Expanses of Time

According to Plato’s account of the dialogue between Solon and the Egyptian priests, the priests stated:

“Oh Solon, you Greeks are all children, and there is no such thing as an old Greek. You are all young in kind; you have no belief rooted in old tradition and no knowledge hoary with age. And the reason is this. There have been and will be many different calamities to destroy mankind… so these genealogies of your own people… are little more than children’s stories”. 49

The Egyptian priests were describing Atlantis as having existed 9,000 years before their own civilisation. Such an account is impossible under our own era’s darwinian linear historical paradigm. However there are many archaeological anomalies which do not accord with the darwinian time frame, which may show technologically advanced civilisations not only well before our own but which make the fabled Atlantis very “young”.

A large amount of data on anomalous archaeology has been assembled by Michael Cremo and Dr. Richard Thompson, which despite the heretical nature of the subject, has received critical acclaim by a number of eminent academics. Cremo and Thompson provided many examples of anomalous artefacts indicating that civilisations may have been rising and falling well before our present common assumptions. Anomalous artefacts such as a gold thread found in a stone at a depth of 8 feet, identified as being 320-360 million years old; and the inscribed coin found in Illinois 114 feet underground in deposits between 200,000 and 400,000 years old, may point to the antiquity of civilisations of high technical achievement that have risen and fallen millions of years prior to our own time.50Many such archaeological anomalies question the assumed age of homo sapiens by evolution. Leif A. Jensen marshals science to refute darwinism from a Vedic traditionalist perspective.51 He quotes astrophysicist Carl Sagan that “the Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion on which the time scales correspond to those of modern scientific cosmology”.52 As we have seen, Hinduism is not the “only” such religion, but it is an extant traditional religion that remains significant to much of the world.
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Traditional man refuses to live in what the modernist calls the “historical present”; he attempts to “regain sacred time” and a sense of eternity.57 When Evola counselled “ride the tiger”, live in the world but remain detached, this is a primary lesson of the Bhagavad Gita. Christians were counselled similarly: “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God”.58 Here also is the theme of inner “renewal” for the “religious man”, and the rite performed is that of the Holy Communion, literally a communion with God.

For “modern” “non-religious man”, time is measured by the drudgery of his work, which he interrupts with “celebrations and spectacles”; what Eliade calls “festal time”. Non-religious man seeks escape from “the comparatively monotonous time”. Some escape allows modern man to experience “a different temporal rhythm from that which he experiences when he is working or bored”.59 Eliade gives the examples of listening to music or waiting for a loved one as experiences that change time-perception for modern man. Our “modern” epoch of Western civilisation, having broken the sacred nexus, attempts to relieve the monotony of profane time by ever more crass levels of distraction.

The more Western time is detached from the Eternal the more depraved or trivial the distractions. The prophets and sages of all the civilisations have lamented these epochs. Those civilisations at a certain point in their life-cycle stopped adhering to the traditions of their forefathers, or reformed them, moderated them, “modernised” them. For Western civilisation the finale of this disconnection was Vatican II (1962-1965) when fundamental reforms “modernised” the Catholic Church, the last vestige of tradition in the West.

49 Ignatius Donnelly, 6-21.
50 Michael A. Cremo, and Richard L Thompson, 1999.
51 Leif A. Jensen, 2010.
52 Carl Sagan, 2002, 258.
57 Nieces Eliade,
58 Romans 12: 2.
59 Mircea Eliade, 72.


Kerry Bolton
The Decline and Fall of Civilizations