Utopianism

I

These myths of the earliest stage of humankind have been referred to by various names, as the following examples will demonstrate:

• The Krita Yuga, the First and Perfect Age, as described in the Mahabharata, an old Hindu epic:

• The Golden Age as depicted in Ovid's Metamorphoses:

• Arcadia, e g in Sir Philip Sidney's prose romance The Old Arcadia (1580):

• The Judaeo-Christian Paradise (the Garden of Eden) as depicted in Genesis 2 (Authorized Version of 1611):

• The Land of Cokaygne:

II

All these myths also express some hope that the idyllic state of affairs they describe is not irretrievably and irrevocably lost to mankind, that it can be regained in some way or other.

One way would be to look for the earthly paradise -- for a place like Shangri-La, hidden in the Tibetan mountains and described by James Hilton in his Utopian novel Lost Horizon (1933). Such paradise on earth must be somewhere if only man were able to find it. Christopher Columbus followed directly in this tradition in his belief that he had found the Garden of Eden when, towards the end of the 15th century, he first encountered the New World and its peoples.

Another way of regaining the lost paradise (or Paradise Lost, as 17th century English poet John Milton calls it) would be to wait for the future, for the return of the Golden Age. According to Christian theology, man's Fall from Paradise, caused by man alone when he disobeyed God ("but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it"), has resulted in the wickedness of character that all human beings have been born with since ("Original Sin) and, consequently, in the mediocre world full of crime and vice we are still living in. But of course Christians have something to look forward to, a future that is radically different from, and much better than, the here and now. In other cultures and religions, there are similar beliefs.

See also: Millennialism