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C H A P T E R 3T H E M A N V A N T A R A
«At the close of night the creation of the three worlds commences again and continues for the livelong day of Brahma, which embraces the regimen of the fourteen Manus (…) At the close of day, the powerful manifestation of the universe merges in the darkness of night, and everything is silent.»
(Bhagavata Purana 3,11:23,28) I have previously alluded to the dramatic contrast between the Zodiacal Year of 25,920 common years, which for the hermetic tradition would match a human cycle of four ages, and the length of 4’320,000 years that the Hindu tradition in turn assigns to the cycle of four yugas – a length that might appear to be excessive and even arbitrary at first sight as, unlike the former, bears no relation with any known astronomical cycle. However, I have already suggested that the key to this issue would be to consider the latter symbolically, at least in connection with the human proper cycle – i.e. the one of the most recent humanity, or Homo Sapiens Sapiens. With this in mind, in the present chapter I will try to bring both ends together and establish the real length of the human cycle thus considered by approaching the problem from a new point of view: that of the so-called Manvantara, or “shift” of Manu (the “Father of Mankind”), an ancient Hindu measure of time that in spite of its being primarily septenary and having a length which, as derived from the texts, would be nearly 72 maha–yugas – which apparently increases the difficulty – actually is for the scholarly, with the exception of those who insist on taking these data literally, identical to what I have described as a single maha–yuga. In effect, the connection with the duration of the human cycle is obvious: the term Manvantara more precisely means “the shift to a new humanity,” in this case our humanity, apart from the fact that from the related word Manusya, which literally means “mankind”, derive the Latin humanitas, the German mann, the English man, etc., Man being, on its part, “Mankind” proper, the Universal Father, the Adam of the Nordic legends. On the other hand, it is interesting that in the world history there exist variations of the name, Manu, applied to founders of diverse cultures such as the Egyptian (Menes), the Cretan (Minos) and even the Inca, whose first monarch, Manco Capac, was the head of a lineage which extended over fourteen kings – that is, the same number of Manus appearing in a Brahma’s day. For the rest, it is important to note, with René Guénon,1 that a Manu is not a mythic, legendary or historical character but the “prototype of Man” for any cosmic cycle or state of existence to which he gives his Law. All this sheds light over one of the most impenetrable issues in relation to the cycle of four yugas, i.e. the apparent incongruence between a sequence of multiple human cycles, on the one hand, and a single human cycle on the other – a problem that was pending solution in the previous chapter. I can say now that as concerns at least our planet, it is not accurate to speak of a succession of human cycles but of a great “general” human cycle, that of the present humanity, which encompasses all other human cycles whatever their order or magnitude. Now, since we are assuming that this “general” human cycle – the length of which I intend now to determine – approximately represents the age of the present earthly humanity, and not that of its more or less remote ancestors, the best course will be to previously establish which astronomical cycles are likely to influence it. The problem identified in such terms, such cycles can only be the following: (I) The Earth’s eccentricity cycle, which results in ice age cycles that approximately occur every 100,000 years and are separated by interglacial periods of 10,000 years. This cycle, which appears to be the main framework within which the present mankind has evolved on Earth, is produced by the lengthening of our planet’s orbit around the sun, which changes every 90,000 to 100,000 years from a circular shape to a more elliptic one and back to start again. When the orbit is circular, the distribution of heat over the Earth during the year is uniform, and when it is more elliptic the Earth is closer to the sun and therefore warmer at some times of the year, the seasons accentuating on a hemisphere and waning on the other due to the modulating effect of the two cycles that are mentioned below.
(II) The cycle of precession of the equinoxes or Zodiacal Year, the length of which is usually rounded as 26,000 years but, as we know, has traditionally been calculated as 25,920 years. What makes this cycle particularly important as a most likely trigger of the human phenomenon on our planet is the fact that when a half of a wobbling period of the Earth’s axis has elapsed, i.e. after 13,000 years approximately, the seasons become reversed: for example, 10,000 years ago, when the Earth was at its farthest from the Sun, in the northern hemisphere it was summer and not winter, as is today (and vice versa).
(III) The cycle of variation of the Earth’s axis tilt in the course of approximately 40,000 years from a minimum of 21.5 degrees to a maximum 24.5 degrees, a variation that obviously accentuates or moderates the overall effect of the precessional period; currently the angle of tilt is 23.4 degrees and decreasing, thus attenuating the difference between summer and winter (see Figure 2).
Fig. 2 – The three great astronomical cycles
Acting coordinately, these three great astronomical cycles – named “Milancovitch cycles” after the Yugoslavian astronomer who first studied them – subject the Earth to a very complex astronomical pattern that has produced the ice fluctuations throughout the ages, albeit out of all three it is the period of precession of equinoxes the one which, by leveraging the combined effect of the other two, seems to have played the main role in the development of the current earthly humanity. Thus, some scientists believe that approximately 40,000 years ago, when the southern hemisphere was the nearer one from the Sun, and as ice gravitated on the North, there appeared at various places, probably in Central Asia, tribes united by their need to face the hard geophysical conditions that prevailed at that time; and thirteen thousand years later, when the northern and southern hemispheres exchanged their positions before the Sun, some tribes appeared also in the southern hemisphere. Approximately 18,000 ago, on the other hand, the Earth began to come out of the last ice age responding to a combination of all three astronomical factors, although the inter-glacial proper did not commence until approximately 10,000 years ago. Now, there is every reason to believe that this inter-glacial period is about to end, and many scientists claim that within a span of time that may range from a few to a thousand years from now, the Earth will have entered a new ice age of 100,000 years; to trigger the process there will only be required a summer with a very weak solar glow, unable to melt the Northern hemisphere glaciers. And irrespective of the signs of an imminent catastrophic thaw caused by the so-called “greenhouse effect” – the planet warming caused in turn by the excess of industrial emissions – the predominant view appears to be at best (maybe I should say at worst) that this factor would only lengthen the process. Be it as it may, at this point it should be obvious that, by interlacing and influencing one another, all three great astronomical cycles exert a decisive impact on the life on Earth, an effect that at times can be beneficial and at other times devastating. At times, for example, the end of one of them will match the end of another, which will make it particularly severe. Of course, the scenario is even more complicated, for it includes the effect of other minor cycles such as the so-called “small ice ages” or cycles of very strong winters occurring unexpectedly every approximately 180 years, which are apparently caused by the so-called “planetary synods” – the grouping of all the planets on one side of the sun while the Earth is on the other – which occur every equal number of years approximately; or like those cycles of great solar activity that occur every 11 and 80 years mainly (the 11-year cycle has later on been specified at 11 years and 29 days), which appear to influence markedly on the occurrence of draughts, volcano activity and the shifts in the Earth’s magnetism; or again, like the maximum and minimum solar cycles of 500 years each, mentioned in some recent works, which would have furthered the emergence by turn of the great historical civilizations. All this without doubt is an engrossing subject, a study of which would require, however, a lengthy space; so for the moment, we will just see how it all can help us to determine the length of the human cycle. Let us therefore consider the Manvantara, in as much as a strictly human earthly cycle governed by a particular Manu, as a small-scale image of the maha–yuga of 4’320,000 common years. Irrespective of the number of zeros that complement this figure, the symbolic length of the Manvantara will then be 4320 and, always following the proportion 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 10, those of the corresponding yugas will be 1728, 1296, 864 and 432 respectively, all of them circular numbers – for the sum of their digits is also nine – and therefore submultiples of 25,920 – which likewise is a circular number. In the other hand, if we additionally consider that on the cosmic level it is precisely the precession of the equinoxes which most strongly influences the length of the human cycle, it will be legitimate to assume that this length should comprise a whole number of such cycles. The question that arises then is: which can be that number? In his extraordinary article Some Remarks on the Doctrine of Cosmic Cycles2 originally published in French in 1937, René Guénon suggests an answer. Assuming that rather than the cycle of precession of equinoxes it is its half, or “great year” of 12,960 common years which, given the particular importance it has for such traditions as the Greek and the Persian, makes up the main foundation for the cyclic ages, Guénon suggests that such number should be five, mainly by virtue of its relationship with the duration of the reign of Xisuthrus (the biblical Sisera, a character manifestly identical to Vaivasvata, the Manu for the present Era), a duration that the Chaldeans established as 64,800 common years (5 x 12,960). To support this thesis, Guénon, on top of noting that a duration of 64,800 years may well represent the real age of the Earth’s present humanity, proposes quite reasonable correspondences for five such as the five bhutas or elements of the material world, etc. Now, although this sort of calculation has never been encouraged by tradition, let me dissent on the number of periods. For if we accepted 64,800 common years as the total length of the present Manvantara, the length of the Kali–yuga would be 6,480 years, or a tenth of that; and if we stick to 3102 BC as its starting point, then a simple subtraction (6,480 – 3,102) would produce the year 3378 AD as its ending date – without doubt a reassuring deadline in times of severe global crisis as those we are living now (though not quite so as the one anticipated by the orthodox Hinduism in about four hundred twenty thousand years from now), but which does not agree at all with certain data from other traditions which, as mentioned in the prologue, announce an imminent end for our troubled civilization. It should be noted that these calculations are all subordinated to admitting the year 3102 BC as the starting date of the present Kali–yuga, which actually, in spite of all the arguments put forward for it, will hardly be by many critics. Even so, let us accept such date for a moment and go on with our speculation: Assuming the yugas to be four and not five, would it not be more natural that the duration in question should comprise four equal periods, that is, to multiply 12,960 by four? After all, the arguments for five periods are not conclusive, as the material proper elements are only four (as the fifth, ether, is non material). And on the other hand, should we use four – the number of seasons in a year – as a factor, the total length of the Manvantara would then be 51,840 years (4 x 12,960), therefore encompassing two full precessional periods, which can respectively be assimilated to Day and Night. Again, 4,320 being a third of 12,960, the real lengths of each yuga would then be given by the product of the symbolic durations by twelve, which is the number of months of the year and of the signs of the Zodiac, so that in a way, we would be converting the symbolic durations – based on the linear scale 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 10 – into circular proper, that is, based on a twelve-month cycle. In either case, the length of the Kali–yuga would become 5,184 years (72 x 72), whether we divide 51,840 by ten or multiply 432 by twelve; and so, by means of a subtraction similar to the one above (5,184 – 3,102) we would get the year 2082 as the final point of the present human cycle, a date which unfortunately is more akin than the previous one with the ominous course of the world’s current events and the severe, all-pervading climatic disturbances in our days that might be announcing a global, profound, irreversible, and perhaps not very distant, disruption. And although I do not pretend to play the soothsayer as I am certainly aware that such forecasts can do more harm than good, it may not be superfluous to insist that the end of an astronomical cycle can overlap that of another and strongly influence it, maybe attracting it to itself, thus rendering the date for border line events even closer.3
NOTES
1 Cf. RENE GUENON: Introducción general al estudio de las doctrinas hindúes, Losada, Buenos Aires, 1945, Chapter 5.
2 As collected in RENÉ GUÉNON: Formas tradicionales y ciclos cósmicos, Obelisco, Barcelona, 1984, p. 12–23.
3 Such shortening could amount to a full precessional degree, i.e. seventy-two common years, which would establish the year 2010 AC as a brought-forward end of the present Manvantara. This date, already quite close indeed to us, ceased to be a mere possibility to become actual data to consider as I started to review these cycles of 72 years from a historical perspective (see Chapter 7) and curiously enough, it is very close to the end time of the Maya, calculated at 2012 AC, and other end-of-cycle dates anticipated by various traditions from all over the world – for example, the Jewish and Persian traditions.
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