Ancient Civilizations of Greece and Crete: Through the Lens of the Yuga Cycles of Time

From the time we come together as a group on Saturday, April 22 and until we all say goodbye on Monday, May 5th, we’ll be entering the sacred space of pilgrimage. This is a time to let go and begin to attune ourselves to the places we will visit on our tour.

Each time we go on spiritual pilgrimage, we open ourselves to what Paramhansa Yogananda calls a state of grace. “Expect the miraculous”, Yogananda would say. If we truly live like this we will draw to us little miracles that affirm God’s presence in our lives. This state of grace becomes more magnetic when a group travels together for the express purpose of spiritual attunement.

We invite you to travel with us to Greece and Crete, enjoy the land and the people, and experience a deepening awareness of these sacred sites that will provide spiritually uplifted inspiration for the rest of your life.

Many of the places that we will be visiting have been inhabited with saintly people. We will also visit some places where pilgrims have experienced healings and personal transformation. We’ll hear stories of Greek mythology and we will also be attuning to the higher ages of The Yuga Cycles of Time. Together, perhaps we’ll piece together what may have occurred in some of these higher ages.

A short introduction for travelers to Greece and Crete on “The Yuga Cycles of Time”

By David (Byasa) Steinmetz
Ananda College Professor and co-author of “The Yugas: Keys to Understanding Our Hidden Past, Emerging Present and Future Enlightenment”

The places we visit on a pilgrimage tour are beautiful windows into a variety of cultures and times, but is there a larger picture, one that helps us see how it all fits together? Yes, there is. It is called the Yuga Cycles of Time. Based on ancient knowledge preserved in India and expounded by Swami Sri Yukteswar over a century ago, this model of the evolution of human consciousness provides a framework on which we can hang all sorts of things. The prevailing consciousness of a people finds enduring expression in their art and architecture, history, mythology, language, and literature. We can use these clues and our knowledge of the evolution of consciousness to help us attune to the people and times associated with each place that we visit.

For instance, when we visit Byzantine monasteries, realize that they come from a time, called Kali Yuga, when the general population had a lower, more material consciousness than most people do today, so these monastics isolated themselves to seek a higher consciousness. We can tune into the depth of devotion and strength of determination these people had to have to remove themselves so completely from society.

Most of the sites on this tour are from the age called Dwapara Yuga which preceded the Kali Yuga and followed an age of higher consciousness called the Treta Yuga. Today we are in the lowest part of an ascending Dwapara Yuga, so we might get a glimpse of our own future by tuning into cultures from the higher (i.e. earlier) part of the descending Dwapara Yuga. In general, that age corresponds to the Bronze Age of archaeology.

These considerations enrich our appreciation of the artifacts we see. For example, we might look at the famous Minoan fresco that depicts acrobats gracefully vaulting over the horns of a bull and compare that sport from the early Bronze Age (higher consciousness part of descending Dwapara) with the bloody bull fight spectacles left over from the lower consciousness of Kali Yuga.

(The above image is from a fresco in the Knossos Palace on Crete. Today some say these bull acrobats would never have been able to grab a bull by the horns, let alone participate with it, because it would have gored the participants to death. However, in the higher yugas of Treta and even Descending Dwapara Yuga, people would have had much higher consciousness and attunement with all life, including with animals, trees, plant forms, etc. In Treta Yuga, people and potentially animals communicated telepathically. Therefore, even in descending Treta and Dwapara Yuga, this higher consciousness would have allowed interactions like these that were more harmonious, perhaps even entertaining. We know Dwapara Yuga was the age of energy. The acrobat on the right hand side of the fresco appears to be using hands—possibly to move energy. In Minoan Art, men were depicted as red, women as white. As we descended down to the Dark Ages of Kali Yuga, both humans and animals lost their connection to higher consciousness and their awareness dropped significantly. Humans began killing and eating animals, animals fought to protect themselves. During the ages of higher consciousness, the bull was revered, even honored, much as they are today in places like India. – Nayaswami Nischala)

(A closer look at this ring from a tomb next to the Knossos Palace on Crete shows a Goddesses like figure descending from the heavens. In other rings found in tombs nearby, women appear to be invoking a Divine Mother figure from above, also showing attunement with the plant and animal kingdom. Some art historians claim the Minoan Civilization provided proof of the first matriarchy, where women were priestesses, lived harmoniously with all nature and animals, and was essentially a spiritual civilization. – Nayaswami Nischala)

Whenever we investigate the ancient civilizations of Greece, Anatolia, the Aegean Sea, and Egypt we encounter a blank wall around the time of transition from Treta Yuga to Dwapara Yuga c. 3100 BC. That is largely due the nature of Treta Yuga. It was a mental age, with little emphasis on building the physical structures that archaeologists love. The artifacts of the Treta will be found in the oral traditions and myths that have been handed down to us over the millennia. When those civilizations disappeared, much of those precious traditions were lost. India is the one culture that has a continuous history dating back even beyond the Treta Yuga to the highest of all ages, the Satya Yuga. We can get clues from Indian Vedic traditions and literature as to the history and consciousness of those times. The Vedic knowledge was spread westward toward the Aegean and beyond in ancient times and traces abound in mythology and placenames. Mostly what this tells is that the ancestors of the cultures we know have their roots deeper in antiquity at least back to the end of the last ice age c.12000 years ago.

Something catastrophic happened in the Eastern Mediterranean c.1200 BC. as the end of Dwapara approached. All the prominent civilizations in the region collapsed in a very short window of time. Greece was thrown into a Dark Age period, the Hittite empire of Anatolia (modern day Turkey) failed, the Mycenean civilization collapsed, many kingdoms were no longer. Those who survived, notably the Egyptians were much weakened. Many scholars have sought for a single cause, to no avail. It seems that a series of earthquakes, uprisings, migrations, climate changes, trade disruptions and more contributed to the collapse. If we are to look for a single overreaching cause it would be the change of consciousness between the Dwapara and Kali Yugas. Such a change has myriad manifestations in both human and natural realms. As the poison of dark Kali Yuga consciousness begins to mix with the dynamic energy of Dwapara the consequences are bound to be cataclysmic. A sobering thought is the realization that we are a few hundred years into the Dwapara Yuga now and seem to be approaching a similar flash point and collapse. The good news is that we are on the upward arc of the Yugas and can look forward to a few hundred years of peace and prosperity similar to the corresponding period of the Bronze age preceding its collapse.

The chart shows the relationship of our time to the ancient times associated with the sites visited on the tour. You will be visiting archeological sites mainly of three different cultures:

1. Mycenaean and Minoan – Bronze Age cultures of the mid Dwapara Yuga. The roots of these cultures are hidden in time, but probably extend from as far back as the Treta Yuga.
2. Ancient Greek and Roman – After the Bronze age collapse these cultures flourished in the descending Kali Yuga. Note that the Roman empire ended with the transition between the descending and ascending Kali Yugas.
3. Byzantine and Ottoman Empires – These were the dominant Western cultures during the ascending Kali Yuga but ended with the return of Dwapara Yuga.

After Kalambaka, we return to Athens and take a plane flight to Crete. We will be visiting the Knossos Palace. Knossos is a vast Bronze Age palace complex excavated by British archaeologist Arthur Evans in 1900. Evans’ excavations made this pre-Greek civilization that began in Treta Yuga known to the wider world. Evans is responsible for creating the name Minoan, which speaks to the mythology of King Minos, a legendary Cretan king who was the son of God Zeus and Europa the bull. King Minos’s myth tells of his son, the Minotaur, residing in a labyrinth where he kills any humans who enter. The Knossos palace design is typical of the Minoan sites, with many small rooms for commerce and storage accompanied by large spaces for outdoor communal religious activities. The palace complex resembles a labyrinth, which is one inspiration for the name Minoan.

Knossos Temple (above) in Crete also has a mythical connection to “the navel of the world” at Delphi. Myths that abound in Hindu, Egyptian and Greek mythology often included Gods with superhuman abilities, similar to what we might expect in Treta and possibly higher Dwapara Yuga. Sometimes these Gods were half animal, half human.

Minoan dolphin fresco in the Temple of Knossos. In Greek Mythology, there exists the Myth of the Delphinium, which relates to modern day Delphi. The myth is that Apollo travels about after his birth on Delos seeking a place for an oracle. He is advised by Telephus to choose Krisa, “below the glade of Parnassus,” which he does, and has a temple built, killing the serpent that guards the spring. Subsequently, some Cretans from Knossos sailed up on a mission to reconnoiter Pylos. Changing into a dolphin, Apollo cast himself on their boat’s deck. The Cretans did not dare to remove him, but sailed on. Apollo then guided the ship around Greece, ending back at Krisa, where the ship ran aground. Apollo then entered his shrine with the Cretans as its priests, who worshipped him as Delphineus, “of the dolphin.”

(Above: Olive groves on the island of Crete. The oldest tree in the world exists on Crete, “the olive tree of Vouves”, an olive tree that still produces olives and some say is at least 3,000 to 4,000 years old.)

As we visit other Minoan palace complexes such as the Phaistos and Agia Triada, we’ll uncover the consciousness, lifestyle, and possible religious beliefs of the Minoans. We’ll immerse ourselves in their art and architecture, including the symbolism of the bull, and ask what their culture can tell us about the descending spiritual consciousness of the Treta Yuga.

The Minoans worshipped trees, in addition to their gods and goddesses. We’ll visit the Monastery of Paliani, today a convent, where an ancient and venerable myrtle bush is tended to by the nuns. Pilgrims have been coming for hundreds of years, perhaps thousands, to make an offering to Divine Mother at this holy myrtle bush. The tree is believed to be endowed with powerful healing properties.

We’ll also visit two religious shrines of a very different nature: Zeus’ Cave and the Church of The Virgin of Kera. Zeus’ Cave is a deep well of amazing stalagmites where both the Minoan and later Greek ancient cultures worshipped a father god and enacted ritual initiations. In mythology, it is where Zeus was hidden by his mother to avoid being killed by his father, Cronos.

The Church of the Virgin of Kera (above) is a 13th century, Byzantine-era church dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Its interior is covered with the remnants of vibrant and arresting frescoes depicting Christ’s Resurrection and the life of St. Anna (mother of the Virgin Mary). The images have an inspiring realism and devotional quality.

Enjoy a hearty breakfast every day. At the breakfast buffets you can expect fresh breads and pastries, dry bread rusks, eggs prepared several ways, yogurts, cereals, cheeses, fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, olives, and both fresh and dried fruits. 

Greek mid-day meals are eaten considerably later than in the US, around 2 or 3 in the afternoon. A variety of vegan and vegetarian salads, spreads, and entrees will always be available no matter where we are in Greece. Food is always prepared fresh with local ingredients and local flavor combinations; this is a way of life in Greece. Dinners are much the same.