedly introduced into the orgiastic rituals, this may be a modification in a Pythagorean sense (Orpheus as musician, or the idea of harmony), which, however, did not alter its fundamental character. According to some Orpheus came from Crete, that is from an Atlantic-Pelasgic center; others, by identifying him with Pythagoras himself, see him as a descendant of the Atlanteans.

10. Harrison (Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 120; 162) identified those festivals in which the feminine theme was predominant with the forms of magical rituals of purification that were typical of the ancient chthonic cult; it is likely that they constituted the germ of a certain aspect of the Mysteries. The notion of purification and expiation, which was virtually unknown in the Olympian cult, was a dominant theme in the inferior stratum. Later on, some kind of compromise and sublimation took place. Once the aristocratic idea of divinity as a natural state was lost (the heroes were mainly such by virtue of their divine origins), what ensued was the idea of a mortal man who yearned for immortality; then the ancient magical and exorcising motif of purification and of expiation was assumed in the mystical form of “purification from death,” and finally in the form of a moral purification and expiation, as in the decadent aspects of the Mysteries that presaged Christianity.

11. Bachofen (Mutterrecht, 247–49) has brought to light an interesting thing, namely, that popular tyrants usually derived their power from a woman and succeeded each other according to a feminine line. This was one of signs of the relationship between democracy and gynaecocracy that is noticeable even in the cycle of the foreign kings in Rome.

12. According to some, Pythagoras owed his doctrine to the teaching of a woman, Themistoclea (Diogenes Laertius, Life of Pythagoras, 5). He entrusted some women to teach doctrine, since he acknowledged their greater propensity to the divine cult; his community had forms that remind us of matriarchy (ibid., 21, 8). Pliny (Natural History, 36.46) mentions that Pythagoras’s disciples started to practice again the chthonic ritual of burial.

13. If we keep in mind the “Dionysization” undergone by the cult of Apollo in Delphi, which led to the introduction of an anti-Olympian ritual of prophecies uttered through ecstatic or delirious women—then the very same traditions that tend to establish a relationship between Pythagoreanism and Apollonism (Pythagoras as “the one who leads the Pythia,” or Pythagoras being identified with Apollo through his “golden thigh,” etc.) hardly contradict what has just been said.

14. Delphi’s value of “pole” was obscurely perceived by the Hellenes since they regarded Delphi as the omphalos, or the “center” of the earth and of the world; in any event, they found in the Delphic amphitrionate the sacred bond that united them over and above the particularism of the individual city-states.

15. It is significant that Apollonian Delphi, the traditional center of ancient Hellas, did not hesitate to abandon the “national cause” when it came in contact with civilizations that expressed the same spirit that it itself embodied, such as in the fifth century, in favor of the Persians, and in the fourth century in favor of the Macedonians. The Persians, for their part, almost recognized their god in the Hyperborean Apollo; in Hellenism we often encounter the assimilation of Apollo to Mithras, and on the part of the Persians, of Ahura Mazda to Zeus, of Verethragna to Heracles, of Anahita to Artemis, and so on. This was much more than mere “syncretism.”

16. In India, Buddhism opposed pragmatism and realism to priestly philosophical speculations around the same time the early Greek philosophers appeared on the scene.

17. Some, like Protagoras, claimed that “Man is the measure of all things” and employed this hermeneutical principle in an individualistic, destructive, and sophistical way.

18. I employ this term according to the sense that Michelstaedter (La persuasione e la retorica [Florence, C. 1922]) gave to it; he vividly illustrated the sense of Socratic conceptual decadence and philosophical evasiveness vis-à-vis the doctrine of “being.. as defended by the Eleatics.

19. Gellius, 18.7.3.

20. This opposition was the central thesis of Bachofen’s Die Sage von Tanaquil (Heidelberg, 1870). In the next few pages I have borrowed and incorporated into a traditional conceptual framework several ideas of Bachofen’s concerning the meaning and the mission of Rome in the West.

21. Bachofen’s work showed the analogy with civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean. Mosso noticed a general relationship between the Aegean (pre-Hellenic) civilization and the pre-Roman Italic civilization.

22. According to Livy (1.34), in the cult of Tanaquil the Etruscan women exercised the role of priestesses; this is a typical trait of the Pelasgic civilization.

23. The Roman gens that remained faithful to the ritual of inhumation was the gens Cornelia, whose characteristic cult was that of the telluric Venus.

24. The most ancient root of the cult of Bona Dea, a deity who at first was venerated in a chaste Demetrian form, reemerged in a decadent period of Roman history during which her cult came to be associated with uninhibited sexual promiscuity. Concerning Vesta, just as the maternal dignity of this goddess was respected and yet subordinated to the authority of the patres, likewise her cult was subjected to the pontifex magnus first and to the emperor later. After all, the official cult of fire in the time of Romulus was entrusted to priests; it became the legacy of the vestal virgins only as a decision of the Sabine and lunar king Numa. Emperor Julian (Hymn to King Helios, 155a) eventually restored its solar character.

25. Varro, 5.74. In this context the lares are to be understood in their chthonic aspect. It would be interesting to examine the mixture of the telluric element, which is an Etruscan-Pelasgic remnant, with the “heroic” and patrician element in the Roman funerary cult. Also it would be interesting to analyze the phases of the process of purification through which the lares lost their original pre-Roman, telluric (the lares as the “children” of Acea Larentia, the equivalent of Bona Dea), and plebeian (a characteristic of the cult of the lares was that slaves played an important role in it and at times were even the officiating celebrants) character and thus assumed more and more the character of “divine spirits,” “heroes,” and souls that had overcome death. Augustine, City of God, 9. 11.

26. The most widespread classical tradition during the imperial era of Rome attributed an Asiatic origin to the Etruscans, in a way that can be summed up in Seneca’s words: “Tuscos Asia sibi indicat.” According to some, the Etruscans belonged to the stock of the Tursha, seafolk whose dwelling was located in some island or region of the eastern Mediterranean and who invaded Egypt toward the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty. According to a more recent and reliable opinion, the Etruscans were the remnants of a population that preexisted those Italic nuclei that had come from the north; this population was scattered in Spain, along the Tyrrhenian Sea, in Asia Minor and even along the Caucasus (from the Basques, to the Liddi and the Hittites); in that case they belong to the Atlantic-Pelasgic cycle. Other scholars, such as Altheim and Mosso, talk about the kinship existing between the Etruscan and Minoan civilizations not only because of the privileged role that women played in the cult, but also because of affinities that are evident in their architecture, art, and customs.

27. Dio, Roman History, 1.27. See also M. Pallottino, Etruscologia (Milan, 1942), 175–81. This author, in addition to “an abandonment and almost an abdication of spiritual human activity before the deity,” also noticed the gloomy and pessimistic Etruscan view of the afterlife, which did not know any hopes of immortality and heavenly survival for anybody, including the ‘most exalted people.

28. Concerning the pathos of the afterlife, G. De Sanctis (Storia dei Romani, 1.147) explained that a characteristic of the Etruscan soul was the “terror of the afterlife, which was expressed through figurations of dreadful demons, like the monster Tuchulcha, and through macabre portrayals that anticipate the medieval ones.”

29. Ovid, Metamorphosis, 15.553.

30. According to Piganiol, in the methods of Roman divination there must have been an opposition between the Uranian and patrician ritual of the augurs and the chthonic ritual of the Etruscan haruspexes.

31. Livy, 22.22.6. Fides—in its various forms, such as Fides Romana, Fides Publica, and so on—was one of the most ancient deities of Rome.

32. In this context “magic” is understood in the higher sense of the word and is referred to the official Roman religion, which according to some, consisted in a sheer “formalism” lacking religious pathos; on the contrary, it expressed the ancient law of pure action. The Roman persecutions against magic and astrology only concerned inferior forms of religion, that were often superstitious or quackish. In reality, a magical attitude understood as an attitude of command and action upon invisible forces through the pure determinism of the ritual, constituted the essence of the early Roman religion and the Roman view of the sacred. Later on, though the Romans opposed the popular and superstitious forms of magic, they continued to have a great respect for the patrician cult and for the figure of the theurgist, who was shrouded with dignity and with ascetical purity.

33. Plutarch, Phyrro, 19.5. In the episode of the Gallic invasion, the countenance of the elders was described by Livy as “more than human,” and as “very similar to the gods (5.41).

34. See for instance: (a) the “sign of the center,” the black stone Romulus put at the beginning of the Via Sacra; (b) the fatidic and solar “twelve,” which was the number of vultures that gave Romulus the right to name the new city; the number of the lictorian fasces carrying an axe, the symbol of the Hyperborean conquerors; the number, instituted by Numa, of the ancilia (sacred shields) which were the pignora imperii (the pledge of command); and the number of the altars in the archaic cult of Janus; (c) the eagle, sacred to the god of bright skies, Jupiter, and also the signum of the Roman legions, which was also one of the Aryan symbols of the immortalizing “glory”; this is why the souls of the deceased Caesars were believed to take the form of an eagle and to fly into solar immortality; (d) the sacrifice of the horse, which corresponds to the aśvamedha of the Indo-Aryans; (e) many other elements of a universal sacred tradition.

In regard to eagles, in ancient traditions we find the belief that the person on whom an eagle came to rest was predestined by Zeus to high offices or to regality and that the sight of an eagle was an omen of victory. The eagle was such a universal symbol that among the Aztecs it indicated the location for the capital of the new empire. The ba, the element of the human being destined to lead a heavenly eternal life in a state of glory, was often represented in Egyptian hieroglyphics as a sparrow hawk, which was the Egyptian equivalent of the eagle. In the Ṛg Veda (4.18.12; 4.27.2) the eagle carried the magic potion to Indra that consecrated him as the Lord of all gods, leaving behind infernal feminine forces. From a doctrinal point of view, this could be compared to the esoteric meaning of the Roman imperial apotheosis (consecratio) in which the flight of the eagle from the funeral pyre symbolized the deceased soul’s ensuing deification.

35. Pliny said: “Saturnia ubi huc Roma est.” Virgil (Aeneid, 357–58): “Hanc Janus pater, hanc Saturnus condidit arcem: Janiculum huic, illi fuerat Saturnia nomen.”

36. Set, the dark brother who killed Osiris, was also called Typhon. According to Plutarch: “They called Typhon ‘Set’; for this name, which denotes overpowering and violence, also denotes frequent return and overleaping.” De Iside et Osiride, 49. The enemies of the solar principle (Ra), who were called “the children of the hopeless revolt,” were associated with Set.

37. According to Piganiol the duel between Hercules and Cacus may have been a legendary transposition of the struggle between an Aryan or Aryan-like stock and an aboriginal stock of a Pelasgic origin.

38. Macrobius. Saturnalia, 1.12.27.

39. After Numa, the king (who originally ranked higher than the flamines, who in turn corresponded to the Hindu brāhmaṇa) was opposed to the rex sacrorum, who during that period was an expression of the plebeian ritual, rather than a priest of the patrician rite; he was the mediator between the people and the great plebeian goddess, the Moon, who did not own the spectio (the right to inspect the aruspicina, which was an attribute typical of the patricians) and who, according to the ritual, ranked below the vestal virgins.

40. I will refer the reader to Bachofen’s work regarding the relationships between the feminine figures and the kings of the foreign dynasty. I will only add that the name Servius (Servius Tullius) originally indicated a son of slaves, just like the name Brutus (the name of the first tribune of the plebs was Junius Brutus and after the first year this name never appeared again in the consular lists) was given to rebellious slaves of Pelasgic stock. There is also a significant (for the plebeian element) telluric theme emphasized by tradition, according to which after the oracle announced that he who kissed his own mother would become king, Brutus knelt to the ground and kissed the earth, whom he conceived as the Mother of all; likewise, the plebeians and the Etruscan lucumoni were regarded as children of the earth. Besides, isn’t it curious that centuries later the first person who attempted to usurp the legitimate authority in Rome himself carried the name of the rebellious Pelasgic slaves, namely, Brutus?

41. Piganiol rightly observed that the struggle of Rome against Vejo represented the struggle of Apollo against the Goddess; a similar meaning seems to be given by Livy (5.23.5–8) who related that Camillus, after conquering Vejo, was regarded as a solar deity.

42. In the example of Rome following the libri sibillini and welcoming the Phrygian Great Goddess (as it did before with the Asiatic goddess of prostitution, following the defeat at Lake Trasimene) in order to facilitate a victory over Hannibal, Bachofen saw an Aphrodistic city that was almost afraid of having neglected the Mother for such a long time and of having consecrated itself entirely to the virile principle of the imperium. This is possible. On the other hand, we should not forget that according to the Romans a war could not truly be won other than by evoking and drawing to their side the gods of the enemy: the great Phrygian goddess was a copy of the Punic Tanit. The cult of that goddess was incorporated into the Roman world only later on and it spread among the plebeian classes especially.

43. It is interesting that Cleopatra assumed the name “Isis” and Anthony.

“Dionysus,” thus reproducing two complementary types of a civilization of “Aphrodistic” type. See Dio Cassius, Roman History, 10.5.

44. Suetonius, Life of the Twelve Caesars (Julius Caesar, 6).

45. Rutilius Namatianus, De red. suo, 1.49, 50, 62–65.

46. Virgil, Eclogues, 4.5–10; 15–18. Among these prophetic expressions of Virgil we find mention of the serpent’s death (5.24); of a group of heroes who will renew the symbolic feat of Argon; and of Achilles who will wage a new symbolic war of the Achaeans against Troy.

47. Expressions of Lactantius, The Divine Institutes, 7.25.6; Tertullian, Ad scapulam, 2.