Today i want to talk to you about some ancient Hindu legends.Throughout history, there have been many suggestions with regards to time travel and these have dated as far back as the ancient times.
One of the ancient Hindu legends is the story of King Raivata ( or Kakudmi), mentioned in the Sanskrit Mahabharata.
The Story
King Raivata was descendent of the Sun Dynasty. He is the elder son of the one hundred sons of King Revata.
He was a good king, a remarkable leader, and father of a beautiful daughter, Princess Revati.
His daughter was so beautiful and skilled that when the time for her to choose a husband came, it was a difficult choice and in her father’s eyes nobody was good enough.
The journey
King Kakudmi, although he was human, had the power to travel to the ‘creator’ Lord, Brahma. Looking to find the right man for his daughter, he decides to take her and go to ask for Brahma’s advice.
So, as the story says, he went to the Creator God. When he arrives there, Brahma is listening to a musical performance, so Kakudmi decides to wait. In a short time, he is then welcomed before the God Brahma.
He explains what his worry is and presents a short list of men as possibilities as future husbands for his daughter.
Brahma laughed and told him that the list is useless because as long he is with him, many thousands of years are passing on earth (108 yugas) and nobody he knows will be alive that he knew upon his return.
Shocked and scared King Kakudmi doesn’t know what to do, but Brahma gives him a solution. He says that Vishnu (the supreme god, the preserver- in Hinduism) was reincarnated on Earth in the forms of Krishna and Balarama.
He recommends Balarama as a good husband for Princess Revati.
They return to Earth and everything was like the God had said. Everything was completely changed. He is shocked how much mankind itself has changed.
He mentions that men are weaker, shorter, have a lower level of intelligence and lower level of development in a spiritual and cultural way. The wedding takes place however and the beautiful Princess marries Balarama.
After the wedding, King Raivata travels north to the Himalayas to live in peace and to engage in meditation until his final days.
The Mahabharata
The Mahabharata was written around 700 BC and mentions, this time travel incident, but more frequently the time travel concept. Multiple universes are also mentioned in Vedas and other Purana manuscripts.
It is said that what scientists have discovered from the nineteenth century until today was a well-known tale for the Hindus..
After much research, Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and Dr. Michio Kaku have found out that their findings have already been written a long time before in the Hindu scriptures.
The multiple universe theory is mentioned in Patma Purana, Vishnu Purana, Atherva Veda and other Sanskrit.
One of the First Time Travel Stories
The legend of King Raivata is one of the very first original time travel stories.
An interesting thing that we can observe here is that the Hindus we aware of time relativity. They had the same idea about time and space as our scientists have now and as Einstein has in his theory of relativity.
So, looking at this story we can assume that the King and his daughter were one of the first time travelers?
I know this is just a myth or some may say even a story, but I think in every story is an element of truth.
One more legend
The legend of King Muchukunda,son of King Mandhata has also elements of time travel and i would like to share his story with you. In a battle between dieties and demons, demons were wining so dieties asked King Muchukunda for help . He agrees and he was fighting demons for a very long time, untilanother comander, able to continue the fight, was found.When dieties found Kartikeya, son of Lord Shiva, They told King Muchukunda that they are greatful for his fight and sacrifices, familily life , time. they explain him that one year in heaven equals three hundreded years on earth and his family and everything he knew was gone. they asked him how can they thank him for his help. being very tired,not having the time to sleep all this time he just asked to be left to sleep and anyone who dare to disturb his sleep to e burnet to ashes.Indra, the King of dieties accepted and send his on earth ,in a cave to just sleepwithout being disturbed.
Many years later, another worior king,Kalayavan, brave and undefeted but also cruel and with no merci for his people finds out that the only one who could win him in a battle would be Krisna. Kalayavan decide to attack Krisna in M.athura ,his kingdom. Following krisna, kalayavan enters the cave where Muchukunda was sleeping . As we know who dared to wake Muchukunda up shall be ashes. Kalayavan entering in the cave , was very dark and he though Muchukunda was krisna.and he attacs him. unfortunatelly when muchukunda open his eyes,kalayavan is burnt imediatwely. by his gaze. until this days the river which flows near that cave is called Muchukunda River.
What do you think? Have you any knowledge of these times?
I really think that to create a story about something like this something must have happened and something must have inspired it.
I would like to know your thoughts about it, so leave a comment below and I will get back to you.
Thank you for reading.
Cristina
Click Below For Further Reading
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- Time Travel Novels
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- Time Travel Legends
I would love to hear from all of you who are also interested in this subject. Movies? Science? Book? Literature?
Whatever your interest is, I would love to meet you.
Time travel in the ancient stories! How fascinating and I’ve also heard that there is evidence of the knowledge of various crafts as well.
I like the part where King Kakudmi is shocked by mankind of the future, and sure sounds like the times we live in today.
Thanks for sharing this, I love to read about ancient myths such as these and I think that there is a kernel of truth to every myth. Or it’s ancient science fiction…
thank you very much for reeding and more stories in my next articles
This is new for me. Incredible. I’ve read the Bhagavad Gita a few times but never got to the Mahabharata. I should find me a copy of that and read it because this is a very nice surprise.
🙂 you should is very interesting:) I hope a gave a small piece:)
This is interesting. You’d think that time travel is a modern concept, only to find out that it dates back to ancient times (based on stories). I find it fascinating coz I remember that we touched a bit of Mahabharata and Ramayana when I was still in high school (I think), but I don’t remember any discussion on time travel. Thanks for bringing this up!
it is interesting to see how advanced were the old civilizations 🙂 I am glad that you like it and I will bring more, as the site develop 🙂 thank you
Hei! I’ve been interested in learning ancient Hindu legends! So thank you for writing this article. How fascinating! Reading and researching old stories like this makes me really excited! It’s a mix from a bit of truth and a bit of myth. They always ring some familiar story for me. Thank you for sharing!
welcome :)) soon you will see Egyptian and other ancient legends if you are interested:) thanks for reading:)
Hi Cristina. You have an interesting post about time travel as I didn’t know that it was foreseen from Hindus back in 700 BC. I’ve always thought that time travel was a stuff of science fiction, and I hear media sources mentioning along the lines of “it is very possible that it can exist.” However, there are no hard evidence to support this claim.
Little did I know that the Hindus have “the same ideas of modern-day scientists and Einstein”. I find this to be quite intriguing as I keep thinking to myself, “how could this be?”
Anyhow, I like your article and I guess it’s safe to say that the King and his daughter were the first time travelers. I also had no knowledge of these times.
-Armand
thank you very much 🙂 as far as I know they are supposed to be some of the first travelers :))
I have a theory that explains it all.
Google OOPArts or Out Of Place Artifacts. Yale a look at some of them. We are talking about things like a copper pot (kettle) being found embedded in a vein of coal dozens of feet below the earth’s surface. Blocks of steel embedded in coal veins. Human skeletons trapped inside rocks discovered while tunneling, etc.
Worldwide literally hundreds of such artifacts have been found. All of the OOPArts impossibly old by human knowledge today. I mean some of them, based on where they were found have to be hundreds of thousand or millions, if not billions of years old. Science simply labels each one an anomaly not yet understood and forgets about them.
I strung them together and came up with a theory that both explains them and also the old Hindu tales.
Time travel is possible, In the future Time travel will replace jail as the fate of political dissidents or other undesirables. Perhaps killers too. Technically kinder than killing someone is just send them back to a time before humanity. I don’t know if they go back with implements to help them survive or not. Look at some of the OOPArts that have been found and decide for yourself. I supect some brought some stuff with them, but most, didn’t.
Imagine being a knowledgeable human punished or disposed of by being dumped a million years back. If you were very, very, lucky others were sent back with you. Maybe a dozen. So you land in the time of Triceratops and Raptors. Maybe you all last 10 years. Maybe 3 days.
Either way, it won’t matter. Time and probability have an inertia. Nothing you do 10 million years ago would make a gnat’s worth of difference today. The butterfly effect does exist, but over that kind of time period ,it would have to be a durn big butterfly. So there’s this cluster of marooned folks. They have no tools, but they have knowledge. When one finds copper ore someone makes a kettle for cooking. Then 100 years later they are all dead anyway and a million years later the found kettle becomes just another OOPArts.
Imagine this becomes a standard punishment that continues in lieu of outright execution for the next 10,000 years or so. Careful records are kept so no two groups of expelled folks get to meet and have at least 1,000 years between them, or go to the other side of the planet and never meet.
As long as someone in the far future is careful and no one gets closer than a half million years ago nothing goes wrong. But I believe something did.
I say this because within the past 10 years in multiple places anthropologists and paleontologists have found skeleton parts identified as unquestionably human, i.e., Homo sapien, but also over 200,000 years old.
They existed concurrently with Denisova hominins, Homo floresiensis and Homo neanderthalensis. You can, as some paleontologists are doing, ignore them utterly and decide they are just more OOPArt a future generation may wish to explain, or you can accept them as a major Whoops by someone sending exiled humans back in time.
Co-existing with our oldest ancestors they flourished and one by one eliminated the competing strains of the human. The old ones ,the American Indians of the West called them. Nephilim the Old Testament called them. To the Neanderthal they were indeed gods.
A colony of modern humans banding together. In a Moscow museum there is a skull of a primitive bison found in Siberia. It is at least 12,000 years old. In the center of a forehead is a 1-inch hole.
Researchers heard a rattle when it was found and from that hole,they shook out what they described as a large musket ball.
Just another OOPArt. Since the tales of ‘old ones’ is found on several continents I suspect more than one group co-existed during the human times before Mespotamia and Sumeria. Our legends come from them. I suspect in what we now call Greece their place was called Olympus. I don”t know where Brahma lived, but I am sure it was someplace similar.
thank you for your comment 🙂 Was actually a great one and I think you know very much related to the subject. Actually thank you for your helpful information:)
I am a big lover of time travel, certainly when it comes to the movies.
To be honest I know very little about it when it comes to the scientific side of things, so I like what you are doing here.
This post is very interesting and I am looking forward to seeing your site again. I have learned a lot from your site.
Many thanks
Chris
thank you for your reading and for sure i will try my best to bring the information as simple as possible that everybody can understand them and enjoy them 🙂 I hope you like this legends and there are more other ancient stories that will make you think if these civilisations had the knowledge of time travel:) Thanks for reading and hope you will enjoy the next articles as the site develop :))
Hi Cristina,
I really love your posts! It’s so entertaining and I like how even people a long time ago had stories of time travel. I remember I saw an article awhile back of several different photos that were taking a long time ago in black and white and there were pictures of people in the background who had things that weren’t even invented at the time the pictures were taken. Who knows if it’s real or if it’s just our imagination going wild and thinking an object is something else but it really is very interesting.
Great post! Keep them coming!
i think you are talking about the photos of the woman with the mobile phone in Chaplin’s film or another person with a laptop .AM I right? yes is amazing, and I don’t know even some writings from ancient Egypt shown one women, pharao wife with a laptop.So do you really believe there are time travelers?
I had no idea that time travel stories went back so far in history. It was interesting to learn that even back then they knew the theory of relativity even before it was made known by Einstein. It was quite a tale a king searching for a groom for his daughter and going to a god to find a suitable one only to find out that all the possibilities that he was questioning were already dead because time acts differently during time travel to speak to the gods. Luckily, the god was able to find a suitable groom, even though man had become less than what they were when the king and his princess had left on their quest. It was an interesting tale.
yes I know is just a legend but to write this legend must have been inspired from somewhere, from something real. what do you think? I think that they know something even if is not sure if they traveled in time, maybe they knew some time travelers from future….
This was an interesting article to read! Thank you for sharing it, as I had never heard this story and didn’t know ancient writings would have any mention of time travel!
yes it is amazing how many things we can learn from the ancient civilization and how advanced were some of them…Thanks fro reading 🙂 and if you look to my category Ancient legends you will find out more mysteries:) I am glad that you did enjoy it 🙂
Time travel is an interesting thought. There are many unexplained incidents – folk lore and tales that need to have some sort of truth to them – or at least I choose to believe that. Thanks for sharing.
Yes, to be honest, i believe the same.I think if different countries in different parts of the world believe in a similar myth and are the same story in different words and with different main characters….you start thinking that something is true. Must be. This is why I give a lot of trust to old stories…Thanks for reading my post and for sure are more here :0 have a look and tell me your opinion.
Hi, Cristina. What a great site! What a brilliant idea.
I, too have always been fascinated with the concept of Time Travel. Ever since watching Rod Taylor return to Weena after fighting off the Morlocks. I have seen almost all the movies that you mentioned, most of the stories, as you know, are about what we learn about ourselves going backward or forward because the actual concept is mind-boggling. I can only follow the traditional reasonings just so far with all their paradoxes……The paradoxes, ay, there’s the rub. As Captain Janeway in Voyager says, ” I hate discussing temporal anomalies. It makes my head hurt”. I agree.
I read Nahin’s book “Time Machines”… Fascinating but DENSE. I keep it on my shelf for reference but it’s not one I can curl up with very long.
I think the concept of Time as a circle resonates best with me. I like its simplicity. It always calls to mind the last few lines of The Incredible Shrinking Man that I watched as a kid. Not a Time Travel movie per se but as he continues to shrink with NO end in sight he says that he realizes that the Infinite and the Infinitesimal are actually the same thing. The unbelievably small and the unbelievable vast will eventually meet, like the closing of a gigantic circle.
This seems like as good an explanation of Time Travel ( among other things) as anything to me..
Nice concept you have here:) I didn’t see The Incredible Shrinking Man…Looks interesting…You really did watch all these movies? So you are a real time travel fan.I love the quote from Captain Janeway 🙂 . I also have a big collection of films and books home related to time travel. But what do you thing about time travel in Ancient civilizations?
Thank you for reading my post and stay close for updates.
Have a good day
Cristina
Hi Christina, As far as time travel in ancient civilizations, I think it is entirely possible, if not plausible. But I can only relate to it threw my circle theory.
I think it ties in with alternate realities and altered states of consciousness, rather than scientific technology, since it was practically non-existent.
In ancient cultures , the search for the meaning of life was sought internally. Hindu Fakirs, Mexican brujos, Native American shamans et al, all sought the connection to life and creation through these alternate or “non-ordinary” realities. This was how they accrued the same knowledge and theories that Einstein and Hawking marveled at, as your site points out.
They entered the circle through” inner space”. As science progressed and we reached out to the stars we now attempt to enter the circle through “outer space”; black holes, temporal rifts etc.
But physicists are also studying “inner space” by searching for ever-smaller particles progressing from grains of sand to atoms to electrons to protons, to neutrons, to quarks, to strings and so on, … smaller and smaller and smaller.
I think if time travel IS possible it will be achieved by closing the inner and outer circle and I think, perhaps, the ancient civilizations of which you write may have already achieved that by creating altered states of consciousness, some starting with drugs ( peyote and jimson weed ) like Carlos Castaneda and progressing to self-altering motivation. Others not needing the drugs at all to “let go” like many devout religious practitioners.
Somehow, I don’t see time travel being achieved through creating our beloved “time machines” but rather a better understanding of self. If we can survive that long. LOL
All this, of course, is just my crazy opinion. Anyway, I LOVE your site and I will be a regular visitor.( I promise my comments will be shorter)……Opa !!!!!………………..JohnWT.
Hello John.
I a, also sure the the ancient civilization believed in time travel, or maybe mastered it, based on parallel universes, alternative realities.was not about science. And ‘If’ was possible my opinion was that they could travel in time and space through natural portals, or through mediation,this kind of ways.
I think you are right, is more possible time travel to be achieved on a spiritual level, more than creating a time machine.
i love your point of view and the way you see things and Thank you for reading my article.
I am glad that you did enjoy visiting my site and stay close for updates.
Cristina
I think this is an example of a time dilation effect. Throughout all of history there have been lots of stories of people disappearing to another place and only a little time has passed but when they return to normal reality, hundreds of years have gone. Let’s say they go to another dimension where time is more slow and it is more fast in our world relatively speaking.
Yes, here I am with you. There are many alternative Universes as we know so..that s right….maybe they jump in one where the time goes slower than in ours. Thanks for visiting my site.. It is not the first time I see you around and I hope to see you soon. sorry for a very delate answer but….summer job:)