PART
2 – Ch.XIV.8
(KION OURANOU. The Sky Column on
in
the country of the Hyperboreans)
XIV. 8. The Sky Column from the Carpathians as symbol of immortality
for the
Pelasgians of
We find
the Sky Column from the Carpathians represented on two antique monuments of
We
shall talk here about both these relics of great importance for the history of
the Sky Column from the ancient country of the Hyperboreans.
The
decoration of the vase from
It
shows in the middle an enormous pillar of rock, whose forms are entirely identical
with the W-NW face of the column from
On the
right side of this rock is figured an old man with a white beard, clothed with
a mantle and holding in his left hand the mace of the messenger. It is the god Hermes (Mercury), who leads Prometheus
to be chained on the sky column. Near Hermes is seen the titan Prometheus, tired and shattered,
sitting on a stone. He holds in his left hand an object which looks like the
half split stalk of a plant (ferula). Hermes stretches out his right hand over the
head of Prometheus and pronounces a sacred formula. In protest Prometheus
covers his head with his right hand. On the left side of the rock is seen a
woman dressed with a tunic and a hemi-diploidion. She is the goddess Themis, the personification of legal
order. With her right hand she makes an imperative gesture towards Vulcan, the master smith, showing him
the rock, while with her left hand she touches the belts which move the bellows
of the smithy. By this she tells Vulcan what Jove had ordered, to chain and
nail on this rock the astute Prometheus. (According to Eschyl – Prom. V. 12 – the giant Cratos / Power, accompanied by his sister Bia / Violence, symbolic personalities of theogony, lead Prometheus
to the place of his ordeal, and Cratos communicates Jove’s order to Vulcan).
Vulcan,
understanding the order he is receiving, turns to go to his smithy, making with
his left hand a sign of immediate obedience [1].
[1. Some have believed that this
scene represents a subject from the Lemnian mysteries. Lenormant (Elite des monuments ceramographiques,
The
artist had wanted to express at the same time that this scene took place on the
peak of a high mountain from the north region. So he drew an undulated line of
white dots at about half the height of the figures, which meant the height of
the snow covering the top of this mountain.
From a
historical point of view, the decoration from the Sicilian vase is important
because the rock figured on it presents in everything the contours of the W-NW
face of the sky column from the Carpathians.
But
this painting brings to light at the same time another big, but obscure matter
of the sacred geography of the Pelasgian epoch.
According
to Homer (Iliad, XVIII. v. 140
seqq), the smithy of Vulcan was on ancient
On the
vase from
We have
here therefore an important document from the Italo-Greek antiquity, a document
which gives us an absolute certitude that the prehistoric Olympus of the theogony, the Olympus from the ends of the earth, according to Hesiod, was that
mountain on which were the legendary columns of the sky, Atlas from the country of the Hyperboreans, Olympus atlantiacus at Calpurnius
(IV. v. 83), today Omul Peak of Bucegi Mountains, near the Lower Istru,
where there are, apart from the columns,
the other monuments famous in the history of theogony, the figure of Zeus
aigiochos and the cyclopean altars.
As I
have already mentioned, three gigantic columns rise on this majestic peak of
the Carpathians. Each of these columns had represented in antiquity a
particular figure, each had a certain symbolic meaning.
These
three columns, important monuments consecrated to the principal divinity of the
Sky even during the times predating Troy, Mycenae, Tirynth and Thebes of Egypt,
played an important role also in the religious beliefs of the Pelasgians of Sicily.
The three columns of the Sky as religious symbol
on a funerary stela from Lilybeu in
(From Perrot et Chipiez,
Phenicie – Cypre, p.309).
On a funerary
stela discovered recently on the territory of the ancient town Lilybeu in Sicily (today the town
Marsala), we see three columns represented on the upper part, the middle one
higher, the side ones shorter, and above these columns there is a triangle and
a celestial symbol. The town Lilybeu, as Diodorus
Siculus tells us (lib. XXII. 10. 4), had been founded by the Carthagenese,
who after the war with Dionysius, the tyrant of
These
three columns figured on the upper part of the stela from Lilybeu represent the
three columns of the sky from the Theogony of Hesiod (v. 522), called cardines
mundi by the Roman authors, on which the sky was supported in the country
of the Hyperboreans (Pliny, H. N.
lib. IV. 26. 11; lib. II. c. 64). They are the three columns from the “
The three Columns of the Sky on
seen in a group.
(From a photograph by L. Adler,
The
Pelasgians of Sicily had, as we see, exactly as the Pelasgians of Greece and
It was
the doctrine of the Hyperboreans.
It was
the same belief, as expressed in the tablets sent by them to
This
same belief is expressed also by Hesiod
when he says that the souls of the heroes fallen in the wars of
The
Pelasgians of Sicily, called also Sicani
and Siculi, appear in Greek and
Roman traditions as the earliest inhabitants of
The
migration of these Pelasgians to
An
ancient town on the north
Livy calls them (Rer. Rom. lib. XXVI. c.
40) foreigners and adventurers, brought together from all the corners of the
world, men who deserved death, who lived from kidnapping and robbery, so much
so that the consul M. Valerius Laevin was forced in 210bc to transport 4000
inhabitants of Agathyrson to
Near
the famous Agathyrson from the north
And on
the south
Finally,
there still existed a prehistoric tradition about a migration from the lower
Istru to this island of the
The
titan Typhon, defeated by Jove, ran, as the Greek authors tell us, to