World Ages and Their Demise
Last Update: January 24, 2011
From TheCityEdition.com
In the first place you remember a single deluge only, but there were many previous ones; in the next place, you do not know that there formerly dwelt in your land the fairest and noblest race of men which ever lived, and that you and your whole city are descended from a small seed or remnant of them which survived. And this was unknown to you, because, for many generations, the survivors of that destruction died, leaving no written word.
--Plato, from Timaeus (about 360 B.C.)
We look at history far differently than Plato and other ancient chroniclers, and this discrepancy may prove our undoing as our future unfolds. Before the late 19th century, the texts of classical antiquity were routinely consulted for insight about natural disasters and other seemingly apocalyptic events. But no more.
It seems this vast depository of wisdom, so painstakingly handed down through hundreds of generations, took a back seat during the British Empire. Within the hallowed walls of Oxford and Cambridge, a decision was made to distinguish between those stories that could be verified by archaeological digs and written records, and those that could not. Since the earliest evidence of translatable script only goes back to around 3000 B.C., the majority of history was thus reclassified as "prehistory"and the legends moved to the fiction section of libraries.
Never mind that explorer Heinrich Schliemann had already dug up the city of Troy. Through his persistence, we now know there was more to Homer's little poem than a vivid imagination. More recently, robot submarines and satellite mapping have revealed immense urban complexes sitting on the floor of all our oceans. How did they get there? And who were the people who who lived in these places?
Some modern investigators even claim to have uncovered the mythical continent of Atlantis. It may be lying off the coast of Japan, at a site known as Yonaguni. Or it may be buried off the coast of Cuba. Both underwater ruins date to at least 6000 B.C. Around the Mediterranean Sea, more than a hundred cities have been discovered. Geologists suggest the locations must have been inhabited at least around the end of the last ice age, when sea levels were much lower than they are now. And in 2001, the fabled city Dwarka was also identified, lying just offshore of western India.
Despite of so much circumstantial evidence, the modern historical record remains unchanged. Richard Rudgley, author of The Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age (and an Oxford-trained scholar himself), had this to say about his academic field in 1999: "The way in which the human story has been written to date is so abridged and poorly edited that it has provided us with an account of ourselves which leaves out most of the contents of the early chapters."
If, as many of the old legends state, a periodic apocalypse rocks the Earth whenever humankind falls out of kilter with the gods, then maybe it's time we revisit those ancient accounts and find out what happened.
Atlantis, Apocalypses and Other Mysteries
The next time you pick up that big atlas on the coffee table for driving directions, take a moment to consider the title on the cover. According to Greek mythology, Atlas was one of Poseidon's sons. Poseidon is said to have founded a seafaring empire that occupied much of the Atlantic Ocean at the dawn of Greek culture. His son Atlas ruled Atlantis, which was the hub of Poseidon's intercontinental commerce. Interestingly, the root of Atlas and Atlantis, Atl (which means water), is shared by both the Basque culture in Spain and ancient mesoamericans.According to the Popol Vuh, Mayan ancestors landed in Latin America about 5,000 years ago, after crossing from the east.
Yet western historians persist in their belief that mesoamerican cultures are the product of the Bering Straits migration, a route that extended between Russia and Alaska. The good professors are also sticking to the story that cultures before 4000 B.C. consisted entirely of nomadic hunter-gatherers who engaged in a lot of superstitious mumbo-jumbo, fertility cults and human sacrifice. From these dubious beginings the pyramids of Giza spring up suddenly in 2850 B.C., built with nothing more than stone chippers, ropes, logs and several decades worth of manpower.
So it's no wonder that few people in the industrialized world are familiar with the concept of world ages. Yet at least 30 cultures around the globe, including the Mayans, share the notion of three or four (or more) world ages separated by mass extinctions. The first three ages are generally known as Golden, Silver and Bronze/Copper. The current epoch of mankind is called the Iron Age.
In the Chinese manuscript known as the Sing-li-ta-tsiuen-chou, a world age is known as a "great year." Up to the lifetime of Confucius, ten worlds, or kis, had come and gone. During the course of a kis, the cosmos "winds up," and "in a great convulsion of Nature, the sea is carried out of its bed, mountains spring out of the ground, rivers change their course, human beings and everything are ruined and the ancient traces effaced."
The ancient Greeks also accepted the concept of world ages. They defined the length of each of these long intervals as a "great year". Not so great was the way they ended, alternating between a deluge and a conflagration of the entire planet. Biblical texts echo this view.
In an essay on the prehistory of Earth's magnetism, researcher Roger Coghill quotes Taoist scriptures which also discuss past world ages. One passage describes a cataclysm that "disturbs the regular method of heaven, comes into collision with the nature of things, prevents the accomplishment of the mysterious (operation of) heaven, scatters the herds of animals, makes the birds all sing at night, is calamitous to vegetation, and disastrous to all insects [and] the six elemental influences do not act in concord."
A Vedic text known as the Visuddhi-Magga also states that world ages are separated by apocalypses. Specifically, "There are three destructions: the destruction by water, the destruction by fire, the destruction by wind."
Many independent researchers think the Mayan long-count calendar represents the beginning and end of a "great year", more specifically the present Iron Age. The calendar commences around 3114 B.C., while our own recorded history takes its roots in Mesopotamia and Egypt about 3100 B.C. In the Vedic world, an age known as Kali Yuga opens in 3102 B.C.
These similar start dates may be just a coincidence. Or they may explain why the long-count calendar was created in the first place. In order to decipher the meaning of its end date in 2012, it would be timely to say the least to take a fresh look at those ancient legends. If Troy really did exist, maybe the advanced civilization of Atlantis also prospered on a lost continent in 9000 B.C., just as Plato said it did. Moreover, the old creation and destruction myths handed down to us from "prehistoric times" may not have started out as myths at all. Were they perhaps eyewitness accounts of comet strikes and other periodic mayhem originating in outer space?
Cycle of Mass Extinctions
In his classic Works and Days, the Greek poet Hesiod offered a concise recap of world history right up to his own era of about 700 B.C. Hesiod described several epochs in which mankind started off from humble roots, prospered, became masters of the Earth, and then apparently started running amuck and had to be destroyed by the gods. His initial description of the Golden Age calls to mind the biblical Garden of Eden:
"In the beginning, the immortals who have their homes on Olympos created the golden generation of mortal people. These lived in Kronos' time, when he was the king in heaven. They lived as if they were gods, their hearts free from all sorrow, by themselves, and without hard work or pain; no miserable old age came their way; their hands, their feet, did not alter. They took their pleasure in festivals, and lived without troubles. When they died, it was as if they fell asleep."
After making a vague allusion to the Earth "gathering over" this generation, according to Richmond Lattimore's translation, Hesiod moves on to the Silver Age:
"Next after these, the dwellers upon Olympos created a second generation, of silver, far worse than the other. They were not like the golden ones either in shape or spirit. A child was a child for a hundred years, looked after and playing by his gracious mother, kept at home, a complete booby. But when it came time for them to grow up and gain full measure, they lived for only a poor short time; by their own foolishness they had troubles, for they were not able to keep away from reckless crime against each other, nor would they worship the gods, nor do sacrifice on the sacred altars of the blessed ones, which is the right thing among the customs of men, and therefore Zeus, son of Kronos, in anger engulfed them..."
Then came the Bronze Age:
"They were not like the generation of silver. They came from ash spears. They were terrible and strong, and the ghastly action of Ares was theirs, and violence. They ate no bread, but maintained an indomitable and adamantine spirit. None could come near them; their strength was big, and from their shoulders the arms grew irresistible on their ponderous bodies. The weapons of these men were bronze, of bronze their houses, and they worked as bronzesmiths. There was not yet any black iron. Yet even these, destroyed beneath the hands of each other, went down into the smoldering domain of cold Hades; nameless; for all they were formidable, black death seized them, and they had to forsake the shining sunlight."
After this civilization was demolished came Hesiod's Age of Heroes (in which the Trojan War transpired), and then the present Iron Age.
"And I wish that I were not any part of the fifth generation of man, but had died long before it came, or been born long afterward. For here now is the age of iron. Never by daytime will there be an end to hard work and pain, nor in the night to weariness, when the gods will send anxieties to trouble us. Yet here also there shall be good things mixed with the evils."
Virgil's Aeneid, written much later at around 30 B.C., offers a lot more detail than Hesiod about how a world age gets started, then spirals downward over time. Of particular interest to alien astronaut theorists is his reference to extraterrestrial beings coming down from space in the aftermath of a Star Wars-like armed conflict.
"First from heavenly Olympus came Saturn, fleeing from the weapons of Jove and exiled from his lost realm. He gathered together the unruly race, scattered over mountain heights, and gave them laws, and chose that the land be called Latium, since in these borders he had found a safe hiding-place. Under his reign were the golden ages men tell of: in such perfect peace he ruled the nations; till little by little there crept in a race of worse sort and duller hue, the frenzy of war, and the passion for gain."
(For more on the E.T. angle, see Ancient Aliens.)
In any case, the idea of a rise and fall in the fortunes of mankind, culminating in the complete dissolution of civilized cultures comes up again and again in world literature. In the Mayan text known as The Popol Vuh, as well as Aztec and Inca legends, four or five world ages are called "suns," each ending with some form of geologic catastrophe metered out by one or more "gods".
In Book of the Hopi, published in 1963, author Frank Waters recounts legends compiled from his interviews with elders of the tribe. According to these purveyors of the past, at the end of the Hopi "Second World", people became so complacent in their mastery of agriculture and use of Earth's other resources that they got downright miserly and obsessive.
"More and more they traded for things they didn't need, and the more goods they got, the more they wanted... They just forgot to sing joyful praises to the Creator and soon began to sing praises for the goods they bartered and stored. Before long it happened as it had to happen. The people began to quarrel and fight, and then wars between villages began."
In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the god Thoth makes a similar assessment and promises a solution:
They have fought fights, upheld strife, done evil, created hostilities, committed slaughter, caused trouble and oppression... I am going to blot out everything which I have made. This earth shall enter into the watery abyss by means of a raging flood, and will return to what it was in primeval time.
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Copyright 2009-2011 TheCityEdition.com
More Resources
Articles of Interest
"The Succession of World Ages." (PDF) By Jane B. Sellars. From The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt (1992).
"The Lost City of Dwarka; Rewriting our Common History." By Malini Alexander. Tasmanian Times 12/27/10
"The Great Year and the Lost Star." By John Major Jenkins. May 2006.
"World's oldest Copper Age settlement found." Indo-Asian News Service 11/15/10.
"Twilight of the Gods." Chapter excerpt from the book Hamlet's Mill. By Giorgio De Santillana and Gertha von Dechend (1969)
"Seven Eras of the World." Excerpt from The Wheel of Time by Luis Goitizolo.
"Prehistoric Origins of Electricity." By Roger Coghill.
Websites
Ages of the WorldBooks
Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization (2003) by Graham Hancock.
The Mythical World of Atlantis (1915) by Preston Whitmore.
Book of the Hopi (1963) by Frank Waters.
The Works and Days by Hesiod. Best English translation is by Richmond Lattimore.
The Metamorphoses by Ovid.
Vishnu Purana, Book VI, Chapter 1. Text available online.
Lost Cities and Ancient Mysteries (series beginning in 1984) by David Hatcher Childress.
The Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age (1999) by Richard Rudgley
Lost Science of the Stone Age: Sacred Energy and the I Ching (2004) by Michael Poynder.
Fingerprints of the Gods (1999) by Graham Hancock.
Forbidden Archaeology (1993) by Richard Thompson and Michael Cremo
DVDs and TV Programs
History Channel: Journey to 10000 B.C. and 2012- End of Days.
The Mysterious Origins of Man: Rewriting Human History (1996) Based on the book Forbidden Archaeology. (Available for rental on Netflix.)
NOVA: America's Stone Age Explorers. (2004) Research into the origins of the Clovis people, circa 15000 - 11500 B.C.