Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
During the same period of upheaval, as one age blended into
another, the Indus peoples set the stage for the emergence of the
world's busiest religion. The move from Vedism's formless One
God to Hinduism's estimated thirty-six million deities was no mean
feat. It corresponds to the drying up of the Sarasvati River and the
movement of Indian civilisation east to the wetter Ganges-Yamuna
region, which is precisely where Hindu scriptures composed after
the Vedas, such as the Puranas, place it. The Vedas show the geography
of the ancient India of the Indus and the pre-Indus eras, but not of
the later period commonly associated with the so-called Aryan
invasion.
What was happening all over the ancient world around 1500
BC
transformed religion. It was moving out of the hands of an elite
priesthood or hierarchy of initiates and adopting forms that ordinary
people could understand. From gods and sages emerged the age of
kings and heroes. Few can relate to a formless and unknowable
entity. Thus the disputatious Children of Israel received the Law
written on stone tablets, and the warring, fun-loving tribes of India
got a mythology as colourful and heterogeneous as they were
themselves. Such was the age of Aries, with no major changes in
religion until the Piscean era introduced the further reforms of
Pythagoras, the Buddha, Mahavir, Confucius, Jesus, and others.
In the Vedic scheme of vast universal cycles, which move above
the astrological ages, moved still greater ones many thousands of
years long, the yugas. In this system, the whole of known history
has been in Kali Yuga - the age of heavy metal, of gross materialism.
The cyclical concept was still expounded by Renaissance
philosophers like Giambattista Vico in his
Scienza Nuova
: an age of
gods, an age of heroes, an age of men, and then a
ricorso
, or return to
the beginning. W. B. Yeats's concept of 'gyres' contains similar ideas.
Early Vedism ushered in the age of gods; Hinduism and Judeo-
Christianity and, later, Buddhism and Islam are very much products
of an age of heroes. We are now quite clearly in an age of men, and
signs of the
ricorso
are appearing everywhere, although Kali Yuga has
several millennia to run yet . . .
