The Olympics were started by the Greeks in what we call their "Golden Age," when philosophy and certain forms of the arts flourished, but to the Greeks, the Golden Age had already long passed. There had been a golden age, but it was lost in a mythical past, sometimes named Arcadia after an ancient city in the northern mountains, but the history of it is unclear - unclear, because the Golden Age had no history or writing to record it. It was Edenic - that is, it shared attributes with the Hebrew notion of a perfect past that was lost when humans first sought knowledge, out of disobedience to God. That brought struggle and strife and labor, and the downfallen world we experience today. There are notions of this time in myths throughout the world - where humans had direct contact with the creator or creators, as well as with animals, as humans and animals were then often interchangeable. But around the world, there was a notion of a past that was, if not perfect, was perfectly open to the mysteries of the universe, gained not through intellectual artifice, but through being itself. Gold was the standard - it was pure and eternal, never rusting, never decomposing, always separable from any alloy. Perfection. Thus the gold now goes to the greatest athlete.
From there, cultural complexity and technology separate the peoples of the earth. In Greece, there was the notion that the golden age was followed by the silver, one of gods and titans, a world of fantastic powers but also strife - a world no longer based on universal union. It was a great age, but alloyed - and the next best athlete got silver to designate this status.
The Bronze age came about in the Mediterranean at the beginning of high civilization - the era of kings and pharaohs and mathematics and great monuments and writing. It was the first age of Man, lower still than the age of the titans, but still near- mythic in the greatness of the human warrior. This was the era of Ulysses and Agamemnon, whom Homer would someday immortalize. It shared attributes of the gods in the powers of the humans, and the gods themselves actively engaged humans, but it was a fallen time, none-the-less. Still, far above our times today - and thus to the third and last decorated athlete, the bronze.
For the Greeks of the first millennium BC, as well as to the Vedic peoples of India, the last and lowest epic of humans was entered at about the same time that philosophy and the arts flourished in Greece. It was derivative time - there was seldom any direct contact with the gods, let alone the cosmos, save for those few individuals who by grace or extreme practice were able to break through the barrier that now separated humans from everything - from Union, from the gods, from nature, from mythic heroism. It was - and is - called the Iron age, and, as the I Ching would say, it is not here as a matter of our individual actions, but as a set condition of the times. There are no iron metals for athletes, for we are all of iron, even the best of us. The metals speak of other times when greatness was natural, but now we can only allude to them through metal and our medals. Ah, sad and fallen world!
This progression - or de-volution - is in accord with perennialist principles, but sometimes we have to wonder. Gold was used for ornamentation but had little practical use, at least as far we know; the same goes for silver. Bronze, however, made great weapons and plows and tools, and iron, once the alloys were figured out, did even better. Human thought took symbolic metals and many other things and made something useful out of them. No longer dream-stuff - in the Iron Age, the rubber meets the road, and the actuality of it - the hard truth of it - makes us wonder: was the Golden Age really so great? Were there toothaches and childbirth deaths and burst appendixes and 30 year life expectancy rates? Were there, in that Golden Age, clan wars and feline and ursine predation? Was it, then, as bad as paleo-anthropologists say, and the Golden Age a myth of mind?
Two points come to mind, the first practical. Certainly, they - those of paleolithic or neolithic times - did not think of their illnesses or dangers as awful calamities. They were, like car accidents and cancer of today, dark parts of every day life. What, though, was their reality? Those who live most like them today, such as a few remote Amazon Indian tribes, conceive of themselves in mythical ways; the moon and sun and trees and animals are all situated in a cosmology that keeps giving back a reference that we would call magical thinking. And of course, magic in such a world is commonplace, just as monkeys can become humans and trees sprout gnome-like protectors. This could have been what was passed down as the age of myth, the silver age - for still, the golden age is gone even with these people, and they, too, look at it as a thing past (or embedded in an endless NOW that is accessible through ritual).
The second point, far less practical, is: was there truly a Golden Age? Was there truly a time of union, of intuitive harmony with the ALL? Would, then, in such a dimension of experience, the paleo-anthropological findings be irrelevant? For in the bones they would only find bones, not the lives lived of these people - and maybe it was so profoundly different that their world was, to them, as of heaven. I don't know: there have been findings of early Homo remains that have been eaten by leopards - certainly the lion did not lie down with that lamb. And there has been evidence of Neanderthal warfare and cannibalism - not an idea of heaven, either. There are only a few of such findings, but it does make us pause. Still, could the experience of even these things be so alien to us - and so perfect to them - that we cannot find the heaven in it where they can? Could it be that perception alone could change us from an iron age to a golden one?
In other words - would a return to a golden age change the laws of physics, or at least the laws of animal behavior? Or is it all perspective? If the latter, it is powerful stuff - and something within our grasp. It may not be the right age, but it would seem we could conjure the Gold - somehow. FK
From there, cultural complexity and technology separate the peoples of the earth. In Greece, there was the notion that the golden age was followed by the silver, one of gods and titans, a world of fantastic powers but also strife - a world no longer based on universal union. It was a great age, but alloyed - and the next best athlete got silver to designate this status.
The Bronze age came about in the Mediterranean at the beginning of high civilization - the era of kings and pharaohs and mathematics and great monuments and writing. It was the first age of Man, lower still than the age of the titans, but still near- mythic in the greatness of the human warrior. This was the era of Ulysses and Agamemnon, whom Homer would someday immortalize. It shared attributes of the gods in the powers of the humans, and the gods themselves actively engaged humans, but it was a fallen time, none-the-less. Still, far above our times today - and thus to the third and last decorated athlete, the bronze.
For the Greeks of the first millennium BC, as well as to the Vedic peoples of India, the last and lowest epic of humans was entered at about the same time that philosophy and the arts flourished in Greece. It was derivative time - there was seldom any direct contact with the gods, let alone the cosmos, save for those few individuals who by grace or extreme practice were able to break through the barrier that now separated humans from everything - from Union, from the gods, from nature, from mythic heroism. It was - and is - called the Iron age, and, as the I Ching would say, it is not here as a matter of our individual actions, but as a set condition of the times. There are no iron metals for athletes, for we are all of iron, even the best of us. The metals speak of other times when greatness was natural, but now we can only allude to them through metal and our medals. Ah, sad and fallen world!
This progression - or de-volution - is in accord with perennialist principles, but sometimes we have to wonder. Gold was used for ornamentation but had little practical use, at least as far we know; the same goes for silver. Bronze, however, made great weapons and plows and tools, and iron, once the alloys were figured out, did even better. Human thought took symbolic metals and many other things and made something useful out of them. No longer dream-stuff - in the Iron Age, the rubber meets the road, and the actuality of it - the hard truth of it - makes us wonder: was the Golden Age really so great? Were there toothaches and childbirth deaths and burst appendixes and 30 year life expectancy rates? Were there, in that Golden Age, clan wars and feline and ursine predation? Was it, then, as bad as paleo-anthropologists say, and the Golden Age a myth of mind?
Two points come to mind, the first practical. Certainly, they - those of paleolithic or neolithic times - did not think of their illnesses or dangers as awful calamities. They were, like car accidents and cancer of today, dark parts of every day life. What, though, was their reality? Those who live most like them today, such as a few remote Amazon Indian tribes, conceive of themselves in mythical ways; the moon and sun and trees and animals are all situated in a cosmology that keeps giving back a reference that we would call magical thinking. And of course, magic in such a world is commonplace, just as monkeys can become humans and trees sprout gnome-like protectors. This could have been what was passed down as the age of myth, the silver age - for still, the golden age is gone even with these people, and they, too, look at it as a thing past (or embedded in an endless NOW that is accessible through ritual).
The second point, far less practical, is: was there truly a Golden Age? Was there truly a time of union, of intuitive harmony with the ALL? Would, then, in such a dimension of experience, the paleo-anthropological findings be irrelevant? For in the bones they would only find bones, not the lives lived of these people - and maybe it was so profoundly different that their world was, to them, as of heaven. I don't know: there have been findings of early Homo remains that have been eaten by leopards - certainly the lion did not lie down with that lamb. And there has been evidence of Neanderthal warfare and cannibalism - not an idea of heaven, either. There are only a few of such findings, but it does make us pause. Still, could the experience of even these things be so alien to us - and so perfect to them - that we cannot find the heaven in it where they can? Could it be that perception alone could change us from an iron age to a golden one?
In other words - would a return to a golden age change the laws of physics, or at least the laws of animal behavior? Or is it all perspective? If the latter, it is powerful stuff - and something within our grasp. It may not be the right age, but it would seem we could conjure the Gold - somehow. FK
RSS Feed