The Neoplatonics

In 337 B.C. Philip the II, King of Macedonia, seized the whole Greece, taking it away from the Persian hegemony. Macedonia was a small kingdom located north of Greece, considered by the Hellenes as a barbarian country. The great military and administrative ability of its ruling dynasty led Macedonia to become a colossal Empire. Alexander the Great¹, son of Philip the II, defeated the Persians and the Egyptians arriving to conquer all the territories from Greece, to the Nile and the Indus rivers. When Alexander died he was only thirty-three years old and his Empire immediately fell apart.
Alexander’s Generals, having proclaimed themselves Kings, divided the Empire in several realms. Despite its ephemeral duration, Alexander’s Empire had great cultural significance. Indeed, the union of so many different peoples, traditions and religions broke the limits of the particularistic and exclusivist mentality of the Greeks, giving rise to a more universal civilization known as “Hellenism”. The direct heir of Hellenistic civilization was the Roman Empire that in three centuries conquered almost all the kingdoms in which the Alexander’s Empire had been divided. It is precisely under the Roman universalistic domain that in Alexandria of Egypt, city founded by Alexander, the Pythagorean-Platonic school called “Neoplatonism” was established. Rome, the imperial capital, became the second centre of the Neoplatonic Mysteries.
In the Neoplatonic attitude there were two innovations: the first was that these philosophers brought to light the knowledge that the previous Pythagoreans had jealously hidden from the profane people, making less rigorous the boundary between esoterism and exoterism. The second one was that they incorporated into Pythagorean-Platonic Mysteric tradition many elements from other initiations, such as the Egyptian, the Chaldean², and the Jewish ones.
The founder of Neoplatonism was Plotinus (204-270 A.D.). He descended from an ancient Egyptian priestly caste family and, besides being initiated into the Isiac Mysteries³, he also got the initiation from the Pythagorean-Platonic Mysteries. He taught that man is like a shapeless stone block. Initiation leads to sculpt and remove all the superfluous parts until the hidden statue is displayed. It is a work of purification which finally releases its own individual nature from the wastes. This is just a first step of the initiatory path. In fact, the statue which one has cleansed is only a form. The One (τό Ἕν, read tò Hen), the Divine Metaphysical Principle, is beyond the form, and in order to know that tò Hen is our real nature, one must overcome any limitation and dualism. Therefore, individuality must be completely eliminated. Doing so, all the appearance of separation are removed and then “there is nothing that distinguishes, there is no longer the duality, but only the One.”⁴ In everyday life man does not realize that in reality he is the “superior man” (sskr. Puruṣa) and he only identifies himself with the “secondary man” (sskr. manuṣya) who cares about the needs of the body, which feels and thinks according to sensory perceptions. The One is always present, but we are absent to ourselves because we turn our attention to elsewhere. One must acknowledge that all this existence that appears to be constantly in becoming, this All (Πᾶν, read Pan), is in reality the Unchangeable without multiplicity (Ἀ-πόλλων, read A-pollon, the God Apollo’name; sskr. a-bahutā). To achieve this, we need to expand our consciousness and focus our attention only on the “superior man”. The method (μέθοδος, read méthodos, sscr. prakriyā) used by Plotinus consisted in abandoning the vision of external objects, turning the attention to the inner self in order to obtain the vision of the One, tò Hen. When he was young, Plotinus had tried to go to India to tap into the wisdom of the Brāhmaṇas, but a war in Persia stopped him. However, he certainly could meet some Brāhmaṇas of the small Indian communities located in Egypt, where he was born, and in Italy, where he died.
Undoubtedly the founder of the school has been intellectually the highest among the Neoplatonics. Plotinus’s successors, though all quite noteworthy, show less interest in metaphysics and more attention to the empirical world. Specially Porphyrius (233-305 A.D.), Iamblichus (250~330 A.D.) and Proclus (412-485 A.D.) claimed that the humanity of the Iron Age (i.e. kali yuga) was so decayed, that the Plotinus’s method had become ineffective. They gave more importance to the ritual aspects of the method; as they considered the rituals of the previous Pythagorean tradition to be insufficient, they borrowed other rituals from the ancient Chaldean and Egyptian Mysteries. Particularly they were influenced by the Theurgy taught by the Greek-Chaldean philosopher Julian the Theurgist (2nd century A.D.).
Theurgy, whose meaning is “the action of the Gods”, was an art designed to call down the real presence of a ritually evoked Deity. For example, when the master enjoined the adoration of a particular form of God (sskr. iṣṭadevatā) to the disciple, in a cavity inside the idol, a peculiar insect, a plant, a precious stone, and other symbols sacred to that God were hidden. Then the master ritually evoked the God’s real presence in the statue (sskr. prāṇapratiṣṭhā). At the end, the idol was ready for the initiatory worship. The same Theurgy could be performed on the disciple himself so the disciple was possessed by a God and became able to produce oracles. This ritually obtained phenomenon was very similar to the spontaneous possession of Socrates by his “demon”.
In the Pythagoreanism, philosophy was considered as a pre-initiatory or exoteric preparation to Sophia, the esoteric knowledge. Similarly, for the Neoplatonics, philosophy had to lead to Theurgy. The purpose of Theurgy was to obtain an intellect (νοῦς, read nus; sskr. buddhi) able to join the divine intellectual sphere (sskr. adhidaivika jagat) and, in this way, to know the things of that world, and harmonize the mundane actions with it. They maintained that this was their union with the One. Even if these Neoplatonics reached a lower level if compared to Plotinus, for us they had the merit of making manifest many esoteric teachings of Orpheus, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and especially of Plato, which were hitherto inaccessible.
They also commented several parts of the Homer and Hesiod’s Poems, explaining in details the meaning of the symbols enclosed in the verses. In this way, those Poems revealed their deepest meanings, hidden beyond their mere literary appearance. However, the continued use of Theurgic rituals often led them to the quest of powers (sskr. siddhi) and the production of magic phenomena. However, from a doctrinal point of view, the assumption of symbols, rituals and beliefs from non-Greek traditions and religions fatally led them to a syncretistic tendency. This inclination produced a new way of thinking, independent from Neoplatonism, but often adopted by some Neoplatonics: the Gnosticism.

D. K. Aśvamitra

1. Alexander had been initiated by Aristotle.[↩]
2. The Chaldeans were a priestly caste dating back to the ancient tradition of the Sumerians (4000 BC), population perhaps proceeding from India. There is the evidence of many contacts between Sumer and the Indo-Sarasvatī civilization. The Chaldeans remained the priestly caste even after the disappearance of Sumerian civilization, performing priestly functions also at the most recent Semitic Assyrian Babylonian civilizations. They were very famous for their vast and deep metaphysical and cosmological knowledge. Their great fame is at the origin of the name of the Celts, of the Culdees Irish Christians monks and of the land of Caledonia.[↩]
3. Those Mysteries were initiation rites dedicated to the Egyptian Mother Goddess Isis. Of them we will be covered in a later chapter.[↩]
4. Plotinus, Enneads, VI.7.34.[↩]

The Odyssey

The second Poem of Homer, the Odyssey (Ὀδύσσεια, read Odǘsseia), relates the sea travels of Odysseus (Ὀδυσσεύς, read Odüssèus¹), the Greek hero returning to his Kingdom, the island of Ithaca, after the destruction of Troy.
From a profane and superficial point of view, the Poem is generally considered as a simple account of adventures. However, the Odyssey also tells in a symbolic and sometimes enigmatic form the difficult and tiring inner journey of Odysseus² in order to restore the mental purity of the original humanity.
Odysseus left Ithaca to take part in the Troy War. After ten years of war, he departed from the Trojan shore with his twelve ships to return back home. When the island was already in sight, winds pushed him far off in the direction of the Atlantic Ocean. For ten years Odysseus drifted on the sea out of any normal human experience. His journey to the reign of the dead is described in a succession of fabulous events³.
Throughout his numerous misadventures, the astute (πολύμητις, read polǘmetis) Greek hero always received the protection of Athena, the Goddess of knowledge and art (ἒντεχνος σόφία, read entèkhnos sofìa). On the contrary, Poseidon, the God of the sea, always remained hostile to him. The adventures of Odysseus and his warriors are fascinating and susceptible to symbolic interpretations. Among them it is famous his landing on the island of the Cyclops⁴ where the hero risked being devoured with all his comrades by Polyphemus, son of Poseidon. Thanks to his proverbial artfulness Odysseus managed to save himself and most of companions by blinding the Cyclopes, but in this way he attracted the wrath of the God.​
Then he arrived to the island of the Laestrygonians, man-eating giants, where he lost eleven ships with their crew. Later he landed on the island of Eeas, abode of Circe, an enchantress who turned men into animals by magic. The sorceress, however, fell in love with Odysseus and so his warriors, who had been turned into pigs, regained their human form. After leaving Circe, Odysseus descended to the Realm of the Dead where he received clues on how to return home. He then passed near a shore where he heard the dangerously charming songs of the Sirens⁵. Hungry, the Greeks reached the island of the Sun, where they killed and fed on the sacred cows to the God. Zeus, angry for the sacrilege casted a storm upon the crew and sank the ship. All died except Odysseus.​
The castaway then reached the island of Ogigia, “where is the navel of the sea”, as Homer says. There, for seven long years, the hero was kept in sweet imprisonment by the nymph Calypso⁶ (Καλυψώ, read Kalüpsò).​
Finally the Gods decided that Fate could no longer wait: it was determined that the hero would eventually reach his destination. It was, therefore, necessary to intervene. Calypso reluctantly obeyed Zeus’s will and allowed the hero to set sail on a raft. However Poseidon sent a storm against the will of the King of the Gods, and Odysseus shipwrecked once again. However he survived it and landed on the island of the Phaeacian people, (Φαίακες, read Fàiakes⁷), who helped him to return home. The Phaeacian island was called Skheria (Σχερία, read Skherìa, the perennial one, sskr. sanātana), a happy land where nature always produced flowers and fruits, which in fact was the very Elysian Fields. Twelve Kings ruled the island, and a thirteenth one reined over all of them⁸. Flying over the waves with a Phaeacian ship (similar to a vimāna) Odysseus finally landed at Ithaca, but, not knowing the situation of his kingdom, he preferred to remain incognito.​
The swineherd Eumaeus⁹ hosted him in his humble home and revealed that, even after twenty years of absence, the fidelity of Penelope to her husband had always remained untouched. She was constantly harassed by suitors (Proci), who were forcing her to marry one of them. The Proci were young, overbearing and arrogant princes who wanted to take over the island by marrying the Queen. In the meantime, they were living in the Odysseus’ Royal Palace, dilapidating his wealth. During a competition with the bow, Odysseus massacred all the suitors. The Palace was finally set free and he reunited with Penelope. The order was restored according to the laws that should govern human existence.
In the Poem, Penelope¹⁰ is always described as wise, the wisest of women. She represents the Knowledge located in the heart of Odysseus, who has never forgotten her¹¹.
The return to home marks the achievement of the inner purification of Odysseus and the restoration of the Golden Age in Ithaca. This resembles the ideal kingdom of Rāma when he returned to Ayodhyā.​
However, a prophecy predicted that Odysseus had to depart again for one last journey carrying an oar on his shoulders. His peregrination would have been completed only when, in a faraway land, a man, not recognizing the oar, affirmed that he had on his shoulder was not an oar but a winnowing stick for wheat. In this way, a further degree of realization was prophesied to him. In fact, the winnowing stick symbolizes the separation of the hero from all the limits and obstacles: so any transient tie should be cut¹².
From this passage of the Odyssey we can argue that in very remote times there were two different initiatic paths: Small Mysteries and Great Mysteries. In Homeric times those listening to epic poetry would understand such meaning. But in the immediate aftermath, that knowledge was deprived of its original meaning finally losing its metaphysical dimension. However, even if the Odyssey is much more symbolic and initiatic than the Iliad, here too any truly sapiential section remains absent.

Durgādevī

1. Probably his name derives from the verb όδύσσομαι (read odǘssomai), to be disgusted. The same root appears in the Latin verb odiare, to hate.[↩]
2. In Latin he was known as Ulysses.[↩]
3. During his descent to the underworld one predicts him: “You seek the return that has the sweetness of honey”: so the journey of Odysseus clearly aims to reach the madhu vidyā.[↩]
4. Cyclops were giants with a single eye on the forehead. The legend represents them as a wild and cruel race.[↩]
5. Dangerous spirits half women and half birds.[↩]
6. Her name derives from the verb καλύπτω (read kalǘpto), to hide, to conceal. It corresponds to the thirteenth year of hiding of the Pāṇḍavas at the end of the exile. Calipso was the daughter of Atlas, so she represents an Atlantean imprisonment. Also in the Mahābhārata the Kingdom of the Matsyas and its King Virāṭa show many features of the Atlantean tradition.[↩]
7. This name probably derives from the verb φαίνω (read fàino), to shine.[↩]
8. Like the sun on the twelve signs of the Zodiac.[↩]
9. In fact, the humble swineherd was the son of the King of Ortigia, the island of Delos, which was part of the hyperborean lands and of which the Mediterranean Delos was only an equinoctial projection. Therefore, here swineherd means “inhabitant of Varāhī“, the artic Home.[↩]
10. In Greek Penelope is the name of a swan or goose, the Eurasian Anser, i.e. the haṃsa.[↩]
11. In the Tripurā Rahasya Jāmadagnya thus addresses the master: “[…] The Goddess has always lived in my heart…”. The Tripurā Goddess is knowledge, just like Penelope.[↩]
12. In the Brahma Sūtra Śaṃkara Bhāṣya (IV.1.12), the phrase “when rice grains are beaten” is commented in the same way: it is required that the beating must continue until the chaff separates from the grains. With such separation, that is to say with the achievement of the mokṣa, any further beating would be unnecessary. Beating rice is a way of representing the ātmānātma viveka. The beating of the rice represents the “neti neti”.[↩]

The Iliad

In conclusion of this series of articles concerning the ancient Greek Civilization we give a brief description of the two Epic Poems that de facto became its religious texts. Greek literature begins in the 8th century B. C. with these Epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, attributed to the blind poet Homer, about whom we have little information. Probably he was born in Chios¹, where a guild of bards (kavi), called Homerids, had been active for many centuries.
In the prologue of the Iliad (Ἰλιάς, read Iliàs), the poet affirms that the very Zeus wanted to provoke the war. The explanation of this important statement lies in a fragment of the Cypria². There it is said that the Goddess of the Earth, afflicted by the weight of a degenerate humanity on her, asked Zeus to relieve her from it. The King of the Gods listened to her prayer and sparked out a long and fierce conflict to diminish the number of those wicked ones.
The Iliad tells of a war fought at the end of the Bronze Age (i. e. Dvāpara yuga) between those Greeks called Achaeans³ (or, sometimes, Mycenaeans) and the Trojans, the inhabitants of Troy⁴, also known as Ilion (Ἲλιον, read Ílion). Troy was located on the western coast of present Turkey. The conflict broked out because Paris, one of the sons of the King of Troy, abducted the beautiful Helen⁵, wife of Menelaus, King of Sparta and daughter of Zeus and one of his human lovers.
King Menelaus, to avenge such offense and rescue Helen, sought help from all the other Greek Kings. They then gathered a huge army and a powerful fleet of more than one thousand warships to cross the Aegean Sea and reach Troy. Agamemnon, King of Mycenae and brother of Menelaus, was elected leader (King of Kings) of the expedition.
The siege of Ilion lasted ten years. However, Homer narrates only the last fifty-one days of war. On the battlefield the most illustrious heroes were Achilles on the Greek side, and Hector on that of the Trojans. Achilles, King of the Myrmidons (the Ants), was the finest among all the warriors for courage and thirst for glory; he was also invulnerable at any part of the body with the exception of his left heel⁶. Having received the opportunity to choose between a short but glorious life and a long but inglorious one, Achilles chose the first.
The city of Ilion was protected by high walls and had numerous allies. The commander in chief of the Trojan army was Hector, the beloved son of King Priam, valiant and firm in his duty to fight to the end. Hector too aspired to glory, but primarily he aspired to save the city. While knowing he could not win Achilles, he bravely faced him in a duel. He was killed and his corpse barbarously outraged. Finally, however, Achilles returned the body of Hector to his old father, the King Priam. The poem closes with the funeral pier of Hector. The Trojans wept the death of their hero knowing that their hope of surviving went down with him. Therefore, Homer does not narrate the conquest and destruction of Troy.
Also the Olympian Gods took part in the war: each of them took the side of one of the contenders, helping their own devotees, until Zeus forced them to stop because Fate (Niyati), to which none of the Gods can oppose, had to be fulfilled. Troy was to be destroyed.
The heroes of both sides fought for the glory. They knew their duty was to fight; they did not fear the enemy and faced death valiantly to fulfil their svadharma and to be remembered by posterity. The only inglorious episode is a nocturnal expedition that Odysseus, the cunning King of Ithaca, led to the enemy camp, making slaughter of the sleeping Trojans.
From fragments of ancient works and from the Odyssey, we know that Ilion was conquered with deceit. Odysseus, famous for his deceptions, built a huge wooden horse in whose belly a group of warriors was hidden. The Greeks dismantled their camp, and their fleet set sail from the beach, pretending to return to Greece. The great mysterious wooden horse was left in front of Troy as a gift to the Goddess Athena, protectress of Troy. Jubilant for the departure of the Greeks, the Trojans imprudently introduced the horse with its burden of death into the city. During the night the Greeks came out of the horse and, with their comrades promptly returned from the sea under the cover of darkness, they massacred the sleeping inhabitants and destroyed the ancient Ilion with fire and sword.
Only Aeneas, son of Anchises, the blind brother of King Priam and of the Goddess Aphrodite, managed to escape with a small group of Trojans. After many adventures, he reached Italy where he founded Alba Longa, the first nucleus of Rome. Thus, the Trojan offspring continued its glorious history, giving rise to Rome, the city that later took revenge by conquering Greece and all the lands around the Mediterranean basin.
It is easy to recognize similarities between the tale of the Iliad and the Indian Itihāsas. First of all, the premise: the Earth lamenting to the King of the Gods the weight of the human kind that she had to sustain. Zeus then initiates the war that will lead to the extermination of the Bronze Age heroes. This remembers the following passage of the smṛti:

In the early age⁷, when still there was no fear and danger, the primal God, Yama, dedicated himself to the sacrifices so no one died and the creatures continued to multiply. All creatures multiplied: birds, cattle, horses, fairs, and men, they grew in a disproportionate number.⁸

The text goes on describing how that uncontrolled multitude pressed the Earth under its weight, obliging Yama to assume his role as God of death. Earth then requested the help of Lord Viṣṇu. He, transformed into a wild boar, hooked the Earth-Vārāhī with his tusk and pulled her up until she emerged again.
The war was motivated by the abduction of Helen by the Trojan Prince Paris. Menelaus gathered all Greek tribes and organized the expedition against Troy. This remembers the abduction of Sītā by Rāvaṇa, and the expedition organized by Rāma against Laṅkā.
Also the Gods participated in the Trojan War; and similarely the army of Śrī Rāma was formed by Gods disguised as monkeys and bears, whereas the troops of Rāvaṇa were made of rākṣasas and asuras.
However, in the Homeric tale the two sides appear inverted. In the Iliad the field of dharma does not correspond, as it should be, to the city of Troy, the Vārāhī of the Hyperborean-Arctic Tradition but to the Achaeans-Atlanteans, who should represent adharma. On the contrary, in the Rāmāyaṇa the demonic Atlantean inhabitants of the oceanic island are defeated. Likewise, in the Mahābhārata, the Greeks should correspond to the Kauravas and the Trojans to the Pāṇḍavas.
The battles and duels described in the Iliad look like those described in the Mahābhārata. Even in the saṃskṛta poem, the Gods participate in the fighting, especially through their human offspring. The episode of the night raid is practically the same both in the Iliad and in Mahābhārata. The difference is that in the Iliad the treacherous night attack and the consequent massacre of Trojans are considered as a ruse of war. On the contrary in Mahābhārata the night attack lead by Aśvatthāmā in the Pāṇḍava’s camp is described as a vile abomination.
What differentiates the Iliad from saṃskṛta Itihāsas is that in this Greek Epic Poem there are no sapiential sections: no chapter comparable to Yoga Vasiṣṭha, Bhagavad Gītā or Anu Gītā, demonstrating in this way a trend merely kṣatriya. Only vague descriptions of sacrifices and cremation rituals or some symbolism and allegory can be found; for instance, the illustration of the shield of Achilles, on which was chiselled a cosmography; or the description of the warrior code, the respect for the priests, the inevitability of Fate, but nothing else.
Heraclitus (535.475 B. C.) stated that the so-called great masters as Homer and Hesiodus put together all the greatest and most important events in a complete confusion. Homer, generally considered as the wisest among the Greeks, could not understand a simple riddle proposed to him by a group of children! Heraclitus has been one of the greatest Greek wise men, comparable to Pythagoras and Empedocles. He had been initiated in Eleusis and with his exceptional intellectual qualifications he reached the intuition of the eternal Truth beyond the illusory world.

Durgādevī

1. Aegean Sea Island.[↩]
2. A lost Epic Poem, which was part of the Trojan cycle Literature.[↩]
3. The Achaeans were one of the Sea Peoples, so they were of Atlantean origin.[↩]
4. Romans called this city in such way. Troy in Latin means the female of boar, Vārāhī. This proves Troy as a city of Arctic-Hyperborean tradition.[↩]
5. Helen (Ἑλένη read Helène). Her name has been linked to the moon (σελήνη, read Seléne), and to its splendour (σέλας, read sélas). Elena is described with a pale complexion: her skin, in fact, recalls the candid lunar splendour. In Rāmāyaṇa, Sītā as śakti of Rāmacandra also has lunar features.[↩]
6. The myth narrates that the goddess Thetis, wanting to make her son immortal, immersed him in the water of the Styx, an infernal river. Thus, she made him invulnerable throughout his body except the heel from which she was holding him. In fact, Achilles was wounded to death on his heel by Paris.[↩]
7. It does not matter that the two episodes refer to different yugas. As we know, human events are cyclically similar to each other.[↩]
8. ābhārata, Droṇa Parvan, LIII. 4.[↩]

Plato

Plato (428/427 B.C.) was born in Athens from an illustrious noble family: His father was descendant of Codrus, the last King of Athens and his mother of Solon¹. Therefore he had an aristocratic education.
He had Socrates as teacher and, in his works he transmitted the thought and the personality of the philosopher. However, Socrates cannot be considered Plato’s dīkṣāguru, because he always refused to be initiated to the Mysteries. Socrates was spontaneously possessed by a “genie” (δαίμων, read dàimon), a kind of gandharva, who guided him in his moral choices. So Socrates was Plato’s teacher in what concerns behavior and virtues, without transmitting him any method or a metaphysical doctrine. “Socrates met in Athens with a Hindū who asked him what kind of philosophy he practiced. Socrates replied that he was investigating the man. The Hindū, laughing, replied that he could not know the human things if he ignored the divine ones.”²
Also Plato’s birth, like Pythagoras’one, was related to God Apollo: in fact, according to Diogenes Laertius³, he was born the same day and the same month of the God.
Following the footsteps of Orpheus and Pythagoras, Plato also traveled to Egypt where he came into contact with initiatic organizations. He stayed for a long time in “Magna Greece”, especially in Taranto where Archytas was the chief of the Army (στρατηγός, read strategòs). Archytas became his guru and initiated him to Pythagorean Mysteries. He also visited the city of Syracuse, where the Pythagorean community was active. Three times he had been received at the court of the Tyrants of Syracuse: he hoped to realize there the perfect city (Καλλίπολις, read Kallìpolis), governed by virtuous and righteous men, as he had longed for in his Republic and Laws. However, he couldn’t fulfill his dream for the pettiness of the men.
He asserted that the right State, governed by righteous men, could provide every citizen with adequate cultural and social formation. In the society everyone had to play a role (svadharma) according to his own qualifications and abilities.
The social levels had to be three: few people, qualified by nature and educated to love for wisdom (i.e. philosophy), had to rule for the common good. Others, holding spontaneous courage, had to fight for the defense of the city. The third and largest number of citizens had to deal with handicrafts and productive jobs useful to everyone.
One of the most important points of the Platonic thought is expressed by the “Allegory of the Cave”⁴ which explains the intellectual diversity among men. All men live tightly chained into a dark cave and they are forced to look at the bottom wall. Behind them there is the entrance; the sun shines outside. Outside the cave, several things are passing by and men can only see the shadows projected on the bottom of the cave. Shadows are the apparent images that men see. Instead, the real things, called ideas (ἰδέα read idéa, or εἶδος, read éidos⁵) are universal⁶, eternal, necessary entities, endowed with autonomous reality. They belong to the world of Being, the hyperuranium (ὑπερουράνιον, read hüperurànion, i.e. “above the sky”), beyond the cosmos visible to us, beyond space and time⁷. It is a knowable place (τόπος νοητός, read tòpos noetòs) only by the contemplating intellect. Therefore it is necessary to distinguish between the World of Being which evermore is and never becomes, and the world of becoming which evermore mutates and never is. Only very few people, thanks to their natural qualifications (adhikāra) and with the help of knowledge, are able to free themselves from the chains and to get out reaching the sunlight. The sun, the God Apollo, is the symbol of the Supreme Good, all-illuminating. In that moment these knowers realize that the only Reality is outside the cave. Inside the cave, men are enveloped in an illusory reality (māyā), prisoners of ignorance (avidyā)⁸. Knowledge, as intuition, is realized by the memory (ἀνάμνησις, read anàmnesis) of the eternal ideas, which are inherent to the causal world.
If the intellect (νοῦς, read nùs) is able to remember and recognize the ideas, it is because it existed before coming to animate the body. It had already contemplated the immutable ideas. This is the platonic demonstration of the soul immortality. The wise man, thanks to the memory, addressing his inner sight to the immutable ideas, archetypes of the empiric reality, comes to know himself⁹ and the Supreme Good. All the beings, at different levels, are attracted by the Good because it is an innate idea and, in this way, they participate to their real essence (svarūpa).
The three categories of citizens of the Platonic ideal State correspond to the three parts of the soul: the intellect (nùs), considered as a divine and immortal spark; the θυμός (read thümòs) producing passions and volitions; the ἐπιθυμία (read epithümìa) to the level of instincts and cravings. The last two elements are mortal and are represented by Plato as two horses yoked to a chariot, which must be driven with determination by the charioteer, symbol of the intellect¹⁰. The soul is the mirror of the perfect city, Kallìpolis, and vice versa.
Plato taught that after the death of the body the soul will be judged for the accomplished actions. According to the faults (pāpa) and the merits (puṇya), the soul will return to a body, with a series of rebirths and re-deaths until it returns pure. Anyway, in its Phaedrus Plato affirms that only the initiate (dīkṣita) to the Mysteries, becoming purified, will be able to liberate his soul from the bonds holding him captive¹¹.
He wrote in the Timaeus that the Demiurge (Δημιουργός, read demiurgòs, i.e. Brahmā)¹² manifested the cosmos as a body animated by an immortal soul, in the image of a perfect model, without beginning or end, cognizable only through the intellect. This cosmos is like an egg (brahmāṇḍa) made up of fire, earth, water and air and contains in itself the Gods and all the living beings (Hiraṇyagarbha-jīva ghana): men, animals and plants participate both in an immortal nature (amartya svarūpa) and in a mortal existence (martya bhāva), with the gross (sthūla śarīra) and a subtle body (liṅga śarīra). Plato has transmitted to the posterity the description of the origin of the cosmos through mathematical and geometrical relations according to the Pythagorean doctrine.
The Platonic Demiurge is the Divinity manifesting the cosmos made in image of eternal immutable and perfect ideas. He is the one that produces the world, while remaining itself unchanged. He is said good by nature and therefore also the world is good being essentially similar to him. He is the Being, the Supreme Good, therefore he is the qualified principle (Brahman Saguṇa). We have no evidence of a Platonic conception going beyond this Causal State (kāraṇa avasthā). But his oral esoteric teaching remained secret and perhaps it has not been transmitted because in the 5th century B.C. the Greeks did not longer understand the pure Metaphysics (śuddha paramārtha).
Many of Plato’s works illustrating his doctrine have come to us. He taught according to the dialectical method, already used by Socrates, based on the discussion between questions and answers. He founded his school, the Academy, in Athens where, until his death (348/347 B.C.), he spread his teachings in line with his the Orphic and Pythagorean line of his paramparā. Aristotle became his disciple and successor. This philosopher changed the traditional doctrine in a rationalistic way, maintaining that mere logic (śuṣka tarka) was the main instrument of knowledge. Aristotle’s egocentrism pushed him to criticize and ridicule the masters who had preceded him, especially Pythagoras and Plato.
Despite this deviation, the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition continued in the shelter of continued persecution unleashed by politicians and rival profane (i.e. uninitiated) philosophers.
In the 3rd century A.D. in fact, while the ancient Greek-Roman religion was declining before the rise of Christianity, a great revival of Pythagoreanism-Platonism took place, thanks to Plotinus¹³ and his Neo-platonic school. This doctrine and its initiation remained alive in the ancient world and perpetuated throughout the Christian Middle Ages.

Durgādevī

1. Athenian Legislator (638-558 B.C.). As our readers can remember, Solon went to Egypt where he learned the history of Atlantis.[↩]
2. Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelii., XI, 3, 28.[↩]
3. Greek writer probably lived in the 3rd century A.D.[↩]
4. Republic, VII. 514a–517a.[↩]
5. Both words derive from ἰδ (read id), one of the roots of the verb ὁράω (read orào, i.e. to see).[↩]
6. For instance, there are many empiric men (manuṣa), but the idea of man is unique (Puruṣa).[↩]
7. Space and time are within the avasthā.[↩]
8. The Orphics maintained that the soul was prisoner of the body (σῶμα, read sòma) considered as a coffin (σῆμα, read séma).[↩]
9. Know yourself (γνῶθι σεαυτόν, read gnòthi seautòn): this injunction was the basis of Socrates teaching. The sentence was engraved in the sanctuary of Delphi, dedicated to Apollo. Sometimes in Plato its meaning goes beyond the Socratic psychological and moral interpretation and then it means “know your Self”.[↩]
10. Phaedrus, 246a-246b. It is evident that in the highest Greek thought there was always a misunderstanding between buddhi and Ātman.[↩]
11. Phaedrus, 249 c.[↩]
12. Etymologically: the one that works for others.[↩]
13. Plotinus is believed to descend from an Egyptian priestly family.[↩]

Pythagoras

Pythagoras was born in 570 a. C. in Samo, the easternmost among the Greek Islands, important site of commercial and cultural exchanges. His works have been lost. The information about his life and his teachings comes from later authors who handed down what they knew about him mostly by oral traditions and by some written texts lost over the time.
Pythagoras traveled for a long time and contacted several initiatic environments, in Egypt, where he stayed for twenty-two years and in Babylon of Chaldea¹. He was also initiated to the Eleusinian and the Orphic Mysteries.
From his earliest youth he was so much celebrated for his extraordinary beauty and wisdom that he was called son of the God Apollo Hyperborean or Apollo himself, who came among men to teach Knowledge.
At the age of forty he moved to Magna Greece², in Crotone³, where he became famous and admired, surrounded by many disciples⁴, even women, to whom he imposed silence and secrecy on the received teachings. He was an Apollo worshiper and the worship of this Deity in Magna Greece coincided with the settle of such a wise man in that land, where numerous temples had been dedicated to that God. There he founded his initiatic school (sampradāya).
We know that his method (sādhanā) was based on arithmetic and geometry: the number is the beginning and the basis of Reality. One is the Whole. Apollo, in fact, means “the only one” without anything else, without multiplicity⁵. Important for Pythagoras  was the tetraktys (τετρακτύς, read tetraktǘs), the numerical series composed by 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10, which could be graphically symbolized as an equilateral triangle. The number 1 corresponds to the point,  beyond the space. The 2 is the causal duality (kāraṇa śarīra) that produces all multiplicity, remaining without extension, as the geometric line. Three is the subtle (sūkṣma śarīra), the two-dimensional geometric surface. Four is the gross manifestation (sthūla śarīra), represented by the three-dimensional solid. The whole Reality is represented by the number 10⁶.
Tetraktys was the name of the school (sampradāya) and the disciples swore on this symbol. The numbers 7 and 10 were hold in high regard. But every number, in reality, had a symbolic meaning and was a support to meditation because all things exist in analogy to it. In particular, the 7 was the number of Apollo⁷ and Pythagoras was born on the seventh day of the seventh month, emphasizing in this way his close bond with the God. The wording of the famous theorem concerning the rectangle triangle bears his name. It is important to point out that in his doctrine the geometric figures and numbers never had only a quantitative value, but always a qualitative and symbolic meaning.
The main quality of these principles of Reality represented by the numbers is the harmony as the balance of opposites and reflection of divine intelligence. The geometric relationships are harmonic as well as the musical proportions. All the cosmos is governed by numerical relationships: music, which springs from the rotation of planets and Earth, unifies the macrocosm and microcosm in an orderly and harmonious whole.
As Orpheus enchanted animals, so the music of Pythagoras, imitating the harmony of the universe, was able to cure and appease souls. The use of the seven-string lyre was attributed to Pythagoras. Nicomachus⁸ claimed that the musical scale, used by Pythagoras, included seven notes whose names were associated with the planets based on their distance from Earth⁹. The teachings were given in riddles because they had not to be spread among the uninitiated.
Iamblichus¹⁰ reports a distinction between those who were simple followers of Pythagoras, called philosophers or “acusmatics” (ἀκουσματικοὶ, read akusmatikòi), i.e. the listeners, and those who were fully engaged in the Pythagorean community and obeyed to the strict rules of conduct, these were called contemplatives or “esoterics”, (ἐσωτερικοὶ, read esoterikòi), the true initiates. Those who aspired to the secret teachings had to wait three years for admission; after that they had to maintain full silence for five years, to experience self-control. Only at the end of those eight years they received the initiation. Their lifestyle had to be simple, frugal; food was strictly vegetarian. They wore white clothes as symbol of purity as synthesis of all colors. Everyone renounced to the possession of personal belongings (mamakāra). They were not allowed to kill any living being because they supported the doctrine of the soul transmigration.
Iamblichus relates that the dīkṣita proceeded step by step on the spiritual path: this means that the Pythagorean Mysteries belonged to the non-Supreme Brahman knowledge (aparavidyā).
They considered Pythagoras as Hyperborean Apollo himself¹¹. In this regard it is said that once he showed his gold thigh to his guest, the Hyperborean Abaris. This priest had given a sacred arrow  to Pythagoras by which he had flown from Hyperborea to Magna Greece. Abaris had given the arrow to Pythagoras because he had identified him with his Hyperborean Lord Apollo¹².
After a period of general enthusiasm, his teachings, his incitement to a simple life style and to a behavior according to the divine laws (dharma), addressed towards him the antipathy and the envy of politicians. These people prompted the Crotonians to a revolt against the Pythagoreans: the crazed crowd burned the building where the Pythagoreans were gathering. Many of them died. Pythagoras managed to save himself, but, stroke by sorrow, he died in Metapontum, a city of Magna Greece, in 495 B. C.
The Pythagoreans were persecuted also later. For this reason Plato¹³, who admired Pythagoras and who revealed the Pythagorean wisdom in his works (especially in the Timaeus), conveyed many teachings of the Master without ever openly declaring to be one of his followers. In this way, all was not lost. Pythagoras, as Apollo’s avatāra, adapted the Greek Tradition to its own time. He established an initiatic path and its papamparā is well known through a long series of guru’s names¹⁴.
The diffusion of his thoughts and teachings has been incredibly wide: Diodorus Siculus, speaking of the Druids¹⁵, states that all they followed the Pythagorean doctrines.
The extraordinary reputation of Pythagoras has crossed the centuries and his doctrine, which remained alive in ancient Greece, and even more in Rome throughout its twelve centuries of monarchic¹⁶, republican and imperial history¹⁷; in a Christianized form it continued alive until the Middle Ages. Dante (1265-1321 A.D.), the greatest Italian poet, has been the last important master of this paramparā.

Durgādevī

1. Southern Region of ancient Mesopotamia.[↩]
2. The Greeks called Southern Italy “Magna (i.e. Great) Greece”.[↩]
3. City of Calabria in southern Italy[↩]
4. It is said that they were six hundred.[↩]
5. The Pythagoreans prayed facing East, from where the sun, aster identified with Apollo, rises.[↩]
6. This perfectly coincides with the numbers characterizing a complete cycle in the Hindū Tradition. In fact, kṛta yuga is equivalent to 4, the treta to 3, the dvāpara to 2, the kali to 1, and the whole cycle applies 10.[↩]
7. According to ancient Greek astrology, the sun, representing Apollo, is the noblest of the seven planets.[↩]
8. Famous Greek mathematician of the Tetraktys school.[↩]
9. For instance Kronos (Saturn), the most distant and slow of the planets, coincides with the lowest note of the musical scale.[↩]
10. Neoplatonic philosopher, born in Syria (~250-330 B.C.).[↩]
11. The name of Pythagoras means “the one speaking through the Pythia”, that is, Apollo himself[↩]
12. Apollo was represented with the quiver with the arrows and the bow symbolizing the the striking rays of the sun.[↩]
13. Photius of Costantinople informs us that Plato was the ninth master of papamparā after Pythagoras.[↩]
14. Among them we mention Empedocles, who has been considered as a God, Heraclitos and Parmenides. In a fragment the Pythagorean Parmenides states that the Goddess had revealed to him that he had to make the intuitive experience of the Being, (τό Ἐόν, read tò Eòn) who does not know either the time or the becoming: “Unborn and indestructible […], whole and perfect, never was or will be because He is now, all together, one and continuous […], indivisible […], all equal to himself […], full of being […] without beginning or end.” The resemblance with Vedānta is really amazing![↩]
15. Members of the priestly caste of the Celts, a population who settled in Western and Northern Europe, and in the British Isles.[↩]
16. Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, was immediate disciple of Pythagoras; he reorganized the ancient Latin religion according to the Pythagoreanism. Hence, the Pythagorean Mysteries were the original form of Roman initiation.[↩]
17. Here we have to mention the most important Latin Pythagorean master, the great poet Virgil (70-19 B.C.) who lived at the beginning of the Roman imperial period.[↩]

The Greek Civilization: The bright side (III)

Esoterism, the Mysteries: In ancient Greece, from immemorial time, esoterism, the initiatic dominion, had the form of Mysteries. As already explained in the third article of this series (3. Initiation and Mysticism), Mystery means something incommunicable, and as well as myste, the initiate, has the same meaning and etymological origin of muni, the one who remains silent. It is appropriate here to distinguish between mystery and secret. Secret is an information that must remain confidential, but if revealed can be understood and communicated by anyone. On the contrary, mystery, if publicly exposed and explained, remains incomprehensible for all those who are not qualified to understand (jñānādhikārin), being incommunicable by its nature. Mysteries were initiatic organization with a main master called “Hierophant” (ἱεροφάντης, read hierophàntes “the one who reveals sacred things”, the main Guru, and a number of mystagogues (μυσταγωγοί, read müstagogòi), Upagurus. Except for the Eleusinian Mysteries, seated in Eleusis, the other Mysteries had their representatives in almost all Greek cities.

Eleusinian Mysteries: One of the oldest seat of a Mystery was Eleusis. Since the time of the Mycenaean civilization (16th-11th century B.C.) an Achaean Pelasgic population, the great complex of the Eleusinian Mysteries was famous throughout Greece. The myth of Demeter (Devamātṛ) tells the origins of this sanctuary. Demeter was the Goddess of the Earth and the protector of agriculture, especially of wheat. The Goddess had a daughter from Zeus, the God of Heaven, Persephone “who gives growth.” One day, Hades, the divine King of Dead, abducted her to make her his bride and dragged her into his underground kingdom. Due to the absence of Persephone the earth could no longer produce anything, with severe danger for men and animals. Demeter, desperate, wandered for a long time in her quest. She received generous hospitality from the King of Eleusis. To repay, Demeter initiated the King’s son to the mysteries of agriculture. Demeter later made a deal with Hades so that Persephone could stay with her mother on the earth for six months and for six months with her husband underground. Thus summer and winter began.
But which was the initiatic meaning of the Eleusinian Mysteries? Man is like a grain of wheat. If it is not grounded to rot, the plant will not grow. This is the secret of initiatic death: to die while staying alive, so important to all Greek Mysteries. Initiatic death is the end of the profane condition and the attainment of rebirth as initiate. For this reason, a fresh initiated to Eleusinian Mysteries was called neophyte (νεόφυτος, read neòphütos), a new seedling. The spiritual growth of the initiate was achieved when he had produced the ear of wheat in himself, namely the ability to make disciples, to become a master.
Eleusinian Mysteries were divided into two phases: little mysteries and Great Mysteries. The little mysteries were celebrated at the end of winter. They consisted in a series of initiatic trials of purification, catharsis (κάθαρσις, read kàtharsis). The Great Mysteries took place in autumn and were a ritual of initiatic death, followed by the transmission of the method (μέθοδος, read méthodos, “the way to go further”, i.e. sādhana mārga). The method consisted of a triple action performed with body, word and mind (dròmena, legòmena and deiknǘmena). One year after the Great Mysteries, the Hierophant taught the interior view (ἐποπτεία, read epoptèia, i.e. antardṛṣṭi) to the beginner. Initiates endowed with greater knowledge later on were recognized as masters and capable of transmitting initiation (μύησις, read mǘesis; or τελετή read teletè). Next degree was that of God’s friends (θεόφιλες, read theophiles), those who after death would share the dwelling of Gods.

Dionysian Mysteries: These Mysteries, though diffused throughout Greece and later in all the cities of the Roman Empire¹, were not of Hellenic origin. In fact, one supposes that their founder Dionysius was a Thracian-Scythian (śaka). According to the myth, Dionysus, whose name means “son of God”, was born further east of Greece from Zeus and Semele². Since God always appeared to his lover in human form, Semele, being pregnant, asked Zeus to appear to her in his universal form. But the apparition of God was so devastating that Selene died blown away by the light of Zeus. The God, however, managed to save his son’s fetus stitching him to his thigh. After nine months Zeus’ thigh gave birth to Dionysus. We have already said that thigh in Greek is called meròs, a word that alludes to Mount Meru of Hindū Tradition³. Due to this second birth Dionysus was also called Dithyrambus, “twice born” (dvija). To avoid further danger he was transformed into a kid and entrusted to the seven Hyades Nymphs, daughters of Atlas⁴. The seven wise Nymphs gave him a third birth to wisdom. So this third rebirth was the very initiation: “First master is the mother, second is the father, the third the guru.” In return for the teaching given to Dionysus, Zeus promoted the Hyades to be the constellation of the head of the zodiac Taurus⁵. Thanks to this knowledge Dionysus discovered the vine and the effects of wine. The intoxicating liquid played a key role in the rites of his Mystery. Armed with vines and with a cortege of Satyrs and Sileni⁶, Dionysus set out to conquer India. This peaceful conquest represents the penetration of Tantrism in the Subcontinent⁷. Returning from India, riding a tiger or a bull and wearing a leopard skin, Dionysus arrived for the first time in Greece. He and his followers upset the old customs and scandalized the people, therefore he was not welcome. He had to fight, even violently, to impose his worship. Dionysus’s followers used to gather at night in the forests where they held banquets with wine and raw meat, with orgies involving men and women. At the climax of these extreme ritual acts, God took possession of his followers, leading them to experiences of violent samādhi with unbridled behaviors. Not much is known about the Dionysian Mysteries, because if any profane tried to watch them secretly, he would be killed and dismembered. However, we know that even in those Mysteries there were the initiation three degrees of katharsis, paradosis and epopteya. Dionysism was very successful among women, called Maenads or Bacchae (in Latin), greatly feared for the violence of their trance.

Orphic Mysteries: Orpheus as Dionysus was not Greek, but of Thracian-Scythian (śaka) origin. Unlike Dionysus, he was Apollo’s son and for this reason he represents a Hyperborean rectification to Dionysian initiation⁸. He learned the art of poetry and music from his father Apollo and his singing was able to tame the beasts and bring order in the nature. When he sang it was as if the Gold Age had returned. He participated in several feats with the most famous Greek heroes, but his role was always as peacemaker and protector. The core of the Orphic Mysteries is illustrated in the myth of his love for the Nymph (i.e. yakṣiṇī) Eurydice. Unfortunately Eurydice died due to a snake bite. Orpheus then discended to the Underworld to convince Hades and Presephone to return him his beloved wife. Orpheus also was able to appease the Gods of the dead. He was granted to bring Eurydice back to the land of the living, as long as he didn’t look back at her before they both were out of the Underworld. But his love was too strong, and he could not refrain from looking at her. Eurydice disappeared again. Consumed with grief he refused to participate in a Dionysian ritual⁹, and for this reason he was killed and dismembered by Maenads. Also the Orphic Mysteries were characterized by the already mentioned three initiatic degrees: katharsis, paradosis and epopteia. We have more information about Orphism because many intellectuals were initiated to its Mysteries, and they left us some notion of the doctrine. At the beginning there was only Chaos. In Chaos there were three separated principles: time, life and substance. Time modeled the substance through life, and then in the Chaos a cosmic silver egg appeared. When the egg broke in two, Phanes¹⁰, the self-luminous God, appeared along with the germs of all the worldly objects and beings. Phanes coupled with the night and, the Sky and the Earth were born; afterwards, in pairs all the Gods, the spirits of nature, men, animals and plants were born. The body was the lowest production. In the Orphic Mysteries the body was considered as a jail from which to be freed. The instrument for Liberation was Love. For this reason this initiatic path (sādhanā) was also called “Mysteries of Love”. Trough love, we differentiate ourselves from the body, from our limited humanity, and we tend to go back to Phanes. This process may take more than a single life. Therefore Orphism teaches the purification through successive rebirths, until one becomes God in a final life. This process of purification occurs by canceling the coercions of Fate, which corresponds to the concept of “past karma“. Injunctions to wear white clothes, to follow a vegetarian diet and to avoid intoxicants, were also part of the purification rituals.

Mysteries of Samothrace and Cabirian Mysteries: Very little is known about these Mysteries. Their Atlantean origin, through the Peoples of the Sea is sure; those of Samothrace were of Semitic origin. The meaning of Cabirian was “great Gods”; in fact in all Semitic languages (including Hebrew and Arabic) kabir means “great”. The Mysteries of Samothrace spread vastly in all the coastal cities of the Roman Empire. In effect, that initiation was reserved to sailors. Instead, the lesser-known Cabirian Mysteries were the initiation of the blacksmith’s corporation (śreṇi). Probably being directed to the lowest social classes they did not attract the attention of the literates and philosophers, hence the lack of information about them. We only know that in those Mysteries the master was not called a mystagogue, but a paragogue (παραγώγος, read paragògos, “which leads beyond”).
From these initiatic environments and from the philosophical schools connected to the Mysteries derives a more complete vision of posthumous destinies. Also Homer, who in the 9th Book of Odyssey, described the gray and sad land of the dead, without any prize or punishment, in 4th Book and in his Hymns¹¹ illustrates a more sympathetic and satisfying vision. Hades¹² was immediately below the Earth surface and could be accessed through well known caves and caverns. The distance between Sky and Earth was equal to the distance between Hades and Tartarus. This distance well illustrates the abysmal diversity of punishment between these two parts of the Hell.
From these sources we know that the dead who had committed serious faults were punished to Hades. Instead, those who had done infamous and serious acts against the divine and cosmic order were condemned to Tartarus.
The heroes dead in battle, however, went to the Islands of the Blest, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Most likely this is an allusion to the submerged Atlantean archipelago, land of the dead for the heroic or gigantic races. These islands were also known as “Garden of the Hesperides”, the Nynphs daughters of Atlas¹³.
Instead, those who had done good deeds obtained as final prize the Elysian Fields, until their transmigration to a new body. The Elysian Fields were in the centre of Hades, but they were on a beautiful, abloom and sunny hill. Those who had done good and bad in life in equal quantity or those who had never done either of them, went to the Asphodel Fields. This kind of indolent Hell corresponds to the above mentioned description of Homer.

D. K. Aśvamitra

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1. In Latin and Dionysus was called Bacchus and the Dionysian Mysteries were called Bacchanalia.[↩]
2. Semele was the daughter of Kadmos. This mythological character was Phoenician, denouncing a Semitic origin of Dionysus. Kadmos, having the root Q D M, in all Semitic languages, including Hebrew and Arabic, means “primordial, fundamental”. The Phoenician Kadmos founded the city of Thebes in Greece and for this reason this city was particularly important for the Dionysian Mysteries.[↩]
3. Thigh was also the name given by the Egyptians to the northern constellation of the Great Bear.[↩]
4. Two tendencies can be easily identified in Dionisism, one of Hyperborean origin, as evidenced by the birth from the thigh, and one Atlantidean from the Hyades.[↩]
5. The Hyades were the sisters of the Pleiades. See the similarity between this myth and that of Skanda and Kṛttikās.[↩]
6. Demigods similar to Gaṇas and Gandharvas.[↩]
7. Dionysus with his followers stayed mainly in the mountainous area in northern India, near a mount called “Meros”. So we have the evidence that the Greek “méros” (thigh) and Meru are the same thing (Diodorus Siculus, cit. II.38.4).[↩]
8. The Tradition tells about a journey of Orpheus to Egypt where he was initiated to the Osiris Mysteries.[↩]
9. This means that previously Orpheus had been initiated to Dionysian Mysteries, so Orphic Mysteries can be considered as their adaptation.[↩]
10. Phanes was considered identical to God Pan, “the Whole”[↩]
11. Let us leave the useless diatribe among scholars if Homer was one or more poets. The Tradition considered the existence of a single Homer.[↩]
12. In this case Hades is not the name of the God but of a Hell.[↩]
13. Hesperides: “those of the West”. There are several geographic and population names meaning West-Western, pointing out their ancient Atlantean origin: for instance Hiberia, Hesperia, Hebrides, Hebrews, Hispans, Cimmers, and so on. The planet Venus is still called Hesperus when it appears at sunset and, not surprisingly, Lucifer in the morning.[↩]

The Greek Civilization: The bright side (II)

The “bright side” of Greek civilization is the result of positive adjusts due to the Hyperborean influence on Greek society of Atlantean origin. Ancient Greek historians, in fact, tell the several mysterious visits to Greece by Hyperborean emissaries coming from the North. However, this correction has to be considered from two angles. The first point of view concerns Greek society and its exterior religion, that is to say, Exoterism. The second one is the initiatic side represented by the Mysteries: Esoterism. We remind the reader that this dichotomy we are speaking of, is characteristic not only of archaic Greece, but also of all the other civilizations, religions and nations that appeared in Europe during the Iron Age.

Exoterism: Aristotle (384-322 BC), the famous Hellenic philosopher, tells us that the Greeks ¹ conceived three kinds of political regime: Monarchy, Aristocracy and Democracy. The Monarchy was the oldest political regime, while at his time Greek cities were administered exclusively by aristocratic or democratic governments. Greek thought that political regimes could, over time, degenerate. Thus Monarchy, the rule of a single King (Βασιλεύς, read basilèus), could turn in to Tyranny, a regime controlled by a despot outside any control of laws. As a reaction against that degeneration, it could be formed an aristocratic regime, composed by noblemen, the aristocrats, that Greek language means the “best men” (ἄριστοι, read àristoi). But even Aristocracy could later degenerate into Oligarchy, the government of a few individuals, which is a Tyranny of a small number of people. Even in this case a rebellion could lead the people (δῆμος, read démos) to the Government of the city, thus forming a democratic regime². In its turn Democracy too could degenerate into Demagogy (lit. people manipulation) when a duly elected leader, by succeeding to be worshiped by the people, becomes a dictator.
There are no certain data about the Monarchies of ancient Greece, because when written documents began to be produced, Monarchies were almost disappeared. The only news are from mythology and epic poems. The King had all the power and was surrounded by wise men (σoφοί, read sophòi) and seers (μάντεις, read mànteis), counsellors playing priestly and sacrificial functions.
These figures disappeared in the historical period. In Greece, in fact, under aristocratic and democratic regimes, there was no longer a priestly order. The priesthood was open to any person, man or woman belonging to every social class. Usually men served in the temples of Gods while women in the temples of Goddesses. The sacrifices consisted in oblations of milk, honey, water, olive oil, or in offerings of the first fruits of agriculture. Also the bull, ram, or goat animal sacrifice was kept, and the victims were killed at the opening of all religious or statal festivals. Then, meat was solemnly eaten by the donor and community leaders, while the inedible parts, bones, fat, tendons, horns, hooves, and so on were offered to the Gods in the altar fire³. However, we know that these cruel sacrifices were of Atlantean origin, since they had been instituted by Prometheus, Atlas’ brother.
If the priestly caste had disappeared in the mist of time, the other social classes were preserved. The aristocratic warrior caste, called the horsemen (ἱππείς, read hippéis⁴) or knight’ class, was the highest, even if with slight differences among the city-states. Then there were the merchants (οἵ ἐκ τῆς ἀγορᾶς, read hòi ek tes agoràs, those “of the Market Square”), divided into subcategories depending on their wealth. Nobles and merchants were citizens of the city and had all civil and religious rights. Foreigners and slaves, on the other hand, had no right in both aristocratic and democratic regimes.
The temples were dedicated to the heavenly Gods, to the chthonic (underground’s) Gods, or to the Ancestors. In the classical period (6th-4th centuries B.C.) also appeared temples dedicated to the Bronze Age heroes, especially to the Demigod Heracles. Demigods were the offspring of a God or Goddess and a human being. Every city was consecrated to a God whose temple stood in the central square. Other temples in the city were considered less important, even if dedicated to divinities more powerful then the Protector God (πολιάς, read polìas, i.e. nagaradaivata). Moreover, in the cities there could have been temples dedicated to the same Deity, represented in different shapes and with different attributes, as it still happens in India today⁵. All young men who felt attracted to serve in a temple, regardless their family background, attended it, assisting the priests, learning local rituals, and finally they were consecrated priests.
The most prestigious temples, however, were those hosting an Oracle. The main priest or priestess on certain occasions, were possessed (āviṣṭa) by the God and then they were able to answer the questions of the people. Only in those few, but influential, oracular Temples Greek priestly caste was maintained. In fact, the priests’ guild of each Oracle descended from a single primordial ancestor.
The oldest among those Temples was the Oracle of Zeus in Dodona, Epirus (today in Albania), of Pelasgic origin (i.e. Atlantean). All the others, more recent, were mainly oracles of the Hyperborean God Apollo, in Thebes, in Lycia, and finally in Delphi, the most famous among them, already previously mentioned. For any major problem the God was consulted: in this way peace or war, the foundation of a new city or the change of laws, were decided. In his book The fall of Oracles (De defectu oraculorum), the Greek priest Plutarch (46-125 AD) narrates that in the first century AD, the crew of a ship sailing from Egypt to Rome, heard a powerful voice coming from the sea announcing: “The Great God Pan⁶ is dead!” This news quickly spread throughout the Roman Empire. From that moment all Oracles of the Greek gods disappeared, as if that voice had announced the cyclical conclusion of the Hellenic Tradition.
The rites were meant to obtain immediate results in this world, or to reach a pleasant condition after death. The attachment to life of ancient Greeks was such that they regarded posthumous destiny as something sad. According to them the souls of the dead were always in pain, regretting the sweet memory of life on earth. Only those who had an initiation (dīkṣā), could long to reach some more blessed condition. In the next paragraph devoted to esoterism.
Of great importance were the myths sung by the poets-singers (ἀοιδός, read aoidòs, i.e. mahākavi) during the festivities or represented as dramas in theaters. Myth played an important role in ethical and civic teaching. However, its symbolic meaning remained out of reach of the masses. Only in the initiatic environment it was possible to find the keys to understand those myths accordingly to the degrees of realization of the sādhanā. We will also discuss this in the next chapters.

D. K. Aśvamitra

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1. “Greeks” was the name given by the Romans. They called themselves Hellenes because all their tribes, though rivals among them, recognized to be descendants from a primordial common hero called Hellen.[↩]
2. Democracy of ancient Greeks cannot be compared to the chaotic, corrupt, and inefficient “democratic” regime that nowadays oppresses most of human beings. According to the Greeks people (démos) were composed only by free citizens of the city, representing about 10 percent of the total inhabitants. In fact, in Athens during the fifth century B.C., free citizens were about thirty-five thousand when the whole population of the city was of more than three hundred thousand inhabitants. Those who were exercising power and carrying out public functions were only the householders among the free citizens. All the others, women, boys and slaves hadn’t any civil rights.[↩]
3. In the case of human sacrifice, performed only in rare occasions, the whole body was consumed on pyre as food for gods.[↩]
4. Called Σπαρτιάται (read Spartiátai) in the city of Sparta.[↩]
5. For example, the main temple of the city of Olympia was dedicated to Zeus Olympius, Lord of the Olympus Sacred Mountain (the Kailāsa of the Greeks), while in Athens the temple of the same God was dedicated to Zeus Ipatos, the Highest one, another hypostasis of the same God.[↩]
6. Pan, a shepherd Divinity, is considered identical to Phanes, the oldest of the Hellenic Gods, as we will illustrate in the chapter on Greek cosmology. Similar to the Vedic God Pũṣan, Pan is the one who guarantees the development of manifestation. Therefore, his announced death was interpreted as the interruption of Greek Tradition. Pan, moreover, in Greek means “All” and is linked to the cult of Hyperborean Apollo. We recall that for Pythagoras the name of Apollo means “Non-Multiple”. Pan’s image in the Oracle Sanctuary of Apollo in Delphi was so terrible that when the Celts irrupted in the temple to plunder it, they ran away. From Pan originates the expression “Panic fear”.[↩]

The Greek Civilization: The dark side (I)

Before addressing the subject of ancient Greek civilization and its religion, let us point out some notes that explain its general characteristics. We start exposing some aspects of the dark side of this civilization that corresponds to its Antlantidean component. This preface is necessary considering that these features have negatively influenced the whole Western civilization until contemporary times. Afterwards, the prestige of Greek civilization has spread all over the world on the wave of global modernization, contributing profoundly also to the change of mentality of non-European cultures.

However, in the next articles we will describe the bright side of the Hellenic Tradition of Hyperborean origin.

Individualism: The main feature of Greek people was individualism. From the earliest times, this behavioral tendency became a true general ideology applied not only to individuals, but also to various social groups, including the State. Incidentally social groups belong to the individual domain, being the communities formed by masses of individuals, even if some modern ideologies -particularly diabolical as Marxism- theorize that society transcends the individual. Greek individualism has been originated by the loss of the concept of a unique and non dual Principle present in the heart of every living being. This loss can be traced back to the earliest Greek literary sources, like Homeric poems (⁓1000 B.C.). Only in the initiatic sādhanās, or among some philosophers who were sādhakas of the Mysteries such as Pythagoras, Plato and Neoplatonics, the consciousness of this transcendent principle was maintained alive. But most of Greek philosophers and thinkers were definitely naturalists, agnostics if not atheists.

Libertinism: Individualism led Greeks to an idolatry of freedom in the most arbitrary and libertine sense, to self-complacency and unlimited satisfaction of passions and vices. For this reason, having lost the symbolic meaning of their myths, they also attributed all the whims and perversions possessed by themselves to their Gods. Well before the present-day moral degeneration, Greeks publicly practiced homosexuality and attributed the same behavior to Gods. Similarly they shamelessly described their Gods as cheaters, liars, traitors, adulterers, envious, greedy and narcissist, projecting their own defects on the divinities.

Aestheticism: The first effect of libertinism has been the birth of hedonism, self-satisfaction and aestheticism. The cult for the beauty of human body, universally admired in Hellenic art, had these small-minded motivations. Observing a Greek artwork we realize that beyond the refined forms there is no spiritual or symbolic significance: there is only a sensual attraction (rāga) for an enjoyment object (bhogya). In art, Greeks infused all their instincts of asmitā, the triumph of aham and mama. Similarly they gave birth to philosophy, which is nothing but the individualist thought of every single philosopher, devoid of any spiritual inner experience (anubhava), of any initiation, of spiritual path: it is only mental elucubration.

Particularism: Greeks were never able to create a nation; the individualism of the people was translated into the particularism of the cities. Every Greek city (πόλις, read pòlis ¹) was armed against another Greek city and every city was internally divided in litigious factions. Even in the epic tale of Iliad, the Greeks employed ten long years to conquer Troy city because of the constant quarrels and feuds that arose among them. At the same time, they were convinced of their superiority over all other people. The term they used to define a foreigner was barbarian (βάρβαρος, read bàrbaros). This word soon assumed the meaning of “uncivilized, coarse, savage, brutal”. In this way Greeks expressed their diversity with other people.

Historicism: When the absolute vision (pāramārtika dṛṣṭi) is lost, it is evident that the only reference point remains the becoming (saṃsāritva). History is the mere annotation of chronological events. In itself it is not harmful, even if only of archival and jurisprudential utility. Instead, Historicism is an ideology: Historicism is the idea of attributing meaningful significance to a historical period, to a peculiar Civilization, to a series of events and characters, following pre-set parameters and providing an interpretation based on certain ideological dogmas. All this happens by proclaiming the “scientific” objectivity of the method. Thus, a system was created for the falsification of the events through the flexible tool of interpretation. For example, according to their historians, the great Greek victories on Persians (499-479 BC) would have liberated Greece from Persian domination forever. That’s what we all have studied at school. But it’s a historical fake one. It is only with a treaty (343 B.C.) agreed with Philip II, that the Persian Emperor gave over his sovereignty of Greece to the King of Macedonia. Greek historians, to justify this incoherence, claimed that Philip the Macedonian, in any case, was a Greek. But in their treaties, they call him Philip the Barbarian! However the assimilation to the Greek nation of Philip II and his son Alexander the Great has been shamelessly proclaimed by many historians. The Greeks boasted in many books that “the Greek Emperor” Alexander the Great would have conquered India. Our respectable Indian readers well know that this episode was so irrelevant that it did not appear in any Indian text. Therefore Historicism has been invented by the Greeks long before the European Renaissance. In the same way, European and World History of the last centuries have been thoroughly falsified. We can see the devastating effects of today’s falsifications created by increasingly sophisticated multimedia.

Euhemerism: Euhemerism is a theory maintaining that religion in general and mythology in particular narrate stories and historical characters that really happened and lived in a given period and place. Later, those people and events would have been imaginatively idealized and transformed by the irrational mentality of ancient people². The birth of philosophy would have made the gift of rationality to the mankind; since that moment the civilized man has been able to recognize that mythology is only the ancient story told in an imaginary form. The rationalization of myth is the effect of historicism and rationalism, denying the existence of any reality different from the empiric one. This theory fatally leads to naturalism³ and materialism, because the only reality is reduced to bodily existence. Euhemerism, attributed to the philosopher Euhemerus, but much older then him, has been a tool to cut the Greek religion’s roots, spreading the secularist and agnostic antireligious mentality. The influence of euhemerism was deffused everywhere: even the insistence on the historicity of Jesus Christ, fascinating the modern Catholics, has euhemerist sources. Euhemerism has been abundantly used by European Indologists to invent the “aryan invasion of India”: they arbitrarily interpreted hindū myths as if Devas were “arians” and Asuras the original inhabitants of India

Rationalism: All the trends we have described converge into rationalism. It is a philosophical field that considers the reason as the primary source of cognition. Human mind uses logic as the unique tool to explain the world. The five senses are considered fallacious and so it is the mind which corrects the information coming from the outside world through logic. In other words, if I look at a rope and I see a snake, the mistake is not located in my mind, but in my eyes! Moreover, rationalism claims to be able to investigate the metaphysical Truth, which is beyond the rational investigation, with the mind. This philosophical movement was supported first by the Sophists, and later by Aristotle, the greatest logician.

D. K. Aśvamitra

1. The word “politics” and its derivatives, proceed from the Greek term polis, “town”.[↩]
2. Here we can find the first germs of a pre-Darwinian evolutionistic conjecture.[↩]
3. Naturalism: theory that denies anything transcending the natural manifested world.[↩]

Atlantis: Other sources (II)

Not only Plato gives us news of Atlantis. There are also several Greek, Egyptian, Jewish and Indian sources:

a) Other Greek-Roman souces:

Plato informs us that for the Atlanteans the preferred sacrificial victim was the bull. In Greek mythology¹, the sacrifice of the bull has been established during the Bronze Age by Titan Prometheus, brother of Atlas. The presence of the bull sacrifice is a bond uniting the Atlanteans to several populations of the Mediterranean basin where they were sailing, had colonies, trades, and where they fled after the cataclysm, spreading their lineage and so ensuring the survival of their tradition. The fight with a bull or its sacrifice was present everywhere the Atlantean influence had spread: in the island of Crete, in the Greek possession rituals of God Dionysus, in the Persian Mysteries of Mithra, in Egypt, among the Sumerians, up to in the Indo-Sarasvatī civilization. Even in today’s Spain, the corrida bullfight survives maintaining many archaic ritual features. Evidently, the most cruel phase of the Atlantis history coincided with the end of the Bronze Age (Dvapara yuga), when the Vernal Equinoctial Point was in Taurus (vṛṣabha, 4300-2200 B.C.)
In other narratives, the collapse of Atlantis seems to coincide with the Deucalion Deluge, which inaugurated the current Iron Age (Kali yuga), dominated by ignorance, anger and greed. The long period of Atlantean degeneration interrupted the transmission of warrior initiations and knowledge and required an exemplary punishment for those who (giants, rebel warriors, Kauravas, manuṣya rākṣasas)  had deviated from the right way and the necessity of a return to justice. The punishment was dealt in form of wars of extermination and floods destroying the offspring of the giants: that was the era when Śrī Kṛṣṇa descended at the Dvapara yuga conclusion, in order to restore justice in the world².
As we said earlier, Prometheus had been chained by Lord Zeus Eastward on Mount Caucasus, in the Scythian territory (i. e. of the Śāka people), while his brother Atlas was relegated Westward, near the Moroccan Atlas mountains, showing in this way the magnitude of the Atlantean conquest of the world. Prometheus relatives were the Amazons³, a fierce people of warrior women.⁴
Regarding Atlantis we do not only have information from Plato. The Greek Historians Hecataeus of Miletus and Herodotus called “Atlanteans” the Berbers living on the slopes of the Atlas plateau. It is also important the testimony of the Greek Historian Marcellus (recalled by the neo-platonic Proclus) that, referring to older historians, says that in the outer Atlantic Ocean there were seven small islands, consecrated to Proserpina (Greek: Persephone)⁵, and three greater ones, one of which was sacred to Lord Poseidon, God of See.

b) Egyptian souces:

From many epigraphic texts we know that Egypt has been repeatedly attacked for more than a century by a coalition of many populations proceeding from the western coasts of Africa and Europe. Egyptians called them “Sea Peoples”. The Greeks also called them Pelasgians⁶. It has been a strategic venture of gigantic proportions: a part of the Sea Peoples invaded all Europe, whereupon they crossed the present Turkey, Palestine, finally attacking Egypt from the East. Another part of the Sea Peoples invaded the whole of North Africa to attack Egypt from the West. Their powerful fleet ⁷ finally conquered all the Mediterranean islands and attacked the Egyptian coast from the Northern side. During this perfectly coordinated pincer movement, which lasted more than a century, many ancient kingdoms collapsed: Malta, Crete, Cyprus, Rhodes, Greece, the Hittite Empire, the Ugarite Kingdom, Palestine etc. Finally the Egyptian Pharaoh (Emperor) defeated the coalition near the city of Sais⁸, about the 1180 BC.
However, all the countries invaded by the Sea Peoples underwent to their influence. Even Egypt was later governed by two Libyan dynasties belonging to Sea Peoples (10th-8th century BC). There is no doubt that the Sea Peoples were the descendants of the Atlantean colonies, who were continuing their evil conquest plan of whole the world. The Egyptians called themselves Rutennu, the red people, and red men is the meaning of the Phoenician name, the ancient inhabitants of today’s Lebanon, one of the “Sea Peoples”. The Atlantean tradition was precisely the civilization of the red race, the color of the sun when it is setting and empurpling the Western sky; and color of the victim’s blood that the Atlanteans drank in their rites⁹. Even the worship of the red donkey, which we are discussing later, shows this disturbing presence in the Egyptian tradition. This demonstrates to what extent the Egyptians were influenced by Atlantean civilization.
Indeed, in the oldest period, Egypt was divided into two Kingdoms. The southern Kingdom, or upper Egypt, was devoted to the worship of Seth, the donkey headed anti-God (asura), while the northern Kingdom, or lower Egypt, had as the main deity Horus, the hawk headed God. The Pharaoh Meni¹⁰ unified the two Kingdoms and gave them a common legislation around 3500 AD. However in Egyptian Tradition two streams continued to live: the first of Atlantidean origin, corresponding to witchcraft worship of Seth, and the second one, the Horus sacred Dharma of Hyperborean origin. According to Egyptian mythology, the latter had arrived on the coasts of Africa from an Eastern country beyond the sea. It is fair to think that it was India. There are many clues proving this origin, as the form in which the Horus priests appeared: they had a śikhā on their shaved head, and wore a white dhoti under a leopard skin, as the śaiva ascetics. Instead, Seth’s evil cult transmitted a witchcraft sādhana to all other western civilizations¹¹. That is the root of the any evil afflicting still today the West and which is propagating throughout the whole planet.
The red donkey headed Seth was the asura of the burning storms of the African desert. The Greeks called him Typhoon, (Gr .: Τυφωέυς read Typhéus), the burning one¹².When Egyptian tradition extinguished, its wisdom continued in the other Mediterranean Religions under the shape of Hermeticism or Alchemy¹³. And in its bosom hiddenly propagated the Sethian seed.

c) Biblical souces:

In the Bible God created the first man of red clay and called him Adam, whose exact meaning in Hebrew language is “made of red clay”. This proves that Adam was connected with the Atlantis tradition. In fact, the Hyperboreans had white as symbolic color, like the brāhmaṇas of India. The Jewish esoteric tradition, the Kabbalah, actually mentions a first human couple that lived before Adam and Eve, not remembered in the Bible: a first “Adam” and his wife Lilith. Is this perhaps a reminder of Hyperborean humanity? However, Adam and Eve also generated their first children only after they lost the Earth’s Paradise. Ten were the generations of Adam descendents, as ten were the Kings of Atlantis. Their first daughters were so beautiful that the angels (Hebr.: Ben Elohim, God’s sons)¹⁴ fell in love with them and from those unions terrible giants (Hebr.: Nephilim) were born. Those giants were empious, violent and arrogant with God and it is easy to recognize in them the race of the Atlanteans. God therefore sent a flood to make perish all them. He commanded to the only right man among them, Noah, to build an ark to save himself so humanity would continue in his offspring after the universal Deluge. The Jews took this story from a previous Sumerian myth¹⁵. And this Sumerian myth probably had the same origins of the Manu’s story. Humanity was destroyed, but the evil seed of giants passed in to the new cycle through Cam, one of Noah’s three sons. In his offspring there was King Nimrod, who desired to conquer the whole world. He even wanted to conquer the heavens and expel God from his throne. He built a very tall tower to reach the sky. But God sent such a violent storm (Typhoon?) that after men could no longer communicate with each other. In this manner Humanity has been divided by language, nation and religion. This is how the Bible narrates the beginning of Kali yuga, in which mankind has been divided in races, languages, and civilizations, and how the historically founded religions were created.

d) The Book of Enoch:

The Book of Enoch is a canonical text of the Coptic Ethiopian Church. In it the visions of Enoch (prophet of the sixth generation after Adam) are described. Enoch tells that a group of angels rebelled against God’s wishes because they desired to marry the beautiful “daughters of men”. Since then they were called Egregors (Gr. Ἐγρήγοροi, read egrégoroi), the Vigilants, rākṣasas¹⁶. Their children were the Nephilim giants, strong and glorious men. But with the succession of generations, their divine origin declined and their increasingly violent, degenerate and diabolical temper emerged. They discovered the use of metallurgy and of the magic powers coming from it. In this way they discovered the witchcraft sciences and the use of black magic. For this reason God sent the Universal Flood in order to destroy that damned race. But through one of Noah’s sons the evil inclinations of the Nephilim overcame the Deluge barrier.

e) Indian souces:

When Rāvaṇa, the King-demon of the celebrated Rāmāyaṇa Epic, when is depicted in his rage with ten heads and twenty arms, often he shows an eleventh donkey head erging over the others. Rāvaṇa’s great-grandfather was Yātudhāna or Nairṛta, names meaning “full of evil” and “son of the destruction”. Nairrta’s mount was a donkey and he was the genius ruling the Southwest cardinal point. As he came from there when he invaded Laṅkā and exiled his brother-in-law Kubera, Rāvaṇa was called Nairṛtapatiḥ, Lord of the Southwest. Therefore, he came from the sea, from somewhere to the west of India, probably from islands such as Maldives or Laccadives, or farer, from the Seychelles. Hence, he possessed a powerful fleet to sail safely and carry numerous troops: in fact Rāmāyaṇa tells us that his subjects, the rākṣasas, extended their domains proceeding from the coasts.
The rākṣasas¹⁷ are demons that appear in human form, of black or reddish complexion, able to generate children indifferently with asurīs, yakṣinīs or women. With these latter they generated human rākṣasas, likewise the Ben-Elohim of the Bible, joining with the women, fathered the Nephilim, the giants. According to the Rāmāyaṇa, rākṣasas were human beings who had betrayed their svadharma and therefore had been banned from the human state and degraded to rākṣasatva condition. For the same reason when the kṣatriyas commit sacrilegious acts and bloodbaths and hence are cursed by some ṛṣis, they are said to turn into rākṣasas. Such as sacrilegious acts recall the terrible mass human sacrifices performed by Aztecs in ancient Mexico or the cannibalism acts of the Biblical giants. In Rāmāyaṇa very often it is emphasized that the rākṣasas eat the flesh of their enemies (nāra māṃsaśīlaḥ) and drink their blood (śoṇita bhojanaḥ), as the Atlantis Kings drank the blood of their victims.
In Laṅkā the principal Goddess of the rākṣasas was Nikumbhila¹⁸, terrific aspect of Bhadrakālī, worshipped with human sacrifices, orgiastic dances, wine¹⁹ and blood libations. The rākṣasas follow their dharma, they even perform asceticism, but just in order to gain power and siddhis for evil purposes. They are divided into castes: Rāvaṇa and his brothers belonged to the Brāhmaṇical caste. Their dharma includes marriage for abduction of indifferently unmarried or married women. They follow their instincts without restraint and represent all that is irrational, dark and destructive in the human soul.
Another resemblance with the Atlantis myth is represented by the description of Laṅkāpura, the capital of Laṅkā: the city was built in the centre of the island on a mountain with three peaks, Trikūṭa; on the central peak there was the fortress of the Ruler, surrounded by a triple circle of metal walls, the most internal of which was of blazing gold.
The rākṣasas wore glittering armors, demonstrating their ability in metallurgy, and they were experts in the magic arts they used widely for their purposes.
During a council with the ministers, Malayavan, Rāvaṇa’s Grandfather and Advisor, reminded him that in the world there are two categories of conscious beings, the divine and the demonic ones. Dharma is the hallmark of the first category, the adharma of the second one. Rāvaṇa and rākṣasas are the representatives of the adharma, just like the Nephilim, the Atlanteans and their descendants who are scattered all over the West and the whole Earth.
The rebellion against the divine laws accelerates the ruin and the unrestrainable decay of the cycle and the rākṣasas certainly are conscious about it. They are the manuṣya rākṣasas, counter-initiation agents and some among them even are rākṣasa-avatāras, adhārmika incarnations of counter-initiation. All these many similarities and incredible coincidences show an undeniable influence and a clear descent of Laṅkā kingdom from Atlantis. Laṅkā means “branch”. Perhaps was it not a branch of the Atlantis-Nirṛti Empire in the East?
Mind to not be fooled by the apparent historical discrepancies. The reader of this Website has already been informed about the historiographical prejudice. The traditional stories follow a cyclical trend, but all have the same meaning. The fight of Paraśurāma against the kṣatriya’s rebellion; Rama’s expedition versus Laṅkā; Kṛṣṇa’s descent as a punishment for the Kaurava are different episodes of a single story. The story of the struggle between Devas and Asuras, between Dharma and adharma.
We inform the readers that in 1995 the site of Göbekli Tepe dated to 11000 BC has been discovered in Southeastern Turkey. It is a complex of fifteen megalithic shrines adorned with fine bas-reliefs. The discovery is very embarrassing for the archaeologists. In fact, according to their evolutionary prejudices, the menkind of that millennium should have been still wild, feeding with berries and game, living as naked, ravenous and bestial nomads.
The entire complex was buried around 8000 BC. It seems that, after the defeat of the Atlanteans mentioned by Plato, the winners wished to erase even the memory of their former dominators.

Durgādevī

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1. Hesiod, Theogonia, 535-540.[↩]
2. “… O valiant Prince! Due to lapse of long time, this Yoga [for warriors] has disappeared from this world.” (Bhagavad Gītā, IV.2) “The royal caste sages knew this Yoga, thus transmitted it though kṣatriya paramparā. Due to lapse of a long stretch of time, the tradition of its transmission has disappeared from this world.” (Bhagavad Gītā Śaṃkara Bhāṣya, IV.2). “Whenever, scion of Bhāratas, Dharma declines and adharma prevails, I manifest Myself, for the protection of the virtuous, the destruction of the wicked, and to secure establishment of Dharma, I am born in every age.” (Bhagavad Gītā, IV.7-8).[↩]
3. Name derived from the ancient Persian ha-mazan, woman-warrior. The connection between Amazons and Scythes is interesting, because it may deal with the origins of Tantrism. Indeed, some Āgamas claim the Tantrism as coming from a continent called Śāka dvīpa. In some paurāṇic descriptions Mount Meru is in the center of Śāka dvīpa, which someone identifies with the so-called Meroe “island” of present Sudan. Pliny and Strabo assert that the ancient Egyptian kingdom of Meroe had always been ruled by women (see also in the Acts of the Apostles, VIII, 27). These considerations let us suppose about a common Atlantean origin of Eastern Tantrism and Egyptian Hermetism, doctrines closely related.[↩]
4. Traditionally, brāhmaṇas play the male role and kṣatriyas the female one, as in Aitareya Brāhmaṇa (VIII, 27): “I am that (male), you are this (female), I am the Heaven, you are the Earth”. Since a people composed only by women cannot exist, Amazons had to be a warrior people out of brāhmaṇical control.[↩]
5. Wife of Hades, the dead kingdom’s God.[↩]
6. Viz. In Greek “Peoples of the Sea”. The Greeks occupied Greece later then the Pelasgians. They told us that the Pelasgians had destroyed the previous Cretan and Mycenaeans Realms, powerful nations of the past.[↩]
7.  Plato had written that just one of the ten fiefs composing the Atlantis Kingdom had a fleet of one thousand and two hundred warships.[↩]
8. This is the reason why we previously argued that ancient Athens had been the Egyptian Sais.[↩]
9. Everywhere in the world red is the color of the Kings as well as in India it is the color of kṣatriyas[↩]
10. As often it happens, the founder of a new civilization assumes a name that reminds Manu, the first man.[↩]
11. According to a legend, Seth had two children, Hierosolymus and Judeus. The mount of the biblical prophets as well as of Jesus Christ was the donkey. According to the Sīra of Ibn Ishaq, the Burāq who brought Muhammad to the heavens was an animal “between the mule and the donkey”. This connects the donkey to some dark aspects of Jewish, Christian and Islamic religions. In India also the disquieting Goddess Śītala rides a donkey.[↩]
12. Native Mexicans of Antlantiedan origin, called the same anti-God Hurricane (Taino: Hurakàn).[↩]
13. Kemì, “Black Earth”, ancient name of Egypt; later al-kīmiyā in Arabic.[↩]
14. As we shall see later, these angels were not Devas, but Asuras.[↩]
15. The story of the Flood of Utnapishtim lies in the Gilgames epic poem (2500 B. C.).[↩]
16. Let us remember that also the antediluvian warriors of Athens and Atlantis were called Vigilants.[↩]
17. Usually it is considered that the name rākṣasa comes from rākṣas, vigilante, with the same meaning of the Egregors of the Book of Enoch. However, it is possible to have another etymological origin from raka (menstruum) and rakta (blood, red).[↩]
18. Literally it means “intricate wood of wild cotton plants,” where secretly sacrifices are cruelly performed.[↩]
19. Tantric tradition has many similarities with this rākṣasa dharma. When Tantrism is out of Brāhmaṇical control and the search for powers prevails, a certain Atlantean component emerges.[↩]

Atlantis. The beginning of Western Civilization (I)

The Greek poet Hesiod has been the first to hand down the most important information about the ancient western mythology¹. He wrote that during the Golden Age men lived without suffering anguish, misery and old age. They fed on the fruits that the earth spontaneously offered in abundance. Human beings were born directly from the earth and there was no sexual generation.
The Greek philosopher Plato (428-348 B.C.) in two famous treatises² tells us the myth of a lost continent: Atlantis. He reports that his ancestor Solon³ had met an Egyptian priest in the temple of Sais City consecrated to goddess Neith (corresponding to the Greek Athena, the devī of wisdom). The Egyptian priest began with the story of two persons born during the Golden Age. Their names were Euenores (the “Viril one”) and Leukippes (“She of white horses”, the dawn, similar to Uṣas). Both were born from the earth therefore they were two Gold Age hyperboreans. They joined in marriage and for the first time a woman gave birth to a little girl. They called their daughter Kléitos, the “Celebrated”. Leukippes, Euenores and Kléitos didn’t live anymore in the Arctic Home as the ancient Hyperboreans, but in an island of the western Ocean. Their new home and the fact that human beings were reproducing sexually⁴ indicate that they were no more in the Gold Age, but in the Silver Age.
At the beginning of the cycle, Zeus (Greek: Ζεύς πατήρ, read Zèus patèr; Lat. Iuppiter, read Yùppiter; Sskr. *aEs! ipta, Dyaus pitā) had shared the rule of the world with his brothers. He had kept the atmosphere and the sky for himself giving the underground kingdom to his brother Hades (Greek: ᾍδηϛ; Lat.: Pluto; Sskr.: ~ Mṛtyu) and the lowest waters domain (samudra) to his second brother Poseidon (Greek: Ποσειδῶν, read Poseidòn; Lat.: Neptūnus; Sskr. ~ Varuṇa).
As God of the Sea, all the islands were in Poseidon’s dominion; he saw Kléitos and he fell in love with her. He had ten children from her. Poseidon fortified the hill where his beloved was living and made it inexpugnable by building three water rings and three earth rings around the island.
That kingdom became the first naval power of human history. In the centre of the island, on the top of the hill, the citadel had the walls made of horeichalkos, a mysterious metal brightful as gold. In the centre of the citadel Poseidon’s temple dominated the hill. The God divided the realm into ten fiefs and assigned them to each of his ten sons. He crowned his older son Atlas as King of the whole Empire. For this reason the island has been called Atlantis. Poseidon also gave written laws of great wisdom.
Plato adds that Atlantis was a great island in the Atlantic Ocean to the west of Hercules Columns (i.e. Gibraltar Strait); it was wider than North Africa and the Near East together. The Greek philosopher also maintains that westwards beyond the island there was another large unknown continent. Therefore America was already known in the ray of Atlantean influence. In fact, Atlantis become powerful and founded colonies in America⁵, in Europe, including Italy (called Tyrrenia), and in Africa up to the borders of Egypt.
The Empire was prosperous and the earth offered abundant fruits and vegetables. Besides sailing and trading, Atlanteans were very skilled in metallurgy. They worked gold, silver, copper, pond, bronze and the mysterious horeichalkos. Their society was organized in four casts living in harmony. In a first period the behavior proceeding from their divine origin prevailed, and they were righteous and wise. Subsequently, their human nature emerged and they became greedy and unjust. Finally, the demonic component rose up and they became violent, thirsty of blood and devoted to magic. The powerful and rich city of Gadira, they founded in southern Spain, still exists with the name of Cadiz. Beyond a group of colonies, most European, African and Asian countries were under their political hegemony and cultural influence. Among these last nations Athens and Egypt were particularly flourishing. As Plato confirms us, such Athens was not the city where he was living and teaching. That Athens was a primordial town which many centuries later founded the homonymous city as its colony in Greece. Where was the primordial Athens? According to the most acceptable hypothesis it was in Egypt. Plato relates that his ancestor Solon had been informed about Atlantis history in Sais, an Egyptian city consecrated to the Goddess Athena. Therefore it is easy to infer that the primordial Athens and Sais were one and only city⁶.
In the distribution of the world performed by Zeus, the Gods Hephaestus and Athena⁷ received the territory of Athens. Those Gods had begot virtuous men and established their law following the social model of Atlantis: the priest class was separated from the others; the warriors had the task of defending them; the third class was composed by artisans and finally there were shepherds and peasants. Warriors were the guardians, φύλακοι (read: fülacoi), of the perfect functioning of society.
During the Bronze Age the Atlanteans, increasingly greedy of power, wanted to conquer the whole world. They spread across all continents. The Athenian heroic warriors with their allies stopped the invasion. This glorious victory took place nine thousand years before Plato.
After the defeat the Atlanteans became increasingly cruel and aggressive. They dedicated themselves to bloody sacrifices in which they drunk the victim’s blood, so turning in black magic worshippers. Their nature quickly became more and more diabolical and they decided at all costs to take revenge and regain the whole world. Gods disgusted by their bullying sent a deluge, and in one day and one night Atlantis sank into the bottom of the ocean. Along with Atlantis, many nations were also involved in the catastrophe, including Athens. This flood, like the one which submerged Dvārakā, concluded the Bronze Age and began the present Iron Age. Only a few Atlantean colonies survived both eastward and westward of the missing continent. In those civilizations the evil seed generated by Atlantis remained ready to develop at every favorable opportunity.

Durgādevī

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1. Hesiod lived in the 8th Century B. C. Three among his mythological works have survived: Works and Days, Theogony, and Shield of Heracles.[↩]
2. Timaeus and Critias Dialogues.[↩]
3. Greek lawgiver and poet (7th-6th century B.C.); he is traditionally remembered as one of the Seven Wise Men (group of vidvas similar to the seven ṛṣis).[↩]
4. Just as suggested by the name of Euenores. In the Bible, God created the man from red clay. Adam means “red clay”. From Adam’s body God extracted the woman. Only after the loss of Eden (i.e of the Golden Age) Adam and Eve were able to beget their children.[↩]
5. The Aztecs claimed to come from a vast island to the east of American continent, which they called Aztlan.[↩]
6. According to Greek mythology, the founder and first King of the Greek Athens has been the Egyptian Kekrops (=with a visible tail) who consecrated the city to Athena Goddess. In this way we get the mythic confirmation of our hypothesis. It is interesting that Kekrops was described as half man and half serpent (nāgarāja), indicating his Atlantean origin. It is also interesting the phonetic assonance between Kekrops and Kyclops (Cyclops). We also know that the Egyptian city of Sais founded Athens in Greece (Diodorus Siculus, Biblioteca Historica, I.28.4).[↩]
7. Hephaestus, the blacksmith God, represents the Atlantean component in Egyptian Tradition.[↩]