Many of the characteristics of the civilizations of antiquity are explained by the fact that in the beginning the celestial Law was of an adamantine hardness while at the same time life still retained something of the celestial.

In speaking about ancient or traditional peoples it is important not to confuse healthy and integral civilizations with the great paganisms—for the term is justified here—of the Mediterranean and the Near East, of which Pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar have become the classic incarnations and conventional images. What strikes one first in these “petrified” traditions of the Biblical world is a cult of the massive and gigantic, as well as a cosmolatry often accompanied by bloody or orgiastic rites, not forgetting an excessive development of magic and the arts of divination; in civilizations of this kind the supernatural is replaced by the magical, and the here-below is divinized while nothing is offered for the hereafter—at least in the exoterism, which in fact overwhelms everything else; a sort of marmoreal divinization of the human is combined with a passionate

humanization of the divine; potentates are demigods, and the gods preside over all the passions.

 

A question that might arise here is the following: why did these old religions deviate into paganism and then become extinct, whereas a similar destiny seems to be excluded in the case of the great traditions that are alive today in both the West and the East?

 

The answer is that traditions having a prehistoric origin are, symbolically speaking, made for “space” and not for “time”; that is, they saw the light in a primordial epoch when time was still but a rhythm in a spatial and static beatitude and when space or simultaneity still predominated over the experience of duration and change; historical traditions on the contrary must take the experience of “time” into account and must foresee instability and decadence, since they were born at periods when time had become like a fast-flowing and ever more devouring river and when the spiritual outlook had to be centered on the end of the world.

 

The position of Hinduism is intermediate in the sense that it has a capacity, exceptional in a tradition of the primordial type, for rejuvenation and adaptation; it is thus at once prehistoric and historic and realizes in its own way the miracle of a synthesis between the gods of Egypt and the God of Israel.

 

But to return to the Babylonians: the stonelike character of this type of civilization cannot be explained solely by a tendency to excess; it is also explained by a sense of the immutable, as if one had seen primordial beatitude beginning to vanish and had therefore wished to build a fortress to stand against time, or as if one had sought to transform the whole tradition into a fortress, with the result that the spirit was stifled instead of being protected; seen from this angle the marmoreal and inhuman side of these paganisms looks like a titanic reaction of space against time. In this perspective the implacability of the stars is paradoxically combined with the passion of bodies; the stellar vault is always present, divine and crushing, whereas an overflowing life serves as a terrestrial divinity.

 

From another point of view, many of the characteristics of the civilizations of antiquity are explained by the fact that in the beginning the celestial Law was of an adamantine hardness while at the same time life still retained something of the celestial; Babylon lived falsely on this sort of recollection, and yet at the very heart of the cruelest paganisms there were mitigations that can be accounted for by changes in the cyclical atmosphere. The celestial Law becomes less demanding as we approach the end of our cycle; Clemency increases as man becomes weaker. Christ’s acquittal of the adulterous woman has this significance—apart from other equally possible meanings—as does the intervention of the angel in the sacrifice of Abraham.

 

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Frithjof Schuon: Light on The Ancient Worlds

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