For the ancient Greeks, the golden age follows the creation of man while Cronus, Time, reigns in heaven and on earth: a time of innocence, justice, abundance and happiness. In a perpetual spring, the fields produce without culture, men live for centuries and die without suffering, smiling…
Strangely, there is no or very little ancient imagery of the golden age: no trace of this myth on Greek or Roman vases, paintings, mosaics. Before the Christian representations of Paradise, they were not images of the golden age and other ages of humanity.
Why this lack of ancient images?
In the continuation of his Theogony entitled The Works and the Days, the immortal Hesiod describes this lost paradise with an ineffable nostalgia.
When men and gods were born together, first the heavenly inhabitants of Olympus created the golden age for speech-endowed mortals. Under the reign of Saturn who commanded in heaven, mortals lived like the gods, they were free from worries, works, and sufferings; cruel old age did not afflict them; their feet and hands kept constantly the same vigor, and far from all evils, they rejoiced amidst the feasts, rich in delicious fruits and dear to the blessed Immortals. They died as if chained by a sweet sleep. All good things were born around them.
The fertile land produced by itself abundant treasures; free and peaceful, they shared their riches with a crowd of virtuous friends. When the earth had enclosed this first generation in its bosom, these men, called the terrestrial genii, became the protectors and tutelary guardians of mortals: they observed their good or their bad actions, and, wrapped in a cloud, travel the entire earth spreading wealth: such is the royal prerogative they have obtained.
But believe me, Hesiod speaks of it by hearsay. The only ones who have made the most of this blessed period are not the little men, our ancestors. But the former Giants, their masters…
Theogony means Birth of the Gods. Let’s see what speaking means. Hesiod attacks like this: When men and gods were born together.
Huh? There was a time when men and gods were not ‘born together’? Yes, the three (or four) ages that preceded the one where we are took place without us. The first, the Golden Age, was that of the Cyclops. The second, of silver, was that of the Giants before. The third, of bronze, that of the Gods before. The fourth, that of the Heroes.
The only age that saw the birth of the fifth humanity, ours, it’s the Iron Age where we are.
When Hesiod believes that we have known the golden age, he is mistaken. Moreover, in his Theogony, there is no place for the golden age so gentle and peaceful. Nothing but fights, pitched battles, deadly hecatombs. In previous ages, the Gods fought tirelessly and fearfully against beings of unheard-of power: gigantic snakes, hydra-flies, octopuses with indescribable tentacles, and enormous long-necked beasts in which we can recognize dinosaurians.
The golden age is like happiness: it is recognized only when it is past.
Despite all due respect, the immortal Hesiod takes it at ease. After having asserted that the gods are the children of the Earth Gaia / Ge and of the Sky Ouranos / Uranus, Hesiod explains to us how the gods had to get rid of a crowd of undesirables who, it seems, occupied the Earth before the Cyclops, the giants and the gods.
Would Ouranos and Gaïa have created them too? Obstinate silence.
But if we break with the myth, prehistory responds. These undesirables are snakes, giant lizards, saurians: the Reptilians who preceded the mammals. Reptilians were our first masters. The oldest texts from India or China evoke them with veneration. Nowadays, the Dragon’s Day is the main festival that Asians celebrate all over the world.
These dragons, let us not forget, were our educators and those of the generation that preceded us, the Titans. And also those of the people who preceded the Titans, namely the Giants, and still before that, the Cyclops.
But at the very beginning? Strangely, we note the extreme rarity of ancient imagery representing the golden age: almost no trace of this myth on Roman or Greek vases, paintings, and mosaics. One must wait for the representations of the Christian Paradise to see appear images of the golden age and other ages of humanity.
Why this lack of images?
I know that we must not stop at such a gap. Do we imagine that we possess everything that was done in Rome or in Athens? If we have preserved many things, historians think that we possess only a tenth, or even less. As for the wonders of ancient Egypt, it’s even less.
Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) is a Swiss doctor, whose name evokes Jungian psychoanalysis and analytical psychology. Less practiced than Freud, it is, in my opinion, quite superior to him.
For Jung, the golden age is an archetype, a universal oneiric structure of human thought. On this point, Jung was a bit quick. This structure has nothing oneiric. The memory of this happy age, out of time, before the start of the beginnings of our species, is inscribed very deeply at the bottom of our heritage memory. I should say matrimonial, because, with all due respect to Hesiod and Jung, the Matriarchs greatly preceded the Age of the Patriarchs. But that’s another story…
In his Red Book, Jung associates these archetypes with what he calls the spirit of the depths.
According to him, we have two minds:
– that of time, superficial, fickle, changing with the fashions and years,
– that of the depths, more elusive, not undergoing the erosion of time.
In us can and must occur the junction of these two opposites. A mature mind has achieved the fusion of sense and non-sense, thus achieving overmeaning. I will return to it in a future article. I am far from finished with Jung, who amazes me.
You want a better world, more fraternal, more just ? Well start doing it : who’s stopping you ? Do it in you and around you, do it with those who want to make it. Do it small and it will grow.
Jung v Freud
Jung and Synchronicity
Jung and the Soul
Jung and Divine Madness
The golden age did indeed exist, but it does not have a historical existence. Because the golden age happened before History began. It belongs to pre-prehistory, to the antério-proto-prehistory or other barbarisms. It does not concern our human species, fifth of the name.
Yet all of us are nostalgic for it!
On all fields, the reign of Cronos, first age of humankind, was a time of affluence and virtue: “In the absence of any upholder of the law, spontaneously, without any law, good faith and honesty were current.(…) The Earth itself, free from every constraint, suffering no damage from agriculture, gift all its fruits with pleasure.” (source)Hesiode, Theogony
Yet, Cronos was a bloodthirsty monster, who devoured his own children! If he were such a bloody tyrant, why do we feel those sweet scents of harmony, sweetness of living in a really peaceful place? This is the main paradox of Eden. Such a nice place for Gods, such a bad place for humans.
It was in the reign of time as in those who followed. After a blessed period of abundance and nobility of soul came the famine and decline: the moon get closer, threatening to wipe out the noble race of Time. Cronos gave way to ones better suited: the Olympians.
Note that the Cronus of the Greeks has his equivalent in Rome. He is called Saturn…
Greek mythology tells us in a more striking form: the day came when the tyrant Cronos was thrown into the darkness of Tartarus and Zeus became the new master of the world. The silver age was beginning. Does this mean that we would have lived happy days under the ruthless reign of an absolute tyrant? Of course not, no more than under the reign of the next tyrant, Zeus, the warlike sex addict, the God of Titans and humans.
Because Theos, from his Greek name, has two translations in French: Zeus and Dieu. Yes, people of faith, Dieu is a vicious tyrant. And the man of power is hardly better. Thirsty for domination, both trade their psi powers for a sad material power, the only human and divine obsession in this age of darkness…
This is what the Greek mythology says, in a more striking form: one day Cronus/Cronos was cast into the darkness of Tartarus and Zeus became the new master of the world. The Silver Age began.
Forget mythology, things will be clearer with science that does not talk about the silver age: in our temperate latitudes, an ice age followed the perpetual spring. The silver age was not very funny… After the sweet vertigo of flowers and abundant fruits, which it was enough to pick to satiate oneself, a terrible nuclear winter falls on the world and on men. A rigorous, untenable winter, to which science attributes a duration of one hundred thousand years.
Some humans will rot underground for many generations. They will live confined in endless cities connected by tunnels. Legends everywhere say that these tunnels connected all the continents, passing under the seas and the mountains. One day, we will find them. Not all. Not right away.
The underground cities offered some comfort: drinking water, aeration system, waste disposal… When we know that the ice age lasted one hundred thousand years, we shiver when evoking the fate of human moles. We also understand the powerful nostalgia that has gripped these beings without sun or prairie. Unless…
Unless the Earth Center is habitable, which I saw — in the Castanedian sense of the term. Not only did I see it, but I went there several times. I often go there by the way of wizards, scalar waves. And I can tell you that we find the spirit of the depths that Jung was talking about. We also find there the golden age, the perpetual spring that delights us with the (very) old myths …
More than fifty thousand years ago, all humans –but yes, there were, believe me. And many! — the many humans had to, to survive, find refuge in the domain of the gods, the underworld, the Hells of the Greeks — who have everything from paradise
The eternal spring has not been for us, nor for the gods before us, nor for the giants who preceded the gods. The eternal spring is the blessed period of the Gigantic Serpents. They have enjoyed a mild and beneficial climate. They took advantage of a docile, orthonormal planet, and not inclined on its axis as it is now.
A terrible catastrophe brutally ended the reign of the Reptilians.
The age before the bomb seemed so fresh, laughing, carefree compared to the harshness of their present condition. It does not take more to create this myth of the Golden Age. This tenacious regret of eternal spring expresses perhaps the terrible frustration of not being able to get out in the open air. Danger!
They would have found without a doubt a landscape devastated by bombs, stained by deadly radiation, and later a world frozen to heart in miles of ice that covered the northern hemisphere. What do I know yet? Nothing livable.
If they buried themselves, it was out of wisdom. And by necessity. For centuries, deep in their burrows, they embroidered on the theme of the beauty of nature in spring …
I often visited these golden surroundings. Over there reigns a good life, a lightness, as something in the air that suggests a lower gravity and a more toned atmosphere.
Clearer is the light, brighter the colours. Blinder. Human bodies are bigger, I admit, or else the hills are smaller, which I doubt. I remember how we love playing leapfrog on the cloudsl – leaving to imagine the size we got.
And a particular sweetness, a floating fruity sensation, that you can find everywhere into the wild, at every time, every season, but that you best appreciate in a Val de Loire sunset at the fall of the year: everything is just fine, nice and beautiful.
The golden age was a final point endlessly extended.
So neither point nor final. Rather ellipsis …
A big question mark while waiting for the fatal sequel.
A quote from Hesiod opened this article, I would like to close it with Ovid:
“It was of gold, the first age to be born: without avenger, without constraint, without laws, he respected good faith and righteousness. No punishment or fear; no threat on bronze tables and the pleading crowd did not fear the face of their judge; without protector, people were safe.
So, the pine had not yet been felled in its mountains and had not descended on the sea waves to visit a foreign world. The mortals knew no shores but their own. No ditch yet surrounded any stronghold. Point of straight trumpet, point of curved brass horn, neither helmet nor sword. Without a soldier, the tribes spent sweet leisure.
The earth too, exempt from any obligation, without being touched by the hoyau, nor wounded by weapons, gave everything of itself. Satisfied with food produced without any constraint, the man gathered the fruits of the arbutus, the mountain strawberries, the cornouilles, the blackberries attached to the thorny brambles and the fallen acorns of the broad canopy of the tree of Jupiter. An eternal spring! The peaceful zephyrs caressed with their warm breath the flowers born without seedlings.
Very quickly, even, the virgin land carried harvests and the fallow field was blanching heavy ears of corn. There, rivers of milk, there, rivers of nectar; drops of blond honey were falling from the verdant yeuse.” ~~The Works and the Days – Ovide.
The aesthetics of the golden age are fully found in the myth of Arcadia. Mountainous region of the Peloponnese, populated by shepherds, Arcadia is the subject of many fantasies of Roman poets, in particular Ovid, in his Splendors, or even Virgil in his Bucolics, which present ancient Arcadia as a world where innocence reigned, love between beings, and where men would have lived in harmony with nature.
A time of abundance, happiness and innocence, where men and animals live without suffering and without the obligation to work. The purpose of ancient religions is the restoration of the harmony of the Cosmos, through the realization of sacrifices to the gods in temples. In ancient times, personal salvation was by no means a central concern. It was necessary to wait for the decline of our Iron Age for Jesus, the improbable Christ, to come and make us afraid, and by repentance, to beg God his father to ensure our salvation.
Remember that French Dieu comes from the Greek Theos, which also translates as Zeus …
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