The Ages of Man

TL;DR

• The ages are a memory of the self arriving in stages: found by women first, taught to children, paid for in short lives and war.
• From Greece to China, from Guatemala to Arizona, in Mali and in the Andaman Islands, people tell the human past as a series of ages, and what changes from age to age is the mind.
• The first age has five marks: death ungrieved, the sexes undivided, food that comes of itself, harmless snakes, and one language. Virgil and Josephus say the snake got its venom when that age ended.
• The passage is a taste and then a botched childhood at the mother’s side. Hesiod’s hundred-year infant has a near twin in Sumer a thousand years older, and the Cheyenne say outright that the people were given “medicine spirit to awaken their dormant minds”.
• The Eurasian metal ages count what was lost and call it decline. The K’iche’ Maya and the Southwestern emergence stories count what was gained and call it ascent. The best tellers count both.
• The metal ages are one scheme, carried from the Aegean to the Ganges. The sequence beneath them is wider, and its thickest cluster is in the American Southwest.

Alors un nuage leur fut soufflé sur la prunelle des yeux par le Cœur du ciel, et elle se voila comme la face d’un miroir qui se couvre de vapeur.
“Then a cloud was breathed on the pupil of their eyes by the Heart of Heaven, and it was veiled like the face of a mirror that mists over.”
— Popol Vuh, K’iche’ Maya, Guatemala (Brasseur de Bourbourg 1861, p. 205)

What are the Ages of Man? #

The Greek poet Hesiod, farming in Boeotia in central Greece around 700 BCE, told his brother that the gods had made five races of men, one after another: Gold, Silver, Bronze, the Heroes, and Iron. “Would that I were not among the men of the fifth generation,” he says, “but either had died before or been born afterwards” (Works and Days 174–175, Evelyn-White 1914).

More than two thousand years later and an ocean away, K’iche’ Maya scribes in highland Guatemala wrote the same history backwards. Their makers first get a man of mud, who speaks without understanding and dissolves. Then come people of wood, who walk, talk and fill the earth with “neither heart nor understanding nor memory of their former and creator”. Only the third people, made of maize, can see. Hesiod mourns the first age. The K’iche’ are glad to be rid of it.

Between them stand India’s four yugas, Iran’s tree of four metals, Daniel’s statue, Laozi’s four reigns in China, the five suns of the Aztecs, the stacked underworlds of the Navajo and Hopi, the three Words of the Dogon of Mali, and the three peoples of the Andaman Islanders.

Read side by side, they are stories about the mind. Four stations recur.

1. The time before. People with no self. Death goes ungrieved, the sexes are not divided, food comes of itself, snakes and beasts do no harm, and there is one language.
2. The taste. Someone eats or drinks, and the “I” arrives. A woman is first, and a serpent is near.
3. The botched childhood. The self is put into children at the mother’s side, by teaching, in a hurry and badly.
4. The cost. Lives grow short, minds turn private, and the age of war begins.

The Eurasian metal ages walk through these stations and count what was lost at each. Mesoamerica and the Southwest walk through them and count what was gained. The stations are the same. The Eve Theory of Consciousness says why they should be: the inner “I” was discovered, by women first, and spread by being taught. A species that went through that would remember a time before it, a rough passage, and a price. That is what the ages are.

How do the traditions compare? #

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What was the first age like? #

The fullest account is Buddhist. The Aggañña Sutta, the twenty-seventh discourse of the Dīgha Nikāya, was composed on the Ganges plain of northern India and written down in Pali in Sri Lanka around the 1st century BCE. T. W. and C. A. F. Rhys Davids, who translated it in 1921, gave it the running head “A Book of Genesis”. The Buddha tells two young Brahmins how the world began this time round (Dialogues of the Buddha III, pp. 82–83):

“And they become made of mind, feeding on rapture, self-luminous, traversing the air, continuing in glory, and remain thus for a long, long period of time. Now at that time, all had become one world of water, dark, and of darkness that maketh blind. No moon nor sun appeared, no stars were seen … neither female nor male. Beings were reckoned just as beings only.”

The beings are “made of mind” (manomaya). They give their own light. They eat nothing but joy. There is no male and no female, and no word for any of them but “being”.

Nobody in that age says “I”, and Sumer puts the absence in the grammar. The poem Enki and Ninhursag, from southern Iraq, copied around 1800 BCE, opens in the pure land of Dilmun before anything had happened there. “The lion did not slay, the wolf was not carrying off lambs”, and (ETCSL t.1.1.1, lines 11–28):

“No old woman belonging to it said there: ‘I am an old woman.’ No old man belonging to it said there: ‘I am an old man.’ … No wailings were wailed in the city’s outskirts there.”

The age ends when the god Enki eats eight plants the mother goddess Ninhursag has grown, and she curses him: “Until his dying day, I will never look upon him with life-giving eye.” The Zoroastrian Bundahishn of Iran divides time into four periods of three thousand years and says of the first that the creatures were “unthinking, unmoving, and intangible” (34.1, West, SBE 5). Plato, in Athens around 360 BCE, says that in the age of Kronos “God himself was their shepherd”, and “all men rose again from the earth, having no memory of the past” (Statesman 271e–272a, Jowett). No “I am”, no thought, no memory, a god doing the steering. Five marks follow from that absence.

No grief. Hesiod’s golden race “lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief … When they died, it was as though they were overcome with sleep” (Works and Days 112–116). Laozi’s first reign, in the Zhuangzi of the 3rd century BCE, is the Yellow Emperor’s: he “made the people’s hearts one. If a man’s parent died and he did not weep, no one blamed him.” The Confucian rival version, in the Liji (Record of Rites) compiled under the Han, calls the first age the Great Unity (大同) and describes those people from the other side (Liji, Liyun):

大道之行也，天下爲公……故人不獨親其親，不獨子其子……是故謀閉而不興，盜竊亂賊而不作，故外户而不閉。是謂大同。
“When the Great Way ran, the world was held in common … So people did not treat only their own parents as parents, nor only their own sons as sons … Scheming was shut off and did not arise; there were no robbers or rebels; and so the outer doors were not shut. This is called the Great Unity.”

A man who does not weep for his dead father and a man who does not treat only his own father as a father are one man, seen by a Daoist and by a Confucian. Plato’s herd has no “separate possession of women and children”. The Jains of India say that when the twins of their first age died, “large birds at once lifted up the bodies of dead twins like nestwood, and threw them in the ocean” (Hemacandra, 12th-century Gujarat, tr. Johnson 1931, vol. 1, p. 138). Nobody buries them and nobody mourns.

In the Andes death itself is missing. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, a Quechua nobleman from Huamanga (now Ayacucho, Peru), finished his illustrated chronicle in 1615, and of his first age he writes: “Y no murieron y no se matauan”, “And they did not die and did not kill one another” (Nueva corónica, p. 49). The Quechua manuscript of Huarochirí, written in the highlands above Lima around 1608, opens on the same country: “in that age, even when they died, they came back to life on the fifth day; and their food, too, ripened within five days of sowing” (ch. 1, f. 64r, in Arguedas 1966; my translation). In north-west Greenland the Polar Inuit woman Arnaluk told Knud Rasmussen in 1903–04 of a first people who “did not know Death” and lived in the dark eating earth, until one old woman said to another, “we will have both Light and Death” (Rasmussen 1908, p. 101).

No sexes. The Aggañña’s beings are “neither female nor male”. In Genesis the first pair “were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed” (2:25). Iran’s first couple, Mashya and Mashyoi, grew up joined as one plant, “such that it was not clear which is the male and which the female” (Selections of Zād-sparam 10.4, West, SBE 5, p. 183). In Plato’s Symposium Aristophanes says the first humans were round double creatures whom Zeus cut in two, turning each face toward the cut “that the man might contemplate the section of himself” (190e, Jowett). The rabbis of Roman Palestine say it of Adam: God “created him two-faced, and sawed him, and made him backs, a back here and a back there” (Genesis Rabbah 8.1; my translation).

Elsewhere the first people are twins. Hemacandra’s are born a boy and a girl who are husband and wife, “free from anger, conceit, deceit, and greed” (pp. 94–95). The Vāyu Purāṇa of northern India says of the first age, the Krita Yuga: “From their pure will alone twin children were produced … They were born and died together”, and “at that time women had no monthly discharge [menstruation]” (8.43–59, in Muir 1872, pp. 89–91). Guaman Poma: “Dizen que parían de dos en dos, macho y henbra”, “They say they gave birth two at a time, male and female”. Boy-and-girl twins in the Andes are strikingly close to the Jain and Purāṇic twins on the other side of the world.

The rabbis also know the Aggañña’s shining body. “Six things were taken from the first Adam: his radiance, his life, his stature, the fruit of the earth, the fruit of the tree, and the lights” (Genesis Rabbah 12.6; my translation). His dress was “a skin of nail, and a cloud of glory covered him. When he ate of the fruits of the tree, the nail-skin was stripped off him … and he saw himself naked” (Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer 14, Friedlander 1916). Yuri Berezkin’s world catalogue of folklore motifs counts that first body, a hard covering of which only the fingernails remain, in some three dozen traditions, nearly all Eurasian (motif E36).

Food of itself. For Hesiod’s golden race “the fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint” (117–118). The Greek word behind “unforced” is automatē, “of its own accord”. Plato’s earth gives fruit “unbidden”. In the Mahābhārata the monkey-god Hanuman tells the hero Bhīma about the Krita Yuga: “There was no buying and selling … And then the necessaries of life were obtained only by being thought of … And there was neither malice, nor pride, nor hypocrisy, nor discord, nor ill-will, nor cunning, nor fear, nor misery, nor envy, nor covetousness” (Vana Parva 148, Ganguli, pp. 304–305). The Jain twins have wishing-trees that “grant their desires day and night”. Eden’s pair eat from trees they did not plant. The Tsistsistas (Cheyenne) of the Plains, now in Oklahoma and Montana, began in a far northern country where “it was always spring”, and “they lived on honey and wild fruits, and were never hungry” (Dorsey 1905, p. 34).

One language. Hanuman’s first age has “one uniform Soul”, “only one mantra”, and “a single Veda”. In Genesis “the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech” (11:1, KJV). The Book of Jubilees, written in Judea around 150 BCE, extends it to the animals: on the day of the expulsion “was closed the mouth of all beasts, and of cattle, and of birds … for they had all spoken one with another with one lip and with one tongue” (3:28, Charles 1917, p. 50). The Mandaeans of southern Iraq say their first generations “stand in one teaching, walk in one speech” (Lidzbarski 1925, pp. 27–28; my translation). The Clear Lake Pomo of California join this mark to the one before. Their maker, about to blow away the fourth of his five peoples, reasons: “Maybe it is because they speak only one language that they are incestuous with their own children” (de Angulo 1935, p. 253). Plato’s people of Kronos could talk with the animals, and in the Laws he says what such speech was like. The simple people after the flood believed whatever they were told about good and evil, because “no one had the wit to suspect another of a falsehood, as men do now” (679c, Jowett). They could not imagine that a man’s words and his mind might differ. That is what one language means.

No harm from snakes. Sumer joins this mark to the last. Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta contains a spell of Enki under his name Nudimmud. It describes a day “when there is no snake, when there is no scorpion, when there is no hyena, when there is no lion, when there is neither dog nor wolf, when there is thus neither fear nor trembling”, and “the whole universe, the well-guarded people” address the god Enlil “together in a single language” (ETCSL t.1.8.2.3, lines 134–155). Then Enki, in Samuel Noah Kramer’s translation, “changed the speech in their mouths, put contention into it” (Kramer 1968).¹ No snake, one tongue, and the god of wisdom ends both.

When did the snake get its venom? #

The snake has a history, and Rome tells it twice, of Jupiter and of Eden. Virgil, in the Georgics of 29 BCE, describes the world before Jupiter, when “no farmers worked the fields; it was not even lawful to mark or divide the plain with a boundary”, and the earth “bore everything more freely, when no one asked”. Then Jupiter ends it on purpose (Georgics 1.121–134, my translation):

pater ipse colendi / haud facilem esse viam voluit, primusque per artem / movit agros, curis acuens mortalia corda … / ille malum virus serpentibus addidit atris / praedarique lupos iussit pontumque moveri
“The Father himself willed that the farmer’s way be hard. He first stirred the fields by art, sharpening mortal hearts with cares … He gave black snakes their evil venom, ordered wolves to prey and the sea to heave”

The snakes of the first age had no venom. Jupiter adds it in the sentence in which he sharpens the human heart, “so that practice, by thinking, might hammer out the various arts little by little”.

Flavius Josephus, a Jewish priest writing in Rome in 93 CE, retells Eden the same way. “All the living creatures had one language”, and the serpent “lived together with Adam and his wife”. The tree “sharpened their understanding”; the Greek says the plant was one “of sharpness and understanding”. After they eat, God takes speech from the serpent, and “he inserted poison under his tongue, and made him an enemy to men” (Antiquities 1.41–50, Whiston). A talking, harmless snake shares the house until the humans’ wits are sharpened, and then it is armed.

The Vāyu Purāṇa says of the Krita age: “There were at that time no beasts, birds, reptiles, or plants (for these things are produced by unrighteousness)” (8.55, Muir, p. 90). Isaiah puts the mark back at the end of time, and on an infant: “the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp” (11:8). The Daodejing’s newborn is one whom “wasps, scorpions, vipers and snakes do not sting”, the subject of Before the First Smile.

Virgil and Josephus agree on the order of events. First there is a snake that cannot hurt anyone. Then a god sharpens the mind, and the snake gets its poison in the same act. A creature has to know it can die before a snake is a terror, and the tellers say so by making the venom as new as the knowledge. Josephus wrote in Virgil’s Rome and may have had him in mind, but the history is told far from Rome. Berezkin’s catalogue lists the snake that only later “becomes poisonous or immortal” in eighteen traditions, from the Sara of Chad and the Tuvans of Siberia to the Barasana of the north-west Amazon (motif H39).

What do the five marks have in common? #

Each mark is something a self brings with it. Grief needs a “who” to lose. Shame needs someone watching, including oneself. Hoarding needs a tomorrow and a “mine”. Fear of the snake needs a creature that knows it can die. A single language is what speech is before each speaker has a private mind to mean things with. The first age is the human world with the self taken out.

The Roman Stoic Seneca drew that conclusion in 64 CE. The people of the golden age, he wrote, held everything in common, and “each cared as much for his neighbour as for himself”. Then he refuses to call them good: “It was by reason of their ignorance of things that the men of those days were innocent … Virtue is not vouchsafed to a soul unless that soul has been trained and taught” (Epistle 90.40, 46, Gummere 1920). The golden race had no vices because it had no one to have them.

How did the first age end? #

It ended with a taste. The Aggañña Sutta tells the passage one step at a time, and every step is a step into selfhood (pp. 82–88).

First, the earth forms on the waters like “a scum … on the surface of boiled milky rice that is cooling”, sweet as “the flawless honey of the bee”. Then:

“some being of greedy disposition, said: Lo now! what will this be? and tasted the savoury earth with his finger. He thus, tasting, became suffused with the savour, and craving entered into him.”

The others copy him. “From the doing thereof the self-luminance of those beings faded away”, and only then do sun, moon, night and day appear. Their bodies “become solid”. Some are now better-looking than others, and “they that were well favoured despised them that were ill favoured”. The first thought with an “I” in it is a comparison: “We are more comely than they.”

The sweet earth vanishes, and they wail “Alas for the savour!” The next food to appear is an outgrowth “as the springing up of the mushroom”. The Pali word, the translators note, is ahicchattako, “literally snake-hood”. Then a creeper, then rice that grows without husk and ripens again overnight. On the rice their bodies coarsen further, and:

“In the female appeared the distinctive features of the female, in the male those of the male. Then truly did woman contemplate man too closely, and man, woman. In them contemplating over much the one the other, passion arose and burning entered their body. They in consequence thereof followed their lusts [the Pali says plainly: they had sex]. And beings seeing them so doing threw, some, sand, some, ashes, some, cowdung, crying: Perish, foul one! perish, foul one! How can a being treat a being so?”

The couples are driven out of the settlement, so “they set to work to make huts, to conceal just that immorality”. Then a lazy being decides to fetch rice for two meals at once. Others store for two days, four, eight. The hoarded rice grows a husk and stops regrowing. They “divide off the rice fields and set boundaries thereto”. Someone steals a plot, is caught three times, and is beaten “with the hand, some with clods, some with sticks”. So they elect “the handsomest, the best favoured” among them to be angry on their behalf in exchange for a share of rice. He is Mahā Sammata, the Great Elect, the first king.

The sutta’s stations are: taste, body, comparison, sex, shame, house, hoard, boundary, theft, punishment, king. The Buddhist schoolmen had one word for the hinge. Vasubandhu, writing in Gandhāra (now Pakistan) in the 4th or 5th century, says the rice stopped regrowing at a particular moment: teṣāṃ tatra mamakāra utpanne, “when the making of ‘mine’ arose in them” (Abhidharmakośabhāṣya 3.98, ed. Pradhan, p. 187, GRETIL; my translation). Mamakāra is literally “mine-making”.

Genesis has the same run in a few verses: the fruit, the opened eyes, the fig leaves, the hiding, the sweat of the field, the first murder, the first city (Genesis 3–4). The Jain version matches it almost clause for clause. As the wishing-trees weaken, “the twins developed a sense of ownership in the wishing-trees, as if in their own bodies”. They quarrel over trespass and make one of their number chief. He “divided the wishing-trees and gave them to the twins”, and his whole penal code is the word “Ha!” (Johnson, p. 97). Then a palm fruit falls on a boy and he dies “by the first accidental death”, and for the first time the birds do not come for the body (p. 138).

Iran tells it as a sequence of thoughts. When the joined plant becomes two people, the Bundahishn reports what was in their heads. “Both of them first thought this, that one of them should please the other.” Then “antagonism rushed into their minds”, and they said aloud that the evil spirit had made the world: “through that false speech they both became wicked.” They drink milk and lie about it, and “the taste of the food was taken away by them, so that out of a hundred parts one part remained”. They find meat, fire, clothing of skins, and iron, and then they have sex. Mashya says to Mashyoi, “When I see thy shame my desires arise.” Their first children are a pair, male and female, “and owing to tenderness for offspring the mother devoured one, and the father one”. Ohrmazd has to take the tenderness away, “so that one may nourish a child, and the child may remain” (15.7–23, West). The first thought, the first lie, the first shame and the first parents come in that order, and the first parents eat their young. The golden reign of the first king, Yima, in which “there was neither age nor death” (Yasna 9.5, Mills, SBE 31, p. 232), ends the same way, “when he began to find delight in words of falsehood and untruth”, and the royal Glory flew from him in the shape of a bird (Yasht 19.34, Darmesteter, SBE 23). Plato’s first people could not suspect a lie. Iran’s first age ends with one.

Which tellers say outright that it was the mind? #

Several do. The Cheyenne are the plainest. Their first people lived naked in the northern spring, speaking with the animals. Then (Dorsey 1905, p. 35):

“the Great Medicine blessed them, and gave them some medicine spirit to awaken their dormant minds. From that time on they seemed to possess intelligence, and to know what to do.”

The first thing he tells the awakened people is to “clothe their naked bodies with skins”. Then come two floods. After the first, “They were no longer able to talk to the animals, but this time they controlled all the animals”. After the second, “there were many different bands with different languages, for the people were never united after the second flood” (pp. 35–36). A variant says that before the gift “they seemed to be of weak minds, though they were physically strong … in their ignorance they roamed about like animals” (p. 38). Nakedness, the animals’ speech and the single language go in the order Genesis gives them, and the cause is stated in so many words: dormant minds, awakened from outside.

The Jewish poet of the first Sibylline Oracle, writing in Greek around the turn of the era, laid Hesiod’s races over Genesis. His first race dies as Hesiod’s does, “as subdued by sleep”. His second race invents ploughing, sailing, star-lore and drugs, and he calls them the Watchers, “because they had a sleepless mind within” (1.70–99, Terry 1899, pp. 18–20). An age that dies like sleep is followed by an age named for being awake.

Babylon says where the mind came from. In Atrahasis, copied at Sippar in Iraq around 1635 BCE, the junior gods go on strike against the labour of digging the rivers, and the god who speaks for the strikers is Wê. The gods make mankind to carry the basket in their place, out of clay mixed with a slaughtered god’s flesh and blood, and the god they choose is the striker: “Wê who has understanding they slaughtered in their assembly” (I 47, 223, Wasserman and Streck). The Akkadian word is ṭēmu: forethought, planning, understanding. Lambert and Millard render the line “Wê-ila, who had personality” (1969), Foster has “Aw-ilu, who had the inspiration” (Livius), and Dalley “a god who had intelligence”. “From the flesh of the god a spirit came to existence,” and the mother goddess tells the gods what they have done: “You slaughtered a god along with his mind” (I 228, 239). The scribes heard the result in the words themselves. The god’s name echoes awīlum, “man”, and ṭēmu echoes eṭemmu, the ghost; one Old Babylonian copy spells the ghost we-ṭi-im-mu, with the god’s name inside it. The human self is a murdered rebel’s mind, put in from outside, and his drum, which readers hear as the heartbeat, is to sound “for the rest of time” (I 214).

In Iceland the Völuspá, composed around 1000 CE, has three gods find the first man and woman on the shore (st. 17–18; Bellows 1923):

Önd þau ne áttu, óð þau ne höfðu, / lá né læti né litu góða; / önd gaf Óðinn, óð gaf Hœnir
“Soul they had not, sense they had not, / Heat nor motion, nor goodly hue; / Soul gave Othin, sense gave Honir”

Ask and Embla are örlöglausa, “without fate”. They stand there complete in body, lacking önd, breath, and óðr, the mind or inspired frenzy from which Odin has his name. Both are handed to them.

The Māori of Aotearoa New Zealand recited the beginning of the world as a genealogy, and the missionary Richard Taylor took down one from the 1840s whose first generations are states of mind (Taylor 1855, pp. 14–15):

Na te kune te pupuke / Na te pupuke te hihiri / Na te hihiri te mahara / Na te mahara te hinengaro / Na te hinengaro te manako
“From the conception the increase, / From the increase the thought, / From the thought the remembrance, / From the remembrance the consciousness, / From the consciousness the desire.”

Taylor called this first period “the epoch of thought”. After it come the generations of night, during which “there were no eyes to the world”, and only then light, land, gods and men. Thought comes first, then memory (mahara), then a mind (hinengaro), then wanting (manako). The Aggañña’s order is strikingly close: beings “made of mind” who then crave. A Tahitian chant recited in the 1820s carries the genealogy on into the crowded world: “When people multiplied, trouble was produced; trouble begat wisdom; wisdom begat cunning; cunning begat mockery” (Henry 1928, p. 403). On Pohnpei in Micronesia, Luelen Bernart numbered three periods and measured them in vocabulary: “in the first period they had few words and their deeds were small”, and the third had the most, “because the differences among the people increased” (The Book of Luelen, p. 77).

China’s Legalists say it as policy. The Book of Lord Shang divides the past into three ages and remarks: 民愚，則知可以王；世知，則力可以王, “When the people are stupid, knowledge can make a king. When the age knows, force makes a king” (Shangjun shu, 開塞; my translation). And the Kuba of the Congo remember a time when nobody had a name.

Why are mothers and children at the centre of it? #

Greece and China place the passage in the cradle. Hesiod’s Silver race:

“A child was brought up at his good mother’s side an hundred years, an utter simpleton, playing childishly in his own home. But when they were full grown and were come to the full measure of their prime, they lived only a little time in sorrow because of their foolishness, for they could not keep from sinning and from wronging one another.” (Works and Days 130–135)

“Utter simpleton” is mega nēpios, “great infant”, and nēpios means a child too young to speak.

Sumer has a child strikingly close to him, a thousand years earlier. The Rulers of Lagash, a king-list from southern Iraq copied in the early second millennium BCE, says of the time just after the flood: “In those days a child spent a hundred years in nappies(?), spent a hundred years in his rearing … He was small, he was feeble (or: stupid); he was [with] his mother” (ETCSL t.2.1.2, lines 14–18, in Jeremy Black’s translation as West gives it, p. 317). The Sumerian line ends on the words ama-a-ni, “his mother”.

Laozi’s reigns run the scene fast instead of slow. Under the second king, Yao, the one heart narrows: he “made the people’s hearts hold to their kin”, and a man might do less for others for the sake of his own, “and no one blamed him”. Under the third, Shun, “pregnant women bore their children at ten months; the child could speak at five months; before it reached the first smile it began to say ‘who’; and then for the first time people died young” (Zhuangzi, Tianyun; my translation). An old note preserved in the Taiping yulan explains that “‘who’ means telling people apart”. Hesiod’s child is a wordless infant for a century, and Laozi’s has the word for persons before its first smile. Both texts put the trouble in the nursery, with the mother, in the timing of speech, and both follow it at once with short lives. The Chinese texts are set against Hesiod in Before the First Smile, and the Silver Age is read as the age of initiation, when the self was born badly and men were raised into it by women, in It’s Hard to Be God.

The Chinese have a formula for the age before fathers. The Lüshi chunqiu, compiled in Qin around 239 BCE, uses it (恃君; my translation):

昔太古嘗無君矣，其民聚生群處，知母不知父，無親戚兄弟夫妻男女之別
“In the great antiquity there were once no rulers. The people lived in herds and dwelt in flocks. They knew their mothers and not their fathers. There was no distinction of kin, brothers, husband and wife, male and female.”

The same five characters, 知母不知父, stand in the Zhuangzi, where Robber Zhi praises the age of Shennong, when people “knew their mothers and not their fathers, and lived together with the elk and deer … and had no heart to harm one another” (盜跖). They open the Book of Lord Shang’s first age, and they stand again in the Han court’s Baihu tong of 79 CE, which adds that those people “could cover their front but not their back”, and tells who ended it: Fuxi “took husband and wife as his base … and first fixed the human way” (始定人道, 號). Fuxi and his sister-wife Nüwa are drawn with human heads and snake bodies. Four rival schools agree that the first humans had mothers only, and the Confucian has a serpent found the family. A Han account of Nüwa moulding the first people from yellow earth says she ran out of time: “the work was pressing and her strength could not keep up”, so she dragged a cord through the mud and lifted it out to make the rest of mankind (Taiping yulan 78, quoting the Fengsu tongyi; my translation). The serpent mother makes us in a hurry.

The Wa of Yunnan, on China’s border with Myanmar, tell three makings of mankind. The first people “could be born but could not die”, bore a child a day and ate up the mountains. The second were let live on condition that they die, and they “knew only their mother, not the father”, which their translator marks as the phrase of the Chinese classics (Ceinos Arcones 2016, pp. 75–78; my translation from the Spanish).

Snorri Sturluson, in Iceland around 1220, says the same of the gods’ first age: “er sú öld kölluð gullaldr, áðr en spilltist af tilkvámu kvinnanna”, “that age was called the golden age, before it was spoiled by the arrival of the women” (Gylfaginning 14; my translation). The poem he is glossing has the gods at their gaming boards, lacking nothing in gold, “till thither came up giant-maids three” (Völuspá 8, Bellows).

Others put a woman at the head of the human line and trouble close behind her. In the Hawaiian Kumulipo, after seven eras of night, “Lailai was born a woman, / Kii was born a man”, and then the gods (Liliʻuokalani 1897, pp. 22–26). The Rāmāyaṇa has Brahmā say that all creatures were once “of one class (or colour), with the same speech, and uniform in every respect”, and that “to distinguish between them I fashioned one woman” (Uttara Kāṇḍa 30, Muir, pp. 120–121). At Huarochirí the return of the dead stops because of a wife. A dead man comes home a day late, his wife throws a corncob at him in anger, the soul flies off humming, and “from then until now the dead no longer return” (ch. 27, Arguedas). In Japan’s Kojiki of 712, at the first coupling of Izanagi and Izanami, the woman speaks first, and the child is a leech, put “in a boat of reeds” and sent away. The heavenly gods give the reason: “They were not good because the woman spoke first” (Chamberlain 1882, sects. 4–5). After the Babylonian flood the gods settle the new order on women’s bodies: there shall be “women who bear and women who do not bear”, and a demon “to snatch the baby from the lap of her who bore it” (Atrahasis III vii).

In Genesis Eve eats and then gives to Adam. The Old English Genesis B, translated from an Old Saxon poem of the 9th century, tells what she got. She sees heaven and earth turn brighter, and tells Adam: “Wearð me on hige leohte / utan and innan, siðþan ic þæs ofætes onbat”, “It became light in my mind, outside and within, since I bit of the fruit.” Then she “pled with him all the day” until he ate (Junius Manuscript, lines 676–677, my translation; Kennedy 1916, p. 30). Hesiod tells the passage twice: once as the five races, and once, in the lines just before them, as Pandora lifting the lid of the jar (Works and Days 60–105).

Teaching comes with her. Plato says that when the god let go, people were “helpless and defenceless”, until the gods gave them fire and the arts “together with so much teaching and education as was indispensable”, and they “had to order their course of life for themselves, and were their own masters” (Statesman 274b–d). The Jewish Book of Enoch gives the lesson its first pupils. The fallen Watchers take wives, “and they taught them charms and enchantments, and the cutting of roots, and made them acquainted with plants”; the men get swords and metals afterwards. A later chapter draws the conclusion: men “were created exactly like the angels … and death, which destroys everything, could not have taken hold of them, but through this their knowledge they are perishing” (1 Enoch 7:1, 69:11, Charles 1917, pp. 35–36, 89–90). The self here is something handed over by teachers, to women first, to a creature that had been steered until then.

The tellers who count downward blame her: Pandora, Eve, the giant maidens, the wife with the corncob. The tellers who count upward credit her: Xmucané of the K’iche’, who grinds the maize the first true people are made of; Thought Woman at Acoma; the mother of the Yabarana hero in Venezuela, who found the first people without fire or speech and “taught them to understand one another by articulate sounds of their mouths” (Wilbert 1959; my translation); the Dogon Earth, who has the first Word; Mousso Koroni of the Bambara, “the first to possess a Soul”. Blame and credit put her in the same place, first.

Why do lifespans shrink from age to age? #

Nearly every Eurasian list has the shrinking, and the numbers are extravagant. A king’s years stand for his people’s.

M. L. West saw the pattern in Hesiod’s original: each race “had a shorter life-span; and within those shortening life-spans, each had a smaller proportion of youth” (The East Face of Helicon, p. 312). That second clause is the important one. What shrinks is childhood. The Golden race never ages. The Silver race has a hundred years of infancy. The Iron race ends born grey. In the Buddhist decline, girls marry at five. In the Mahābhārata’s last age, “girls of seven or eight years of age do then conceive, while boys of ten or twelve years beget offspring. And in their sixteenth year, men are overtaken with decrepitude” (Vana Parva 187, Ganguli, p. 379). In Jubilees the grey heads are three weeks old. In the Zhuangzi a baby says “who” at five months.

The Great Andamanese, foragers of the Andaman Islands in India with no metals to name an age by, count three peoples downward. The first man, Tomo, was “much taller and bearded” and “lived to a great age”; his descendants, “until the period of the Deluge”, spoke one tongue and caught pigs with ease, since pigs “had in those days neither ears nor noses”. Tomo’s wife, “with woman’s ready wit”, drilled the holes that let them hear and smell, and men have had to hunt ever since. After the flood came the chauga-tabanga, “fine tall men with large beards … said to have been long-lived”, and after them the present islanders, shorter in body and in years, their speech split again at each dispersal (Man 1883, pp. 96–104). The stations hold where the ladder of metals never reached.

Japan and Korea say it with a flower. In the Kojiki of 712 the heavenly grandson Ninigi is offered two sisters, Rock-long-princess and the Princess of the Blossoms, and sends the ugly one back. Her father’s curse follows: “the august offspring of the Heavenly Deity shall be but as frail as the flowers of the trees” (Chamberlain 1882, sect. 37). In the Changse-ga sung by the shaman Kim Ssang-dol-i at Hamhŭng in North Korea in 1923, the present age begins when Seokga steals the flower blooming on the sleeping creator’s knee, and the creator curses the theft: “the flower will not bloom ten days, and planted will not last ten years” (Son Jin-tae 1930, as quoted in Lee 2016, pp. 67–68; my translation).

The Kaxúyana of the Trombetas in Pará, Brazil, say it with wood. Their first people were made of hard bow-wood, and the Great Snake swallowed them. “It is because of the taxi, which is soft wood … of which our grandfathers were made, that we are weak, can bear nothing and die soon” (Frikel 1970, pp. 15–17; my translation).

These numbers record the mind. Years are counted from birth to death by someone who expects his own death. Where no one keeps that count a reign has no edge, and the scribes wrote the only number that fits, a vast one. A being with no self does not die young, because there is no one whose death it is. Nobody counts its years. The Liezi, describing the dream country of Huaxu, gives the reasoning in full: 不知樂生，不知惡死，故無夭殤；不知親己, “They did not know to delight in life or to hate death, so none died young. They did not know to hold the self dear” (Liezi, 黃帝; my translation). Once there is a “who”, there is a someone who ends, and the Zhuangzi says so in six characters: 則人始有夭矣, “then for the first time people died young”. China’s own king-list makes the same cut. The twelve brothers of the Heavenly Sovereign, who ruled eighteen thousand years, were “alike in body and face, impossible to tell apart”. The Human Sovereign’s brothers lived a hundred years each, divided the land into nine regions, “and from this came distinctions”. The long lives belong to the people nobody could tell apart.

The texts all record the same event. Death arrived when the one who dies did, and the long ages before it are how the before looks from the after. The shrinking childhood is the other half. Each generation gets the self earlier, because each has more people around it who already have one and teach it. The grey-haired newborn is a child handed the whole weight on the first day. The lives get shorter and the lessons start sooner and run faster.

Which age is the age of war? #

After the botched childhood the lists go to war. Hesiod’s Bronze race “loved the lamentable works of Ares and deeds of violence” and “were destroyed by their own hands” (Works and Days 145–152). The Buddha’s decline bottoms out in “a sword-period of seven days, during which they will look on each other as wild beasts” (Cakkavatti-Sīhanāda Sutta, p. 71). The Völuspá remembers “the first in the world”, when the gods “with spears had smitten Gollveig”, a woman they burned three times and who was three times reborn, and it ends in “Axe-time, sword-time … Wind-time, wolf-time” (st. 21, 45, Bellows).

Three tellers say why. Laozi’s fourth reign is Yu’s: “he made the people’s hearts change. Every man had a mind of his own, and taking up arms was called reasonable.” The private mind and the weapon arrive in one sentence.

The Liji gives the mechanism: “Now the Great Way is hidden; the world is held by families; each treats his own parents as parents and his own sons as sons; goods and strength are for oneself (貨力爲己) … walls and moats are made for security … so scheming came into use, and from this war arose (而兵由此起).” The word 己, “self”, stands twice in the Chinese: goods are “for oneself”, and a few lines on merit is reckoned “for oneself” (以功爲己).

Guaman Poma’s fourth age is the Auca runa, “warrior people”. They left the good valleys “for fear of war” and built hilltop forts, pucara. There was “muy mucha muerte y derramamiento de sangre”, “very much death and spilling of blood”. “Each of them charged like lions, and if he killed his opponent, he took out his heart and they ate it” (“le sacaua el corasón y lo comían”, pp. 64–66).

Where the texts give a cause, it is the boundary: a plot that is mine, a plot that is yours, and a being who takes the second while guarding the first, as the Aggañña has it. A world of private minds has private property and private grievance, and the weapon follows.

Are Eurasia’s metal ages one story? #

They are. Hesiod’s five races are four metals with the Greek heroes wedged in between bronze and iron. M. L. West showed that the scheme “appears entirely alien to the general Greek view of the past”; “that it comes from some oriental source seems certain”; and “the scheme of eras designated by metals cannot have originated in Greece” (pp. 312, 319).

In the Zoroastrian Zand ī Wahman Yasn (the Bahman Yasht), Zoroaster asks Ohrmazd for immortality and is shown instead “the root of a tree, on which were four branches, one golden, one of silver, one of steel, and one was mixed up with iron”. The god explains: “those four branches are the four periods which will come.” The golden is “when I and thou converse”; the last is “the evil sovereignty of the demons with dishevelled hair of the race of Wrath” (West, SBE 5, pp. 191–193).

In Daniel 2, written in Judea in the 2nd century BCE and set in Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar dreams of a statue: “This image’s head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, his legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay” (2:32–33). Iron “mixed” with something baser ends both the Iranian tree and the Jewish statue.

India has four ages without metals but with the same arithmetic. “In the Krita age Dharma is four-footed and entire, and (so is) Truth … In the other (three ages), by reason of (unjust) gains, Dharma is deprived successively of one foot” (Manu 1.81–82).² Narayana’s colour goes from white to red to yellow to black.

So one scheme of four declining ages, each marked by a baser substance and a shorter life, was known from the Aegean to the Ganges by the middle of the first millennium BCE. It was carried, like the alphabet and the zodiac, and it kept being carried. The Sibylline poet joined Hesiod’s races to the Watchers and the flood in a single list. Snorri’s word gullaldr is the Latin aetas aurea in Norse dress, laid over a native poem that already had the women and the war.

The Mongol prince Sagang Sechen opened his chronicle of 1662, written in the Ordos (now Inner Mongolia, China), with the Aggañña as national history: first beings who float in the air, shine by their own light and have no sexes, for whom “the name ‘man’ was not yet in use”, and on whom the first food brings “the darkening of the mind” (Schmidt 1829, pp. 3–9; my translation).

A scheme that travels is a scheme people recognised. The Greeks hung their own Trojan War on it. The Iranians hung their kings on it. The Buddhists and Jains turned it into half of a wheel. The Chinese versions have no metals and no fixed four, and Laozi’s reigns hit Hesiod’s stations in order. Either the scheme reached China without its metals, or China found the same sequence in its own memory. Both readings say the sequence mattered more than the furniture.

The counts agree. Berezkin’s catalogue codes a stack of three or more earlier worlds or races in twenty-eight traditions. Five are Eurasian, and that figure leaves out Iran, Daniel, the Jains, the Buddhists and China, which the catalogue does not code. Twenty-three are American, and they lie thickest in the Southwest (motif I75). The ladder of metals is one late route across a much wider field.

Do the Americas tell the ages the other way round? #

Mesoamerica and the Southwest do. Their first beings are failures, and the story is how the makers finally got a person.

The Popol Vuh: mud, wood, maize #

The Popol Vuh was written in K’iche’ Maya in the Roman alphabet at Santa Cruz del Quiché in highland Guatemala in the 1550s, and survives in the copy Father Francisco Ximénez made around 1701. The quotations here are from Brasseur de Bourbourg’s French of 1861, with my English.

The makers want beings who will name them and remember them. Among the makers are Tepeu and Gucumatz, the Plumed Serpent, and the old couple Xpiyacoc and Xmucané. The animals are tried first and can only squawk. So the makers build a man of mud (p. 19):

“Il avait été doué du (don du) langage, mais il n’avait pas d’intelligence, et aussitôt il se consuma dans l’eau sans (pouvoir) se tenir debout.”
“It had been given the gift of speech, but it had no understanding, and at once it dissolved in the water, unable to stand.”

Speech with no mind behind it. They break it up and carve people of wood. These walk, talk, breed and fill the earth (p. 25):

“Mais ils n’avaient ni cœur, ni intelligence, ni de souvenir de leur formateur et de leur créateur ; ils menaient une existence inutile et vivaient comme des animaux.”
“But they had neither heart nor understanding nor memory of their former and creator; they led a useless existence and lived like animals.”

The wooden people are a whole humanity with language, families and houses and no inner life. Their end is the most violent scene in the book. A flood comes and a rain of pitch. A bird “tore their eyes from the sockets”, a jaguar “devoured their flesh”, and another “broke and ground their bones”. Then their own things turn on them. Their grinding-stones say: “we shall grind you and reduce your flesh to powder.” Their dogs, tearing at their faces, ask the question the whole book turns on (p. 29):

“Comment donc ne raisonniez-vous pas, comment ne pensiez-vous donc pas à vous-mêmes ?”
“How was it that you did not reason? How was it that you did not think of yourselves?”

The survivors are the monkeys in the forest.

The third making succeeds, and a grandmother does it. Four animals show the way to a mountain full of yellow and white maize. “Then they began to grind the yellow maize and the white maize, and Xmucané made nine drinks of it (“en composa neuf boissons”), and this food, entering in, brought forth strength and vigour, and gave flesh and muscle to man” (p. 197). The four men made of her maize dough “had no mother and no father”. And they work too well:

“Nous avons reçu une bouche, un visage, nous parlons, nous entendons, nous pensons, nous marchons : nous sentons et nous connaissons également bien ce qui est loin et ce qui est rapproché. Nous voyons toutes les choses grandes et petites dans le ciel et sur la terre.”
“We have received a mouth, a face; we speak, we hear, we think, we walk; we feel and know equally well what is far and what is near. We see all things great and small in the sky and on the earth.” (p. 201)

The makers are alarmed. “Ce n’est pas bien … Mais ils seront autant de dieux”: “This is not good … They will be so many gods” (p. 203). So the Heart of Heaven breathes on their eyes, “and it was veiled like the face of a mirror that mists over … they saw only what was near” (p. 205). Then, while they sleep, their wives are made.

Genesis has the same alarm: “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil” (3:22). In both books the gods see a creature that knows too much and take steps. Even this book of ascent ends with a loss. And it keeps the first-age mark of language: before the dawn, “all had but a single language” (p. 211), and after the migration from Tulan the tribes lament, “Alas! we have left our language behind! … We had but one language when we came from Tulan” (p. 221).

The Five Suns #

The Nahua of the Valley of Mexico counted five suns. The Historia de los mexicanos por sus pinturas, taken down from painted books in the 1530s, gives each sun a people and a food. Under the first, the gods “created giants, who were very large men, and of such extreme strength that they could tear up trees with their hands, and they lived on the acorns of evergreen oak trees, and nothing else”. Jaguars ate them. Genesis knows them too, “There were giants in the earth in those days” (6:4), the race read in Nephilim, Fallen Angels, and the Eve Theory beside Hesiod’s overgrown Silver children. The people of the second sun “ate the nuts of the pine trees”, and those the wind left “turned into apes and monkeys”. The third ate “a species of seed of a grain which is born in the water”, and fire rained. The fourth ate “only a seed of a grain like maize”, and the sky fell in a flood (Phillips 1883, pp. 619–621).

The foods climb to maize itself for the people of the fifth sun, and monkeys are again a failed humanity kept on in the trees. Diego Muñoz Camargo of Tlaxcala says what those monkeys are: people who “olvidaron el uso de la razón, perdieron la habla”, “forgot the use of reason, lost speech” (Historia de Tlaxcala, pp. 153–154; my translation). The Leyenda de los Soles of 1558 tells how the present people were made. Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, fetches the bones of the earlier dead from the underworld. “Niman ye quiteci itoca Quilachtli, yehuatl in Cihuacohuatl … niman motepolizo in Quetzalcohuatl”: “Then she ground them, the one named Quilaztli, who is Cihuacoatl”, Snake Woman, in a jade bowl, “then Quetzalcoatl bled his penis” over them. When maize is found, “the gods chewed it and placed it on our lips, and so we grew strong” (§§30, 33, Lehmann 1906, pp. 253, 255; my translation).³ A woman at a grinding-stone and a serpent make the real humans, in central Mexico as in Guatemala, and the gods feed them the first meal as a mother feeds an infant.

The Aztec present is no golden age. The Fifth Sun is 4 Movement, and the Annals of Cuauhtitlan say how it ends: “ipan inin mochiuaz tlalloliniz mayanaloz”, “in it there will be earthquake, there will be famine” (in Lehmann, p. 257, n. 6). It has to be fed with hearts to keep moving.

A third Nahua account, the Histoyre du Mechique, survives only in the French of the cosmographer André Thevet. In it the bone from the underworld falls and breaks, “and so man came out small; for they say that the men of the first world were very tall, like giants”. Then the gods look at what they have made (de Jonghe 1905, pp. 26–28; my translation):

“voici l’homme sera tout triste si nous ne faisons quelque chose pour le resjouir, et afin qu’il prenne plaisir de vivre en la terre, et qu’il nos loue et chante et danse.”
“Here is man; he will be wholly sad unless we do something to gladden him, so that he takes pleasure in living on the earth and praises us and sings and dances.”

The first thing the gods notice about the finished human is that he will be sad. Their remedy is drink. The wind god carries off the virgin goddess Mayahuel; her grandmother’s star-demons tear her branch apart “et la mangèrent”, “and ate it”; and from her buried bones grows the maguey from which pulque is brewed. The K’iche’ person is finished with nine drinks ground by a grandmother, and the Nahua person is consoled with a drink grown from a girl’s eaten body.

The emergence: Navajo, Acoma, Hopi #

In the Southwest the ages are stacked as underworlds, and the people climb. The fullest early Navajo text is Washington Matthews’s Navaho Legends (1897, pp. 63–78), taken down in Arizona and New Mexico in the 1880s.

The first world is red, and its people are twelve kinds of insect. They are expelled because “they committed adultery, one people with another”, and fly up through a hole in the sky. The same happens in the blue second world and the yellow third. In the fourth there is still “neither sun, moon, nor star”. There the gods come and tell them plainly what they are: “you have the teeth, the feet, and the claws of beasts and insects … you are uncleanly, you smell badly.” Then the gods lay a white ear and a yellow ear of corn between two buckskins, and the wind blows through. “The white ear of corn had been changed into a man, the yellow ear into a woman. It was the wind that gave them life. It is the wind that comes out of our mouths now that gives us life.” These are First Man and First Woman. Their first children are “hermaphrodite twins”. The Jain, Purāṇic and Andean first people were born as boy-and-girl pairs; the Navajo put both in one body.

Then the sexes divide, and Matthews gives the quarrel in a note. First Man brings home a deer. First Woman eats, wipes her hands on her dress, and says, “E’yéhe si-tsod”: “Thanks, my vagina.” He asks whether it was her vagina that killed the deer. “Yes,” she says; “if it were not for that, you would not have killed the deer. If it were not for that, you lazy men would do nothing. It is that which does all the work” (p. 218, n. 32). First Man takes all the men across the river, and the hermaphrodites go with them carrying the grinding-stones. For four years the sexes live apart. The women starve, and many drown trying to swim over. During the separation, Matthews writes, “both the men and the women were guilty of shameful practices, which the story-tellers very particularly describe”, and from “the transgressions of the women” the monsters were born that later “nearly annihilated the human race” (n. 33). After the reunion and a flood, the people climb a reed into this world. Here one of the hermaphrodite twins “ceased to breathe”. Two men look down the hole of emergence and see her “seated by the side of the river, in the fourth world, combing her hair” (p. 78). It is the first death.

At Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico the teacher is called Thought Woman. Two sisters grow up underground in the dark, nameless: “they could only feel each other”. The spirit Tsichtinako feeds them, “and as they grew they learned their language from Tsichtinako”. Up in the light, “Iatiku’s mind was slowed up while Nautsiti’s mind was made fast”, and then “the two sisters were now thinking selfish thoughts”. A snake, Pishuni, “that had come to life of itself”, finds the quick one: “Why are you lonely and unhappy? … If you bore someone like yourself, you would no longer be lonely. Tsichtinako wants to hold back this happiness from you.” Nautsiti lies on her back and conceives by the rain. The teacher leaves them: “From now on, you will do as you see fit.” Pishuni comes back as the first disease, “for the people had never known sickness before”; then comes “the first mention of death”, and then the first war (Stirling 1942, pp. 1–12, 28, 47, 53). The teller was a Koshari clown and a Catholic, and his serpent speaks with Eden’s voice.

The Hopi of Arizona put the women at the turn. In the text Cushing took down at Oraibi in 1883, the trouble in the third cave-world is this: “Women became crazed. They neglected all things for the dance. They even forgot their babes. Wives became mixed with wives so that husbands knew not their own from others … fathers became mothers to the neglected little ones” (Cushing 1923, p. 165). So the people climb. In the versions H. R. Voth collected, Spider Woman leads them. Below, they had one speech. “As soon as they emerged, the Mocking-bird assigned them their places and gave them their languages. To one he would say: ‘You shall be a Hopi, and that language you shall speak.’ To another: ‘You shall be a Navaho’” (Voth 1905, p. 11). The one language is lost at the door of this world, as at Babel and at Tulan, and death is found waiting just past the door. The long view of these stories, and the women who lead them, is in Emergence Myths, Female Agency, and Deep Time.

Did the friars bring the ages to America? #

Every American text here was written down after 1492, most of them by or for Christians. What matters is what no friar carried. Wooden people ground by their own grinding-stones, hermaphrodite twins and First Woman’s thanks are in no catechism. Guaman Poma was a Christian with a breviary, and twin births and eaten hearts are not in it. Where the Bible did arrive, as with Acoma’s Pishuni, it was hung on a frame already there: two sisters taught to think in the dark.

Does Africa tell the ages? #

It does, and its fullest tellings make speech the thing that comes in stages.

In October 1946 the blind hunter Ogotemmêli, a Dogon elder of the Bandiagara cliffs in Mali, spent thirty-three days teaching the French ethnographer Marcel Griaule. His history of the world is a history of three Words (Dieu d’eau, 1948; page numbers from the Fayard reprint; my translations).⁴ At the start the Nommo, the water spirit, looks down:

«Le Nommo, du haut du ciel, vit sa mère, la Terre, nue et sans parole»
“From the height of the sky the Nommo saw his mother, the Earth, naked and without speech” (p. 26)

He clothes her in a skirt of fibres, and the fibres are the first Word, “the crudest of all time”. So the first speech in the world is given to a woman, and it is her clothing. Her son the jackal wants it. He commits incest with his mother, and «L’inceste fut de grande conséquence : il donna d’abord la parole au Chacal … il fut la cause de l’apparition du sang menstruel», “The incest had great consequence: first it gave speech to the Jackal … it was the cause of the appearance of menstrual blood” (pp. 27–28). God turns away from his wife, the Earth.

The eight ancestors of mankind belong to that first world: «les hommes ne connaissaient pas la mort … chacun était à la fois mâle et femelle», “men did not know death … each was at once male and female” (pp. 30–31). The seventh of them receives the second Word, “clearer than the first” and “meant for all men”, and speaks it through weaving; the Dogon word for cloth, Ogotemmêli says, means “it is the word”. This seventh ancestor is the Master of the Word. When the order of the ancestors is broken he comes down among men “in the form of a great serpent”, and the smith tells them to kill the serpent and eat its body (pp. 50–53). From that meal comes the third Word, “clear and perfect”, carried by the drum. And then: «après la révélation de la troisième parole et l’organisation moderne du monde, la mort était apparue. Jusqu’à ce moment les hommes étaient immortels», “after the revelation of the third word and the modern organisation of the world, death had appeared. Until then men were immortal” (pp. 127–128).

Every station is there: a first world naked and without speech, deathless beings neither male nor female, a woman who has the Word first, incest and the first menstrual blood at the passage, a serpent who is the Master of the Word, and death arriving when speech is complete. Ogotemmêli counts speech upward and life downward in one story.

The Bambara, the Dogon’s neighbours in Mali, tell it in three creations, as Dominique Zahan set out their initiatory teaching. The first is a beginning made in secret, “without a voice”. Its sign is a woman, Mousso Koroni, “the first to possess a Soul”, and its men are “at that time immortal”. The second belongs to Faro, lord of water, whose Word is “a sort of language in which the words are not separated”. In the third the heavenly smith cuts speech into words, and now “men assert themselves as individuals” (Zahan 1974). Speech comes voiceless, then unbroken, then articulate, and the individual arrives with the last.

The Kuba (Bushongo) of the Kasai in the Democratic Republic of the Congo keep their past as a list of kings and what each one began. Emil Torday took it down in 1907–09. In the earliest reigns palm wine “was drawn from a lake where it was prepared for everyone’s use”. Under the fourth king, Woto (Torday and Joyce 1910, pp. 21–22; my translation):

«Jusqu’à présent la généralité de l’espèce humaine n’avait pas de nom personnel; mais Woto décida … que chaque individu serait distingué par un nom … ce fut également lui qui introduisit l’usage de la circoncision.»
“Until then mankind in general had no personal name; but Woto decided … that each individual should be distinguished by a name … it was also he who brought in circumcision.”

On the same page Woto sees his sister, “the nameless daughter of Lobamba”, has sex with her and gets a son on her, and “their shame was a secret for some time”. Later reigns bring bark-cloth (“before this time no clothes were worn”) and the end of an old rule under which “both sexes had an equal right to sovereignty” (p. 23). A people without personal names is the first age said as plainly as it can be said. The names arrive with the initiation knife, incest and shame.

The Lugbara of north-west Uganda and the Congo set a line of first beings before society who did everything backwards: they were “at first ignorant of sexual intercourse … they committed incest; they ate their own children”. The hero after them, Dribidu, “the hairy one”, ate his children too, until a leper woman gave him fire to cook his meat and he paid the first bridewealth for her (Middleton 1973). Iran’s first parents ate their young too.

The Hadza, foragers of Lake Eyasi in Tanzania, count four epochs by their peoples: hairy giants who “never used fire” and ate their meat raw; hairless giants with fire, who began the dance to the sacred being epeme; smaller people with bows and huts; and the people of today (Ndagala and Zengu 1989, pp. 51–56). It is an ascent with no golden age behind it.

Most of Africa south of the Sahara tells the loss as one break. The sky was low and God lived within reach. Then a woman pounding grain struck him with her pestle (the Ashanti of Ghana), or a woman’s long hoe hit the sky and a rope between heaven and earth was cut (the Dinka of South Sudan), and God went up and away, and death came. Those stories and their sources are in God Withdrew. They keep the hinge of the sequence, the woman grinding food at the moment the old order ends, which is where Xmucané and Cihuacoatl stand in Mesoamerica. Where Africa tells the passage at length, it tells it as the Word, the soul and the name.

Is the present always the worst age? #

No. Two blocks of tradition point firmly in opposite directions, and the best tellers count both. Michael Witzel saw the two blocks: “The Greek view is one of pessimism, of declining quality of the Four Ages, while the Pueblo and Mesoamerican one supposes the increasing quality” (Witzel 2012, p. 68).

The metal ages go down. Hesiod, Aratus, Ovid, the Iranian tree, Daniel’s statue, the yugas, Laozi and the Liji all put the best first and the worst now. The Buddhists and Jains agree about the present and add that the wheel turns: after the sword-period people come out of hiding, embrace, and resolve to “abstain from taking life”, and their children live twenty years, then forty, then on up to eighty thousand.

The K’iche’ Maya and the Southwest go up. Mud, wood, maize. Insects, beast-clawed people, First Man and First Woman. In these stories the present people are the first real ones, and the earlier worlds are failed drafts and bad neighbourhoods.

They have company down the hemisphere. Outside the Southwest the serial worlds cluster in California, as Franz Boas saw in 1914 (Boas 1914, p. 390). The Pomo count five peoples, drowned, burned, frozen and blown away, each better taught than the last, and the Kalapuya of Oregon count four creations before “the new people arrive” (Gatschet 1881, pp. 60–63). The Yanomami of Brazil and Venezuela say, “When Omamë made us we were not the first”; the people before were “very ignorant” and “constantly changing form”, and they ate one another (Wilbert and Simoneau 1990, pp. 41–43).

Eurasia has its ascents. Lucretius, the Roman Epicurean, wrote the anti-Hesiod around 55 BCE. His first humans “dragged out their life in the roaming manner of wild beasts”, each “taught by himself to thrive and live for himself”. What changes them is a household: “when they got huts and skins and fire, and a woman joined to a man went with him into one home … and they saw children born of themselves, then first the human race began to soften” (De rerum natura 5.932–1018; my translation). The woman and the children are at his hinge too. The Tibetans, on the plateau now in China, descend from a monkey sunk in meditation and “a rock-ogress, burning with lust”, who bedevilled him for seven days. “As their father was a monkey, so their bodies were covered with hair, and as their mother was a rock-ogress, so they had tails … and, moreover, they knew how to speak.” Fed on grain, “they were racked with pain, and all the hair on their bodies fell off … and their tails shriveled up and disappeared”. Then they sow: “This is the first labor in the land” (Rockhill 1891, pp. 356–360).

America has its declines. The Yucatec Maya, to the north of the K’iche’, count four periods downward. The first people were dwarfs who built the ruins “in darkness before there was any sun” and were fed down a living rope from the sky, “and in the middle flowed blood … For some reason this rope was cut, the blood flowed out, and the rope vanished forever” (Tozzer 1907, p. 153). The Dinka of South Sudan tell of a rope strikingly close to it. At the village of Chan Kom in the 1930s the people said that in the Good Times “the corn cooked itself. No one was wicked, and all were wise”, and that now man’s “mind is dark” (Redfield and Villa Rojas 1934, p. 12). That is the Popol Vuh’s misted mirror told as a village memory, with the sign reversed. The Huarochirí dead stop coming back.

Guaman Poma counts both. His Indians improve in every art, from leaves to woven cloth, from caves to walled towns, from digging sticks to terraces and worked gold. And they fall in every other way. The first age “did not die and did not kill”. The third “set boundary-stones” on their lands and raised kings, and the many tongues of Peru appeared because “they twisted the words” (“torcieron las palabras”, p. 61). The fourth is the heart-eating Auca runa.

The direction of an ages story follows what its teller counts. Count ease, innocence, long life and peace, and the line runs down. Count seeing, speaking, remembering and skill, and it runs up. The scheme that spread across Eurasia on its ladder of metals counts the first set, and Mesoamerican makers and Southwestern emergence count the second, and those are the two great blocks. Between them the best tellers count both. The Cheyenne mind is awakened while the Cheyenne world is flooded twice. Ogotemmêli counts speech upward and life downward. The Book of Lord Shang sets “the people stupid” against “the age knowing” in one line. Show Hesiod the wooden people and he would see ease, plenty and death like sleep. Show the K’iche’ his golden race and they would see dolls with no heart who forgot their maker. Both are describing a humanity that walks and talks and has no one home. Each keeps a trace of the other’s view. Hesiod grants the Iron race “some good mingled with their evils” (179). On the other side, the Popol Vuh closes its triumph with the clouded mirror, and the Navajo and Hopi find death at the top of the reed.

What do the ages remember? #

The Eve Theory says this happened. There was a time when humans spoke, made things and lived in bands, and had no inner “I” that watched the rest. The “I” was found, by women first. It was passed on by teaching, above all in initiation, at great cost to the people it was done to. It spread, and those who had it earliest and youngest had the advantage. The serpent is the old sign of that knowledge.

Each of the four stations is on the lists.

The time before is the first age, with the self’s shadows missing: no grief, no shame, no hoard, no fear of the snake, no private meaning. Plato adds “no memory of the past”. Dilmun has no one who says “I am”. The Kuba have no names. The Zhuangzi adds that “though men had knowing, they had no use for it”. The Popol Vuh says it of the wooden people in a different tone: no heart and no memory of the maker. The one language belongs here. Speech among beings with no private minds is one speech in the sense that matters: nothing is hidden behind it. Once each speaker has an inside, words can mean one thing to me and another to you. Enki “put contention into it” (Kramer), and the builders at Babel “may not understand one another’s speech” (Genesis 11:7). Why grammar itself had to do this is the subject of The Snake and the Syntax Tree.

The taste is the discovery. In India it is the savour of the earth, in Israel a fruit, in Guatemala nine drinks of ground maize, in Mexico chewed maize put on our lips. Some tellers skip the food and name the thing: dormant minds awakened, a sleepless mind, a slaughtered god’s ṭēmu, óðr given, remembrance and then consciousness, “mine-making”, a personal name. A woman is first: in Genesis, in Hesiod’s Pandora, in the mothers who were known when fathers were not, in the giant maidens, Laʻilaʻi and Mousso Koroni, in the Earth who had the first Word, in Xmucané and Cihuacoatl, and in First Woman’s thanks to her vagina. The serpent stands at the hinge as teacher, founder or food: the serpent of Eden, snake-bodied Fuxi fixing the human way, the Acoma serpent who sells a child as the cure for loneliness, the Dogon Master of the Word eaten as a snake, the Plumed Serpent among the K’iche’ makers, the Feathered Serpent and Snake Woman making the people of the Fifth Sun. And where the snake’s venom has a history, in Virgil and Josephus, it dates from this moment.

The botched childhood is the teaching. Hesiod’s century at the mother’s knee and Lagash’s century in nappies, Shun’s five-month talker and the Buddhist five-year-old bride are each a way of saying that the self was put into children from outside, on a schedule that kept moving earlier, and that it went badly at first. Mashya and Mashyoi eat their first two.

The cost is the short life and the age of war. Death arrives as soon as there is someone to die. Private minds bring private fields and then weapons.

The direction of the story is where the teller stands. The Daoist looks back at the unsmiling infant and wants to be him again. The K’iche’ daykeeper looks back at the wooden people and thanks the makers for a heart. Ogotemmêli and the Cheyenne do both in one breath. Eurasia carried its version from the Aegean to the Ganges on a ladder of metals. The Americas kept theirs on a ladder of worlds.

All of them remember three things. There were once people who were not yet persons. Becoming persons was done to us, by our mothers and our teachers. And it has been paid for ever since, in grief, in short lives and in war. The K’iche’ put the price in one image: the first true people saw everything, far and near, until the Heart of Heaven breathed on their eyes and they misted like a mirror. The dogs of the wooden people had asked the question first. “How was it that you did not think of yourselves?” Every age since has.

Sources #

Primary texts

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Studies

• West, M. L. The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997, pp. 312–319.
• Boas, Franz. “Mythology and Folk-Tales of the North American Indians.” Journal of American Folk-Lore 27 (1914): 374–410.
• Berezkin, Yuri E., and Evgeny N. Duvakin. Thematic Classification and Distribution of Folklore-Mythological Motifs by Areas: Analytical Catalogue. Motifs I75, H39, E36.
• Witzel, E. J. Michael. The Origins of the World’s Mythologies. Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 68.
• Kramer, Samuel Noah. “The ‘Babel of Tongues’: A Sumerian Version.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 88(1) (1968): 108–111.
• van Beek, Walter E. A. “Dogon Restudied: A Field Evaluation of the Work of Marcel Griaule.” Current Anthropology 32(2) (1991): 139–167.