© Lloyd

__VOL I, No. 5 March 14, 1997

THE MYTH OF THE GOLDEN AGE By David Talbott

In this and several submissions to follow, I will offer some background notes on a few mythological themes that are integral to the historical argument of the Saturn theory

Golden Age, Ancestral Paradise, Universal Monarch, King of the World, Saturn as Ancient Sun God, Myth of the Polar Sun, Saturn at the Pole

GOLDEN AGE

When the world began, according to the biblical account and other Hebrew myths, Adam, the first man and prototype of man, occupied a garden of abundance, in communion with God Himself — a deathless realm, free of sickness and any need for human labor.

Loss of that original paradise was nothing less than a cosmic rupture, and never, since that rupture, has man experienced a comparable terrestrial condition.

The Eden story is filled with interesting and familiar images. Four rivers of paradise, tree of Life and tree of the Knowledge, devious serpent, Adam's rib, temptress Eve, flaming sword at the gate, and more. But what immediately concerns us is a single underlying theme, a theme clearly linked to a myth preserved on every habitable continent.

A global myth declares that the world has not always been as it is experienced now. In a former time, man lived in a kind of paradise, close to the gods. It was the Golden Age. Throughout an eternal spring, the earth produced abundantly, free from the seasonal cycles of decay and rebirth. And under this remarkable cosmic order, man experienced neither war nor sickness, neither hunger nor any requirement of human labor.

This recurring and unexplained myth was carried into modern times by primitive races the world over. In Mexico native legends spoke of an ancestral generation whose every need was met, without cost. There was no sickness or hunger no poverty or sadness, and the gods dwelt among men. But this harmonious age didn't last, eventually succumbing to an overwhelming catastrophe.

According to the Cheyenne of North America the original race roamed naked, innocent and free, enjoying the natural abundance of an eternal spring. What followed, however, was an age of flood, war, and famine.

The Caribs of Surinam have a poignant memory of this fortunate epoch. "In a time long past, so long past that even the grandmothers of our grandmothers were not yet born," they say, "the world was quite other than what it is today: the trees were forever in fruit; the animals lived in perfect harmony, and the little agouti played fearlessly with the beard of the jaguar "

The South American Indians of Gran Chaco and Amazonia recall this as the Happy Place, where work was unknown because the fields produced abundance of their own accord.

The Hopi Indians proclaim that in the earliest time they were a marvelously contented race, at peace with their brothers. They knew nothing of sickness or conflict, and all things were provided by Mother Earth without any requirement of labor.

But these are just the American Indian versions of the story.

The aborigines of Australia insist that their first ancestors enjoyed a Golden Age, a Paradise of abundant game and without conflict of any kind.

Northern Europeans once celebrated this earliest age as the "Peace of Frodi," a mythical Danish king. Throughout this peaceful epoch no man injured another and a magical mill ground out peace and plenty for the entire land.

Memories of a Golden Age pervade the myths of Africa. The distinguished folklorist Herman Baumann reported that "Everything that happened in the primal age was different from today. People understood the language of animals and lived at peace with them; they knew no labor and had food in plenitude."

Sacred texts of ancient India recall this as the Krita Yuga or "Perfect Age," without disease, labor, suffering or war. The Iranians called it the age of the brilliant Yima, an age with "neither cold nor heat," an eternal spring. According to ancient Chinese lore, the purest pleasure and tranquillity once reigned throughout the world. Mythical histories called it "the Age of Perfect Virtue" and declared that "the whole creation enjoyed a state of happiness  ... all things grew without labor; and a universal fertility prevailed."

How old, then, is this ancient memory of a lost paradise? It is this question we will take up in our next installment.

__"REMEMBERING THE END OF THE WORLD" -A Feature-Length Documentary-

Review by Steven Parsons (openflow at vr-net.com)

This documentary takes the viewer on an extraordinary journey into the collective memory of our species. The compelling audio/visual effects and thoughtful narration weave a story so deep that I felt excited for days. I found that I was unable to explain to my friends, in just a few sentences, what I had learned during my 90 minute viewing of "Remembering the End of the World."

I felt compelled to watch the video a second time, then a third. With each viewing, I gained a greater appreciation for the utter enormity of the topic and the deceptively large amount of information presented.

If David Talbott is correct, the common themes of myth that have been told and re-told by all cultures of the world point to actual physical events, global events. Deep in our collective memory, beneath conscious awareness for most of us living today, we remember the golden time with nostalgia and longing. We remember doomsday with dread. In a consistent way, these deep memories have erupted into form through the arts, through stories and through cultural ritual.

According to this theory, our ancestors actually did live in a paradise, an Eden, a Golden Age that ended in chaos. This golden time occurred recently enough that our distant ancestors remembered. During the Golden Age and its confusing aftermath, the sky looked very different than it does today. During this period, neighboring planets loomed very large in the sky.

The people of this earlier time did not invent stories of gods in the heavens just to entertain themselves. Rather, the towering presence of planetary spheres in the sky could only be understood in super-human or god-like terms. These gigantic planetary spheres enacted the original dramas that have been depicted in myth and art ever since. Those dramas in the sky deeply impacted the inhabitants of that era, even creating world-wide terror and destruction.

David Talbott presents a convincing argument. The preponderance of mythical evidence points to dramatic global events, and already several experts in the physical sciences have stepped forward to present theoretical ways of understanding these events.

Perhaps our ancient astronomers deserve more credit. Perhaps Venus and Mars really did display character attributes such as flowing beauty or war-like intensity, and displayed these vividly. Perhaps the historians of Greece and Rome deserve more credit, too. What if we take their descriptions of earth-shaking events in their own history to be fact?

What if we were to listen to the ancient voices and to look for truth there? We would find that their collective story paints a picture of a past that is radically different than modern science has assumed. If we temporarily regard myth and art as bearing the same level of usefulness as bones and rock, the expressions of those story tellers and artists carries more information than once thought.

This documentary summarizes a very large and very important story. If the story proves to be true, its acceptance today will deeply impact astronomy, depth psychology, cultural anthropology and many other sciences. A consideration of the hypothesis will not only boost our planetary understanding but may also open a door for healing and integration within deep layers of the collective psyche.

The pacing of the narrative is gradual and the visual effects serene at times. Very skillfully, the periods of quiet, the scenes of winter rains and forest streams invite the viewer into a contemplative mood. Such a mood seems necessary so that the probing questions posed by the narrator may ripen in one's mind, unanswered. The magnitude of this topic requires inner calm for its realization.

Let no one be fooled by the conservative pacing of delivery here, influenced by Canadian-style film making. This production contains an enormous amount of visual and verbal information. I believe the director did an excellent job in weaving an immense story together with supportive evidence, while maintaining a high level of audio/visual interest. I regard this as a high quality production in every respect.

__VOL I, No. 6 March 16, 1997

THE MYTH OF THE GOLDEN AGE (PART 2) By David Talbott

In their myths, rites and hymns the ancient Sumerians contrasted their own time to the earliest remembered age — what they called "the days of old," or "that day," when the gods "gave man abundance, the day when vegetation flourished." This was when the supreme god An "engendered the year of abundance." To this primeval age, every Sumerian priest looked back as the reference for the preferred order of things, which was lost through later conflict and deluge.

In the city of Eridu at the mouth of the Euphrates, the priests recalled a Golden Age prior to familiar history. The predecessors of their race, it was claimed, had formerly reposed in the paradise of Dilmun, called the "Pure Place" of man's genesis. This lost paradise of Dilmun, about which scholars have debated for decades, is strangely reminiscent of the paradise of Eden.

"That place was pure, that place was clean. In Dilmun ... the lion mangled not. The wolf ravaged not the lambs," the Sumerian texts read. The inhabitants of this paradise lived in a state of near perfection, in communion with the gods, drinking the waters of life and enjoying unbounded prosperity.

Ancient Egypt, an acknowledged cradle of civilization, preserved a remarkably similar memory. Not just in their religious and mythical texts, but in every sacred activity, the Egyptians incessantly looked backwards, to events of the Tep Zepi. The phrase means the "First Time," a time of perfection "before rage or clamor or strife or uproar had come about," as the texts themselves put it. This was the Golden Age of Ra, and the memories of that time echoed through centuries of Egyptian thought. "The land was in abundance," the texts say. "There was no year of hunger  ... Walls did not fall; thorns did not pierce in the time of the Primeval Gods."

Or from another text: "there was no unrighteousness in the land, no crocodile seized, no snake bit in the time of the First Gods."

Cosmic harmony. Abundance. Paradise. To this Golden Age, according to the great nineteenth century scholar Francois Lenormant, the Egyptians "continually looked back with regret and envy." The golden age of Ra was, for the Egyptians, the Great Example setting a standard for all later ages.

A surprising fact emerges. The legend of the Golden Age is as old as civilization. And the implications are well worth pondering. A coherent set of ideas has survived all of the twists and turns of cultural evolution for at least five thousand years — and on every continent. Now that's an astonishing verification of the durability of myth! Many of us had always thought of myth as the outcome of reckless invention — illiterate savages entertaining themselves by contriving magical stories out of nothing. Imagine such a process going on for thousands of years, and ask yourself if any possibility of a universal memory would remain.

Remember that the myth-makers did not just recount a charming tale; they strove desperately to recover what was lost. In the infancy of civilization collective activity reflects a singular reference to the age of the gods — the honoring of the gods through celebration, representation, reenactment, codification, and massive construction activity. In fact, there are numerous grounds for saying that civilization itself was the outcome of this fundamentally religious activity.

Perhaps the most accomplished analyst of mythology in modern times was the late Mircea Eliade, chairman of the Department of History of Religions at the University of Chicago, and editor of the Encyclopedia of Religion. From his meticulous, lifelong survey of the subject, professor Eliade drew a stunning conclusion: literally every component of early civilizations — from religion to art and architecture — expressed symbolically the desire to recover and to re-live the lost Golden Age. That which symbolically transported the participant back to the First Time, the Golden Age, was sacred. That which did not was transient and mundane, of no interest.

Around the world, early man yearned for a return to paradise. Every coronation of a king, every New Year's festival, monumental construction, every recitation of temple hymns and prayers, every holy war, every sacrifice to the gods was motivated by a desire to recapture some aspect of the Golden Age, to live, if only for a symbolic moment, in the original age of the gods.