Once Before Time - Martin Bojowald [128]
Among them we noticed a group of girls in colorful clothes. They were chatting beside the trail, on the roof of a building attached to the slope beneath. One of my acquaintances, Rakesh, turned toward the eldest of them to inquire about the route to the river—as usual, in Hindi, for English is not often spoken in this region—and so I was unable to follow the seemingly cheerful exchange. Afterward, Rakesh recounted the surprising conversation: The girl could not understand why we wanted to go down to the river, and upon further questioning, she explained: “People go there after they die!”
The meaning of this exclamation was obscure not only to me but also to my two fellow travelers versed in Hinduism. Was it merely a prank played on strangers? Or a horror story told by parents to prevent their children from making a potentially hazardous descent to the river? But would this not even encourage the adventurous? Following the trail, we kept thinking about the girl’s statement, so puzzling but uttered so sincerely. All the while, the river remained behind the slope horizon. Dusk came on, and the clouds began to cover the peaks for the night. Rain was forecast for later that evening and we were unsure whether the roads early the next morning would be negotiable by buses to bring us, after a weary eighteen hours, back on time to Delhi, the starting point of trains or flights to our dispersed homes. The darkness made us turn around having seen here in the valley nothing of that Indian Styx. Just as hidden remained for us the precise meaning of what the girl from Joshimath had communicated. But it symbolizes cyclic ideas of the world in the form of an existence on earth after death, closely interwoven with what is locally presented by nature.
34. The Ganges Valley at Joshimath.
Many other cultures also favor a cyclic worldview, not altogether surprising if one considers the primarily cyclic form of most phenomena, such as the course of the day, and their strong impact on nature and on cultures young and old. The changing day and the course of the sun played an especially significant role in ancient Egypt, where the sun god rode through the heavens as across a sea and every night had to tackle severe dangers that threatened the next day’s rise. So it was not at all ruled out that daily cycles might one day cease as in a singularity. In Egyptian cosmology, too, there was held to be the “first time” of a primary creation, followed by infinitely many cycles. Moreover, Egyptian culture strongly relied on support from periodic floods of the Nile. Such vital events can easily find their way into an abstracted worldview. Examples also exist on the American continent, for instance among the Mayans and Aztecs, who arranged their calendars in disk shape, making the cyclic course obvious (figure 35).
In the early days of European culture, cyclic concepts played a crucial role, too—in spite of occasional appeals to Christian teachings, which preferred a linear picture of cosmogony. Western philosophy and science were initiated and subsequently given important momentum in pre-Socratic Greece. In Hesiod’s tales, one finds the four ages of the world, an obviously cyclic worldview. In addition, one can see there traces of a discrete conception of time, especially in the representations of a sickle-wielding Kronos, whose every cut shortens