C H A P T E R    5

T H E   U N I V E R S A L   D O C T R I N E
  

«So what does natural history tells us? The destruction of the earthly things, not all but a very big number of them, it attributes to two main causes, the tremendous onslaughts of fire and water. These two Heaven-sent punishments, we are told, descend by turns after very long cycles of years.»                               

(Philo, On the Eternity of the World, XVII [147])

The notion of Ages or Eras ended by violent cataclysms is common to the traditional cultures from all around the world, from the most primitive to those that reached a high level of civilization. They may differ in number, length, and in the characteristics of the evoked catastrophes, but at the same time the coincidences are extremely significant: in the majority of cases, as seen below, the Eras are four or seven, their lengths are “circular”, and the disasters that finish them are usually floods and conflagrations that occur in alternate fashion and are attributed to planetary influences.

Thus, for instance, according to Latin scholar Varro (116 BC – 27 AD), the Etruscan annals recorded seven preterit ages whose ends had been announced to men by diverse celestial prodigies. On its part, “Bhaman Yast”, one of the books from the Avesta, talks about seven World ages or millennia; according to Zoroaster, the prophet of Mazdeism, at the end of each there are signs, wonders and a great chaos all over the World. A Buddhist text, Visuddhi–Magga, in its Chapter “Cycles of the World”, says there are seven ages separated by global catastrophes of three kinds – by water, fire, and wind – at the end of which there appears a new Sun; after the seventh Sun, the World bursts in flames. Curiously enough, this notion of seven “Suns” also appears on the Sibylline books, where it is said that we are now in the seventh Sun (though yet two more are prophesized to come), on the Mexican Annals of Cuauhtitlan, written in Nahuatl tongue around 1570 on archaic sources, which likewise allude to seven epochs or “Suns” (the “Chicon–Tonatiuh”); and among the aborigines at North Borneo, who assert that the six previous Suns having now perished, the present one is the seventh to light up the World.

On the other side of the World, in North America, the legends of the Hopis, who from old were apparently familiar with the fact that the Earth rotates on its axis, speak rather of four ages or “worlds”. Having the three previous ones succumbed to fire, snow, and water, the current World would be the fourth (another version says the fifth)which will in turn be consummated when the Earth stumbles on its own axis as a great blue star, referred to as “Sasquasohum”, precipitates upon it. Apparently, however, the humankind will have to go through seven worlds in total.

The scheme of seven ages or Eras is also predominant in the mysterious Chaldean legends about seven “kings of kings,” the last of whom, the elsewhere-mentioned Xisuthros, saves his kin from the great flood (the six previous kings are Alorus, Alaparus, Amilaros, Ammenon, Megalarus and Obastes); in the seven Manus of the Hindu tradition, in which the last one also, Satyavrat, with the name Vaivasvat, saves a few chosen from the flood; and in the seven “Edomite Kings” from the Hebraic Cabbala, who like the previous ones govern by turn upon seven “Earths” which may be taken both in a temporal and spatial sense. Seven “Earths” appear as well in the Islamist esoterism, in this case governed by seven “Poles” (in a presumable allusion to the phenomenon of precession of the equinoxes), a reference which also appears among the ancient Egyptians, who seemingly recorded seven successive Pole Stars; and on its part the Rabbinical tradition, which crystallized on the post Hebrew Exile, asserts that there have been six successive re-creations of the Earth, after an equal number of global catastrophes; on the fourth Earth lived the generation of the Babel Tower, and now we are on the seventh. According to Philo, the Jew philosopher born around 20 BC, some perished by floods, others by conflagrations.

On the other hand, in an obvious correspondence with the seven “days” of the biblical Creation, we have elsewhere seen that the Hermetic tradition refers to seven “creation days” of 25,920 years each – the length of a precessional cycle.

As can be seen, the notion of seven ages or Eras is common throughout the World, which manifests an almost absolute concordance on this matter among most traditions. There are, however, exceptions: the Icelandic Edda rather refer to nine ages, such as the Sibylline books (yet preterit ones) and the Hawaiian and Polynesian legends do. As to the Chinese tradition, it mentions ten kis or ages since the beginning of the World until Confucius times, and the Sing–li–ta–tsiuen–chou, an ancient encyclopedia that deals with the periodicity of the convulsions of nature, refers to the very long periods of time between each other – though without specifying their number – as “great years”; the same is true of texts by Sse Ma–chien and Mo–tzu, which allude to large floods and long periods in which order and cataclysms alternate on Earth.

By contrast, other traditions, like the Greek (derived partially from the Hindu), the Tibetan, and particularly those from Central and South America, which will be touched later on, stick more strictly to a scheme of four ages.

We have seen, for instance, that the Greek and Roman traditions speak of four preterit Ages of Mankind, equivalent to the four yugas of the Hindu tradition; and in India itself, apart from Bhagavata Purana and other Puranas, other sacred books like the Rig and Yajur Veda allude as well to four preterit ages, though differing in the lengths of each. Also, it is not unlikely that the Buddhist tradition according to which out of the one thousand Buddas who appear on a kalpa, only four have manifested till now, may be related to the four yugas that make a maha–yuga and to the one thousand maha–yugas that make a kalpa; as to the Buddha Maitreya, who is to appear at the end of the cycle to inaugurate a new “millennium”, he is clearly identical with the avatara Kalki of Hinduism and with other inaugurators of the coming “millennium”, such as the “Christ of Glory” of  Christianity and the Messiah of Judaism and even the Mahdi, “the Guided One”, of Islam. And here is another remarkable coincidence: both the avatara Kalki and the Christ of Glory from Revelation 19:20ff are supposed to appear riding a white horse.

On the other hand, the quaternary scheme correlates very closely with certain universal archetypal forms which, while dramatically separated from one another in space and time, do not vary in their innermost essence.

For example, according to the Hopi people, since the arrival of the white man in North America we are on a fifth and final “World”, worse than the four previous ones, which will aggravate with the desertion of the four “cosmic guards” who are supposed to look after the columns that support the universe. On their part, the Mayas believed in four bacabs who played a similar role and were identical to Atlas of the Greeks, who copied it in turn from the Orientals. (Atlas actually supports the heavenly vault, not our planet.) In turn, the Egyptians received from the Sumerian people the tradition of four giants who supported the heaven’s cover, and who were correlated to four great mountains (one was Mount Ida, in Greece, another stood on the Atlas mountain range in Morocco). In China there also existed this tradition: four guardians look after the World, surrounding a fifth element (identified with the Emperor); when Kung-kung, an evil spirit, broke one of the columns with his head, taking advantage of the guardian’s negligence, all water from heaven fell down, causing a tremendous deluge. Again, the Scandinavians believed in four guardians correlated in turn with the swástika, another universal symbol (yet of unpleasant connotation because of Nazism), which is the same as that of the Hindus and Greeks and the Olin of the Aztecs (the “Sun” of Earthquakes) who in turn took it over from the Toltecs; and here we have another archetypal form that spread out all over the World in a virtually identical manner.

Another common symbol to all of the World’s cultures and civilizations is that of a “Cosmic Egg” which, in as much as an image of the perpetual dissolution and rebirth of the universe, bears a close resemblance with the “myth” of Phoenix, which is similarly found in civilizations ranging from the Hindu to the Chinese – where it appears as the myth of Pan-ku –, the Egyptian, and even the Inca: for example, it is known that on the main wall of the Ccoricancha temple, in Cuzco, there was a representation of the Cosmic Egg that would later on be replaced with the Sun’s image that met the Spaniards’ eyes.

But we are deviating from the versions related to the scheme of four ages, among which the most typical probably are the Mesoamerican accounts preserved in sacred texts such as the Popol Vuh and the “Quiche Manuscript” where, as above, they are consistently referred to as “Suns” – although this time they are four, not seven. The Aztecs, for example, who apparently collected these traditions from the Teotihuacans, who in turn would have received them from the Olmecs, differentiated four “Suns” that ended in an equal number of destructions of the World: the first by jaguars that devoured all men (another version says by the “God of Night”), who at the time were giants; the second by hurricanes, the third by a shower of fire (or by the “God of Fire”), and the fourth by a great deluge. Though with slight variations, mainly in the order of “Suns”, this tradition was disseminated throughout the Mayan world, and there is a significant fact: the four destructions in all cases are correlated to the four traditional elements.

Also the Incas, farther South, believed that time unfolds by cycles and that every so often the universe was challenged by great upheavals, times of distress referred to as “Pachacuti”. Chroniclers of the conquest of America, like Fray Buenaventura Salinas, transmit the tradition of the four ages previous to the Inca Empire. The last age would have lasted 3,600 years, an emblematic “circular” figure that if divided by ten becomes the number of the circle degrees and that of the priestly days of the year: 360, an exceptionally sacred number to the majority of traditions from all over the World.

And here we enter the area of lengths – which, most significantly, not only are consistently circular but even show amazing coincidences among each other.

Particularly suggestive are those that center on the “great year” of 12,960 common years, a half of the Zodiacal Year. According to Latin author Censorinus (third century AD), who was Varro’s compilator, in this “great year”, also called  “Platonic Year” and “Supreme Year of Aristotle,” there is a great winter or kataklysmos (which means “deluge”) and a great summer or ekpyrosis (which means “combustion of the world”). Now, at some point in history this “great year” was rounded up by Persians and Chaldeans as 12,000 years – a period of time which, to the former, came to be the totality of time. (To the present-day Persians, the year 2000 was the year 11,630 of that time.) And it is not unlikely that the Jews, in contact with those cultures, may have taken this “great year” and divided it by two, for religious reasons, to establish in turn their “World’s total duration” as 6,000 years.

In this connection, however, according to the aforementioned Rabbinical tradition, each of the World’s Seven Eras would have a length of 1,656 years – a circular figure that multiplied by seven yields a total sum closer to 12,000 than to 6,000 years: 11,952 years.

In addition to the “great year” of 12,960 common years, other “Greek” cycles, similarly connected to global catastrophes, are known to have suggestive correspondences in the Hindu tradition. According to philosopher Heraclitus of Efesus (540–475 BC), for instance, the period between two great conflagrations such as the one that would have submerged Atlantis, thousands of years before his time, is 10,800 years,¹ a “circular” period of time which divided by one hundred becomes 108 – a number which for Hinduists and Buddhists is an object of special veneration, as it is the number of Upanishads in the Buddhist canon and is placed before the name of the venerable acharyas or teachers of the great disciplic lines, apart from the fact that it is the number of stone figures along the lanes at the temple of Angkor in Camboya, etcetera; and whose basic form, 18, which corresponds, as seen in a previous chapter, to the number of breaths of a human being in one minute, is, among other many “coincidences,” equal to the total number of Puranas and of Bhagavad–gita chapters. For the rest, it should be noted that the total number of the Rig Veda verses is 10,800 and those of Bhagavata Purana 18,000, distributed into twelve “Cantos” or chapters; and that within the Judean–Christian esoterism, the number of chapters of the enigmatic Book of Enoch is, again, 108.  

At this point we will better make a pause, as it is impossible that this copious reiteration of numbers is only owed to the fact that they are all cyclic or “circular”, and therefore readily divisible among each other; the coincidences are too numerous to be just the product of chance, particularly when they derive from places and traditions so distant from one another. There is obviously something else, maybe a wish to draw attention – although in a veiled fashion – towards a mysterious, awe-inspiring fact that would allow to penetrate the very essence of the mechanism of cycles so as to anticipate their starting and ending dates.

For example, according to certain sources,² the sinking of Atlantis would have occurred 7,200 years before the year 720 of the present Kali–yuga – which corresponds, if its starting date is considered to be 3102 BC, to 9582 BC. And this date is perfectly reasonable in spite of its being a product of obviously symbolic figures, i.e. based on 72 which, as we know, is the key element in the context of a circular time. We would certainly need to be blind to see a mere product of chance in all this.    

Another cycle that would span between two consecutive destructions of the Earth is the one calculated by Aristarchus of Samos (310–230 BC), a few centuries after Heraclitus, as 2,484 years, a number that is also circular – yet considerably smaller than the ones previously mentioned. And here we can see yet another clue: the newer the calculation, the lesser the calculated period. This hypothesis is supported by a curious fact narrated by historian Herodotus (c.480 – c.420 BC): the Teban priests would have shown him 341 colossal statues, each representing a generation of priests from 11,340 years before – a period also “circular” but much closer to the “great year” of 12,960 common years.

So it comes as no surprise that also in the Bible, in whose first chapters there is an account of the two best known and most emblematic catastrophes ever to occur on the Earth – the Flood and the conflagration that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah – are many references to rather short, “circular” periods of time. For example, in the New Testament (Revelation 11:3, 12:6) is mentioned a mysterious period of 1,260 “days”, and the enigmatic references to “time, two times, and a half time” in Daniel 12:7 and Revelation 12:14 obviously allude to the same period if, as is undoubtedly the case, each “time” consists of 360 “days”. For the rest, in Daniel 12:11, 12 are mentioned two equally enigmatic periods: 1,290 and 1,335 “days”, numbers whose digits, even though they do not sum up nine, do sum up three, which also makes them circular.

However, it is in the longer cycles that we find the most significant correlations with the Hindu tradition. For instance, it is known that in the Library of Alexandria there was a World History written by the Chaldean priest Berosus (c. 250 BC), in three volumes, the first of which comprised a period of 432,000 years from the Creation to the Flood – exactly one tenth of the Hindu maha–yuga. And a fascinating coincidence: according to the Scandinavian legends, 432,000 was the number of warriors parked on Asgard, the home of the gods.

Similar correlations are found on the other side of the World, among the ancient Mayas. For example, in Tikal, in present-day Guatemala, there is a stela – the number 10 – that records a period of 5'040,000 years, a circular number that divided by ten is that of Manus in a total universal manifestation. As to the liturgical calendar, in addition to the tuns or years of 360 days, consisting of 18 uinals or months of 20 days, the Mayas’ count was by katuns (7,200 days), baktuns (144,000 days), etc., all of them “sacred” circular numbers whose importance I have emphasized repeatedly – with the exception of 144,000, which incidentally is the number of saints ascended to Heaven at Revelation 7, 7. 

As to the Xiumolpili, or periods of 52 years used by the Aztecs for the computation of the four ages or “Suns” by multiplying them by certain factors (apparently 13, 7, 6 and 13, even though, confirming the aforementioned tendency, the factors are bigger on the earlier versions), it is believed that they originated with the Olmecs, who had discovered that the Solar, sacred and Venusian calendars coincided every 37,960 days, equivalent to 104 years (or two times 52). In fact, although these cycles were so important that it is believed they required from the Mayas the remodeling of all their sacred structures at their beginning or end, at any rate we are dealing here with an anomaly – the exception that confirms the rule. However, there is an interesting correlation with the great celebrations that the Dogon in Mali, Africa, make every 52 years, rites intended, according to them, to “regenerate the World” and which apparently correspond to the cycle made by Sirius “B”, a white dwarf, around Sirius. But apart from these likely connections, it can be noted that 52 is four times 13, this number being, according to scholars, a particularly auspicious one throughout the Mayans’ world – unlike elsewhere in the World, where it is particularly ill-omened. However, what definitely links this “anomalous” system with the “orthodox” circular one is, in my opinion, the fact that after 52 years of the liturgical calendar of 360 days, there appears to have elapsed exactly 72 years of the magical calendar of 260 days, i.e. a total 18,720 days – a circular number by excellence, as it is made up of 18 and 72.

And with this I will close this overview during the course of which we have been able to glimpse, through the assortment of data and figures presented, a sort of needlework of Four Ages of Mankind, of varying lengths according to the different traditions, but always circular, interwoven in the fabric of a more general scheme of Seven Eras of the World, in turn somehow correlated to the precession of the equinoxes. In the middle of it all we have glimpsed at the third and most dramatic element in the problem: the dreadful catastrophes at the beginning and end of every cycle, out of which the most emblematic is undoubtedly the Flood that usually separates the Eras from each other, and which is a favorite and specially recurring topic in the myths and legends from all over the World. In the following chapters I will try to recapitulate all the information provided and draw as many conclusions as possible, which will hopefully let us get a deeper insight and, at the same time, a wider view of the problem in its entirety.

NOTES

¹ In turn the Greek astronomer Hipparcus, who spread out over the Western world the knowledge of the precession of equinoxes, made a catalogue of 1,080 fixed stars. In the reiteration of these numbers by both Greeks can be seen further evidence of the existing nexus between the Greek world and India.

² RENE GUENON: Formas tradicionales y ciclos cósmicos, p. 41 (note).

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