In The Beginning
The Early Ages
Part I
VArchive.org
The
Hebrew Cosmogony
This
world came into existence out of a chaos of fluid driven by a divine blast:
this is the epic beginning of the Book of Genesis: “The earth was chaotic and
void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and God’s wind moved upon
the face of the fluid.” From this primeval matter, in a process of subsequent
creations, was born the home of the living.
Already before the birth of our Earth, worlds
were shaped and brought into existence, only to be destroyed in the course of
time: “Nor is this world inhabited by man the first of things earthly created
by God. He made several worlds before ours, but he destroyed them all.” The Earth underwent re-shaping: six consecutive remouldings. Heaven and Earth were changed in every
catastrophe. Six times the Earth was rebuilt—without entire extirpation of
life on it, but with major catastrophes. Six ages have passed into the great
beyond; this is the seventh creation, the time in which we live.
According to another tradition, several
heavens were created, seven in fact. Also seven earths were created: the most
removed being the seventh Erez, followed by the
sixth Adamah, the fifth Arka,
the fourth Harabbah, the third Yabbashah,
the second Tebel and our own land called Heled, and like the others, it is separated from the foregoing
by abyss, chaos, and waters.
The
description permits an interpretation that all the seven earths exist
simultaneously; but a deeper insight will allow us to recognize that the
original idea did not admit seven concurrent but separate firmaments and worlds
in space, but only consecutive in time, and built one out of another: “The
seven heavens form a unity, the seven kinds of earth form a unity, and the
heavens and the earth together also form a unity.” The
Hebrew cosmogony in its true sense is a conception of worlds built and
reshaped with the purpose of bringing creation closer to perfection. The
separation of one world from another by abyss and chaos evidently refers to
the cataclyms that separated the ages.
Planet
Ages
The
ages of the past, between the successive catastrophes, are called in many
diverse sources “sun ages.” I have tried to show why this designation is
meaningful. But the ancients also maintained that the successive ages were
initiated by planets: Moon, Saturn, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Mars. Therefore the sun-ages could also have been called
planet ages.
Hesiod ascribed the
Golden age to the time when the planet Saturn was ruling, and the Silver and
Iron ages to the time of the planet Jupiter. The same concept is found in Vergil, who says that “before Jove’s day [i.e., in the
Golden age when Saturn reigned] no tillers subdued the land—even to mark the
field or divide it with bounds was unlawful.”
The idea that the Earth was under the sway of
different planets at different ages is also the teaching of the Pythagoreans,
the Magi, Gnostic sects and other secret societies.
In numerous astrological texts the same
concept is repeated, that seven millennia were dominated by seven planets,
one after the other.
The worshipers of the devil, the Syrian sect
of the Yezidis, believed that seven thousand years
had passed since the Deluge; at the end of every millennium one of the seven
planet-gods descends on the earth, establishes a new order and new laws, and
then retreats to his place.
An identical tradition is found in the
writings of Julius Africanus: the ages of the
ancestors passed under the government of the planets, each in its turn. Also according to the Ethiopian text of the First Book of
Enoch, the seven world-ages were each dominated by one planet.
The gnostic sect of
the Mandaeans taught in its holy book Sidra Rabba that
the history of mankind is composed of seven epochs, that these epochs were
terminated by catastrophes, and that one of the planets ruled in each epoch.
The length of the ages in the Sidra Rabba is
made very long, but the concept is, nevertheless, common to many ancient
creeds.
Sabbath
The idea of naming the days of the week in honor of the seven planets was, according to Eusebius,
introduced by the Persians at the time of the war of Xerxes against Greece.
Dio Cassius, the Roman author of the fourth
century, wrote that the division of the week into seven days in honor of the seven planets originated with the Egyptians,
and then spread to other peoples.
Even today the names of the days of the week
in European languages can be traced to the names of the planets. Thus the
Roman dies Solis (Sun), or Sunday, is Sonntag
in German; dies Lunae (Moon), or Monday, is lundi in French and Montag
in German; dies Martis (Mars), or Tuesday,
is mardi in French and martes
in Spanish; dies Jovis (Jupiter), or
Thursday, is jeudi in French and Donnerstag in German; Friday is dies Veneris (Venus), or vendredi
in French, while Saturday is dies Saturnis, the
day of Saturn.
The naming of the seven days of the week in honor of the seven planets is not only an act of
reverence apportioned to these gods, but also a memorial to the seven ages
that were governed by each of the seven planets in succession. This idea can
be traced in the establishment of the Jewish week with its Sabbath. Although
the social significance of the Sabbath as the universal day of rest for man,
his servant, and the domestic animal working for him is so apparent from many
passages in the Scriptures and especially from the beneficent application of
a weekly day of rest by all civilized nations that took this precept from the
Hebrew Bible, the cosmological meaning of the Sabbath must not remain
overlooked.
In six ages the world and mankind went
through the pangs of genesis or creation with its metamorphoses. It is not by
mistake that the ages which were brought to their end in the catastrophes of
the Deluge, of the Confusion of Languages or of the Overturning of the Plain,
are described in the book of Genesis: the time of Genesis or creation was not
over until the Sabbath of the Universe arrived. With the end of the world age
simultaneous with the end of the Middle Kingdom and the Exodus, the Sabbath
of the Universe should have begun.
The destruction of the world in the days of
the Exodus closed, in the conception of the Hebrews, the age of creation. It
was to signify the end of the time when the Earth and men were to be shaped
and reshaped. The traditional and very old Hebrew prayer at the beginning of
the Sabbath opens with these words: “The sixth day. And the heavens and the
earth were established. And the Lord finished in the seventh day the entire
work that He did and rested from all the work that He did.”
The meaning of this passage is that in six
world ages the heavens and the earth were finally established, and that now,
in the seventh age, no further changes in the cosmic order should be
expected. The Lord is actually implored to refrain from further reshaping the
Earth.
The idea that God’s day is a millennium is
often met in Talmudic literature; the apostle Peter also says: “One day is
with the Lord as a thousand years.” Thus the seven days of the week represent
seven world ages; and the day of the Sabbath represents the seventh world
age, which is our age. According to the rabbis of the Tractate Shabbat of the
Babylonian Talmud, “Sabbath” is to be interpreted as sabbatu - cessation of the divine wrath.
This fits exactly our idea of the Sabbath as the age of rest when the heavens
and the earth are established and are not to be disturbed again.
Many exegetes have wondered as to why the
prayer of benediction to the Sabbath starts with the words: “The sixth day,”
expecting to find there the words “The seventh day.” The words “the sixth
day” are not necessarily wrong here: the meaning may
be that with the expiration of the sixth age the heaven and the earth become
unchangeable. But it may be that the prayer originated in pre-Exodus days
when only six ages were counted. The prayer next refers to the Sabbath as
“the day of rest, the memorial to the act of genesis, because this day is the
beginning of the reckoning of days, memory of the Exodus from Egypt.”
The assembling of three different causes for the establishment of the Sabbath
would appear confusing were it not for the fact that the three occurrences
were simultaneous: the last act of creation, the new flow of time, the Exodus
from Egypt.
Although after the beginning of the seventh
age new world catastrophes disrupted the established order—in the eighth and
seventh centuries before the present era—the idea of the Sabbath of the
Universe was already so deeply rooted that the new world catastrophes were
not counted, so as not to discredit the establishment of the Sabbath. But the
return of the sun’s shadow ten degrees in the days of Hezekiah and Isaiah was
registered as “the seventh world wonder,” and thus actually the eighth world
age started. The difference in the magnitude of the catastrophes caused also
some nations of antiquity to count six, seven (as most nations), or eight, or
nine, or even ten ages; one and the same people, like the Mayas, had
traditions of five and seven ages in diverse books of theirs. Also,
catastrophes recurring at short intervals, as those which took place in the
eighth and beginning of the seventh century before the present era, could be regarded as the closing of one age, or a few
short additional ages could be conceived. Catastrophes, variable as they were
in their magnitude and consequences, could have had a subjective appraisal.
Even the encounter of the earth with a lesser comet, which appeared very
bright, in the days when Octavian Augustus observed the mortuary activities
in honor of Julius Caesar, and which dispersed its
gases in the atmosphere of the Earth, was regarded by one contemporary author
as the end of a world age and the beginning of a new one, although no
perceptible changes in the motion of the earth and no greater calamity than a
year-long gloom were observed.
The Sabbath being a day of rest in the social
order, its cosmic meaning in the great fear of the end of the world can be
suspected also in view of the rigor with which it was observed; at the
beginning of the Christian era, members of some sects among the Jews would
not even move, and would remain in the place and position in which the
beginning of the Sabbath found them. Social institutions
are generally not observed with such an awe and with
such rigor. It was actually not the Deity, having worked during six ages and
reposed in the seventh who gives example to man; it is man, by abstaining
from work on the seventh day, the symbol of the seventh world age, who
invites the Supreme Being to keep the established order of the heaven and
earth, and not to submit them to new revolutions.
The same idea is found in the prayer of the
Chinese Emperor Shun, who lived shortly after the Emperor Yahu.
This prayer, declaimed by him, reads: “The sun and moon are constant; the
stars and other heavenly bodies have their motions; the four seasons observe
their rule.” A number of centuries thereafter, in the days of the Emperor Kwei, the order of the celestial sphere was again
disrupted: “the planets went out of their courses.”
Also Hebrew psalmists and prophets tried to
suggest to nature to abstain from revolt; but at the same time they expressed
their fear of changes in the future comparable to those in the past. After
more than two thousand five hundred years, one of the two original ideas of
the Sabbath, its cosmic meaning, was lost to mankind, leaving the social idea
conscious and triumphant the world over.
Deification
Of The Planets
The Sun and the Moon are two great
luminaries, and it is easily understandable that the imagination of the
peoples should be preoccupied with them and should ascribe to them
mythological deeds. Yet the ancient mythologies of the Chaldeans,
the Greeks, the Romans, the Hindus, the Mayans, preoccupy themselves not with
the Sun or the Moon, but prima facie with the planets. Marduk, the great god of the Babylonians, was the planet
Jupiter; so was Amon of the Egyptians, Zeus of the
Greeks and Jupiter of the Romans. It was much superior to Shamash-Helios, the
Sun. Why was it revered by all peoples? Why was the planet Mars chosen to be
the personification of the god of war? Why did Kronos
of the Greeks, Saturn of the Romans, play a part in hundreds of myths and
legends? Thoth of the Egyptians, Nebo and Nergal of the Babylonians, Mithra
and Mazda of the Persians, Vishnu and Shiva of the Hindus, Huitzilopochtli
and Quetzalcoatl of the Mexicans, were personifications of planets;
innumerable hymns were dedicated to them and adventures and exploits ascribed
to them.
“The life of our planet has its real source
in the Sun,” wrote E. Renan. “All force is a
transformation of the Sun. Before religion had gone so far as to proclaim
that God must be placed in the absolute and the ideal, that is to say,
outside of the world, one cult only was reasonable and scientific, and that
was the cult of the Sun.” But the Sun was subordinate to the planets, even
though they are not conspicuous, poor sources of light, and no sources of
warmth.
The night sky illuminated by stars is
majestic. The geometrical figures of the constellations, such as the
Pleiades, Orion, or the Great Bear, rolling from the east in the evening to
the west before morning, are favorite motifs in
poetry, no less than the Sun and the Moon. But the discrepancy in the choice
of motifs by the ancients becomes still more obvious. The constellations of
the sky took only a minor and incidental part in the mythology of the ancient
peoples. The planets were the major gods, and they rule the universe.
“It is not easy to understand the idea which
was the basis for the identification of the Babylonian gods with the
planets,” writes an author; but the same process of identification of major
gods with the planets can be found in the religions of the peoples in all
parts of the world. The planets were not affiliated to the gods, or symbols
of the gods—they were the gods. In prayers and liturgies they were
invoked as gods. “The greater gods, even when addressed by name in prayer,
were regarded as astral powers.” This or that planet is selected, according
to the text of the prayer, from “the multitude of the stars of heaven” to
receive a gift.
“The planetary gods are much the most
powerful of all. Their positions in the sky, their reciprocal relations . . .
have a decisive influence on all physical and moral phenomena of the
world.”
The great majority of us moderns pay no
attention to these points in the night sky, and probably not one in ten or
even in a hundred is able to point to Jupiter or Mars in the firmament. The
planets change their places, but not conspicuously. Were they indebted for
their deification to this slow movement, by which they differ from the fixed
stars? Did Zeus-Jupiter-Marduk-Amon become the
supreme deity, the thunderer and dreadful lord of
the universe, only because of his slow movement—he passes in twelve years the
circle of the zodiac, traversed by the Sun in twenty-four hours, and by the
Moon even quicker? When seen with the naked eye the planet Jupiter
distinguishes itself from the fixed stars of first magnitude only by this
slow change of position.
Augustine, confused by the problem of the
deification of the planets, wrote in the fourth century:
But possibly these stars which have been
called by their names are these gods. They call a certain star Mercury, and
likewise a certain other star Mars. But among those stars which are called by
the name of gods, is that one which they call Jupiter, and yet with them
Jupiter is the world. There also is that one they call Saturn, and yet they
give him no small property beside, namely all seeds.
Mercury, the closest to the Sun, is barely
visible, being hidden in the Sun’s rays. But the ancients made the planet
Mercury into a great god—Hermes or Nebo. Why was it feared and worshiped?
What is there generally in the planets to inspire awe, so as to influence
people to build temples for them, to sing liturgies, to bring sacrifices, to
narrate legends, and to dedicate to them the domain of science, of war, of
agriculture?
The ancients were sufficiently enlightened to
know that the planets are large rocks like the Earth that circle on orbits.
And this makes the modern scholars wonder: knowing that the planets are
rocks, why did the ancients believe that they are gods?
The key to this problem, which is the major
problem of all classical mythology, is already in our hands. The planet Venus
was deified because of its dramatic appearance and because of the havoc it
brought to the world, as described in Worlds in Collision. I
illuminated also the events which made Mars a feared god. Divine qualities
were ascribed to the other planets because of the catastrophes they wrought
in earlier ages.
In the Persian holy books it is said that “on
the planets depends the existence or non-existence of the world—wherefore are
they especially to be venerated “The seven planets rule the universe,” says a
Nabatean inscription. The Greeks
and Romans believed that “everything is, in fact, subject to the changes
brought about by the revolutions of the stars.”
“The celestial orbs by their combined
movements are the authors of all that was, and is, and is to come.” According
to ancient Hebrew traditions, “there are seven archangels, each of whom is
associated with a planet.” “The seven archangels were believed to play an
important part in the universal order through their associations with the
planets. . . .”
The reason for the deification of the planets
lay in the fact that the planets only a short time ago were not faultlessly
circling celestial bodies, nor were they harmless. This is also expressed in
a Mandaean text: “How cruel are the planets that
stay there and conspire evil in their rage . . . the planets conspire in rage against us.”
Uranus
The seven planets of the ancients comprised
the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. However, the
ancients’ religions and mythology speak for their knowledge of Uranus; the dynasty
of gods had Uranus followed by Saturn, and the latter by Jupiter. In the
clear sky of Babylonia the planet Uranus
could have been observed by an unaided eye; but since it was known as a
deposed deity, it would seem that at some later time the planet lost much of
its brightness.
It is quite possible that the planet Uranus
is the very planet known by this name to the ancients. The age of Uranus
preceded the age of Saturn; it came to an end with the “removal” of Uranus by
Saturn. Saturn is said to have emasculated his father Uranus.
Behind this story there might have been a
scene in the sky. In one theory of the origin of the solar system a
sideswiping star tears out from the sun a long filament of gaseous material.
Similarly Saturn may at one time have “emasculated” Uranus—Saturn was
represented by the Romans with a sickle in his hands.
Circumcision may have originated as an
emulation of the acts displayed in the sky—when it appeared that Saturn with
a sickle emasculated Uranus, the Egyptians, and so also the Hebrews,
introduced circumcision, the removal of the foreskin being pars per toto, or instead of castration.
It is not unthinkable that sometime before
the age the record of ancient civilizations reaches, Uranus, together with
Neptune, Saturn and Jupiter, formed a quadruple system that was captured by
the sun and from which the planets of the solar system had their origin—but
here nothing but imagination takes over where tradition based on witnessing
does not reach.
[According to Hesiod,
the catastrophe described as the removal of Uranus by Saturn gave birth to
Aphrodite. In Worlds in Collision Aphrodite was identified with the
Moon.]
The
Earth Without The Moon
The period when the Earth was Moonless is
probably the most remote recollection of mankind. Democritus and Anaxagoras
taught that there was a time when the Earth was without the Moon. Aristotle
wrote that Arcadia in Greece, before being inhabited by
the Hellenes, had a population of Pelasgians, and
that these aborigines occupied the land already before there was a moon in
the sky above the Earth; for this reason they were called Proselenes.
Apollonius of Rhodes mentioned the time “when
not all the orbs were yet in the heavens, before the Danai
and Deukalion races came into existence, and only
the Arcadians lived, of whom it is said that they dwelt on mountains and fed
on acorns, before there was a moon.”
Plutarch wrote in The Roman Questions:
“There were Arcadians of Evander’s following, the
so-called pre-Lunar people.” Similarly wrote Ovid: “The Arcadians are said to
have possessed their land before the birth of Jove, and the folk is older
than the Moon.” Hippolytus
refers to a legend that “Arcadia
brought forth Pelasgus, of greater antiquity than
the moon.” Lucian in his Astrology says that “the Arcadians affirm in
their folly that they are older than the moon.”
Censorinus also alludes to
the time in the past when there was no moon in the sky.
Some allusions to the time before there was a
Moon may be found also in the Scriptures. In Job 25:5 the grandeur of the
Lord who “Makes peace in the heights” is praised and the time is mentioned
“before [there was] a moon and it did not shine.” Also in Psalm 72:5 it is
said: “Thou wast feared since [the time of] the sun
and before [the time of] the moon, a generation of generations.” A
“generation of generations” means a very long time. Of course, it is of no
use to counter this psalm with the myth of the first chapter of Genesis, a
tale brought down from exotic and later sources.
The memory of a world without a moon lives in
oral tradition among the Indians. The Indians of the Bogota highlands
in the eastern Cordilleras of Colombia relate some of their tribal
reminiscences to the time before there was a moon.
“In the earliest times, when the moon was not yet in the heavens,” say the
tribesmen of Chibchas.
There are currently three theories of the
origin of the moon:
1) The Moon originated at the same time as
the Earth, being formed substantially from the same material, aggregating and
solidifying.
2) The Moon was formed not in the vicinity of
the Earth, but in a different part of the solar system, and was later
captured by the Earth.
3) The Moon was originally a portion of the
terrestrial crust and was torn out, leaving behind the bed of the Pacific.
All three theories claim the presence of the
Moon on an orbit around the Earth for billions of years. Mythology may supply
each of these views with some support (Genesis I for the first view; the
birth of Aphrodite from the sea for the third view; Aphrodite’s origin in the
disruption of Uranus, and also the violence of Sin—the Babylonian Moon—seems
to support the second view).
Since mankind on both sides of the Atlantic
preserved the memory of a time when the Earth was without the Moon, the first
hypothesis, namely, of the Moon originating simultaneously with the Earth and
in its vicinity, is to be excluded, leaving the other two hypotheses to
compete between themselves.
We have seen that the traditions of diverse
peoples offer corroborative testimony to the effect that in a very early age,
but still in the memory of mankind, no moon accompanied the Earth. Since
human beings already peopled the Earth, it is improbable that the Moon sprang
from it: there must have existed a solid
lithosphere, not a liquid earth. Thus while I do not claim to know the origin
of the Moon, I find it more probable that the Moon was captured by the Earth.
Such an event would have occurred as a catastrophe. If the Moon’s formation
took place away from the Earth, its composition may be
quite different.
There is no evidence to suggest whether the
Moon was a planet, a satellite of another planet, or a comet at the time of
its capture by the Earth. Whatever atmosphere it may have had
was pulled away by the Earth, by other contacting bodies, or dissipated in
some other way.
Since the time the Moon began to accompany
the Earth, it underwent the influence of contacts with comets and planets
that passed near the Earth in subsequent ages. The mass of the Moon being
less than that of the Earth, the Moon must have suffered greater disturbances
in cosmic contacts. During these contacts the Moon was not carried away: this
is due to the fact that no body more powerful than the Earth came
sufficiently close to the Moon to take it away from the Earth for good; but
in the contacts that took place the Moon was removed repeatedly from one
orbit to another.
The variations in the position of the Moon
can be read in the variations in the length of the month. The length of the
month repeatedly changed in subseqent catastrophic
events—and for this there exists a large amount of
supporting evidence. In these later occurrences the Moon played a passive
role, and Zeus in the Iliad advised it (Aphrodite) to stay out of the
battle in which Athene and Ares (Venus and Mars)
were the main contestants.
The Early Ages -
Part II
2005 - St.Clair
Foundation Online
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