21.10.08

Kali Yuga: can we get to the bottom of cyclical myths?

Posted in Uncategorized at 4:01 pm by nemo

Wikipedia on Kali Yuga

MBFM asks me about the Hindu concept of ages. I can’t play expert here. A big subject, and full of pitfalls. We can research on the question as needed, which is not always easy in terms of Indian religion. The idea of cycles of civilization is endemic in the ancient world, and the Indian system is not so different from what we see in Greek civilization, from Hesiod to Plato, in a degenerating series of ages ending in the Iron Age. A lot of this thinking was simply a cultural coloring, saga mythology, and not always taken at face value by its members. The extreme length of the Kali Yuga, 432,000 years is a bit outlandish. But basically these ideas combined notions of cycles, and the absence of the idea of progress.

Just as an aside, I have a hunch about the sources of much Indian religious thought, another very difficult subject. Note that the Kali Yuga was said, in some accounts, to have started ca. -3000 BC, a frequent peg in many chronologies, for reasons we don’t quite understand.
(Although a student of the eonic effect has a pretty good guess in advance).
My hunch, and it is nothing more than that, is that much Indian religion in the proto-Hindu mode had its first great flowering in the Neolithic in the time-frame -5000 to -3000, now seen to be a very dynamic period in human history. If true, this would explain a number of things. This age period is almost lost to us, but its significance, to me at least, is that this was the first lower step, so to speak, to the rise of civilization, so-called, in the period after -3000, visible in Sumer and Dynastic Egypt. A very reasonable hypothesis. This period was as long in duration as the period from Socrates to Einstein!!
We need to be very skeptical/critical of any claims here, but it is by no means unscientific to consider that much of what we see later in historical times (after the invention of writing) had vigorous sources in the Neolithic. Much of Indian religion, e.g. its goddess worship, has a clear Neolithic signature. Ramakhrishna is a good example of the type, outstanding in modern times, as if transported in a time machine, a very advanced yet very primitive guru.
It is my suspicion/hunch then that before the invention of writing, and before the rise of ‘monumental’ civilization (first technological civilization,visible in Sumer/Egypt, etc) a Neolithic ‘civilization’ had already achieved some considerable depths of realization, among them the emergence of the world of the gurus and disciples and their yogas/tantras, in traditions handed down via oral communications (even in historical times, this was true, even up to the twentieth century, the great sutras were passed down via memorization).

We should note that perceptions of culture in this later period and context might well have sensed a great decline after that early and forgotten flowering. By the time of the Buddhists and Jains, notwithstanding the great Upanishadic flowering, it might have seemed that Hindu culture had somehow been greater in an earlier age period.
Table that, and take it with a grain of skepticism, we still don’t know.
This doesn’t explain the Kali Yuga, save to suggest that this mythology is probably a garbled version of something passed down from these earlier periods. That the Kali Yuga should be said to have started ca. -3000 (and associated with Khrishna) can thus be taken with a smile, and sense of recognition of how people might have been perceiving historical change. Not much to go on, but we can begin to see how cyclical thinking is pervasive in all of this, and why.

There are tremendous difficulties with rightly interpreting Indian religious history. First there was the Aryan invasion paradigm, now under severe attack by reactionary Hindus. While I don’t by any conceivable stretch of the imagination endorse those reactionary Hindus, they may be right on one point: the various yogas handed down to the Axial period were very ancient. We know this to be factual now, since we have a cylinder seal of a meditating yogi from -2000 or so BC. Whether these yogic traditions were invented by Indo-Europeans is then conjectural, contra the reactionaries. And it may be that the ‘Aryan’ signature’ of these later forms of Hinduism is a painted over ‘fraud’: they adapted these traditions to their Indo-European legacies. We just don’t know. The Indo-Europeans may have been in India much earlier, but the dating gets tight.
The non-aryan traditions of Shiva worship are part of that possible process of overlay confusion.
It is always said that Hinduism springs from the Vedas, but I fail to see the derivation. It’s like saying you can get Buddhism from the Iliad. Something is missing in our understanding.

BTW, the study of the eonic effect (which is not a study/myth of cycles, but unwittingly throws light on these issues) nonetheless shows immediately why people were getting confused over age periods, cycles and the whole muddle).
With grim precision, and uncanny timing, a new age of spirituality emerges in the era of the Upanishads and Buddha, and the reversal in the decline of the Hindu matrix was underway. So it is hardly surprising people were thinking they could detect cycles but couldn’t get it straight!

I have some material I scanned on a related subject (the later history of Hinduism/Buddhism) which I will put online, and which tells the tale of the collision of Hinduism and Buddhism and the final defeat of the Buddhists by the neo-brahmins (James is almost hallucinating this ancient conflict).

The point is that the emergence of Buddhism is a ‘new age’ saga, but one that we can nail to the map with some actual history. So we should be skeptical, yet respectful, of these degenerated myths of age periods and cycles, because they are a garbled mythology of half-remembered lost eras of history.

Lot more to research here.

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