Golden Age. The notion that there was a perfect or ideal state in the past from which humankind has deviated or fallen away occurs in various forms in many societies. In the primitive religion of Australia, for instance, there seems to have been a belief in Alcheringa, a sort of Dream Time or Dawn Period when the earth was shaped by the gods. The concept of the Noble Savage, popular in some circles in the 18th c., relies on the presupposition of a Golden Age when all was peaceful and blissful and that something then occurred to destroy that happy state and plunge humanity into the misery in which it has ever since remained. For most of us the most familiar form of such a notion is that of the Garden of Eden as described in Genesis: an earthly paradise ruined by the transgression of Adam and Eve. The persistence of the idea throws light on certain aspects of the human psyche but has no known historical warrant. The concept of the Fall, so closely connected with the Golden Age notion, has nevertheless much theological importance. See Fall. Hesiod, in the 8th c. BCE, provided the basis for the notion of a golden age. He thought that human history was going through a series of ages, each one a deterioration of the one before it: the first had been a golden one, the second silver, and so on. Plato was influenced by the concept.

Geddes MacGregor, Dictionary of Religion and Philosophy, New York: Paragon House, 1989