SECTION IX. THE COPPER AGE.
The Divine Cycle of time can be likened to a fruit. Like the ripening and rottening of a fruit, the Divine Cycle develops and degenerates into rottenness. The Golden Age is its ripening stage. At the end of that age, it is fully ripe. The Silver Age is its overripe stage. The Copper Age marks the stage of its rottenness and the Iron Age is its fully rotten stage. At the end of the Iron Age, it is reduced to its seed out of which springs the sprout of the Golden Age. And during the junction period of the Golden Age, covering 144,000 human years, the sprout grows into a flowering tree which bears fruit with the commencement of the Golden Age proper.
The length of the Copper Age is 2,000 divine years, equal to 720,000 human years, while its Twilight periods are 72,000 years each. Men in this age are seven cubits or ten and a half feet high. Virtue lives in it in two quarters, the other two being filled by vice. Vitality is rooted in the blood; men live as long as there is blood in their body. Gold and silver leaving become dearer the metal generally used in making household utensils is copper which is found abundantly, whence the age derives its name. The intensity of accelerated Rāja within Nature helps the assertion of Tama in all her manifest phases, although Sattwa still has some influence. The trees become less in height, less fruitful and the fruits less sweet; crops less abundant despite the best efforts of cultivation. Cows give less milk than in the Silver Age, while wild animals become more ferocious. Most animals can speak in the Silver Age, but now only some of them, the higher ones, are blessed with that power during the major portion of it.
People in the Copper Age become more and more outward-looking generally, especially the Sudras, some of whom having become filled with dense Tama, revolt against all laws and discipline and turn into thieves and robbers. These latter are expelled from their caste and banished out of civilized centres of population the world over by the kings. They are called by the common name of robbers and specific names of Yavans and Mlechhas which means men who are wild, barbarous and unclean by nature and habits. These Yavans and Allechhas come into existence towards the end of the Silver Age and rapidly increase in number during the Dwāpar (Copper Age), towards the end of which they form the majority of the world's population and are known by different names according to the localities of their habitation, different shades of their dark attributes, and the callings they pursue: Yavan, Kirāt (hunters), Gāndhār, Cheen (Chinese), Shabar, Barbar (barbarian), Shak, Tungār, Kanka, Palhab, Ramat and Kambhoj. The kings in the Copper Age have a hard time to protect their subjects and their territories from the depredations of these wild characters and robbers. The king's first duty is to preserve peace in his kingdom so that his subjects may not be disturbed in the performance of their religious duties, may apply themselves to the study of the Veda and the contemplation of the Supreme Deity and tread the path of virtue without annoyance.
The king's chief duty being to insure the material welfare of his subjects with the sole view of helping their spiritual welfare, the punishment for the infringement of caste and religious rules is made severe and swiftly administered. At the same time the spirit of the times is taken into consideration and many rigid rules are relaxed and minor faults are pardoned. The four castes are subdivided into sub-castes according to the different callings that the Vaishyas and Sudras show preference in their inclinations to follow. Those who take to agriculture are classed as cultivators, those who rear cattle and sell milk and butter are called milkmen, while those who take to trade and commerce are called traders and merchants and so on. All these form into different sub-castes under the general caste of Vaishya. Similarly the Sudras are subdivided according to their respective callings; viz., blacksmiths, potters, carpenters, masons, etc., all under the general caste of Sudra. The chief object of these sub-castes is to save human society from disintegration as much as possible, to preserve the masses of men in as large coherent sections as practicable linked to one another through spiritual, moral and material relations.
Another, and almost equally important, object of the caste and sub-caste systems in the Copper Age is to conserve the heredity of their different intellectualities, talents, healthy characteristics, and instincts. This becomes all the more necessary owing to the fact that it is in the Dwāpar Yuga that husbands and wives begin to have carnal relations. During the Golden Age and the greater portion of the Silver Age all men and women are, what Christians call, virgin-born. The fuss that is made about this immaculate conception succeeds only to excite a smile of pity in the Shastra-enlightened Hindoo—a smile of pity for the ignorance of the facts in the past history of the human race of which they seem to know so little and care less to know more. This fact about the Golden and Silver Ages, this generally prevailing immaculate child-conception, ought to open their eyes. If they require any authority for this statement, I refer them to the study of the Shānti Parva of the Mahābhārata.
The Yoga-power of the Golden Age men draw disembodied souls from the Bhuba sphere and spiritual souls from higher spheres to enter into a woman's womb and be born on the earth plane. The will-force of these men supplies these incoming souls with the material of a physical body. In the Silver Age the higher illuminated Brāhmans and Saints can bring about conception in the same way, while others bring it about by making the women eat magnetized "charoo," which not only draws these spirits to the womb, but supplies the material for the physical body. In the Copper Age, however, the decrease of spirituality takes away the power, and so the material of the physical body has to be supplied by the physical vigor of the father and the blood of the mother to enable a disembodied spirit to enter the womb and grow into a child.
This degenerated process of procreation coming into vogue in the Copper Age renders it necessary to fuse higher magnetism into the lower castes, as well as to preserve the magnetism of each caste from deterioration. The means adapted for securing these ends is to allow the two higher castes men to marry girls of the lower castes, and towards the latter end of the Copper Age even Vaishyas are permitted to marry Sudra girls. The lower caste men, however, are never allowed to marry higher caste women, as it degenerates the breed, the seed being a far more potent factor in producing excellence of growth than the soil. The offsprings of these intermarriages form into castes distinct from those of their fathers and mothers, lower than their father's and higher than their mother's.
In order to preserve the magnetism and the hereditary talent and instincts from deteriorating, the castes are divided into sub-castes according to their general proclivities and professions of livelihood. Each sub-caste must marry within its own circle, and must eat food cooked by the hands of its own members. Heredity is now being believed in by the materealistic people of the modern world, and when that belief in heredity will have grown stronger in their minds, they will then take practical measures to preserve the good qualities of heredity from being spoilt by coming in contact with the bad magnetism of its lower traits.
This human magnetism is a subject which is worthy of the study of modern scientists. If they can find out what it is, ascertain its properties, power for good and evil, and how good magnetism can be conserved and transmitted and how bad magnetism can be purified, they will do humanity greater good than they have done by the discovery of steam and electricity, which, judged from the standpoint of the highest good, ought to be considered as very doubtful boons. Magnetism is not useful magnetism if it is purely physical. It is not worth preserving, it is injurious, and its contact ought to be avoided.
It is spiritual magnetism which is worth preserving. It is spirituality which is the medium which transmits good heredity from parent to progeny. The mind is the storehouse and battery of all human magnetism. The vibrations of the mind pervade every atom of the body and the mind's vibrations are generated by its principal and most powerful thoughts and sentiments. These vibrations are the essence of these thoughts and sentiments, and magnetism is that subtle essence impregnated with the potencies of the mind mixed with the subtle forces of the physical body.
Marrying, cooking and eating within the caste helps to conserve in the individual members thereof the spiritual and mental magnetism, generated by the performances of the religious duties and ceremonies and spiritual incantations which form the daily routine of household life enjoined by the Scriptures.
Thus wisdom, talent, traits, instincts are all ingrained in and transmitted through the blood from generation to generation of each caste. The caste is like a university, each home a school, and the instincts and talents, brought into being with the birth of each member, are the implanted principles of the knowledge of each profession of which it is the caste. A carpenter's caste is a guild for carpentry, a carpenter's home is a technical school for carpentry where the natural talent and love for the art are partly imbibed by the instincts of heredity and partly by observation which is the best system of training.
With these tendencies of material arts are born in the blood of the child the germs of the moral and spiritual culture of the parents. These germs shoot forth into healthy growth under the fostering care of the child's guardians, aided by the religious, social and domestic duties the growing child has to perform daily. The carpenter is as much a useful member of the four-caste society as the Brāhman. The householder Brāhman can no more do without a carpenter than a carpenter can do without a Brāhman. But the value of the Brāhman's help to the carpenter being more important to the development of his soul, which is the true aim and goal of earthly life, the obligations of the other castes to the Brāhman are greater and deeper than those of the Brāhman to the Sudra. The question may now be asked, has that carpenter no chance of becoming the equal of the Brāhman through spiritual culture? Yes and no. Yes, because Brāhmanhood is nobody's monopoly. Brāhmanhood is but a state of the human mind—the ensouled state of the human mind, and anybody who develops this state of mind, even though he be encased within a Pariah's flesh, lays legitimate claim to Brahmanhood. Only he must make that ensouled mental state perfect, only he must enter the fold of Brāhmanhood through the door of Nature, through the ingress of Rebirth. The maturity of a material or mental condition is best known to Nature. A mass of animal flesh, lying on the surface of Mother Earth, undergoes all the processes of disintegration and putrefaction, and when that disintegration is complete, Earth assimilates and absorbs it again; it becomes a part of her body, it becomes earth itself. What is true of material plane of Nature is true as well of her mental and spiritual planes. When a carpenter has developed full Brāhman consciousness, Nature opens to him wide the portals of the spiritual caste which had looked down upon him in his carpenter birth. Even in his carpenter birth, he does not go unrewarded. The case of the carpenter Rishi, called Suta, is a luminous instance in point. His spiritual culture was so great that the highest illuminated sages (Rishis) learned from him the lessons of the Purānas which he preached to them, sitting on a raised platform with their reverential permission. He was considered a knower of Brahm and so enjoyed the respect paid to the highest spiritual beings. A Sudra may not become a Brāhman, but may become through practical spiritual culture a higher being than a Brāhman even in his Sudra birth, and be born into a highly spiritual Brāhman family, by sheer dint of merit, the merit of developing spiritual consciousness—in the next birth. Similarly a Brāhman, born in the highest family of his clan, will, by developing Pariah qualities, be outclassed in his Brāhman birth and enter through the door of Nature into a Pariah family in a subsequent birth.
The above facts and truths are known to a child even of every caste. Even a child knows, either in the Copper Age or to-day among the four-caste people, that a caste-birth is dependent upon Karma (actions). A Sudra, therefore, takes the very fact of his birth as sufficient reason for his being placed in the lowest caste. He is reconciled to his fate, a fate with the potentialities of his actions in previous existences. And the little gloom of sadness that his lowly station of life casts upon his mind is illumined now and again by the silver lining of the consolation that it is in his power, if he so wills it, to be a high Brāhman in the next incarnation, if he succeeds in developing his higher soul-consciousness.
The Veda in the Copper Age has for the first time to be studied and its truths practised in two parts—the philosophical and the ceremonial parts. Men generally are degenerated so much in this age that they can no longer grasp the truths of the Upanishads without first purifying their body and through the purified body the mind. The Vedas are divided into Upanishads (Eternal Spiritual Truths) and the Mantras (incantations, hymns and ceremonies, the practice of which cleanses the impurities of the mind and body). In the Dwāpar Yuga, therefore, the performance of the ceremonials of the Veda is much in vogue. When the body and mind are purified, they are made fit for grasping the meanings of the higher philosophy of life and become receptive to the influences of the subtlest spiritual vibrations.