• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 5521 0

had been the Golden Age, when men had lived happily and innocently at one with nature and each other, with all their needs taken care of. Then had come a Silver Age, when men had become proud, rebelling against the gods, eventually provoking Zeus to such anger that he destroyed many of them. Then had come the age of Bronze, when men had turned on each other, using their new weapons to kill and wage war. This had eventually led to the Heroic Age, a kind of interlude, the time of the Trojan and Theban wars, when at least the great warrior heroes had redeemed themselves by their nobility. But now had come the worst time of all, the age of Iron, when humanity had sunk back from this heroic level and become petty, mean, greedy, lustful, vain and quarrelsome, without any real redeeming features. And at this point Hesiod personified that principle of `wholeness' from which men had so fallen short as one single `God'.

This picture of how, following his emergence from a state of nature, man's increasing consciousness had progressively brought him more and more problems long pre-dated the flowering of Athenian civilisation between 600 and 400 BC. But during this period a new impulse was beginning to show itself in the psyche of mankind which was to come up with a quite different way of looking at the relationship of human beings to that state of `wholeness' from which they felt exiled. What if, behind all this profusion of anthropomorphic gods personifying the forces shaping human thinking and behaviour, there was only One? What if, behind all the multitude of creatures on this earth and beyond it, there was just one immeasurably mysterious, all-powerful and omniscient Spirit or Mind, responsible for creating the entire universe and everything in it; and of which all created things, including human beings themselves, were in some way just transitory physical embodiments?

A further great earthquake was taking place in human consciousness: as great as the one which had given rise to the sky gods two or three thousand years earlier.

Tao, the universal soul and `the one'

In all the more advanced civilisations of the world at this time we can see an impulse to unify: to imagine all the bewildering variety of creation as being governed not by a range of separate divinities but by one Ultimate Power, Spirit or Principle. We see this not just in the west, where Hesiod had already written of a single God as ruling over the affairs of mankind. It emerges even more dramatically in the world's two most populous civilisations, those of China and India.

Just as in Greece and Egypt, the prehistoric mythologies of China and India had developed a dazzling multiplicity of deities to explain the invisible forces which presided over human affairs. In the early period of the Chinese empire, the chief god was the August Personage of Jade.11 He was seen as like a heavenly version of the emperor, surrounded by his court, living in a jade palace on top of a fabulous mountain. This imperial god ruled over a vast heavenly government, made up of bureaucratic `ministries' responsible for all areas of natural and human existence. The rule they represented to mankind was known as `l'ien Ming' or `the Mandate of Heaven. Eventually the Chinese devised an equally bureaucratic version of hell: an underworld complete with its own law courts and carefully prescribed punishments for each form of failure to obey the Mandate of Heaven; while those self less, virtuous mortals who did fulfil it might be rewarded after their death by being admitted to the gardens of the heavenly palace, to eat the fruit of the Peach Tree of Immortality.

The peoples of India had already begun weaving the most convoluted mythic web of all, out of which were eventually to spring several different religions, including the various forms of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. In earliest times the Zeus-figure of their pantheon was the sky god, Indra, celebrated in Vedic hymns before 1000 Bc, associated with explosive masculine power, god of thunder and war, bringer of fertility by his splitting