Over the course of subsequent history, peoples would move from North to South and from East to West – and not otherwise. This constitutes their course through history – a path of aging, degeneration and, at times faster, at times slower, of inexorable decline. This is how great conquests began, those that encompass immense regions, entire continents, and this is how great wars start, like the one that raged under the walls of Ilium – or was this only a shadow of some mythical war waged in the far deeper past, during the mythical age of the Earth? Perhaps at the beginning of time, “in illo tempore.”
They did not rush towards unknown and exotic lands, but towards their lost homelands, towards mythical lands of the beginning, towards the riches of the Golden Age. Towards primordial, Edenic abundance. Towards Paradise Lost, such as the biblical one, which we have not stopped searching for here on Earth even today.
One Islamic mystic, Suhrawardi, claimed that after death the soul returns to the homeland, for merciful Allah himself commanded this, and this would not be possible if he had not previously resided in it. This mythical homeland is to be found somewhere in the “spiritual East.” In order to find the strength for this, we must start from the spiritual West, the “Western wells of exile.”
The true journey, true adventures of the spirit, this Sheikh taught, start in the West. This is a place like a grave, a stockade of the burial-place. Arriving on the soil of an unknown continent, Christopher Columbus thought he had discovered the New Earth mentioned in the Apocalypse of St. John. The famous seafarer believed he was in the Gulf of Paria, and in its fresh currents had discovered the origin of the four rivers of the lost heavenly garden, Eden itself. “God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth, of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of St. John, and before that through the mouth of Isaiah,” Columbus proclaimed to King Juan, “and he showed me the place where to find it.” ...<<<Read More>>>...
