The Wheel of Time - A Study in the Doctrine of Cosmic Cylces

When I started my first version of La rueda del tiempo (in English, "The Wheel of Time") about twelve years ago, I was motivated by very special circumstances. A most precious, monumental Hindu holy scripture, the Third Canto of Bhagavata Purana, had come to my hands as if by accident, and I was marveled to learn that in such remote times the Hindus were already familiar with such advanced concepts as that of the expansion of the universe and the space and time relativity, both of them notions that the modern scientists would only become acquainted with from the Twentieth Century onwards. But what really amazed me were the huge lengths of time mentioned in relation to cosmic cycles. For instance, the Kali-yuga o "Dark Era", a cycle which clearly corresponds to the Age of Iron of the Greek and Roman traditions, would actually extend over 432,000 terrestrial years, a tenth of a human cycle of 4'320,000 years; and if its start was in 3102 BC, as recorded by Hindu astronomical texts, then its end would arrive as late as 429,000 AD, without doubt a reassuring date in times of enormous global crisis as we are living now, but which does not absolutely correlate with data from other traditions announcing an imminent end for our degenerated civilization.

The answer to my deep uneasiness would come a bit later, mainly in the form of an extraordinary article by René Guénon: Some Remarks on the Doctrine of Cosmic Cycles, originally published in French in 1937. Thanks to it, I was finally satisfied that such figures were essentially symbolic, as suggested by the fact that they are all multiple of nine – which precisely makes them “circular” o cyclic – and that they must be basically assimilated to the great cycle of precession of equinoxes, a key period of time in the development of mankind whose traditional length, 25,920 common years, also is a multiple of nine. True, at the same time I concluded that in the light of the most recent scientific discoveries, such lengths could be taken in an approximately literal manner, something that Guénon could not be acquainted with in his time; but for the moment, it was fairly enough. Then, as if by magic, came to my hands other articles, some of them very important and others that were not quite so, which helped me do a preliminary study and publish a first edition in 1998. This first literary endeavor contained some elements that have remained till now, the main one being my own calculation of the final date of the Kali-yuga and, therefore, that of the current human cycle. An additional element was a footnote according to which such final date would appear to have been drawn nearer by a degree of such cycle, or 72 years – a phenomenon referred to in the texts as an overlapping of yugas.

Soon thereafter, however, I realized that this first version in Spanish not only contained some historical errors but also wrong quotations, so I tried to upgrade it by means of a second edition which was published and circulated for some years until – its cycle concluded – I opted for removing it from circulation.

By then, various articles by “disciples” of Guénon had started to appear mainly on the Internet, in which they claimed the following:

(1) The length of the full human cycle is 64,840 years, equivalent to five half cycles of precession of equinoxes (5 x 12,960 years); this calculation had been suggested (but only suggested) by Guénon in the aforementioned article, as well as the following point.

(2) The year 720 of the Kali-yuga (which would last 6,480 years, or a tenth of the above figure) would have coincided with that of the beginning of the Jewish Era, traditionally established as 3761 BC; therefore, also based on other tempting elaborations by Guénon in various articles, the Kali-yuga would have started in the year 4481 BC.

(3) Once the corresponding calculation was made (6480 – 4481), the end of the Kali-yuga (virtually equivalent to the end of our civilization) would be in 1999. Some even, resorting to decimal numbers, further specified: the catastrophe, whatever form it adopted, would visit us… on the 14 November 1999!

Well, with regard to the doctrine of cosmic cycles, the first thing that we have to understand is the word millennium is not equivalent, as might be thought, to a thousand common years, but to an indefinite length of time, usually referred to any major cosmic cycle. This is a point that will never be stressed enough, and it surely is an elemental principle that the aforementioned authors seemed to have forgotten. Still worse, not only did they evidence an inability to let go of the literal sense of the term, but also a certain proclivity to the kind of hysteria that usually attacks the masses as the end of any major cycle draws near – not to mention such a frightening end of cycle as the one that was about to visit us.

Under these terms, the fact that the year 2000 arrived painlessly – in other words, without any fatal outcome to regret – did, by far, not mean that the validity of the doctrine of cycles became dubious. On the contrary, it merely denoted that it was all misconceived. Looked at in retrospect, on the other hand, it did not mean either that our planet had got rid of the atrocious cataclysms that usually escort the end of all major cycles, as quite obviously such end, should the doctrine remain valid, would be yet to arrive.

Be it as it may, sure as I was that Guénon would have never approved of such excesses – though still doubting whether or not his “suggestions” had been made on purpose so that such calculations failed – I set myself to the task of publishing a third edition of La rueda del tiempo with a view to clarify this point as much as possible, at the same time that correct any omission, make some points more specific, and even improve the general appearance from the previous editions.

It has not been until now, however, that I have been able to finish this task. And curiously enough, the most remarkable fact about it is that I have not had to substantially modify the previous editions, apart from correcting one or two wrong references, adding some data, and refining writing and syntax. On the other hand, I have doubted as to the convenience to keep some sections, such as, for instance, the description of the Egyptian “Divine Year” in Chapter 1, which could deviate the attention from the main subject, and I even was tempted to completely suppress Chapter 6, which could seem little convincing. But I was dissuaded by the fact that, while such sections are not essential for understanding the matter, they can be profitably read, above all the latter, which briefly depicts the Kali-yuga of the present cycle – virtually the history of our so-called civilization.

Now, it is understandable that this particular view of history will frontally crash with that of the majority of readers, who, save for one or two exceptions, know very little about oriental doctrines. In this sense, it is essential to understand the concept of maha-yuga, the Hindu cycle of four yugas or decreasing ages whose lengths are proportional to 4, 3, 2 and 1 and which can, in fact, be assimilated to any temporal cycle, as another fundamental point of the doctrine is that there exists a total correspondence among them all; and then stop at the concept of Manvantara, this one referred to the total human cycle and whose length must be calculated as two cycles of precession of equinoxes or a total 51,840 common years. One more step, and it must become clear that if the yugas sum up proportionally 10 (because 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 10), then the length of the Kali-yuga will be one tenth of that total, i.e. 5,184 common years.

Yet another step, consequent with the previous one, will make us understand that the characteristics of the present Kali-yuga, by virtue of the correspondences to which I have referred, reflect accurately – yet in a more incisive way – those of the full cycle of 51,840 years; this, in practice, will give us a small-scale image of this cycle, including, also in a small scale but with lengths always proportional to the scale 4, 3, 2 and 1, that of the four descending yugas. The last step will be to focus on the last of these yugas, which we may call the kali-yuga of the present Kali-yuga: a period of time of little more than five hundred years, extremely rich in historical events and great material achievement but which unfortunately, precisely by reason of their being only material, would appear to be leading us towards disaster at an ever increasing speed.

Thinking therefore about the Western readers, who in their great majority tend to believe in a brilliant future for mankind, I have seen it convenient to commence this study by reviewing certain passages from the Bible that they may be me more familiar with, and starting from this point and from the unbelievable coincidences between those and other sacred texts from all over the World – coincidences that strangely prefigure the most recent discoveries of modern Astrophysics – to usher them through ancient universal myths such as the Four Ages of Mankind and the Seven Eras of the World, to finally arrive at disquieting conclusions about the present moment and the near future of our planet – a turning point in time towards which there would appear to be converging, in a most threatening fashion, cosmic cycles of various orders and magnitudes.

Lima, Peru, July 2007

Last update: September 2009

Home

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Among the great mysteries of the universe, few have exerted so strange a fascination upon the mind of man as time. Indeed, time is not a mere enigma. Unfathomable at its deepest core, time is, in its own right, a mystery of mysteries.

Over the centuries, this mystery has persisted and captivated the world’s greatest intellects: Solomon, Pythagoras, Plato, St. Augustine, Newton, Descartes, each fell in turn irresistibly attracted to it. Even in recent times, it troubled great scientists like Einstein and his “successor,” Stephen Hawking.

Regarding this, however, we are struck by wonder. For it appears that Einstein was not the first, nor was he the only, to discover that time is relative to space. From time immemorial, such knowledge has been in the possession of the ancient Hindu people, as some of their most sacred texts – particularly the Puranas – corroborate (this is a point upon which I will elaborate later on). As to Hawking, he was not long ago wondering whether time merely advances in a linear fashion, as the orthodox physics has always postulated, or it rather does it by circles – as has always been conceived by the Eastern traditional doctrines.

We will do well, therefore, to review two of our deepest-rooted notions – namely, that it is only in the last two centuries that the greatest scientific discoveries have been made… and that the ancient peoples had absolutely no scientific knowledge of the world.

A third example will help us reinforce this point. Based on radioactive measurements, the modern science has for some time been estimating the age of the Earth as approximately 4,500 millions of years since it was formed within the solar system. More recently, the analysis of stones from the Moon has produced an even more accurate – and apparently definitive – length of time: 4,310 millions of years, a figure I unfortunately have not been able to verify though it certainly matches the former. Well now, this length is nearly identical to that of 4,320 million years which, according to the Puranas and some Indian astronomical treatises, is the duration of what the Hindus call a “Brahma’s day” (or kalpa) within the immense cycle of cosmic manifestation.

It may, indeed, be argued that the Hindus came by this figure by mere accident or that it simply was invented, as also was invented everything related to the ages and cosmic cycles. To refute such objections we would need to determine whether the whole of these notions is backed up by other sacred writings of the world – i.e. whether there is agreement on these issues between the Hindu scriptures and other sacred books of the world – and then, as a collateral evidence, to establish whether the remaining information the said scriptures contain is reliable enough; all this with a view, at least at a preliminary stage, to cloak them with a certain degree of respectability when faced to the most obstinate skeptics – those who plainly make fun of these theories.

To begin with, from the last century onwards, remarkable coincidences have been observed between the Bible and certain texts of the Western tradition, on the one hand, and certain Eastern sacred books, mainly Hindus, on the other. To mention the best known, the Bible speaks of a Universal Flood that takes place at the end of a period of sheer degradation of the human race, and the Puranas and other sacred texts, both from the East and West, talk about periodical, partial devastations of the universe by water. (Actually, memories of one or several “universal floods” remain alive in old traditions throughout the world.) But there are many other coincidences, as will be seen below.

For example, the Book of Genesis (1:2) relates how, in the beginning, “the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters”; Bhagavata Purana (5, 25: 1, ff), in turn, says that at the beginning of creation, Vishnu (God) is lying over the Causal Ocean.

In the Gospel of St John (John, 14:2), Jesus states: “In my Father’s house there are many mansions.” Brahma–samhita (5:40), in turn, says God’s glow, the brahmajyoti, contains countless planets.

Again, in a passage of the “Gnostic” gospel of Thomas (77), says Jesus: “I am all: from me all came forth, and to me all attained.” Svetasvatara Upanishad (4:11), another well–known sacred Hindu book, states: “He [God] governs all the sources of creation; the universe emanates from Him, and to Him it comes back in the end.”

On the other hand – and here we are getting further into matter – the book of Genesis (3:23, etc.) describes the “fall” and exile of man from Paradise, a recurring topic in the scriptures and traditions from all around the world that is closely associated to the idea of world ages and cosmic cycles. While not that obviously, also in John 14:3, 15, 19, 15, and in his announcements of the end of time, Jesus would be referring to them; also Daniel 2:21, 29 ff, 7:1 ff, other prophets from the Old Testament, St John’s Revelation, etc.

Last but not least, some authors have observed remarkable concordances on these issues between certain Eastern scriptures, like the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu and the Hindu Upanishads, on the one hand, and several stoic, hermetic, and neo–platonic treatises on the other.

The modern science has in turn validated various passages from the Bible. Some of the best-known examples, like the predominance of an evolutionary order in the creation of species (fish – birds – beasts), accurately reflected in Genesis 1: 20 ff, and the fact that in the last ten or twelve thousand years there might indeed have occurred such a great disaster as to produce a “universal flood,” as evidenced both by the rings of the Californian sequoias and the fossils and corpses deposited and preserved in frozen mud, are just a few of them. Other examples include a knowledge of the spherical shape of the Earth in Isaiah 40:22, where the Hebrew word chugh, commonly translated as “circle” or “orb,” may also mean “sphere;” of the Earth floating in space, in Job 26:7; of a primitive Earth cloaked in darkness and in a watery steam, in Genesis 2:6; and of the very steps of the Creation in Genesis 1: 3 ff, whose sequence – if considered from the viewpoint of a terrestrial observer, as well as that each “evening” with its corresponding “morning” represent vast periods of time – perfectly harmonizes with the one postulated by the most recent cosmological theories.

However, it is among the Eastern scriptures that can be found extraordinary examples of scientific information.

Bhagavata Purana (9, 3:30–34), for example, recounts the trip of king Kakudmi to Brahmaloka, the highest planet in the universe, governed by the powerful demigod Brahma, the creator of the world, to ask for his advice on a good husband for his daughter Revati. When the king reaches Brahma’s palace, the god is hearing musical recitals by the Gandharvas, the celestial musicians, and Kakudmi waits in the anteroom; when the music is over, he expresses his desire. Brahma breaks in laughter: “O King, he answers, whoever might have been thought of by you have been swept off by Time. Twenty–seven chatur–yugas [27 x 4’320,000 terrestrial years] have rolled by and we hear no more even of the races of their sons, grandsons and great grandsons…”

Now, although a space–time bend as the one exemplified by this story may result from the different translation velocities of the “higher” and “lower” planets around the Sun according to the Hindu tradition, it still remains illustrative of the well-known paradox anticipated by the theory of relativity for interstellar traveling at close to light–speed velocities.¹

While curiously inverse, a similar story from the Islamic tradition adds force to our case: Muhammad visits the seventh heaven riding the resplendent mare Alburak. At the moment that the mare takes flight, she overturns a jar filled with water. On Muhammad’s return after countless eons, the Prophet reaches down to lift the jar from the ground... and lo, not a single drop has been spilt!

In another passage from Bhagavata Purana (3, 29:43) it is stated, with astounding ease, that the complete universal body is expanding. This fact, only in recent times confirmed by astronomical observation supporting the ‘Big–Bang’ theory, could hardly be described as a product of either chance or imagination even by the most obstinate skeptics; and on the other hand, such theory does not exclude the possibility of a recurring expansion – contraction of the universe through immense periods of time, a derivation that in turn perfectly fits with the framework of the Hindu doctrine of cosmic cycles and many other similar concepts. In effect, this idea is found in the majority of the traditional doctrines. In Taoism, for example, the Tao has a reverting motion of withdrawal and return to the origin (See Tao The Ching of Lao Tzu, particularly Chapters XXV and XL). Hermetism, in turn, asserts that the world “begins from where it ceases.” (Corpus Hermeticum I, 11, 10.7). Again, according to the Neo-Platonist Proclus: ...Everything moves on and returns, has a cyclical activity... unites the end with the principle.” And also the Stoicism attributes this motion to its Logos.

We can see the list is lengthy. But let us focus now on history, where modern archaeology has repeatedly confirmed information from the Bible and other Western texts. For example, Assyrian king Sargon II was for long known only from the narration in Isaiah 8:1 and the critics rejected this reference as devoid of any historical value. Later on, archaeological excavations shed light on the magnificent palace of Sargon at Korsabad and on numerous inscriptions alluding to his reign, such as the siege and conquer of Samaria and the subsequent exile of the Israelite people. Similarly, not long ago was confirmed Sennacherib’s expedition to Israel which, according to the Old Testament version (2 Kings 6:13 ff, 7:36; Isaiah 36: 1, 37: 37), ended in failure and the subsequent return of the Assyrian king to his own country. (While this piece of information is not found on the mural inscriptions within the royal palace, such exclusion is perfectly understandable from a natural reluctance to admit one’s own defeats.)

A special mention deserve, for their great significance, the dramatic discoveries made by amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann from 1870 onwards. As is widely known, this remarkable German archaeologist, defying the general view that would see in the Iliad but an imaginary story, started excavations at the site designated by the poem as the seat of old Troy and found not one, but nine superimposed cities, with the sixth, counted from below, being the one sung by the epics. And then in Mycenae, described by the same poem as “most superior materially to Troy,” brought to light huge stone walls, carved lions and the fabulous treasure of Atraeus – all of them wonders which, were it not for him, would most likely be regarded as legendary until our days.

From these examples – the likes of which could actually go on indefinitely – it would seem that where it comes to science, and to a certain extent history, the great scriptures and sacred texts of the world are indeed reliable; in this sense, not only can we conclude that “the Bible was right”, as was the title of a famous book, but also that other ancient texts and writings from all over the world were right as well; similarly, based on the same examples, it might be inferred that the Hindu texts appear to be valid for the longer periods of time, of millions and trillions of years, while the Bible and other Western texts would be valid for the “shorter” periods of thousands or, perhaps, hundreds of thousand of years. Of course this is not accurate as, for one thing, some passages of the Bible, notably the first verses of Genesis, obviously cover immense periods of time; but at least for the purposes of our present query, we can very well afford this generalization.

As to the Hindu texts, we will have many an opportunity to learn the intricacies of their elaborate doctrine. I will just say right now that, as occurs with many other traditions, the word millennium – as well as other similar terms like “great year,” century, etc – is synonymous with any great cosmic cycle and not only one thousand years, as might be thought, and is usually applied to them by properly using it in the sense of any “indefinite” length of time. This should be stressed out not only by reason of the fact itself, essential to the study of the doctrine, but because it is somehow consubstantial with the existence of all sorts of correspondences and assimilations between cycles of various orders and magnitudes, so that such expressions as “day” and “night,” where it comes to immense periods of time, sound perfectly natural.²

A question naturally arises from the above: if it was not purely and simply invented, or was not the result of mere fortunate speculation, where did the compilers of these Scriptures obtain such information, whose origin is lost in the pages of time? That the various cultures were spontaneously and simultaneously born around the world, all sharing a strangely similar lore, is hard to accept; the numerous analogies rather suggest an unknown common origin and, in fact, it would appear to be more logical, or at least more plausible, that there previously existed an older civilization that was the depository of the knowledge based on such information, and that all other cultures received from it such knowledge, which was then modified and, for the most part, distorted by the particular circumstances of time and place. This notion of a common ancestral culture, which would account for the universality of a certain “hidden” lore, has been widely supported and developed by renowned researchers such as René Guénon and others, according to whom, in the apparently chaotic assortment of most ancient myths and legends that describe the nature and origin of the universe, traditionally handed down by societies throughout the world, there is evidence of such primeval civilization. This archaic society would be prior to all ancient known civilizations, including those from Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and India, not to mention the American continent; and so, stories whose original meaning has been lost, but have otherwise been preserved in a fragmentary and distorted form, might provide genuine, essential information about the great mysteries of the universe.

By way of example, I will quote but one of such stories: The Sioux Nation in North America speak of a cycle of four eras; there is a buffalo that loses a leg during each era; now we are in the last era, which is of great degradation, and the buffalo has but one leg left. In Bhagavata Purana (1, 16: 18 ff) the same story is told about the bull Dharma. We are currently in the last age – the Age of Kali, an era of quarrel and hypocrisy – and Dharma is supported by only one leg…³

In the course of this study, after briefly dealing with the likely origins of the doctrine, the Four Ages of Man of the classic tradition will be described and, within the same context, the “divine year” of the Egyptians will be succinctly explained along with its divisions and sub-divisions. Then, after considering some interesting numerical relations, an equally brief description of the Hindu cycles and eras will be presented together with some preliminary remarks. Next an attempt will be made to reconcile both systems on the basis of existing works, after which some considerations will be offered regarding the disturbing characteristics of the current era. Then a review will be made of the doctrine of cycles in other parts and traditions of the world in order to demonstrate its universality, and existing traces of the primeval civilization will be discussed with a view to determine its origin. Finally, an analysis and recapitulation of the above will be made and general conclusions drawn which may be valid for the doctrine as a whole, all supported by the largest possible number of historical evidence.

NOTES

¹ For most of the traditional cultures, the universe consists of “higher,” “intermediate,” and “inferior” planets. Since the former are assumed to be huge, their rotations and translations should be proportionally longer than those of the Earth (which is a “intermediate” planet) thus creating relatively longer “days” and “years.”

² The same applies to the first verses of the Book of Genesis, where a “late” and a “tomorrow” are mentioned in relation to each of the “days” of the world creation.

³ RICHARD L. THOMPSON: Vedic Cosmography and Astronomy, Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1989, p. 65.

Home

C H A P T E R 1

T H E F O U R A G E S O F M A N K I N D

«They lived like gods without sorrow of heart… when they died, it was as though they were overcome with sleep…

The fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly... while they dwelt in ease and peace upon their lands, rich in flocks...»

(Hesiod: Works and Days)

In strict sense, the “myth” of the Four Ages of the World is assumed to have originated in Greece around the eighteenth century BC, back in the days when the country was plunged into desolation by the Doric people’s invasion. Around that time the poet Hesiod, probably influenced by obscure legends about past cataclysms and the happier times that preceded them, is said to have set to the task of composing, in the solitude of the countryside, his Works and Days, the most intriguing of the two famous poems attributed to him – the other being his famous Theogony.

In the former, Hesiod relates how, up until his time, the human race had lived four main ages – the Golden Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age, with an additional age, that of the Heroes, apparently inserted between the Bronze and Iron ages only to accommodate the great heroes of the Iliad.

Within the same tradition but many centuries later, the Latin poet Ovid (43 BC – 18 AD), in his Metamorphoses, additionally alludes to the deluge that ensued at the end of the Iron Age and from which were spared Deucalion and Pyrrha, who gave birth to a new humanity.

So far the classical version. In a broader sense, however, the tradition would have an older, possibly Oriental origin. According to scholars, it would have originated in the primitive peoples’ longing for a natural life, which coupled with considerations about the recurrence and regularity of the disasters that afflict the world, as well as the speculation inspired in such quaternary cycles as the four yearly seasons, four phases of the Moon, four stages in the life of man, and so on, would have crystallized in the “myth” of the Four Ages of Mankind brought to light by Hesiod.

As to the place of origin itself, some are inclined to believe it was India, considering the manifest identity between the four ages of the Greek tradition and the descending cycle of four yugas of the Hindustan tradition.

In this connection, however, we would still need to determine whether this is also the origin of many other myths in which the notion of four ages is equally prominent, such as the Maya and Inca and many other traditions; and even of all other “myths of return” where – irrespective of the number of ages – there stands out the universal, most ancient belief in the “fall” of man, a tradition that evokes the decline and alienation of mankind from a golden, paradisiacal condition to one of total degradation – usually ending in a catastrophic deluge – a most familiar and characteristic version of which can be read in the first pages of the Bible, from the “fall” of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from Paradise to the events that led to the Flood.

Curiously enough, these multiple coincidences seem to have gone unnoticed to the majority of the Western scholars – not to mention the layman, the common man of our times. So it comes as no surprise that the notion of four descending ages, or for that matter of any number of them, may sound unintelligible and absurd to the latter; and not out of sheer ignorance, for he is sure to have read those biblical passages, but because he has from his childhood been instilled the idea, exactly opposite, of a sustained progress of mankind throughout history – and also because it has always been confronted and fought by the Church. For example Origen the patriarch of Alexandria (185 – 254 AC), a man of deeply-rooted Gnosticism and seemingly familiar with the idea that the floods and conflagrations caused by planetary influences can be calculated beforehand, wrote in Against Celso: “We do not refer the flood or the burning of the world to the planetary cycles and periods, but we declare that their cause is the widespread prevalence of evil and its eradication by a deluge or conflagration.” (Actually Origen assumed that the worlds follow one another in time just like an equal number of schools in which decadent beings are reeducated, a process which would have started with the “fall” of man, which was then followed by the material world.) And in turn Saint Augustine, in the 12^th book of his City of God, questions the doctrine of cycles as a whole based on the futility of an eternal wheel of creations and the absurdity of an endless death of the Logos.¹

But let us take a look into the tradition of the Four Ages in its most familiar version, that of the Greek poet Hesiod. According to him, in the Golden Age man lived in an ideal condition of perfection and justice. An eternal spring prevailed, and so there were no extremes of heat and cold. The fields, always green and flowery, yielded spontaneously golden corn throughout the year and from the trees, perennially vigorous, hung delicious, mature fruits, so that men were oblivious of hard work. There was no evil and injustice, envy and greed, crime and depravation, war and hatred. Life was an endless carnival and men were perfectly happy at the feet of their gods, who in exchange for their blessings received veneration and obedience. Yet evil manages to creep into this paradise and men turn their backs to the gods. They pay no attention to their precepts, praise and sacrifice cease: the Golden Age draws to an end.

The Silver Age, which follows the Golden Age, reflects, in the view of some authors, the matriarchal society of remote times when women were the centre of society and men worked the fields on their side; it would, at any rate, signal a time when humanity was beginning to focus on agriculture. In the Greek myth, it is in this age that men begin to differentiate the seasons: to the spring, previously eternal and now limited to short months, there follows a burning sun that dries and withers everything on its passage. After the heat dissipates, pastures turn yellowish and die, and the tree tops drop all their leaves. Heavy snow finally falls covering the Earth with desolation, while freezing winds relentlessly yell on the wilderness. No longer do the fields give food for free. To survive, men learn to do painful work, and to shelter from the stormy weather they have to build their own houses, as the caves in which they dwelled during the Golden Age have become uninhabitable for them. Youth, previously eternal, ends; happiness belongs to but a few; death arrives unannounced. And since mankind has gone on degrading, Zeus, from the Olympus, resolves to exterminate it. The Earth is left silent and empty.

Let us now look into the next or Bronze Age. According to the specialists, it probably corresponds to the earliest Aegean conquerors whose last representatives were the warrior kings from Mycenae, and would therefore signal the start of the first great civilizations of Greece, including the Cretan and Mycenaean. In the Greek story, when the gods get bored for lack of prayers or insults from men, they opt for creating a new race, courageous and strong, a race of bronze, which will populate the world and reverence them. Their trade will be war, Ares (Mars) their main god, fighting their highest aspiration. These are times of war, of incessant clash of swords, of wild struggle. Yet the tributes expected from men do not materialize, and the gods resolve to wipe this race away from the memory of the world.

Finally, the Iron Age would match the period of supremacy of the Doric people – the Greek society that begins towards the twelfth century BC, who already were familiar with iron and destroyed the Mycenae civilization. According to Hesiod, the men of this time were the worst that inhabited the Earth. Force, ambition, and excessive violence are omnipresent now. A new metal emerges stronger than all others, iron, useful to forge weapons and open the earth to remove the treasures hidden in it by the gods – gold and silver, still more precious than iron, and the origin of all dissension. Ambition for wealth and power respects nothing. No honor, honesty, loyalty exist anymore: lying, violence and cunning are the only means used by men to achieve their goals. The Earth is divided and marked; everyone wants their part, and all attack one another to increase their possessions. Brutal wars collect thousands of lives: the world is covered by blood. Fear spreads everywhere; no one is safe; anguish precludes sleep. Division prevails: husband and wife betray each other, brothers raise their hands against their brother, sons kill their own father... From Mount Olympus, Zeus, beset with wrath, resolves to do away with suffering by exterminating all that lives and breathes upon the world. And the deluge comes to cleanse the Earth from such abomination...

So far a description of the ages. Let us now see the next logical step, i.e. determine their lengths. In his Timaeus, Plato asserts that the seven planets, once the time to balance their respective speeds has elapsed, return to their point of departure. This revolution is a “perfect year” and, considering the great significance it has for different traditions, it must somehow influence the total length of a cycle of four ages. In turn Cicero, while recognizing the difficulty in estimating the length of this vast celestial period, rates it as 12,954 common years, although the precise length appears to be 12,960 years (180 x 72) as certain concurring data suggest. And in effect, this latter period, also called “great year” by both Greeks and Persians, is the exact half of the great astronomical cycle known as the precession of equinoxes (or “Zodiacal Year”), the length of which has been traditionally calculated as 25,920 common years (360 x 72) and, as is widely known, is the one during which the projection of the Earth’s axis, responding to the motions of rotation and oscillation or “wobbling” of the planet along its orbit, describes a full circle at a rate of one degree every 72 years and returns to the exact point of departure in relation to the Zodiac constellations so that the equinoctial point, one of the two times of the year in which the night and the day are of identical length, turns out to be the same as it was at the beginning of the period. Another consequence of the slow circular motion of the Earth axis projection is that it will successively point to a different Pole Star in the course of those 25,920 years.

Fig. 1 – The cycle of precession of the equinoxes

Although this cycle is said to have been discovered in 139 BC by the Greek astronomer Hipparchus, some authors believe the first to calculate its duration as 25,920 common years were the ancient Egyptians, who would have come by this figure by matching the equinox with the same Zodiacal sign during 2,160 years; and still others say the first to know about it were the old Brahmins of India, which knowledge would have been spread to Iran and Sumer and then to Egypt, where it was picked up by the Greek Hipparchus. Be it as it may, the Egyptians, according to the hermetic tradition, were trying to establish the length of the Divine Year, which was then fixed as approximately 168 Zodiacal years (or “creation days,” as they used to call them). This itself is extremely suggestive, as 168 times 25,920 is 4’354,560 common years, virtually the length of a Hindu cycle of four yugas (4’320,000 common years), with a difference of “only” 34,560 years; however, since the consideration of such a remarkable coincidence would take too long, for the moment I will just elaborate a bit on the Egyptian Divine Year.

Like most of the old traditional cultures, the ancient Egyptians are known to have conceived a universe built on mysterious numerical relationships in which the various orders of magnitude matched each other both quantitatively and qualitatively. In this way, they believed that the Divine Year of 168 zodiacal years consisted of three “divine times of work” each divided in 56 zodiacal years (168 : 3); each “divine time of work” consisted of four “seminal seasons” of 14 zodiacal years each (56 : 4); each “seminal season” consisted of two “divine conception weeks” – equivalent to Day and Night – of seven zodiacal years each (2 : 2); and each “divine conception week” consisted of seven “creation days” of 25,920 common years each (7 : 7), this being, as we have just seen, the duration of a cycle of precession of the equinoxes or Zodiacal Year. Thus was established a first analogy between the Zodiacal Year and a “creation day.”

Additionally, they divided the “creation day” of 25,920 common years in 12 “differential hours” – equivalent to 12 zodiacal months – of 2,160 common years each (25,920 : 12), i.e. the period during which the equinox coincides with the same sign of the Zodiac.

Now, since the ascent of every new sign is considered to be escorted by events that are catastrophic or in some other way crucial to the Earth, this “differential hour” or zodiacal month of 2,160 common years has received particular attention from the hermetic tradition. For example, it is said that when the Age of Leo was coming to an end and the one of Cancer was about to arrive, some 10,000 years ago, there took place the downfall of Atlantis. In turn, the shift from Cancer to Gemini would have witnessed the passage of an enormous comet that shook up the Earth. The shift from Gemini to Taurus, about 6,000 years ago, is supposed to have marked the start of new civilizations and the beginning of the worship of the bull – and the goat – at several places of the world: the ox Apis in Egypt, the winged bulls in Babylon and Assyria, as well as holidays associated to the spring and procreation. In turn, the arrival of Aries, about 4,000 years ago, is known to have concurred with the appearance of the paschal lamb, a symbol of Judaism. Finally, the shift from Aries to Pisces would have heralded the appearance and propagation of Christianity, the main symbol of which, at least at its beginning, was, as we know, the fish.

Be it as it may, as a “differential hour” within the “creative day” of 25,920 common years, and continuing with the hourly analogy, the Egyptians divided the period of 2,160 years into 60 “minutes” of 36 common years each (2,160 : 60) and the “minute” of 36 common years into 36 “specific tasks” of one common year each (36 : 36), thus establishing two important hourly analogies by matching, first, the common hour with the “zodiacal month”; and secondly, each minute of that “hour” with a cycle of 36 common years, equivalent to a half of a degree of the zodiac circle. Finally, they divided the “specific task” or common year into seven “creative aptitudes” of 52 weeks and fraction each (365 : 7) and the “creative aptitude” into seven “human virtues” of seven days and fraction each (52: 7), which established a correspondence between the common week and the Divine Year of 168 Zodiacal Years and fundamentally, although in this case by resorting to imperfect divisions and fractions, between the common week and the seven “creation days” of 25,920 common years each.

Whatever the practical value of these latter calculations, it is clear that the ancient Egyptians, as well as the Greeks, Persian and Chaldeans, dispensed a most special relevance to this cycle of 25,920 years (or its half of 12,960 years), which would very likely represent the length of a full cycle of four ages. If so, what would be the length of each age?

According to the hermetic tradition, the “Adamic race,” which we belong to, would have evolved through four ages of 6,480 years each and would now be nearing the end of the full cycle. These four ages, naturally equivalent to the same number of “zodiacal seasons” of three “zodiacal months” each, would have been marked by four key events: (I) Formation, from the start of the Zodiacal Year to the Sin or “fall down” of man; (II) Sin, from the expulsion from the Garden of Eden to Tribulation, which began with the Flood; (III) Tribulation, from the Flood to Redemption; and IV) Redemption, consummated by Christ. Thus, while the sun draws about to enter the first degrees of the Aquarius constellation – after retrograding past the Taurus, Aries and Pisces constellations – the Zodiacal Year would be about to complete its last cycle, and the “Adamic race” that of its redemption and deliverance.

I would like to make some remarks here. These periods or “seasons” – the description of which certainly sounds a little bit fanciful – which some traditions automatically round up as six thousand years, clearly correspond to a more general, and therefore more extensive, cycle than the one made up by the ages depicted by Hesiod, who was clearly talking about more local and contingent periods and about cycles already concluded in his time. On the other hand, they strongly crash, both in their magnitude and by their equal lengths, with the four yugas of the Hindu tradition, which are of an incredible elaboration and whose lengths, proportional to the scale 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 10, are amazingly 1’728.000, 1’296.000, 864,000 and 432,000 common years respectively, equaling a total length of 4’320,000 years for the full cycle. Incidentally, it is most significant that this scale, although reversed, is the same as the Pythagorean Tetraktys expressed as 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10. Let me briefly address the latter.

Among the Greeks who exposed on the doctrine of cosmic cycles – great philosophers like Anaximander, Empedocle, Heraclitus, and subsequently Plato and the Stoics – there clearly stands out Pythagoras, whose intellectual interests were primarily mathematic. It is said that his most transcendental discovery, which would signify a sort of disclosure of the nature of the universe, was that certain intervals of the musical scale can be arithmetically expressed as relationships among the numbers 1, 2, 3 and 4, which combined sum up 10, a symbol of the Supreme. Originated – according to legend – in the pitch of the sounds issued by an anvil on which hammers of different sizes were beating, this discovery demonstrated the existence of an inherent order in the nature of sound and, moreover, a mathematical organization in the formation of the universe, of whose structure, harmonious and beautiful as music itself, time participates as a key element.

Now, in times of Pythagoras, as well as later on, the Greek scholars used to make study journeys to various countries, mainly Egypt and Mesopotamia, and even beyond, to India itself, considered throughout history as the ultimate goal of the lovers of knowledge. It is uncertain whether Pythagoras undertook such journey; but if he did, it could explain the real origin of his famous Tetraktys, the “Hindu version” of which I will deal with in the next chapter.

NOTE

¹In this way the Church, almost from its inception, would systematically oppose the doctrine of the Four Ages – among other reasons, because it affected the Augustinian view of a history divided in three main parts or periods (in which men live, first without laws; then under the laws, and finally in the time of grace). Then in the course of the centuries, and in midst of a virtual conspiracy of silence, the timeless doctrine gradually fell into oblivion as in the West at least, and contrarily to what almost all the ancient traditions had taught, the notion of a linear time indefinitely extending into the future gathered strength.

Home

C H A P T E R 2

K A L P A S A N D Y U G A S

«Those Yogis who know from realization Brahma’s day as covering a thousand maha-yugas, and so his night as extending to another thousand maha-yugas, know the reality about Time.»

(Bhagavad–gita, 8:17)

In essence, the Hindu doctrine of cosmic cycles conceives a circular, qualitative time that cyclically affects our universe and everything in it. A universe that on its part is eternal, without beginning or end, and which manifests itself, along with other billions of universes, from a state of development to another of equilibrium, and then to another of decadence, after which there occurs its dissolution – or pralaya – and back to start again, forever. A universe, in sum, governed by recurrence, in which, from manifestation to pralaya, there flow in countless numbers the immensely vast Brahma’s days, or kalpas, preceded by their corresponding nights; and where within each kalpa there follow one another one thousand “human cycles,” or maha–yugas – a study of which, reversing the order, I will attempt in the first place.

Let us begin by noting that each maha–yuga consists of four cyclic ages or yugas, of decreasing length, which mark an equal number of gradual stages of degradation of mankind and so correspond exactly with those ages that the Classical tradition has designated always as the Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Iron ages – except for one aspect of the doctrine: the magnitude of the durations involved. In effect, the length ascribed to the maha–yuga, 4’320,000 common years, is in appearance so disproportionate to represent a human cycle, that it usually startles the Westerner unfamiliar with these matters; because even without mentioning that we are talking about cycles – of which there are as many as one thousand in a Brahma’s day –, such length exceeds that of the existence of mankind on Earth, a span of time which, while in a very broad sense can be traced back some millions of years into the past, in a more strict sense – i.e. in relation to modern man, or Sapiens Sapiens – is, nevertheless, estimated at best as 50,000 – 100,000 years. On the other hand, why should the lengths of the yugas be proportional to the scale 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 10 and not rather equal, as are the four ages of the Classical tradition? We will see very soon, however, that these difficulties are not unsolvable as might be thought, nor is the problem as a whole as complex as it appears to be. So for the moment and without further delay, we will take a look into those lengths as can be deduced from the relevant texts.

Table 1 – The maha–yuga or cycle of four yugas

Apart from the proportion by which the lengths decrease, here we can immediately see that the total length in “divine years”, if translated into “human years”, is the product of the first by 360 – according to the statement in Bhagavata Purana 3, 11:12 that “a day of the demigods is like a year of human beings”. A careful study reveals, however, what is perhaps the most significant fact in all of this analysis (and a perfectly logic one at that): at least in “human years”, all the lengths are “circular” – that is, not only are they divisible, by reason of their ending in two or more zeros, by 2, 4, 5, 8, 10, 15, 20, etc, but they also are divisible, because the sum of their digits is nine, by 3, 6, 9, 12, 18, 24, 36, 72, 108, 144, 180, 360, etc, all of them “sacred” numbers for most traditions. This essential feature not only fits in perfectly with any numerical system based on the circle of 360 degrees, which is most suitable for a circular time as it makes it possible to produce exact divisions, but it also enables the “human” lengths to be related to the period of precession of the equinoxes of 25,920 common years – the sum of whose digits is also nine. Thus, 72 x 60 = 4,320 and 72 x 360 = 25,920 (the total length of the cycle of precession of the equinoxes, and remember the equinox precessions by one degree every 72 years), and again, 4,320 x 6 = 25,920, all of which is actually not surprising, as the division of the circle is naturally effected by multiples of three, six, or nine – the latter being the one that affords the greatest possibilities.

Now, in connection with these two key numbers, 72 and 25,920, there are extremely suggestive coincidences which evidence a perfect correspondence between the life of man, the “microcosms,” and that of our universe or “macrocosms.” For one thing, 72 corresponds to the average beats of the human heart in a minute, and a quarter of 72, or 18, to the human breathings in the same period, so that in one day a man will have breathed 18 x 60 x 24 = 25,920 times. On the other hand, after 72 years, which is the average length of life of man at present, a man will have lived a total 25,920 days (assuming an ideal year of 360 days), while the Earth’s axis will have barely traveled a degree of the equinoctial circle of 360 degrees or 25,920 common years. In other words: from a cosmic view, man’s life lasts only one day.

In the other hand, the number 72 appears very frequently in connection with cosmic cycles. For example, it appears in the Chinese magical square and corresponded, in the Far-Eastern tradition, to the division of the year in five parts (5 x 72 = 360), out of which three (3 x 72 = 216) were “Yang” or masculine, and two (2 x 72 = 144) “Yin” or feminine.¹ I will mention, in passing, that this division of the year was also used by the ancient Incas. Among the ancient Egyptians, in turn, 72 are the plotters who stand by Seth in his scheme to kill Osiris.

Again, remember that 72 were the disciples of Jesus, 72 the members of the Jewish Sanhedrin and, in the Middle Ages, the articles of the Rule of the Order of the Temple were also 72. But however interesting all of these numerical considerations are – and they could certainly multiply to tedium – I will leave them at this point so as to turn back again to the maha–yuga.

Perhaps the most vivid description of this important cycle is the one provided by the story of the bull Dharma, narrated elsewhere in Bhagavata Purana (1, 4:17 and ff). There is depicted how Dharma, “Religion,” steadily loses, one by one, his four legs at every successive age: In Satya–yuga, the primeval age in which mankind fully keeps the religious principles, and which is characterized by virtue and wisdom, he is supported by the four principles of austerity, cleanliness, truthfulness, and mercy; in Treta–yuga, the era in which vice appears, he loses austerity; in Dvapara–yuga, as vice increases, he loses cleanliness; and in Kali–yuga, the era of quarrel and hypocrisy and of the biggest degradation and spiritual darkness of all four, in which we are now, he additionally loses veracity and is only supported by mercy, which declines gradually as the time of devastation closes by.

This devastation occurs at the end of a final, ghastly period in which men become like dwarves, have extremely short lives, and decay to unimaginable extremes of abomination. The description of this last period, which appears on the Twelfth Canto of Bhagavata Purana, usually arouses disbelief and rejection from Western readers, although such daunting images are by far not uncommon in the Western tradition (as attested, for example, on biblical texts such as Deuteronomy 28: 53, 57; 2 Kings 6:28–29; Ezekiel 5:10; Lamentation 4:10, etc.). For the rest, in the current cycle such devastation would still take place about four hundred twenty thousand years from now, a date that awaits reassuringly remote in the future – at least from our limited historical perspective – and which greatly differs from those that other traditions – the Jewish and Persian for example – establish, within the current era, for the end of time – although, as we will see in subsequent chapters, on the earthly-and-human proper levels the end of this cycle could very well be, so to speak, as close-by as around the corner.

Additionally, the Supreme Lord himself, as the avatara Kalki, is said to appear at the end of the Kali–yuga to destroy the demons, save his devotees and inaugurate another Satya–yuga, thus starting a new cycle of four yugas.

As to the beginning of the Kali–yuga, a crucial date in our study as it should let us calculate, once established its actual length, its ending date, Surya–siddhanta, perhaps the oldest astronomical treatise in the world, establishes it at midnight of the day that corresponds in our calendar to the 18th February of 3102 BC, when the seven traditional planets, including the sun and moon,² were aligned in relation to the star Zeta Piscium. While this date certainly sounds implausible, as it contradicts all our notions about the known history, plus raises an apparently insoluble problem, i.e. the obvious incompatibility between the existence of multiple human cycles on the one hand, and a single human cycle on the other (an issue that will be addressed in the next chapter), for the moment I will just mention that such conjunction has been confirmed by astronomical calculations made by computer software published in the United States by Duffet-Smith.³

Let us take a look into the bigger cycles now. As has been said at the beginning of this chapter, a Brahma’s day consists of one thousand maha–yugas, and his night of an equal number of them. The “day” and “night” therefore are 4’320,000 x 1,000 x 2 = 8,640’000,000 common years long. Now, since Brahma lives one hundred of his years (of 360 “days” each), a simple calculation (8,640’000,000 x 100 x 360) unveils the total length of the immense cycle of cosmic manifestation: 311’040,000’000,000 common years – a duration that theoretically is just that of a breathing period of the Maha–Vishnu, the Great Universal Form, and symbolically corresponds to the two complementary phases into which each cycle of manifestation is divided – in this case a dual, alternating movement of expansion and contraction, exhalation and inhalation, systole and diastole.

Some preliminary remarks are in order here. Regarding cosmic cycles, the Hindu tradition, like the Chinese and other ancient traditions, has always expressed their lengths mainly by symbolic numbers so as to conceal a certain knowledge that is considered confidential. Thus, in some cases, some figures may have been “disguised” by either multiplying or dividing them by a factor, or by adding to them a greater or lesser number of zeros – which does not modify their respective proportions; such may well be the case with the maha–yuga of 4’320,000 common years. For those Hindus who would not dare to question them, however, the plain, literal yuga lengths should perhaps be considered not so much strictly referred to the Earth but rather to the cosmic level; and in fact, all the difficulties inherent in the problem would be solved by including within the framework of the doctrine different planetary systems in which the cycles of four yugas unfolded successively. This hypothesis raises, however, metaphysical issues that are beyond the scope of this study, so while not excluding that in the next chapter I may deal with this cycle more extensively, I have limited here to mention it.

As to the kalpa of 4,320 millions of years – an appropriate study of which would need a whole chapter – it should be noted that its usual association by Western scholars with the total cosmic manifestation has been overrun by today’s estimation of the age of the universe by modern science, an age that would place it rather on a planetary or, at best, galactic level. And in effect, according to the orthodox Hindus for whom the kalpa is simply synonymous with a Brahma’s day without its corresponding night, the end of the kalpa comes with a partial dissolution of the universe by water;⁴ and as regards its duration, the doctrine abides strictly by the aforementioned figure. Now, the fact that this length of time virtually matches the 4,500 millions of years estimated by modern science for the Earth’s age (let alone the “ultimate” figure of 4,310 millions mentioned in the introduction), certainly points to the possibility that it represents the lifetime of our planetary system; if so, it would not be unlikely that the Earth were currently very close to the end of a Brahma’s day and that its corresponding night was now approaching, even if it takes ten or twelve millions of years yet to arrive. However, all this is not by far that simple: For one thing, the related texts are in some cases quite enigmatic, as suggested, for example, by the reiteration of the phrase “Those who know...” (Bhagavad–gita 8:17), so the possibility remains that the 4,320 millions of years do not actually mean the daytime but the full Brahma’s day, so that the length of the daytime would be 2,160 millions of years, and an equal number of years that of the night. So here again, the possibility that the figures may have been somehow disguised should be taken into account.

Finally, the enormous length of 311’040,000’000,000 common years that the texts implicitly assign to the great cycle of cosmic manifestation accommodates indeed very comfortably the 15 billions of years estimated by modern physics as the age of the universe; and even if such length were deemed exaggerate – say it was a thousand times lesser, i.e. the actual figure was only 311,040’000,000 years, which is certainly not impossible if we stick to the foregoing remarks – even so the 15 billions of years would fit very comfortably within that period. At any rate, it would mean that our universe is still very young and that we are now, within the immense cycle of universal manifestation, virtually at the beginning of an expansion period.

And indeed, it is amazing that it took literally millennia for the modern scientific circles to again conceive this ancient notion of a universe that “breathes,” i.e. a universe that has two phases, one in which it expands and the other in which it contracts; two phases which, by virtue of the correspondences to which cycles of any order of magnitude are subject, can be respectively assimilated to a Brahma’s day and its corresponding night, as well as to both phases of what the Hindus call a Manvantara – an old Hindu measure of time which, in my effort to integrate what I may call the Western and Eastern sides of the doctrine, I will deal with in some detail in the next chapter.

NOTES

¹ ONORIO FERRERO: El Tao te ching de Lao tzu, Ignacio Prado Pastor, Lima, 1972, p. 12, note.

² The traditional astrology used to list the following seven planets, including as such the sun and moon: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury and Moon.

³ RICHARD L. THOMPSON, op. cit., p. 20. It is important to mention that other siddhantas make almost identical calculations.

⁴ Such dissolution constitutes a pralaya proper, as opposed to the maha–pralaya or “great” pralaya that occurs at the end of the total cosmic manifestation.

Home

C H A P T E R 3

T 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,¹that 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 it 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.

Home

C H A P T E R 4

T H E A G E O F K A L I

«… in this Age of Kali people are mostly short-lived, slothful, most dull-witted, unlucky and tormented with diseases and other evils.»

(Bhagavata Purana 1, 1:7-10)

According to Bhagavata Purana (1, 14:1 ff), the advent of the present Kali–yuga was heralded by portents of a fearful nature: the sacred images in temples seemed to weep and mourn, deception and misunderstanding polluted all dealings among relatives, and everywhere people were turning increasingly greedy and violent. Above all this, there prevailed severe disruptions in the characteristics of the seasons.

This would have occurred in 3102 BC as the Dvapara–yuga, or third yuga, of the twenty-eighth “millennium” of the seventh and present Manu, Vaivasvata, came to an end.

Confirming the starting date, Aryabhata, a famous Hindu astronomer born in 476 BC, writes he was 23 years old when 3,600 years of the present Kali–yuga had elapsed, which yields 3,600 – 23 – 476 = 3101 BC. The use of a “zero” year in the conversion to the Western calendar can account for the difference of one year.

Now as was said in Chapter 2, the precise start, on the midnight of the 18^th February of 3102 BC, was presided by an alignment of the seven traditional planets (including the Sun and Moon). According to the jyotisha–shastras, the texts of astronomy of the old Hindus, this is perfectly normal: the Surya–siddhanta, for example, which measures the time in days from the beginning of the Kali–yuga, assumes that the positions of all planets, in their two cycles, are aligned at “zero” day in relation to the star Zeta–Piscium, which is used by the said shastras to measure the celestial longitudes. Such alignment would have had minimal deviations and anyway, it would be a very rare phenomenon, as from that date to our days there only were found three intervals of ten years in which there had been such an exact alignment.¹

Here the question arises: why should the passage from one age to the next be determined by an alignment like the one depicted, if it is rather the cycle of precession of equinoxes the key factor for determining the length of the human cycle? To give a precise answer is not very easy; but if we consider that the circumference described by the Earth’s axis does not have an actual starting point (since, as in a common year, it is actually conventional), then it is very likely that there is some triggering factor, like the planetary synods described in Chapter 2, which might have caused additional climatic disturbances so as to precipitate the passage from one yuga to the next one. There is, regarding this, a suggestive connection with the fact that the El Niño phenomenon, which such dreadful disorders caused in recent years, appears to have begun in the year 3100 BC approximately; and we may also remember the concept of a “perfect year,” the time the planets take to align themselves back again at their startup point, which coincides with the “great year” of 12,960 common years.²

In connection with the likely starting point of the present Kali–yuga, some authors have highlighted the fact that, at some time in the sixth century BC, the traditional doctrines experienced diverse re-adaptations and reformulations in several key areas of the world: in Greece by Pythagoras, in Persia by Zarathustra, in China by Confucius, etc., re-adaptations which, considering the universality of the phenomenon, would have been a sort of preparation for the start of a new Era. I must admit that this date around the sixth century BC, while imprecise, sounds more plausible as a starting point than 3102 BC, which crashes frontally with the belief in an uninterrupted progress of humanity from the development of agriculture and the invention of writing onwards. Yet in favor of 3102 BC can be argued, apart from the unusual planetary alignment depicted, the singular coincidence with the “zero year” of the start of the Mayan and Egyptian civilizations (in 3113 BC the former, around 3100 the latter), without a doubt significant as such start coincides with the beginning of writing around the world and seems to draw, for the same reason, a veil between history proper – the written history – and pre-history, about which virtually nothing is known with absolute certainty. In the other hand, it has been suggested, based on astronomical calculations, that the great epics Mahabharata would date back from 3100 BC as it would be partially contemporary of Satapatha Brahmana, where it is said that the Krittikas (the Pleiades) «do not turn from the East» – i.e. they were on the celestial Equator. Add to all this the persistent allusions, both in oral and written tradition, to ancient, highly sophisticated civilizations spiritually more advanced than ours that disappeared as a consequence of dreadful cataclysms which erased all traces of their passage on Earth, and the picture becomes more complete: if one or more of these civilizations existed before our written history, then it would push the specific weight of history back by several millennia and turn the year 3102 BC into a comparatively recent date.

But let us deal with the difficulty that is obviously central in our study: Are we really in the Kali–yuga, the age of quarrel and hypocrisy? If so, in which phase of it? And, is it possible that we have been in it so long (more than 5,000 years)?

As a matter of fact, giving answer to each of these questions will depend on the point of view that we take. We are dealing with directly opposite perceptions of a vast problem that also implies, considering the long time involved – virtually the whole history of our so-called civilization – such additional questions as: Were the Greeks and Romans really greater than the Egyptians, the builders of huge pyramids and majestic temples several thousands of years before the Greeks made their appearance in the world? Among the Greeks themselves, were the contemporaries of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle wiser than Pythagoras, Heraclitus and Tales’ colleagues? And – skipping the broad time span – were the European Middle-Ages really inferior to the Renaissance, and if so, in what sense? What can be said, for example, of the Empire of Charlemagne, the earlier Romanic churches, and of Gothic art, which was an entirely original art and not an imitation of classic art as that of the so-called Renaissance was?

Again, is the present time an age of immense progress as depicted by the technocrats, or rather a progression into chasm in every sense?

As is commonly known, India is at present probably the only country in the world where the traditional spiritual values have been kept almost in their entirety. So it is only natural that, from an eminently spiritual perspective, the traditionalist Hindus view the whole of the last 5,000 years of history as a process of gradual deterioration in all orders and life conditions, a process in which the nefarious atmosphere of the Kali-yuga has finally spread through everything and materialism, real or disguised, has set its supremacy on the world. This is particularly due to the fact that, not existing a qualified priesthood anymore, the administration of society has fallen on the hands of the lower-class people whose sole motivation is personal gain. As a consequence, there exist a growing anxiety in the minds of men, increasingly impatient, greedy and violent, and a mounting degradation of customs that ends out in family disintegration and a disorderly sexual conduct which will inevitably result in a large part of the world population being “unwanted,” that is, born from illicit coupling, including sexual assault, or simply “by accident.” As if all this were not enough, there is an increasing deterioration in the quality of everything, even food; and there appear awful and previously unknown diseases that result from the increase of artificial needs and the proliferation of the most pernicious habits. It is in sum, for those Hindus that have not been seduced by the false glow of Western progress, an atheistic, violent and degraded Era in which goodness virtually does not exist anymore (according to Varaha Purana, “demonic beings take their birth in it”), an Era which can only lead to a final cataclysm.

For the rest, such symptoms have not gone unnoticed to some Western reputed scholars, among them Oswald Spengler, the famous author of The Decline of the West, and Alexis Carrel, the author of the notorious and most controversial L'Homme, cet inconnu (“Man, The Unknown”); but above all to René Guénon, for whom we are essentially dealing with a process whose ultimate cause merely resides in the increasing estrangement from the principle from which the whole manifestation derives, a situation that has become irreversible and is primarily characterized by a progressive secularization and materialization of the world – in other words, by a gradual darkening of the primeval spirituality. This fatally results in a total reversion of the universal values, a reversion that aggravates as we move toward the end of the cycle and which is nourished by the fallacy of an unrelenting evolution and progress. Actually Guénon distinguishes a fifth cyclic phase within the Kali–yuga which he refers to as “the age of increasing corruption,” which entails the risk of total annihilation of mankind. We would be now in the dreadful times announced by the sacred books of India where «all castes will be intermingled», where «family itself will no longer exist». Disorder and chaos prevail in all orders and have reached a point that exceeds by far all that had been previously seen; a stop would no longer be possible, since according to the warnings from the traditional doctrines, we have indeed entered the final phase of the Kali-yuga, «the darkest period of the Dark Age.»³

It is amazing that this accurate diagnosis of the epoch was formulated nearly one century ago, at a time when many voices predicted scientific and technical advances that would “very soon put an end to of all the worlds’ evils”, a progress that would bring “unlimited happiness” to humankind. Well, since then there have only been atrocious wars, the nuclear threat got started, unknown diseases appeared, and moral, social and political decay has reached extreme levels throughout the world to such an extent, that the entire society would seem to relentlessly drift toward anarchy. Violence has become common to an unheard-of extent particularly in the large cities, which are literally submerged in drugs and pornography, and where it shows up in atrocious modes like urban terrorism. Actually we only need to open the papers to become horrified at the profusion of news on religious and racial slaughter and unbelievably brutal terrorist deeds and, on the other hand, to be appalled by the gradual, increasingly accelerated deterioration of the environment, the growing contamination of rivers, seas and lakes, the extinction of forests and whole animal species by the hand of man, the more and more frequent natural disasters which, caused basically by the current global warming (in turn forced by a disproportionate boom of the industrial activity) include the progressive desertification of the Earth, atmospheric exhaustion, draughts, floods, earthquakes and cataclysms resulting in casualties by the millions every year… do I need to continue?⁴ Indeed, there is every reason to believe that we are in the last days of the present cycle and that the end of our civilization, as we know it, is very close at hand, irrespective of what the believers in a “future of material and moral progress” of the human race may claim. This admitted, we would only need to deal with how that end would be like.

According to Bhagavata Purana (3, 11:29 ff), at the end of the “millennium” the devastation is produced, at an early stage, by the «fire that is emitted by the mouth of Sankarsana», which wreaks havoc on the “three inferior worlds” during one hundred years of the demigods (36,000 human years). This version matches exactly a Nordic tradition according to which at the time of the world destruction (the ragnarok), from the mouth of Surt, “the Black One”, radiate devastating flames. Of course, the allusions to fire may refer to great volcanic eruptions or to the increasingly frequent forest fires that are currently taking place around the world. Then, during other 36,000 years, there are gales and torrential rains accompanied by raging waves that cause the seas to overflow, a devastation which, in the view of the experts in the Hindu scriptures, occurs at the end of the period of each Manu. Of course, on the human level, the afore-mentioned figures are to be considered symbolic; in connection with the Manvantara as has been previously defined, the 72,000 years of devastation, which in the context correspond to the 4,320 millions of years of a Brahma’s day, very likely are only equivalent to 72 years, so that what I have referred to as “the beginning of end” would be actually situated around the year 2010 AC, a border line suggested at the end of the previous chapter (Note 3). Moreover, if some other factors that would take too long to detail would be brought into the calculation, we would see that such “beginning” might already be occurring, as is unfortunately clear from the unprecedented rise in the climatic disorders of our days – one of whose most visible manifestations is the recurring onslaught of the “El Niño” phenomenon – which would be announcing an imminent disaster of universal proportions.

NOTES

¹ RICHARD L. THOMPSON, op. cit., pp. 20–21.

² Actually, studies of this sort have been made in the past, although with more limited means. Kepler is said to have discovered, in 1603–1604, the conjunction of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, and calculated that it occurs every 805 years; and an exact alignment of Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn was predicted in some books for year 2000, information that our means unfortunately would not let us verify.

³ RENE GUENON: La crisis del mundo moderno, Mosca Azul, Lima, 1975, p. 41. See also by the same author : Le régne de la quantité et les signes des temps, Gallimard, Paris, 1972.

⁴ There is a serious study by the Red Cross, probably the most important that this entity has ever undertaken, whose main conclusion is that the situation depicted is absolutely real, global, and – even worse – irreversible as it has become a cyclic process of huge dimension. Initiated mainly with irresponsible tree chopping and excessive industrial emissions, this destructive cycle would seem to have been started not only to the effect of destroying all life on our planet, but also to end its very existence by raising the sea levels, thereby thoroughly changing the weather patterns and the seasons plus causing major landslides and draughts and all the other described phenomena. As to the likely date of the imminent collapse – or “rupture”, as it is called – the aforementioned entity calculated it at approximately 2010 AD.

Home

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 we have 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,²the 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).

Home

C H A P T E R 6

T H E P R I M O R D I A L C I V I L I Z A T I O N

«Off the Celts’ country and on the ocean that surrounds it, there to the North is an island that is not smaller than Sicily. Its dwellers are called Hyperboreans, for they live beyond the area where the North winds blow. There, in the island, is a magnificent forest consecrated to the Sun god and a strange temple of circular shape.»

(Manifest of Hecateus, as quoted by Diodorus)

When I took to studying the ages and cosmic cycles, I started from the renewed interest of modern astrophysics in the behavior of time, a subject matter that embraces innumerable disciplines (mainly metaphysics but also philosophy, religion, archeology, astronomy, geology, and many more) and a mystery whose solution, even partial, could help us unravel, almost in their entirety, the great enigmas that have intrigued science since it became interested in them again.

Concerning this, an enigma which does not belong in the field of astrophysics, but is to me as meaningful as the ones above, is the fact that the ancient civilizations were all familiar with the knowledge that time unfolds in a circular way. This poses the first and most important question in relation to the problem: namely, how could these civilizations also know, for instance, about the space–time relativity or the current expansion of the universe, when it is generally believed, particularly in the “advanced” countries, that ancient people were ignorant and superstitious – while science itself has fully corroborated so many other historical and scientific data contained in old treatises?

Already in the introduction I have suggested that the numerous correlations and analogies among the various traditions, as well as the universality of a certain esoteric knowledge, can only be explained if a common origin is admitted for them all; and in the previous chapter I have reviewed the countless coincidences among different traditions in the matter of ages and cycles, all of them elements whose study, along with the study of certain archetypal universal forms, could help us trace back such origin.

To this end, I will start the study with the scheme of seven eras or “Worlds”, earths that become manifest in a successive or chronological way but offer a connotation that is at the same time, and primarily, spatial. This can easily be appreciated in the correlations, for example, with the seven dvipas o “continents” (literally “islands”) of the Hindu tradition, regions that manifest themselves consecutively without the remaining six – which wait, so to speak, in a dormant state – disappearing because of it. (An interesting analogy may help clarify this point: within the cycle of cell renovation of the human body, which as a whole develops along seven years, not all cells are born at the beginning of that cycle, nor do they die at the end thereof; but some, mainly due to their diverse life spans, do so while the others await their turn to appear.)

I have also mentioned another very important connotation: this one with the Pole Star, as suggested by the Islamic tradition, which refer to seven Qutbs or “Poles” that would have ruled seven successive skies. This tradition is obviously related to the one quoted by historian Berosus – whom I have referred to in the previous chapter – according to which several generations before the Flood – which would be the Mesopotamic one, in about 4000 BC – there emerged from the ocean seven beings of great wisdom, «animals endowed with reason», the first of which was Oannes, the Babylonian Noah, a instructor of the people.

The earliest known precedent of this tradition, which actually is 2,000 or 4,000 years older, would be certain Assyrian cylindrical seals that date back from 1000 to 800 BC, very possibly associated to the Ursa Minor constellation; wherewith it appears that we are getting somewhere in our quest, as these very sages are found in Egypt: they are the seven wise men of the goddess Mehurt, or Hetep-sekhus, who came out of the water and, like falcons, ascended to heaven to preside the sciences and literature along with Toth, who counts the stars and measures and numbers the Earth. Now Toth, or Hermes, is the «savior of the knowledge existing prior to the cataclysm»; at times he is identified with Enoch, who in turn is equated to Tenoch, the founder of Tenochtitlan, deified by his people; and on the other hand, both of them, Enoch and Tenoch, are supposed to have been the progenitors o populators of the Earth, like Brahma, Abraham, the different Manus, etc. Furthermore, the seven Egyptian wise men are said to represent the Ursa Major. Finally, the seven stars mentioned at the beginning of Saint John’s Revelation (I, 16 and 20) are considered as well to very likely represent the said constellation.

Let me refer now to the “sapta–rksha” of the Hindu tradition, a Sanskrit term that means “seven bears”, although “rksha” also means “star”, “light”, and “sapta–rksha” might therefore be translated as “the dwelling of the seven rishis or “wise men”, the seven “lights” by which the wisdom of the preceding cycles was passed down to the current cycle. Now, the fact that such term was not applied later on to the Ursa Minor but to the Pleiades, also seven, considered as deities by various cultures – e.g. the Incas – denotes, according to Guénon, that at a given moment the tradition was transferred from a polar constellation to a zodiacal one; and here we have another clue toward solving the problem. But anyway, it is clear that what is designated as the seven successive “Poles” or “Earths” are the seven stars of the Ursa Major, to which at a certain epoch the projection of the Earth axis would have successively pointed as the period of the precession of the equinoxes progressed over its circular course, thus especially favoring certain regions of the Earth or dvipas. An example will help us understand this: some 13,000 years ago, the celestial position of the North Pole was occupied by Vega, and exactly the same will occur 13,000 years from now; at present such position is occupied by Polaris, although due to the greater tilt of the Earth axis, the current path is through the stars of the Ursa Minor.

Continuing our quest, which will ideally take us back to the primeval origin of the doctrine, we will deal now with the other great scheme: the quaternary cycle, considerably more frequent and of an eminently temporal nature – although it also shows spatial correlations, basically with the four cardinal points. Omnipresent in our study, its main feature is its variable length. In effect, it is a cycle that appears in all orders of existence, from the total universal manifestation to those of any historical peoples or societies, each with their own chronology and their own starting date.

One of the better known examples of these particular applications is the famous dream interpreted by the prophet Daniel (2, 1 ff), which he refers to four civilizations that he identifies with the traditional ages of Gold, Silver, Bronze and Iron (they are actually five, but the last one is irrelevant). However, it would not be difficult to find many other similar examples in all of which we will be dealing with cycles of a descending nature, where every phase is worse than the previous one; although only the Hindu tradition, the one alone that has received the primeval knowledge in one piece from the original center, has preserved that of the proportion by which the respective lengths decrease, whatever the total length of the corresponding cycle.

This latter fact carries an additional and most important conclusion itself: namely, if the length of the last period of the quaternary series is, by definition, a tenth of the total length, then such period can obviously be sub-divided into other four ages which follow the same proportion (and in fact not only the last period, but any of them). For example, if the Kali-yuga really has an effective length of 5,184 common years or a tenth of 51,840 common years, then we can safely assume that it will consist in turn, always following the corresponding proportions, of four periods whose lengths will approximately be 2,074, 1,555, 1,037 and 518 years. In other words, we are talking about cycles within cycles so that one may refer, say, to the kali-yuga of the current Kali-yuga – that is, the darkest phase of the Dark Age. Naturally, this is a hypothesis that must be demonstrated, and in the following chapters I will do my best to do so. Meanwhile, I will face an objection that is usually presented with regard to the doctrine as a whole: namely, whether we are not dealing with mere “numerological” speculation; for, were not the ancient so ignorant that they merely possessed some basic technical knowledge?

Without referring yet to the possibility that in remote times entire civilizations may have disappeared without leaving a trace, I will try, in what follows, to refute such objection: quite simply, I will prove that the ancient cultures possessed, among other advanced scientific information, a most precise knowledge of the chronology and calendar computation, probably born of their liking for the great observation of stars in the case of the Egyptian and Babylonian civilizations, and, particularly among the Mayas and Aztecs, for the accurate measurement of huge lapses of time. Even more, we will see that the ancient had such advanced knowledge in mathematics and astronomy that only recently, after long and dark millennia, it have been equaled or improved – yet not always.

Such is the case, for instance, of India, whose knowledge in astronomy was so advanced that it became the ultimate goal for wisdom seekers. A very old jyotisha, Brahma–gupta, deals among others issues with such topics as the motion of the planets around the Sun, the ecliptic obliquity, the spherical shape of the Earth, the light reflected from the Moon, the Earth revolution on its axis, the presence of stars in the Milky Way, the law of gravitation – all of which would not see the light in Europe until the time of Copernicus and Newton.

In turn, Surya–siddhanta informs us that the Earth, a globe that moves through space, has a diameter length equivalent to 12,617 present-day kilometers, an extent fairly approximate to the one calculated in our days.

Now, while there exist most advanced conceptions of the space–time dislocation and the current expansion of the Universe, all data pertaining to the period of precession of the equinoxes seem to have been disguised by means of a most peculiar symbolic language, even though a careful inspection of certain texts – for example, Bhagavata Purana 5, 21:4 – will let us discern its length approximately. Anyway, I have already said that it was probably in India where Hipparcus obtained his knowledge of this phenomenon, in the same way that Aristarchus of Samos received a much less sophisticated one but which scandalized his generation, even though it was shared by other philosophers like Zenon of Elea, Anaxagoras and Democritus: that of the sphericity of the Earth and its orbiting, together with all the other planets, around the Sun.

As to Democritus, the origin of his famous atomistic theory will very likely have to be found also in India, in the so-called Vaisheshika philosophic system of the legendary sage Kanada.

But long before the Greeks themselves emerged to history, it seems all this, or little less, was known in ancient Egypt. A manuscript by one Abdul Hassan Ma’sudi, preserved in the Oxford Bodleian Library, recounts for example that «Surid, king of Egypt before the great Flood, ordered the building of the pyramids and had his priests deposit the knowledge of sciences in them»; and that «he had the data pertaining to the spheres and their positions put into the biggest one, in order to perpetuate them».

In this connection, it is a proven fact that the pyramid of Kheops contained both the knowledge of the value of pi – as given by the sum of its four sides divided by the double of its height – and the golden ratio, 1.618 – obtained by dividing the surface of its base by the lateral surface and the surface of this one by the total surface – plus many other data like the mean distance from the Sun, etcetera.

In addition, eclipses were predicted, and an agricultural calendar was developed that was so advanced, that it announced the exact time of the Nile inundations. All this made Egypt, like India, the ultimate goal of all seekers for knowledge. According to Diogenes Laertius, it was here that the Greek philosophers Thales and Democritus learned geometry and astronomy, and for his part Porphyry, in his Life of Pythagoras, insists on an Egyptian origin of Thales’ ideas and, therefore, of those of Pythagoras. As to the latter, it seems his famous theorem was of common use in Egypt as early as 2500 BC.

However, it surely was in Babylon, according to recent studies, where the said theorem was known not only in its practical use but also in its theoretical formulation as early as 2000 BC, and there even is a possibility that this knowledge dates back from the old Sumerians, which in fact would place it in prehistoric times. Be it as it may, it is said that the old Babylonians invented the circle divided into 360 degrees, although this “invention” seems to have been made in many places and at different times. What is sure is that like the Egyptians, the Babylonians established an accurate agricultural calendar that not only predicted floods but also eclipses, all of which made Babylon, like Egypt and India, a great culture-radiating center.

As to China, a single example will suffice to show the extent of the advance it reached from old in the area of astronomy: An archaic manuscript describes, in the peculiar Chinese poetic stile, a “inharmonic” meeting of the Sun and Moon in Fang, a portion of the ski of China which would correspond to four stars in the Scorpio constellation. Well, calculations made by contemporary astronomers have revealed that this eclipse did occur on the 22nd October of 2137 BC – more than 4000 years ago!

Back to this side of the World, one can see the remains of magnificent pyramids whose builders, the old Mayas, developed so accurate a calendar that it established the year of 365.2422 days – a lot more precise than the Julian of 365.2500 and even the Gregorian of 365.2425 days, in use until now. The Mayas also developed a numbering system based on the position of values, whose use would only become general in Europe from the Fifteenth Century onwards, and which implied the conception and use of zero.

As to the Toltecs and Aztecs, great builders of pyramids, and the mysterious, much older Teotihuacans and Olmecs, I have already mentioned that they apparently were the first to develop a most advanced astronomy and an accurate calendar, probably so accurate as that of the Incas, which was altogether astronomical and agricultural and so sophisticated, that it included the biological cycles of some plants and animals. Also, I need not say that all these cultures determined with utmost precision the dates of the equinoxes and solstices; this was made, for example, in the South of Peru, by the Pre-Inca compound which features the mysterious “lines of Nazca”, regarded as the world’s largest astronomical calendar, and the Inca monolith known as Intihuatana (“Sun-Hitching Stone”), a clock or astronomical instrument preserved on the highest spot at the citadel of Machu Picchu, near Cusco.

Other witnesses of the great advances made all over the world from remote times can be seen, even today, in the ruins of ancient cities whose existence was legendary or unknown, like Mohenho–Daro and Harappa, in India, so advanced that their streets had canalizations and their houses bathrooms, and a meaningful fact: their inhabitants apparently did not wear any offensive weapons. Here too, mysterious engraved inscriptions were found that even now can be seen in Mesopotamia where, by the way, from a deep Sumerian layer pertaining to 3000 BC or before, a statuette of Shiva meditating in Yogic stance – identical to another found in the ruins of the Mohenho–daro citadel, obviously indicating that it was made before that date – was unearthed. These findings not only suggest that already in remote times there were relationships among civilizations, but also – as further claimed by some people – that the Sumerian civilization originated in that city-state, which in fact would be a lot older than is officially accepted.

There even are traces of a vast civilization that would have encompassed the whole North of Europe, from Ireland and Britain to the Scandinavian countries, and which would date back from as early as 9000 BC. It is very possible that the builders of the great stone observatories of Stonehenge in England and Carnac in France, as well as the gigantic zodiacal circle of Glastonbury, in England, of 30 miles in circumference, which would date back from 3000 BC, came from it. Modern analysis has shown that such builders, on top of possessing a most advanced astronomical knowledge, were great geometers who, for example, knew that a triangle whose sides are proportional to 3, 4 and 5 will always contain a right angle, a property whose discovery is attributed to Pythagoras (who formulated the famous theorem) but which, in all justice, should be attributed to them; in like manner, it is known that by means of an approach that not for being simple was less advanced, they could draw huge, almost perfect circles.

From these and other enigmatic vestiges, some authors have concluded that some of the posterior cultures, like the Sumerian and Egyptian in the Old World, and the Mayan and Aztec in the New, were in their respective prosperous times, and after the disappearance of some technological culture about which nothing is known at present, climbing down, and not up, the world’s civilization ladder. This notion has been reinforced by the discovery of certain documents, including the famous map of Piri–Reis, with characteristics of 12,000 – 13,000 years ago: the Antarctic coast free of ice, rivers and mountains on the Queen Maud Land, and an ocean level lower than it is currently; the map of Zenon, which shows Greenland free of ice such as it was 14,000 years ago; that of Hadji Hamed, with the land bridge of the Ice Age between Alaska y Siberia visible; that of Finaens, showing the Sea of Ross as it was 6,000 years ago, etc – and also by references to remote cataclysms which, upon extinguishing whole cities, even civilizations, would have caused a cultural reversal to various degrees of barbarianism. Such would be the case, for example, of the biblical Flood, which would have to be placed between 8000 and 10000 BC, and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, which is supposed to have occurred around 3000 BC, to mention but two of the better-known examples, capable to create conditions like the ones depicted. After that there would have been a slow, painful material progress of mankind toward present-day civilization, which does not remember a thing about the primordial civilization, and whose decline and imminent disappearance are predicted in turn by many scholars.

Once a common origin is admitted for such great, enigmatic cultures like the Sumerian and the Egyptian in the Old World, and the Mayan and Aztec in the New, the question naturally arises: where could such common origin be? Many people will immediately say that it could only be in Atlantis.

However, at the risk of disappointing Atlantis’ many thousands of fans, it must be said from the start that it could not be in that emblematic island-continent. For while massive evidence has been presented for its existence, mainly in the several thousands of books that have been written about this matter over the years, a careful consideration of all the existing data, particularly the timeframe involved, will show that Atlantis was at best a secondary center that radiated, like many other worldwide culture–radiating centers at different times, at a moment when the current Manvantara was fairly advanced, i.e. when the primeval tradition, being Polar by nature and therefore centered around the Ursa Mayor, had already changed into zodiacal and was oriented to the Pleiades – a fact that becomes specially relevant if we remember that the Pleiades were Atlas’ daughters, from which they were called “the Atlantides”.

On the other hand, there is no doubt at all that the Atlantis civilization existed, and perhaps the best evidence for it are the countless geographical names on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean that obviously derive from the same source, for example Aztlan, a mythical island which the Aztecs claimed to be their original country (and curiously enough, Atl is the word for water both in the old Mexico and the Semitic countries); and there are a lot more.

Another evidence would be what has been called the great paradox of the ancient Egypt, which seems to have passed, from as early as the Old Empire times, from a simple union of proto–historic clans to a most refined civilization capable of building huge pyramids – an immense achievement which favors the hypothesis that it originated in some other part of the world, which would not be other than Atlantis.

However, it is precisely as a consequence of the catastrophic sinking of the island–continent that the biblical Flood would have occurred, which, by placing both events around the same epoch, would make Atlantis an even more unlikely place as a common cultural origin for the current humanity – all the more when, according to certain traditional data, its lifespan would have not exceeded a “great year”, i.e. a half of a precessional period.

So to find the supreme center we must disregard any secondary and relatively recent centers and look farther back to the very start of the present Manvantara, then ruled by the Manu Vaivasvata of the Hindu tradition, the father of the current humanity, whom the avatara Matsya, the fish, a pre-figuration of the Babylonian Oannes, is said to have saved from the great deluge that «covered the three worlds». Such epoch would be previous to the biblical Flood by at least 40,000 years and would date back to the times of the Hyperborean Thule, located on the North Pole, where – in Homer’s words – the «Sun’s revolutions», the home of the Celtic or Hyperborean Apollo are. In effect, this is a place of delight evoked by many traditions, even the Chinese, where the Pole Star, and in general the Ursa Mayor, “the crank”, play a most significant role; but mainly by all that have an Indo-European origin, and which would be the most remote precedent of the Garden of Eden of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

That the Garden of Eden had the Hyperborean Thule for its most remote precedent is proven by the fact that from time immemorial to as late as the European Middle Ages, it used to be represented as a paradisiacal place located on the top of an inaccessible mountain surrounded by the sea – a most ancient image that is found everywhere throughout history, and a representation of the Earth that appears even on the Mercator maps, where the ocean is depicted as a torrent which, through four mouths, precipitates into the North Pole’s Gulf to be absorbed by the Earth’s bowels; and on which the Pole itself, as the supreme center, is represented as a black rock that rises to a prodigious height.

Along the same lines, the fact that many of these centers have been represented as a cavern, an island, a citadel, a palace, a temple, or a pyramid, only indicates that later on there was a proclivity to evoke, by means of secondary “images”, the primeval center by excellence: Mount Meru of the Hindus, depicted in Surya–siddhanta as a small mountain located in the North Pole, and a prototype that has survived mainly in the sacred mountains of Central Asia – believed by many to be the cradle of humanity – by such names as Sumer, Sumber or Sumur – all of them clearly identical to the Sanskrit Sumeru.

I will mention in passing that if the biblical paradise is usually believed to be located in this latter area is because it became, in the course of time, a secondary tradition from the Hyperborean; and also because the references to a paradise in the book of Genesis are essentially symbolic, and certainly subordinated to the area in which the book was compiled. On the other hand, the fact that all these representations gave rise, in different cultures, to beautiful, evocative legends only reveals the intention to keep, over the centuries, a remembrance of such supreme center alive.

Such is the case, among the Celts, of mythical Avalon of the legends of King Arthur, an emblematic image of the perfect king whose knights, numbering twelve, had twelve seats – a usual representation of the twelve constellations – set aside around a table whose center, as a symbol of the supreme center, was reserved to accommodate the Holy Grail. This in turn was a symbol of the perfect knowledge or, rather, of the place where this knowledge is safely stored all through the vicissitudes of a full human cycle – as is also the case, for example, with soma among the Hindus or the elixir of gods among the Greeks.

For the rest, it is obvious that only in one of the two Poles could exist such ideal conditions as to make it possible an “eternal spring” – the season that rules throughout the Golden Age. And in effect, in Bhagavata Purana, 5, 20:30, the Sun is depicted as revolving over the horizon during the whole year – and not just during a part of it as currently – around Mount Meru, the archetypal image of the original center. This original center is located at the core of Bhu–mandala, a schematic, most ancient representation of the Earth (and probably of the solar system, the galaxy, and the entire universe) consisting of six concentric rings separated by seas which altogether form, by surrounding the center, the seven dvipas – “islands” or continents – of the Hindu tradition. All of this would appear to ultimately take us back to a time when the plane of the ecliptic, the Equator, and the Earth horizon all coincided approximately – probably 50,000 years ago, when the orbit of our planet was more circular and its axis was not as tilted as is today.¹

I am certainly aware that this hypothesis rather raises difficulties than solves them, not the least of which is the fact that around the timeframe thus established the Northern polar region was most probably covered by a thick snow layer, a condition that does not match the one that should prevail in a “paradise”; even so, according to René Guénon and others, certain traditional data indicate that the tilt of the Earth’s axis has not always existed – rather, it would be a consequence of what is known as the “fall of man”.² And while it is most unlikely that such was the case at that time, such circumstance would immediately solve the problem.

Yet another possible solution would be to push the Hyperborean times back to over 100,000 years ago, i.e. twice as much as the combined length of two precessional periods (2 x 51,840 years), and this by virtue of the existing analogies with the day and night of Brahma, which appear to occur for cycles of all orders and so would be perfectly applicable to the case. Even so, science deprives us of such possibility, for it appears that the last ice age, that of Wurm (130,000 years ago) had already started by that time, which would force us to look further back on to the previous one, that of Riss – which in turn would have spanned from 230,000 to 180,000 years ago – and the prolonged inter-glacial period of time that followed, of about 50,000 years (from 180,000 to 130,000 BC): here the facts do appear to fit, for this one epoch, in which more favorable conditions would have prevailed (perhaps the tilt of the earth’s axis was null, and its oscillation minimal), approximately corresponds to that of the man of Neanderthal’s appearance and, in another order of things, to the winter solstice and mainly to the North within the analogical correlation with the four seasons of the year, as well as to the Hyperborean Apollo, the white race and, among the elements, water.

Of course, in this case the “fall” would not be that of Adam and Eve but that of Lucifer himself, as stated in the famous Biblical passage of Isaiah.³ All this as opposed to the epoch that we may call “Adamic”, which would correspond to the Cro-Magnon’s appearance and, in the respective analogical order, to the Autumn equinox and to the West, as well as to the red race and the element earth – in all of which there are included even linguistic considerations, as the word Adam is related to both meanings, “earth” and “red”. However, approaching such diverse issues would require a detailed study. For one thing, with this particular method we would be exceeding the timeframe of the present Manvantara, which I have established as 51,840 common years, and the sphere of modern man, whom I don’t consider to be a “relative” of the Neanderthal but rather of the Cro-Magnon. Also, we must not lose sight of the fact that some scientists place the appearance of the earliest organized tribes in about 40,000 or 50,000 years ago, and probably in Central Asia, which parallels even the afore-mentioned Biblical exegesis.

Well, I must admit that it is extremely difficult to ultimately solve these issues, as is also to be satisfied that my calculation of the total length of the Manvantara is accurate. We may remember that, according to Guénon, such length would not be 51,840 years (or 12,960 x 4) but rather 64,800 years (12,960 x 5), and I absolutely cannot challenge his knowledge of these matters, nor can I pretend to be able to establish with absolute certainty the starting point of the Hyperborean tradition at the date I have mentioned, something that he, to my knowledge, did not even attempt, nor did he ever attempt to trace its path in detail back to any date whatsoever. As to specifically predicting future events, it is something he always avoided, let alone establishing any date for them. In other words, nothing ensures that my calculations are not wholly or partially wrong; and if I have made them – and, for that matter, if I started this work at all – it is because I felt the time was ripe for it, even contravening certain precepts of the esoteric doctrines that do absolutely not support this kind of speculation. Either way, it will be the recapitulation in the following chapters which will establish to what extent the data and figures as considered mainly from Chapter 3 onwards are valid, both in my determination of the length of the whole current Manvantara, and of its starting and closing dates.

NOTES

¹ For simplicity, the possibility that the primeval center was in the South Pole has not been considered. However, it is as valid an option as the one of the North Pole and even, for reasons both astronomical and historical-geographical, a more viable one: for one thing, there is no difference between “up” and “down” astronomically; the magnetic pole is known to have inverted several times in the past, and there even is talk of an overturning of the Earth axis coinciding, incidentally, with the “fall” of man. On the other hand, it is known than Antarctic was a paradisiacal place, and its shape, even now that it is almost fully covered by ice, is virtually identical to that of Asgard, the dwelling of the Scandinavian gods. But all this poses new, obvious possibilities that I cannot address here.

² RENE GUENON: Formas tradicionales y ciclos cósmicos, op. cit., p. 30.

³ Isaiah 14: 12–15: “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! [...]For thou hast said in thine heart [...]: I will sit upon the mount of the congregation, in the side of the North...”

Home

C H A P T E R 7

T H E C I R C U L A R T I M E

«The Universe is built on the power of numbers.»
«The essence of everything real is in numbers.»
«Time is the sphere of the World as everything is in Time.»

(Pythagoras)

In the course of my lucubrations on the nature of time I have touched some issues which, while broadly treated by some authors, are nevertheless essential to the study of cosmic cycles and ages and therefore still require a thorough examination from us. An example that may seem extemporaneous, now that we are nearing the end of this work, is the probability that time influences cyclically the evolution of humanity both along brief lapses of a few years or decades and over longer periods, and either by itself or through the stars’ activity.

Note that I am not talking about two different things, as between time and the stars there is so close a relationship that it can perfectly be said that they create each other. In effect, if on the one hand it is by means of time that the celestial bodies are created, on the other hand it is motion – mostly circular motion – of the latter that somehow creates time (and in fact, time is, in terms of physics, inconceivable in the absence of motion of some kind).

Is it not the Earth’s circular motion on its axis that creates the day, and is it not its almost circular orbit around the Sun that creates the year? And what is true of these two basic “short” cycles, is true as well of the greater ones. In effect, is it not the circle drawn by the ideal projection of the Earth’s axis over the imaginary plane of the constellations that creates the period of the precession of the equinoxes, of a decisive significance to the history of mankind? This fact, which would itself be a definite proof for a circular time, and which even throws new light on fundamental sacred texts like that of the fourth “day” in the creation of the world, should make reflect both modern scientists and the western churches’representatives, who conceive of time as linear. For modern civilization has forgotten things that all of the past cultures, based to a lesser or a greater extent on the primordial tradition, used to regard as evident in themselves.

On the other hand, it is not difficult to see that just as there is nothing in the world that is not subject to the action of time, so there is also nothing on Earth that is not somehow influenced by the Sun, the Moon and even our own planet, so it would be absurd to think of the human being as the one alone that is not influenced by them to some extent as well. And in effect, the more we study the rhythms of nature, the more we understand that man is not an isolated entity but is part of an immensely more vast mechanism where he is influenced by the slow rotation of the Earth on its axis, the elliptic curve described by the Moon around the Earth, the Sun’s electromagnetic energy, and so forth; and where he is subjected to certain natural rhythms that parallel the twenty-four hours’ cycle, including changes in body temperature, hormonal levels and the awareness state every three hours, plus a well-known cycle in Yoga: the alternation between the right and left nostrils. As to the lunar cycle, its influence on the female menstrual cycle is so widely known that I will not mention other kinds of lunar effects about which there is some controversy. Nor will I press on physical and mental biorhythms, etc., or on certain cyclic motions of various durations the existence of which is not questioned even though their dependence on the stars remains unclear. Also, it is not clear how the stars influence the well-known seven-year cycles that we all seem to be subjected to: the first at seven, coinciding with the first dentition and the transition from infancy to boyhood, the second at fourteenth as adolescence and second dentition are reached, the third at twenty-one with adulthood, and so on. However, in dealing with longer cycles, it has statistically been proven that the stars influence agriculture as well as the existence of periods of 3.5 and 6.5 years which regulate the evolution of life on the Earth and, particularly, of certain biological phenomena like the world production of furs; which is not irrelevant because the same statistics, gathered over centuries, have helped to establish the well-known incidence of the sunspots cycle, with a length of approximately 11 years, on the psychological reaction of the masses and certain social disturbances as upheavals, etc., apart from ecological instability related to draughts and floods which obviously influence dramatically the evolution of human society.

As to the still longer cycles (and here we are drawing further into matter), great philosophers like Toynbee have generalized certain favorable circumstances created by the environment, either in the form of adverse changes or of climatic challenges, as triggering factors in the emergence of civilizations which force societies to behave differently by transforming themselves from static to dynamic – and vice versa, I might add. Examples of these cycles would be the planetary synods occurring every 179–180 years – which are mentioned in chapter 3 – whose influence over the last 12,000 years is well known. It is, for instance, accepted that after 10000 BC, following the ice withdrawal, there ensued the warmest time in all of the inter–glacial period, which reached its peak between 7,000 and 5,000 years ago. Then followed an extremely cold period that climaxed about 3,000 and 2,300 years ago, and later on an “optimum secondary climatic” which culminated in the early Middle Ages, between 1000 and 1200 AD approximately. During this period, as the arctic ice pack melted, new routes were opened to the Scandinavians who settled down in Iceland and Greenland and visited North America. From then on, there is what is known as the “small glacial era”, a reversal to the hard conditions that culminated in Europe along the seventeenth century and which are probably not yet over.

Another example of these major cycles are the periods of maximum/minimum solar activity apparently occurring every 500 years approximately and which were studied by astronomer John Eddy from the Observatory of Boulder, Colorado (USA), based on the analysis of the amounts of carbon 14 deposited on the annual rings of certain trees (the study was published in the Smithsonian Institute’s reports in the late 1977). An interesting feature of these cycles, also alluded to in chapter 3, is that at times of peak activity, relevance was placed on the so-called “solar myths” (Aton, Lugh, Mitra and Christ), while at those of minimum on the telluric ones (Isis, Lusina and Black Virgins), so that from 3000 BC three peaks would have respectively occurred: a Sumerian, a “pyramidal Egyptian”, and that of Stonehenge. After that, from 1500 BC, three minimums: Egyptian, Homeric and Greek; then a Roman maximum at about year “Zero”, and then, by order, a mediaeval minimum, a mediaeval maximum coincident with the times of the Crusades, starting from 1000 AD, and after two minimums – respectively called “Sporer Minimum” and “Maunder Minimum” – approximately from 1500 to 1750 AD, a current maximum that was expected to end in around 2000 AD.

There is no doubt, however, concerning mankind evolution, that among the major cycles the most important are the three great astronomical cycles that we have studied in more detail in chapter 3, and that the most important among them, and which in a way is the central element in our study, is the cycle of precession of the equinoxes or Zodiacal year of 25,920 common years. In chapter 1 we have given it special attention by placing particularly emphasis on the fact that 168 of them (which amounts to a “Divine Year”) are equivalent to a Hindu maha–yuga, as well as on the divisions and sub-divisions that the old Egyptians, according to the Hermetic tradition, would have subjected this cycle to for the purpose of correlating it with the daily cycle of twenty-four hours. On the other hand, it is interesting that these correspondences also occur with other Hindu cycles, as evidenced not only by this fact but also by the one that I will mention as follows: for the Pythagoreans, a “World’s day” was to the common day as one day is to a second; and in effect, in one day there are 24 x 60 x 60 = 86,400 seconds, which with five added zeros becomes, in common years and according to the Hindu doctrine in its most orthodox version, the duration of a Brahma’s day with its corresponding night.

In turn, we have devoted chapter 2 to the study of the maha–yuga and its huge multiple, the kalpa of 4,320 million years, disconnecting ourselves from all known astronomical cycles. Still, here are likely connections with present-day science, including the fact that the most remote ancestor of the human species, the recently discovered Australophitecus Ramidus, might have lived 4.4 millions of years ago – a number of years that is virtually identical to the duration of the maha–yuga. On the other hand, the fact that the maha–yuga simply represents a Manvantara, an eminently septenary period, to many qualified scholars, evidences that there are analogical correspondences between cycles of the most diverse order, and of course not only between the Manvantara and the maha–yuga, which is basically quaternary, but also between the former and the kalpa, of an essentially binary nature and divided into Day and Night – or better the opposite way, for it must be remembered that for most traditions, Night precedes Day. This in turn allows an additional inference: namely, that any cycle can be regarded as consisting of these two parts of day; and here it is possible to see yet another confirmation of the scientific – and at the same time symbolic – validity of these figures taken literally, for the Homo habilis, who no longer was an hominid but a human being almost in the full sense of the word, would have made his appearance on Earth about 2.2 millions of years ago, i.e. when the Night was just ending and the Day of the current maha–yuga starting.

As to my calculation in chapter 3 of the real length of the current Manvantara as 51,840 common years, or two Zodiacal Years, it should be regarded as preliminary and subject to demonstration, which will be attempted later on by means of historical data. Prior to that, I would like to mention two relatively recent discoveries somehow connected to circular numbers, especially 72, which provide new approaches to the close relationship between space and time.

The first of them was divulged by the magazine Geomundo (Vol. 5, No. 2, February 1981). In essence, it reveals that the ancient Teotihuacans knew, with astounding accuracy, the mean distances from the planets to the Sun. In fact, according to US engineer Hugh Harleston Jr., the author of the discovery, Teotihuacan would have been not only a great astronomical observatory but also, and mainly, a scale model of our solar system, an assertion supported by the distances measured between the stone tumuli punctuating the Avenue of the Dead from the Temple of Quetzalcoatl to the Pyramid of the Moon.

In effect, between the Sun on the one hand and Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto on the other, the distances measured in hunabs – the standard unit of 1.0594(6) m determined by the researcher – multiplied by a certain factor, are 36, 72, 144, 520, 1,845, 2,880 and 3,780 respectively. Compare with the distances currently established in astronomical units, equivalent to the mean distance from the Earth to the Sun and which, in the same order, are 0.387, 0.723, 1.524, 5.203, 19.247, 30.220 and 39.642, and all possibility of their being a product of chance can be ruled out. But there is the additional, significant fact that all of the distances are perfect circular numbers, i.e. numbers whose digits add up to nine, with the only exception of the distance from Jupiter, whose digits add up to seven – a “sacred” number which, while somehow anomalous, we have had the opportunity to see frequently in the course of this work.

The second discovery, reviewed by the magazine Año Cero (Year 6, Nº 10 – 01963), may be summed up like this: Within the current expansion of the universe, it is widely known that the greater the distance from a galaxy to the Earth, the greater the velocity with which the latter speeds away from the former. However, only now is it known that in this speeding away there are no intermediate velocities, but the galaxies travel at a given velocity and suddenly skip to another: in fact, they move like subatomic particles, or in speed packs, exactly by leaps of 72 kilometers per second or of some multiple of this velocity, such as 216, 432, etc., all of them figures we are most familiar with by now; all of which evidences what we might call the magical nature of the universal operation and grants a renewed validity to the old hermetic saying that, «As is above, so is below.»

And here we are treading again on symbolic field, for the length of the current Manvantara – as established in chapter 3 – is precisely the product of 72 x 720. This, however, which might be a preliminary confirmation that I was not wrong in my calculation of such length – as 51,840 years may well represent, according to all of the scientific information available, the antiquity of Homo sapiens on Earth, apart from the fact that it is in close agreement with the Brahmanic tradition that civilization appeared on our planet about 50,000 years ago – can hardly be regarded as conclusive proof of its accuracy. We need, then, more tangible evidence, such as can endure the most skeptics’ scrutiny. But since the only such evidence is the one supported by historical data, precisely what is missing in this case, we need to resort to other means in order to get it. Now, which can those means be?

To begin with, we have seen that the proposed length offers various angles, and so a first approach would be to regard it in its most visible parts, that is, in the two Zodiacal Years that this length consists of. Thus, by comparing the first Year to the Night and the second to the Day, we would be focusing only on the latter, which would let us judge, through inference, whether the full length has at least a real basis. But here the question arises: Which would be the starting and ending dates of this second part?

Fig.3 – The present Manvantara divided into the last two Zodiacal Years of 25,920 common years each, assimilated respectively to Night and Day and focused mainly on the last “great year” of 12,960 common years.

A first approach to this specific issue would be to find a “benchmark” from which to build such dates. This might be the year 9582 BC, which would correspond to the sinking of Atlantis – a disaster that in addition to coinciding in time with the biblical Flood would have marked the transition from Leo to Cancer. However, here, too, the symbolic character of the figures on which the calculation is based (7,200 years before the year 720 of the current Kali–yuga) somehow deprives it of scientific validity, not to mention the already stated fact that it is not possible to ultimately prove that the Kali–yuga actually started in 3102 BC. Therefore, the best course might be to look for such benchmark at the ending date of the present Manvantara (which in chapter 3 has tentatively been established, in as much as the “beginning of end”, in the year 2010 AD, a date that could coincide with the transition from Pisces to Aquarius) plus concentrate our focus, for the same reasons exposed for the Manvantara as a whole, on the last two “zodiacal seasons” only (the shadowed areas in Fig 3), i.e. those consisting of Leo, Cancer and Gemini in the first place, and of Taurus, Aries and Pisces in the second; so that in practice, we would be covering a “great year” of 12,960 common years.

In this way, the first date established would be the year 10950 BC, which would approximately coincide with the end of the last Ice Age, when agriculture was just starting and the Paleolithic art would seem to have already disappeared. The second one, 8790 BC, which got Cancer started, would correspond to the biblical Flood and the sinking of Atlantis, which would thus be displaced 792 years from the previously indicated date – actually a not very significant difference (9,582 – 8,790). The third date, 6630 BC, between Cancer and Gemini, would mark the year of the foundation of the first city ever – Jericho, at a time when the civilization was painfully recovering from the biblical Flood.

Now, though the shift from Gemini to Taurus in 4470 BC does not tell us very much (remember that before 3100 BC it is virtually impossible to date any event to any degree of accuracy), it very likely indicates the date of the Babylonian – or “Gilgamesh’s” – deluge, which left such deep cultural traces on the region that would originate an abundant literature. In turn, the shift from Taurus to Aries in 2310 BC would have been presided by the so-called “Deucalion’s deluge”, which was not limited to the Mediterranean area but apparently inundated China, where an inscription owed to emperor Yao, alluding to an eclipse observed at the time, has made it possible to confirm the date of the catastrophe. In Egypt, in turn, the catastrophe would have coincided with the beginning of a period of political fragmentation after the death of Pharaoh Pepi II, while in Mesopotamia the Guti invasion was followed by the destruction of Sargon of Akkad’s empire.

Finally, the shift from Aries to Pisces, in 150 BC, would similarly be marked by transcendental events – yet this time for the Roman civilization – like the Third Punic War and the establishment of a direct government on Greece (which will now be divided into provinces), therefore eliminating the last obstacles to its dramatic ulterior expansion.

So far, it can rightly be objected that our review looks rather vague and imprecise, particularly if what it is trying to do is validating our calculation of the beginning and end of the present Manvantara. Well, if we consider that a 72 year period – equivalent, if we remember, to one degree of the Zodiacal Circle – represents a “day” within the great Zodiacal Year of 25,920 common years, then we may try to further corroborate whether or not it is valid by reducing, to that end, our focus in order to see whether during the transition from one “day” to another – as an image of the transition from one great cycle to another – there have been any key events in history, even though for chronological reasons we need to limit our review to the last “month“ of 2,160 common years and, in order to not be too monotonous, to overlook some “days”.

In this way, just two “days” after 150 BC, in the year 6 BC, we find the birth of Jesus Christ, an event most transcendental to Christianity and the Western World and a year when, according to Kepler, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn were aligned at the constellation of Pisces; and one “day” later, around 66 AD, the great fire of Rome and the start of the Christians’ persecution by Nero as well as the deaths of Seneca and Petronious ordered by him, in addition to the rebellion of the Jews and the destruction of the Q’umram monastery and, ultimately, that of the whole Jerusalem by Titus (in 70 AD). Exactly a “week” later, in 570 AD (readers are invited to make the calculation) Prophet Muhammad is born – an event, if you will, as transcendental as the above-mentioned one yet this time to Islam and the Eastern World; and one “day” later, around 642 AD, two similar and strangely synchronic events occur: the fall of the Sassanid empire in Asia and, on the other side of the world, in the American continent, the ruin of Teotihuacan.

Skipping another week, exactly in 1146 AD Morocco is conquered by the Almohads and Lisbon by the Christians; and preparations for the Second Crusade, which is launched in the following year, begin. Exactly five “days” later, in 1506, Christopher Columbus dies and two “days” later, around 1650 AD, the Thirty Years’ War is brought to its end with the Peace of Westphalia, the Fronde revolts break out in France, and the Dnieper Cossacks rebel; a little before, in 1649, Charles I of England is executed, wherewith Cromwell’s dictatorship begins. In turn the year 1794, just two “days” later, finds France immerse in the Terror; and a “day” later, around 1866 AD, Lincoln is killed and Maximilian of Mexico shot, the anti-Bourbon revolution breaks out in Spain, the Ku–Klux–Klan begin their activities in the United States and, in yet another order of things, Alfred Nobel invents dynamite. Finally, exactly one “day” later, in year 1938, actions take place that get the II World War started, an event with which we arrive at the beginning of the last “day” of the “month” reviewed.

Naturally, in reviewing history in this way we have just made a simple summary, overlooking some “days” and, in order to expedite the study, sacrificing many significant events – yet not so much as the ones presented – and to a high degree unfortunate – although some, mainly in the cultural field, were absolutely not. But what has been achieved in expeditiousness has been missed in thoroughness, an insufficiency that I intend to correct by broadening somehow the scope of the review. In effect, if we consider that the shift from one “day” to another is, in as much as an image of the transition from one great cycle to another, at all significant, then it will be licit to think that the full part of each “day” will be as well. To corroborate this we will focus now, in the same limited way, on some “noons” of the last zodiacal “month” – with which in practice we will be examining cycles of 36 years each.

Incidentally, I will mention that these 36-year cycles have already been studied, from a more “astrological” point of view if you will, by some authors who have regarded each cycle as ruled by a given planet. It is said, for example – and this is an extremely suggestive piece of information – that Mars was the ruler from 1919 to 1945, a period of time which encompassed the two World Wars. However, this is an aspect we cannot stop at for too long, so we will go on with our review along the established path.

In this way, we see that approximately in the year 114 BC the astronomer Hipparchus of Nicea dies, an event that becomes relevant if we remember that it is precisely he who is attributed with spreading the knowledge of the precession of the equinoxes in the Western World. Then follow some cultural deeds, like the building three “days” later, around the year 102 AD, of the ceremonial city of Teotihuacan in America and, most importantly, the invention of paper in China. The appearance of the first printed text will have to wait approximately one more “day”, that is until year 174 AD. At the following “noon”, that is about 246 AD, a dreadful plague spreads out around the Mediterranean Sea, and Decius decrees the first general persecution of Christians; and after another “day”, about 318 AD but with a difference of “hours”, the defeat of Majencius by Constantine takes place and the Decree of Milan is issued, while the first councils of the Christian Church are celebrated. Exactly on the next “noon”, in 390 AD, a tragic event for universal culture takes place: the fire of the Alexandria Library.

Let us take now a leap of four “days” (or 288 years) to arrive at 678 AD, around which date the first Arabian onslaught on Constantinople (which will afford a pretext to use the so-called black fire on the blockaders) takes place and exactly one “day” later, in 750 AD, a famine breaks out in Spain which forces thousands of Berbers to return to North Africa. One more “day” and the Iconoclastic rebellion in Byzantium, the Khmer expansion in Cambodia (around 822 AD), and the widespread use of the long military bow, occur.

We must wait for another “week”, the year 1326 AD, to see the first canyon, and for yet another, i.e. exactly the year 1830, to witness the inauguration of the first railroad (Liverpool–Manchester), as well as some noteworthy events as the resignation and death of Bolivar, the bourgeois revolution in France, the Polish insurrection, the French conquest of Argel, etc. One “day” after this, around 1902, the Ford factory is created and the Wright brothers make the first flight ever on a motor plane; and the following “noon”, i.e. in 1974, a general economic recession and world rise in food prices, at the same time that a severe draught in Sahel, a great famine in Africa, and a cruel epidemic of cholera in India, break out. (In the USA, one year after the retreat from Vietnam, Watergate affaire and Nixon’s resignation take place.)

Thus far my review of the present Manvantara from the “Western” point of view. I am certainly conscious that with this analysis, even reviewing some “zodiacal days” individually, the possibilities of studying this cycle have not been exhausted, which is evidenced by the fact that in the last zodiacal month of 2,160 common years there have occurred events of greater significance than those that have been showing up here – like the discovery of America by Columbus, to mention but one that is undoubtedly the most emblematic and transcendental in the historical sense. Hence I have mentioned other possible approaches which will be put to test below.

So let us consider the Manvantara in its fundamental aspect, that is, as an eminently septenary cycle. I will start by saying that seven, which in as much as the sum of four and three symbolizes the union of Heaven, as represented by three, and Earth, as represented by four, embodies, particularly inside the Hindu Cosmo vision, rather the spatial than the temporal aspect of things, even though it somehow may serve as a nexus between the two of them.¹ And in effect, even though its temporal aspect is not at all absent in the septenary symbolism, it is with the spatial one that it shows the main correspondences, notably with the seven dvipas or continents of the Hindustan tradition and, in ascending order, with the seven traditional planets and the seven worlds recognized by tradition as forming the entire order of manifestation – three superior worlds, three inferior worlds, and the Earth as the intermediate world – a model of the universe which is shared by the majority of the ancient traditions, including the American. On the other hand, however, the first thing that comes to mind in connection with this number is the seven days of the week and fundamentally, within the Western tradition, the Seven Days of Creation, equivalent to the seven Manus of Hinduism and the seven “creative days” of Hermetism, the favorite symbols of the temporal aspect; apart from a scarcely observed, but not because of it less real, fact: Within the annual cycle, after the Winter Solstice, which occurs six months after the Summer Solstice – on late December in the Northern hemisphere – there comes the seventh month, which is when it can be said in all property that the end of the long winter night and, with it, nature’s rebirth, is already close at hand. So there is a well-marked relationship between the septenary symbolism and the annual cycle. In fact, the use and connotations of this enigmatic prime number, only divisible by itself and by one, are innumerable and universal: among many referents, there can be mentioned the seven arms of the Jewish Candelabrum, the seven stars and seven angels of the Book of Revelation, the seven Hindu rishis or sages (and their Egyptian equivalents), the seven chakras or energetic centers of human body (as a counterpart of the seven worlds or cosmic planes), the seven cardinal sins and seven theologian virtues of Christianity, etc. Other significant correspondences are the seven colors of the rainbow and above all the musical diatonic or seven-note scale of the Pythagorean (3 + 4), which would originate multiple and varied applications in mathematics and other disciplines, as opposed to the relationship between the duodenary cycles as the common year or Zodiacal Year and the chromatic twelve-note scale (3 x 4). Now, in the diatonic or seven-note scale it is the eighth note, i.e. the one that culminates on the nearest higher octave, the note which completes the cycle. Which takes us to the point that I wanted to reach: that is, that in the case studied, and by virtue of the analogical correlation that must exist between the Manvantara as a whole and the complete diatonic scale, it is possible to approach this cycle as such, i.e. to break it down into eight parts, which in practice will make it consist of eight zodiacal seasons of 6,480 years each.

An indication that this approach is not arbitrary at all is given by the fact that such duration is a half of a “great year” of 12,960 common years – and an extremely important period for the Mesopotamian traditions, which frequently round it up as 6,000 or 7,000 years – as well as a tenth of the length of the reign of Xisuthros, the Chaldean Manu. However, it is not with this particular approach that we will find additional proof about the starting and final dates of the present Manvantara, nor will we obtain new dates for “key” events of history, as these still are basically the same as the ones obtained with the first review, at least as regards the beginning of every zodiacal season (even though in the present case it may be more appropriate to move the end of the whole period to 2082 AD: in practice, a circle degree or 72 common years). Even so, here too we can concentrate our focus onto the last period, the one that represents the octave (the darker section in Fig. 3), and break it down again into the same number of periods, in this case of 6,480 : 8 = 810 years each.² This is no arbitrary procedure either, as it is based on the same analogical correspondences among cycles of the most diverse order to which I have repeatedly alluded, as well as on other considerations of too complex a nature to be dealt with here, but which have to do with the fact that each Manvantara actually consists of two septenary series, one of which refers to the past, with the present as its immediate resultant – which can be regarded as a small-scale image of the first series – and the other to the future.

This novel approach does provide us with some new, meaningful dates. In effect, if we start from year 4470 BC (which in Fig. 3 corresponds to the transition from Gemini to Taurus within the last Zodiacal Year), we see that the second date, which would be 3660 BC, corresponds to a time that may well mark the earliest beginnings of the Sumerian civilization. Yet it is around the third one, which would be 2850 BC, where we will find more meaningful events like the Egyptian Third Dynasty foundation by Pharaoh Zozer – whose famous prime minister Imhotep is credited with building the step pyramid in Saqqara –, as well as the foundation of the first dynasties of Kish and Uruk and the erection of the latter city-state walls (supposedly by Gilgamesh), all of it in Mesopotamia. Next would come year 2040 BC, around which date the Third Dynasty of Ur collapses and the document known as “Ipuwer’s Papyrus” is written down in Egypt, all of which, in all likelihood, is a sequel of a catastrophic event: the so-called “Deucalion’s Flood”. Next a date, the year 1230 BC, around which there appear to multiply key events for history, like the War of Troy, the Aegean migration – probably connected with the displacements of the so-called “Sea Peoples” – and the beginning of Assyria as a potency, etc. Then, in 420 BC, as Rome’s ascent is ongoing and the great Peloponnesian War breaks out between Sparta and Athens, a dreadful epidemic wreaks havoc in the latter city; Herodotus dies in the same year, and in 421 BC the Peace of Nicias, which ends the said war for a short time, 50 years, is signed. I have already referred to the next date, year 390 AD, which witnesses the triumph of Christianity by Emperor Theodosius – a ferocious opponent to any “deviation” from orthodoxy, the apex of the Barbarian invasions in Europe and, above all, the fire of the Alexandria library. The last date, 1200 AD, witnesses the end of the Crusades and King Richard Lionheart’s death (and his brother John Landless’ ascent to the throne bringing along the “Magna Carta” promulgation), while in Asia the rise of Genghis Khan, and in America the destruction of Chichen Itza, take place.

Thus we may conclude this second approach to the problem, which has provided us with a bit of what we were seeking – yet not enough of it. In the next chapter we will focus on the full cycle as a descending quaternary cycle, or maha–yuga, whose study from the historical point of view should motivate us to continue this recapitulation.

NOTES

¹ The readers interested in deepening into the septenary symbolism, and particularly in its relationship with the seven note scale, may consult the work of P. D. OUSPENSKY: Fragmentos de una enseñanza desconocida, Hachette, Buenos Aires (2ª Edición)

² Curiously enough, if the cycle is regarded as ending in 2082 AD then the total length becomes 6,552 years, a figure that although a multiple of seven, in producing partial cycles of 936 years each yields irrelevant dates; in other words, it leads to a dead end.

Home

C H A P T E R 8

T H E C I R C U L A R H I S T O R Y

«For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be

remembered, nor come into mind.»

(Book of Isaiah 65:17)

In the previous chapter, the Manvantara has been studied first as a cycle consisting merely of two zodiacal years of 25,920 common years, and then as preferred by the Hindu tradition, namely, as a septenary cycle by excellence, even though, considering the little space available here for a work of mere divulgation as this is, I have limited myself to a brief commentary. In the present chapter I will approach it as a descending quaternary cycle (a “maha–yuga”) subjected to the scale 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 10. This should not only help us bring about other key dates in history, but also elaborate upon some important issues concerning the doctrine of cosmic cycles that are still pending analysis.

To that end, and in order to go from the particular to the general, we will study in the first place some historical cases where the scale has been fundamental, even though given the scarcity of cultures that offer accurately enough chronological data, as well as of societies whose relative isolation guarantees their authenticity, we need to be selective. Even so, the few examples that we will be limiting ourselves to should be enough to demonstrate that the scale is applicable to the four periods of time into which the history of any people or culture can be divided.

Bearing this in mind, in the first case selected, the ancient Egypt, we will limit ourselves to the strictly dynastic periods and leave out the post-imperial phase, which no longer can be regarded as genuinely Egyptian. Thus we will obtain a first phase, or “Golden Age”, which goes from the First Dynasty, in around 3100 BC, to the so-called First Intermediate Period, about 2300 BC – that is, a length of 200 x 4 = 800 years.

Fig. 4 – The strictly dynastic Egypt broken down
into four ages or “yugas”

Of this phase, in which writing starts quite suddenly, I will only say that its material realizations stand out by their honest, simple grandiosity and exquisite care – the great pyramids of the third and fourth dynasties being a perfect demonstration that the only truly creative period of the ancient Egyptians is that of the beginnings of their civilization, indeed most superior in technical perfection to the posterior ones.

The second period, or “Silver Age”, would span from about 2300 to 1700 BC – a length of 200 x 3 = 600 years – the latter being the date around which the so-called Second Intermediate Period is to be found. Over the course of this phase, the germ of which must actually be traced to approximately one hundred years before, there is a weakening of the monarchy in the face of a decentralization which culminates, after Pepi II’s death (around 2180 BC), in violence and anarchy; the so-called “Ipuwer papyrus” provides insight into this period, strangely reminiscent of the Puranic descriptions of the end of the Kali-yuga and the Gospels’ announcements of the end time. And while there follows the Middle Kingdom, with somewhat admirable achievements, shortly after 1800 BC there ensues the so-called “great humiliation”: the state sinks and, around 1700 BC, the Hyksos invade Egypt.

The third period goes from approximately this date to 1300 BC – a length of 200 x 2 = 400 years – and although it exhibits apparent big achievements like Egypt’s trading expeditions to the Land of Punt and – among other great architectural works – the erection of the obelisks at Karnak and the temple of Luxor, as well as literary and artistic creations of great refinement like The Book of the Dead, it actually marks the beginning of end: General Horemheb is forced to stop the Libyan penetration of Egypt and proclaim himself Pharaoh after the reign of Akhenaton, the famous “heretic Pharaoh” who antagonizes the Memphis priesthood, and in 1283 BC Ramesses II is forced to sign a peace treaty with the Hittite King Hattusil III. So it may be around the end of this time that the Syrian enter and sack Memphis, defiling the streets and beheading and enslaving the people – yet of this event, called “the Syrian interregnum”, there are, for obvious reasons, no major records extant.

Lastly, the fourth period, from approximately 1300 to 1100 BC – a length of 200 years, or a tenth of the total period considered – announces the proximity of disaster: After Ramesses III saves Egypt from the Libyans and the “Sea Peoples”’ pressure (and incidentally loses his life as a consequence of a harem’s plot), scandals break out everywhere: the laborers of Thebes workshops rebel out, corruption prevails on all levels, there is hunger among the people, the royal tombs are sacked. After a period of general chaos, a high priest of Amun, Herihor, rises in rebellion and relegates Ramesses XI to a subordinate position and, about 1085 BC, puts an end to the XX dynasty. Around the same time an old viceroy, Smendes, seizes the power in the Delta, wherefore Egypt is divided between Upper Egypt in the hands of the Army, and Lower Egypt in those of the military aristocracy. From then on, feudal dismembering will increase until it culminates in the Ethiopian empire, which in turn will give way under the Assyrian invasion: Never more will Egypt be the master of its own destiny.

Fig. 5 – The Sumerian Cycle broken down into
four ages or “yugas”

Though I should have presented it chronologically first, our second example, due to the insufficient available data, and in order to abide by the standard usage, will be the Sumerian civilization (see figure 5). In this, the first period or “Golden Age” spans from approximately 3500 to 2800 BC, i.e. over some 700 years (175 x 4). At the start of this period, the Sumerians appear suddenly in Lower Mesopotamia bringing with them copper and, as early as that, tablets with ideographic inscriptions. Their provenance is uncertain, though it is very possible that they came from India, most likely as a remnant of the Mohenho–Daro and Harappa civilization as suggested by the remains found in the earliest strata of these cities by archeologists, by the sea deities present in the oldest legends, and even the very name of this culture, Sumeru, surely derived from the famous Mount Meru of the Hindu tradition. This earliest civilization first flourishes in Uruk, approximately between 3100 and 2800 BC.

The phase that may be called “Silver Age” goes from the latter date to 2275 BC, i.e. some 525 years (175 x 3), a period of time in which the Sumerians plainly emerge into History. It consists of the so-called Proto dynastic period of which abundant tablets with cuneiform inscriptions are preserved, and as urban, developed states appear together with a religious – civilian administration and the use of slaves.

This phase concludes in an invasion by a Semitic people, the Akkadian, whose leader Sargon of Akkad, after defeating the famous Lugalzaggesi, inaugurates the first Mesopotamic Empire and whose grandson, Naram–Sin, renowned for his commemorative stela, must face in turn an invasion by the Guti, who will control the area for long centuries. This whole period spans from 2275 to 1925 BC, that is lasts some 300 years (175 x 2) and would belong to the “Bronze Age” of this culture.

Finally, around the latter date (1925 BC) there is a “rebirth” of Sumer with the third dynasty of Ur, which lasts some 175 years – a phase of great apparent splendor which ends up catastrophically about 1750 BC after an invasion by the Amorrites and the Elamites, who cause the ruin of the city. From then on history, which has ceased to belong to the Sumerian civilization, will continue with the Amorrites’ period of Mesopotamia.

Our third example deals with the history of Israel. It covers from the departure of patriarch Abram from Ur of Chaldea in about 1950 BC to the moment that Jerusalem surrenders to the Romans, who around 60 AD destroy the temple – thus spanning over a full 2,000 years period (see Fig 6).

The first phase, which may be called pastoral, is that of the Hebrew patriarchs – a Golden Age which comes to an end with the so-called captivity in Egypt. It spans from 1950 BC to 1150BC, that is, some 800 years (200 x 4).

Fig 6 – The Hebrew cycle from Abraham
to the fall of Jerusalem

The second period or “Silver Age”, from the latter date to 550 BC (a length of 200 x 3 = 600 years), begins dramatically with the so-called “plagues of Egypt” and goes from the Exodus of the Hebraic people and their crossing of the Red Sea, possibly parallel to the great flood known as “Ogygian deluge”, to the exile in Babylon – with their entering into Canaan (the Promised Land), the period of the Judges, and the glorious reigns of David y Solomon in between them.

The third phase or “Bronze Age”, which goes from 550 BC to 150 BC (a length of 200 x 2 = 400 years), ends up, after the rebuilding of the temple and other events, in Alexander the Great’s conquests – a period of servitude for the Hebrews, yet at the same time a period which is not lacking in episodes of grandeur like, for instance, the Maccabeans rebellion just before its end.

Last comes the “Iron Age”, with approximately 200 years in length, which may be considered at best as a period of partial freedom, and in which the Romans take the control of Palestine – a phase which, after the occupation of Jerusalem by Titus, ends up in the Jews’ Diaspora.

Thus ends this study of a few concrete cases through which I have wanted to show, at least in the case of the peoples which have remained relatively isolated from any foreign interference, that the phases of their history are not only naturally reduced to four, but also that they decay gradually and in all aspects, even the material one; and that as concerns their length, it always decreases by the scale 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 10. It goes without saying that I would have liked to include a greater number of cases, for example, those of the Aegean and Roman civilizations; but the uncertain character of the phases and dates, in the first case, and the difficulties inherent in determining the precise time of their start and end in the second, prevented my doing so.

Let us go now to the main purpose in this part of the study as we approach the whole Manvantara from the same point of view; only this time, based on 3102 BC as the starting year of the Kali–yuga, by marking again the year 2082 AD as the final date of the whole cycle. This will yield the year 49758 BC (51,840 – 2,082) as the starting point of the first phase or Satya–yuga; 29022 BC as that of the second one or Treta–yuga (49,758 – 5,184 x 4), a period which will witness the apogee of the Atlantis civilization; 13470 BC as that of the third phase or Dvapara–yuga (29,022 – 5,184 x 3), the likely epoch recreated by the stories narrated in Ramayana; and 3102 BC as that of the fourth and last phase or Kali–yuga, this being the one alone that can tell us anything in a historical proper sense. So if we want to demonstrate that the Manvantara broken down like this has any chronological validity at all, we will have to again resort to the expedient used in the previous chapter in relation to the same cycle, regarded as a “dual” zodiacal year: namely, to consider the Kali–yuga as a small-scale image of the whole cycle, and break it down into the same number of phases according to the same proportions (see Fig 7).

Fig. 7 – The Kali–yuga broken down into
four ages or “yugas”

As can be seen from the figure above, this procedure does enable us to arrive at dates of great historical significance. In 3102 BC, in effect, there begins what paradoxically may be regarded as a “small-scale” Golden Age, as the great political organizations are formed in Egypt and Mesopotamia (and, as has just been discovered, in Asia and America) and as the monarchy and priesthood are created as dominating classes on those agricultural societies which have a well-developed state apparatus. At the same time, major hydraulic works as well as buildings for political and religious use are erected which, in a way, will never be improved; and copper, silver, and gold metallurgies are created. On top of all this, the writing systems of Sumer and Egypt, among others, are developed.

Thus, contrary to what might be thought, the next phase, which can be called “small Silver Age”, and whose start would be in 1028 BC (3,102 – 518.4 x 4), represents a reversal from the previous one, even though the opposite may be true from a material point of view. For example, after the apogee of the Ramessides in Egypt, there follows the empire’s decadence and final disintegration, as the cruel threat of the Assyrian expansionism and domination looms on the horizon. In the area of the Aegean Sea, on its part, it is around this date that the great fortresses of Mycenae are destroyed and set to fire, and that the Minoan state collapses. However, I do not pretend to develop a philosophical discussion on so controversial an issue, too ample to be studied in only a paragraph. And though it is all too difficult to generalize on matters of such magnitude, it has already been said in chapter 4, while examining the present Kali–yuga, that all depends on the point of view we use; and if this is the spiritual one, in spite of the eventual and contingent periods of seeming grandeur that may have occurred on the second phase – mainly the boom of such civilizations as the Greek and the Roman in the Old World, and the Mayan and the pre Inca cultures in the New – then it is not difficult to see how there around the world takes place a progressive, general decadence, not so much in the area of morality and customs as in that of culture, which reaches its lowest precisely at the end of this second “age”, around 527 AD – even though, on the other hand, this is the year when Justinian is enthroned to rule over the East Roman Empire, a fact which may be regarded as positive. Even so, there is the curious fact that, in examining the new phase and the one that follows – which would correspond to the “small” Bronze and Iron ages – it can be seen that precisely those dates which are “dragged” 72 years back, i.e. the ones which are based rather on the year 2010 as the final point of the present Manvantara, become more relevant, almost as if in some mysterious way, Jesus Christ’s well-known words concerning his announcement of the end of the times had to do with it: «And if those days were not shortened, no flesh would live again. For the sake of the chosen then, those days were shortened.» (Matthew 24: 22) Of course, a more “scientific” approach to explain this discrepancy would resort to the difference of five days plus fraction between the ideal year of 360 days, traditionally used in all calculations related to cycles and ages, and the year of a little over 365 days, which according to some versions, would have started some five thousand years ago as a consequence of some catastrophe, possibly related to the beginning of the “El Niño” phenomenon, which would have accelerated the Earth rotation so that literally, the days would have been shortened; now, since the period that may be regarded as fundamental to the total manifestation is precisely the day, it would become necessary to make an adjustment of some 26,000 days or 72 years. However, there is the fact that the cited discrepancy is perceived not so much in the case just mentioned, in which the year 455 AD, 72 years before 527 AD, abounds in unfortunate events to the Western Roman Empire – including the stabbing of Emperor Valentinian III and the sack of Rome by Genseric – as in the episode that would start a new era: the discovery of America by Columbus, exactly in 1492 AD, compared to which 1564 AD – which would be the normal starting date of the “last” age – loses relevance, even though it does not entirely lack transcendence itself, as it is around it that the Wars of Religion break out in France.

Be it as it may, between the years 455 y 1492 there ensues a long period that is usually viewed as inferior to the previous one, so much so that it is referred to as the “dark ages”: a term which somehow reflects the image of a “Bronze Age” in which men, mainly those in the higher classes, seem to be born basically to fight in wars (with the exception of those that are not good at them and are so destined to some other trade, like clergy) but in which a certain grandeur, moral principles, and a gentlemanliness and romanticism that constitute their ideal are not altogether absent; the quest for the Holy Grail is a beautiful example of it. Even so, it is near its end that there starts a new decadence, this time mainly in the fields of morals and customs – a process which through various stages has been accentuating down to our days – until it ultimately gives rise to the movements known as the Renaissance and the Reformation, which to many mark a time of great progress in the arts, sciences, and literature, but to others represent the loss of many things of real, transcendental value. A single example should suffice to demonstrate this assertion: during the Renaissance, hunting, which previously was referred to as ars nequissima (“a cruel exercise”) by the Popes, becomes a favorite pastime for many ecclesiastics – among them Leo X, the first Pope who is a hunter. However, that which in my opinion represents an irreplaceable loss is the disappearance of the traditional philosophy, as well as that of the great, authentic art which characterizes the mature epoch of this period and which is best represented by the Gothic cathedrals, unfortunately later on replaced by an imitation of ancient art which no longer expresses anything genuine. Which takes us to the central point in this process: the dissolution of Christianity, a faith the civilization of the Middle Ages essentially identified with and around which all human activities were centered, precisely as a consequence of the Reformation and the beginning of “humanism”, which ultimately is but the secularism and materialism that dominate our time. A time in which, in spite of everyone’s expectations about technology helping mankind to evolve into an ideal society, there is only disappointment and frustration, and in which history, ever increasingly accelerating, seems to have reached a culminant point which foretells of its imminent end – the signs of which are perceived everywhere: a total reversion of values, a “technological revolution” which is at best a by-product of the industrial revolution and one of whose consequences, environmental pollution, brings about in turn the planet’s warming and the disappearance of the ozone layer; the emergence of countless Messiahs posing as guides and saviors of mankind and announcing the arrival of a “New Age” whose founders and leaders are, naturally, themselves; and finally, the proliferation of abortive clinics and of certain practices which, out of an elemental reserve, I would rather avoid referring to, but which involve the utilization of human corpses…

With this I expect to have described what in good account has been the present Kali–yuga, as well as briefly discussed its main characteristics. But what about other significant epochs, such as the one that spans over the sixth century BC, to which particular attention has been given as another possible starting point of such period?

Well – and this again corroborates the multiplicity of approaches the Manvantara may be subjected to – I have already shown how any cycle can be broken down according to the scale 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 10. This admitted, I will consider only the “kali–yuga” of the last Zodiacal Year and will likewise divide it in order to obtain the figure below:

Fig. 8 – The “kali–yuga” of the last Zodiacal Year

Note that in this case, in following the remarks above and since we are dealing with a period length considerably shorter – a tenth of the previous one – I have used the year 2010 as its ending date. Other than that we are dealing here, rather than with the Manvantara as a whole, with a minimal fraction of it – in practice, with any period length – which somehow justifies the step taken, apart from the fact that in actuality, at least in what concerns the first of the dates obtained, we are just dragging them 72 years back.

Thus we see, as early as approximately on the first date, events of great historical transcendence like the appearance of Taoism in China and the Jew’s captivity in Babylon. By then too Buddha and Zarathustra, as well as Confucius and Pythagoras, must have been born – so if Hinduism is excluded, it is about this time that virtually all the major Eastern doctrines do appear. Now, at the risk of pestering the readers, I will make a quick review of the dates that would mark the start of the next periods: Approximately in 452 AD both Attila’s defeat on the Catalonian Fields (in 451) and his death (in 453) take place. Then, circa 1229 AD, the death of another scourge of mankind, this time Genghis Khan, takes place, while the Sixth Crusade wins Jerusalem by deal and the last remnants of the Albigensian Heresy are eliminated. Finally, around 1747, the manufacture of molten iron becomes commonplace and the industry of mechanical weaving looms is developed, upon which the industrial revolution gets started along with its sequel of misery for the British laboring class (and, in time, for that of the major part of the world) announcing its already mentioned by-product: the modern technological revolution.

And what about the disquieting 52-year cycles that were mentioned in chapter 5, so revered by the ancient Mesoamerican cultures (and perhaps by the South American ones as well) that all of their astronomical and calendar calculations centered around them? Well, in trying to provide historical proof like I did with the cycles of 72 years, I took as starting point – a little by chance – the year 1977, the one when the “El Niño” phenomenon turned back again to cause severe damage, which prolonged into early 1998 and which, curiously enough, fell 52 years after the atrocious nuclear explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which put horrendous end to World War II. Other than that, it may be remembered that the startup of the above-mentioned phenomenon very likely matched the one of the present Kali–yuga, as has been mentioned in chapter 4; and something extremely suggestive: the previous Mega “Niño” occurred in 1925, exactly 72 years prior to the one in 1997. Then I saw that the infamous Opium War had started 104 years before and that another historical event extremely significant, the French Revolution of 1789, had taken place exactly 156 years before that. However, as I kept looking back in time, small discrepancies did occur in the dates of major and in a way always unfortunate events, so I decided to use a cycle of 51.84 years or a hundredth part of the actual Kali–yuga duration. And here the dates coincided with astounding accuracy: in 1738, 51.84 years before the French Revolution, the mechanical weaving looms were patented, a nefarious fact whose significance I have already commented; 104 years prior to that, in 1530, Lope de Aguirre, who was viewed as the Antichrist of his time, was running amok in South America, and 52 years before, in 1478, the Spanish Inquisition was created. Three cycles before, in 1271, Saint Louis died, and three before (in 1064 or maybe in 1065) the invasion of England by William the Conqueror occurred. Also, the year 1012, i.e. 52 years prior to that, is market by the persecution de heretics in Germany. In order to avoid being too meticulous, I will overlook some facts less unfortunate and, sticking to the Western world and the Christian era, will go five centuries back to around 753, a year during which a great famine breaks out in Spain. Seven centuries prior to that, exactly in the year 390, occurred an ill-fated event in which date, as viewed elsewhere, appear to have variously concurred two other cycles’ ends: the fire of the library of Alexandria, an event so important that not in vain is usually regarded as marking the end of the Old and the beginning of the Middle Ages. For the rest, six cycles before, in the year 79, the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were destroyed by the Vesuvius’ eruption. And according to some, 52 years before that, i.e. the year 27, is the most likely date of Jesus Christ’s death.

And here I will end this prolonged historical interlude, with which I expect to have shown that the cosmic cycles do exert a decisive influence on the evolution of human kind – both those from the west, somehow represented by the precession of the equinoxes or Zodiacal Year of 25,920 common years, and the ones from the east, as represented in particular by the so-called Manvantara and, in general, by the Hindu maha–yuga based on the scale 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 10, to which any period of whatever length can be assimilated. As to the reason why the latter should be like this: apart from the natural influence that the different parts of the precessional period, in case it is considered a quaternary cycle, must exert as actual zodiacal seasons (as compared to what occurs, in a much lesser order, with the common year), it is in the very nature of things that there in due course of time must ensue a certain decadence in the vitality of any society or culture (and indeed, of any other order of manifestation), such as occurs with any living organism. This in principle would account for the fact that any cycle can be assimilated to the Hindu maha–yuga. Now why should they be four ages, and not a higher or lesser number of them?

The question is not easy, but I will venture an answer. Apart from the huge gravitation of numerical symbolism (remember the four seasons of the year, the four phases of the Moon, etc), the cause would simply reside in the quaternary being a cycle which appears to be like tailor-made for any temporal phenomenon – and this because it is based on an even number and so it is divisible by its half, as is any of its multiples as well. This quality can be easily appreciated, for example, in the musical compass of four times, which is of a great fluidity and, so to speak, circular; which, by the way, is opposed to the artificial division of history in three main parts – a division for which historians seem otherwise to have a great predilection. However, there remains a big question to be answered: why should such lengths be decreasing? I have already referred to the influence that, in the case of the Zodiacal Year of 25,920 common years, must at any rate be exerted by its four seasons of 6,480 common years each; an influence whose accumulated effect, owing to a natural multiplying or “avalanche” effect (very possibly stimulated, in this particular case, by the population increases), produces ever increasing events in approximately equal periods, or (what is the same) an equal number of events in ever decreasing periods of time. Naturally, with cycles of any other lengths would occur the same process, though there would be left to be known what the “cardinal” moments are that influence their cumulative development; moreover, these moments could bear no relation at all with any cosmic cycle, plus there would remain a pending question of what it is that makes the decreasing proportion to occur within a given total length. It is therefore possible that the problem is wrongly put and that the final explanation may reside in the total length depending rather on the duration of the first period or “yuga” – that is, that the former is produced from the latter, and not vice versa – and that the length of the first period, once ended (either by a natural wearing process or else suddenly, as a consequence of some cataclysm) determines, once and for all, the length of the remaining three successive phases, and therefore that of the full cycle in question – something like is shown by nature in the shape of a certain snail whose body traces as it grows, and proportionally to the 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 10 scale, the so-called “spiral of four centers”, in which some people will all but see a mere curiosity; but indeed, it would be hard to find another element that may give so much strength to the point.

Figure 9 – The “spiral with four centers”

With this said, there are just a few things left that need to be examined in relation to the doctrine, some of which are important questions to which there may be no satisfactory answer. I am, for example, aware that there is a weak point within the whole structure of my calculations: namely, the starting date of the Kali–yuga in 3102 AD. Even so, I have tried to back it up with arguments that go from the astronomical and geological to the philosophical fields, as in effect, although progress in all fields has been virtually uninterrupted for the “official” history and science from that date to our days (with the only exception of the Middle Ages, otherwise most unjustly regarded), in the spiritual sense, which is the one alone that really counts, there has only been retrogression.

But I have said enough about this. An objection can still be raised, that in all that has been said we have only examined the so-called “historical” times, and that it is too far-fetched to infer from it that the whole doctrine is true. Well, I still can present up to two arguments of varied sort in support of my case.

In the first place, if what has been asserted about the maha–yuga is true, we may likewise turn the matter the other way round and demonstrate that the length of any period, however vast, must still follow the scale 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 10; but to this end it is necessary to establish to the utmost possible precision the starting and final dates, which is not always easy. Such is the case, for example, of the geological eras and above all of the appearance of the animal species, since the dates that are available usually differ and are once and again modified by the scientists, ever apt to change their minds. Even so, we still can try and do it simply by means of a scheme, similar to the previous ones, which represents the progression of the geological eras from the earliest vertebrates onwards; yet in this case, in order to conform to the current usage, we will do it in the shape of a “biological clock”, plus we will take the liberty to introduce an additional era in order to conform it to what I believe to be closer to the historical reality of our planet. However, it must be considered to represent only its diurnal part – that is, the last 2,160 millions of years.

Fig. 10 – Biological clock of the Earth with an
additional, “Modern” Era

In this way, although the earliest living forms appear, according to paleontologists, some 2,700 millions of years ago (in the “biologic clock”, about 15 hours ago), it is only some 600 millions of years ago – that is, only three to four “hours” ago – that the earliest known vertebrates show up. Well now, if we break this period down into four parts that follow the scale 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 10, we will obtain a length of 240 millions of years for the first era, the Paleozoic; this will end when the Mesozoic gets started, about 360 millions of years ago (or 600 – 240), as the earliest reptilians and, in the sea, the cephalopods – already advanced beings – show up; 180 millions of years later, that is an equal number of years ago (360 – 180) will be the turn of the Cenozoic era, an epoch when the earliest mammals and angiosperms show up. Finally, some 60 millions of years ago, the time arrives when, after the extinction of the dinosaurs, mammals begin to branch out and succeed on Earth.

As to the human species in the broadest sense, i.e. including its most remote ancestors (presumably the earliest Australopithecus), the subject is too complex to even attempt its study, not to mention the fact that the anthropologists present a new fossil fragment, usually accompanied by a new theory and a new chronology for the intermediate species, almost daily. However, I have already summarized a bit of what is of real interest to us: namely, that the appearance of our earliest remote ancestor, the Australopitecus Ramidus, would have occurred about 4’300,000 years ago, and that of the Homo Habilis approximately one half of that time ago, with the Homo Sapiens Sapiens, as represented by the man of Cromagnon, emerging some 50,000 years ago and the Neanderthal, unjustly regarded as only Homo Sapiens, prior to that, possibly some 200,000 years ago – all dates with which we have become familiar over the course of this work.

And after this long parenthesis, I will conclude my argumentation. To the end of anticipating, however, objections from the most recalcitrant skeptics, I will endeavor to extrapolate the foregoing remarks and try to imagine what the times prior to 3102 BC could be like. In the case of Egypt, for example, experts have noted that the end of the pre-dynastic period was superior in at least one significant feature: in the production of earth and stone pots as well as other vessels, a decrease is observed in the quality of the earthenware and the boldness of the shapes and decoration, while the stone pots are definitely less beautiful and no longer is the stuff always fire-proof. Still more important, as the dynastic period set in and the small communities became big states, an “urban revolution” occurred which brought about a predominance of specialization and a depersonalization of individuals. Formerly societies were small, homogeneous, self-contained and strongly traditional, founded upon deep religious and family roots. Now they are secular and, since trading activities are interdependent, they have become complex and chaotic. And this, though with little variations, is what has happened everywhere and in all times, even in our days.

For the rest, if through a similar process and broadening this reality on to the spatial field, we look into an epoch when society is essentially pastoral and lives in a state of almost perfect happiness, we will be traveling back from age to age to ultimately arrive at the primordial civilization that I have located in the Hyperboreas, a civilization depository of the transcendental knowledge which, through time and space, has arrived in our days in one piece only by way of the Hindu tradition, though covered in a symbolic guise so as to preserve its confidentiality. A knowledge which has been summarily exposed in this brief work and whose ultimate origin, which vanishes back in the night of time, can only be regarded as extra human.

Finally, does the doctrine of cosmic cycles offer a pessimistic view of the world and of history, as those who hear of it for the first time are apt to believe? Nothing could be farther from the truth. For if on the one hand the doctrine teaches how our civilization is to hopelessly end up in an era of such great tribulation as the world has never seen, on the other hand it also announces new times and a new earth that are to come immediately after consummation and which will be inaugurated by the saviors I have briefly alluded to in the course of this exposition, who obviously are all but different representations of the same Redeemer. Of course, how this salvation will be carried out can be represented to the reader’s predilection, as we cannot know at this moment how exactly it will be; and on the other hand, it cannot be sufficiently emphasized that we are talking about the end of a world, our world – i.e. an order of things, and not the end of “the world”. For such an end, announced by all of the world’s scriptures and traditional texts, and which embodies the expectations of thousands and millions of beings, is to be but the inevitable and necessary prelude to the restoration of order, after which the earth will know a new Golden Age where everything will be perfection and happiness as it was in the beginning, when man lived in perfect harmony with the whole universe and God.

This brief study has not pretended to be exhaustive. Nothing has been said, for example, about the sandhya, which according to the relevant texts are the three periods of equal lengths into which any yuga is divided (although, according to other versions, they are the periods intermediate between two yugas), and which therefore offer additional possibilities as to key historical dates. Nor has the information that during the present millennium the third yuga “overlapped” the second, a fact difficult to explain in its true meaning, been elaborated upon; nor has the one that 27 maha–yugas of the era of the current Manu – the seventh in his series – having elapsed, we are now in the fourth yuga of the 28th maha–yuga, which no doubt has a symbolic meaning (4 x 7 = 28). Nor has the fact been mentioned that the current mean lifetime of man is affected by the scale 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 10 , though it may still be noted that it is not so much affected by this scale itself as by its exact reversion, the Pythagorean Tetraktys, according to the Hermetic maxim that “as above, so is below, but in a reversed way.” As to the value of my calculations of the present Manvantara’s duration, as well as to that of my perception of the advanced stage of it in which we are now, the readers are invited to draw their own conclusions.

Home

G L O S S A R Y

Avatara – Sanskrit word that literally means “he who descends”, though avataras are usually called “incarnations”. It is said that in the present Manvantara (see below) there have been eight main incarnations of Vishnu, headed by the avatara Matsya, the fish incarnation that saved mankind from the deluge just before that period got started.

Maha–yuga – A series of four ages or yugas, of gradually decreasing lengths, whose sequence is repeated time and time again. It parallels the Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron ages of the western tradition and its total length, according to the orthodox Hinduism, is 4'320,000 common years, though as considered in this book it can be assimilated both to a human cycle, a Manvantara, and any period of time. The terms divya–yuga and chatur–yuga are also used.

Jyotisha–shastras – Ancient Hindu astronomical treatises.

Kalpa – A series consisting of one thousand maha–yugas. It comprises a “Brahma’s day” with its corresponding “night”.

Manu – Literally, “The Father of Mankind”. He is the Archetypal Man and at the same time “the savior”, leader, and legislator of the new humankind after each partial devastation of the universe. In the western tradition, Noah is an equivalent character.

Manvantara – Literally, “a shift of Manu”. For the orthodox Hinduism it is a septenary cycle of immense duration, but in the sense given in this book it is equivalent to the maha–yuga as referred to the current mankind, i.e. a quaternary cycle whose length comprises two precessional periods.

Pralaya – An “emptiness” ensuing after the dissolution of each cosmic manifestation, when the universes are absorbed by the Supreme Being. Actually it is not a “period” but an outside-of-time phenomenon.

Puranas – Literally, “antiquities” o “ancient stories”. They are eighteen in number and according to the orthodox Vishnuism, they narrate the history of the universe. The Third Canto of Bhagavata Purana, which is one of them, and whose contents is considered to be wholly authoritative, assigns durations to all cosmic and biological conceivable cycles, from an atom’s phase to the total universal manifestation.

Yuga – Each one of the four (“Satya”, “Treta”, “Dvapara”, and “Kali”) cyclical ages a maha–yuga consists of. For the orthodox Hinduism, their lengths are 1'728,000, 1'296,000, 864,000 and 432,000 terrestrial years.

Home

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

GUENON, RENE: Formas tradicionales y ciclos cósmicos, Obelisco, Barcelona, 1984; Introducción general al estudio de las doctrinas hindúes, Losada, Buenos Aires, 1945; La crisis del mundo moderno, Mosca Azul, Lima, 1975; Le regne de la quantité et les signes des temps, Gallimard, París, 1972; Símbolos fundamentales de la ciencia sagrada, EUDEBA, Buenos Aires, 1969.

HARDY, RALPH et. al.: El libro del clima (Vol. III), Hyspamérica, Buenos Aires, 1982.

NOCK, A. D. and FESTUGIERE, A. J. (editors): Corpus Hermeticum, Les Belles Letres, París, 4 Vol.

OUSPENSKY, P. D.: Fragmentos de una enseñanza desconocida, Hachette, Buenos Aires, 1972 (2nd ediction).

THOMPSON, RICHARD L.: Vedic Cosmography and Astronomy, Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1989.

NOTE: The quotes from Bhagavata Purana have mostly been taken from GOBIND VHABAN-KARYALAYA’s version, translated into English by C. L. GOSWAMI, M.A., SHASTRI: Srimad Bhagavata Mahapurana, Gita Press, Gorakpur - 273005, India, 6th Edition, 2003. A.C. BHAKTIVEDANTA SWAMI PRABHUPADA’s version has also been used: Srimad Bhagavatam, Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1979 Edition. For the biblical quotes, the updated versions of King James editions have been mainly used.

Home

The Book
The English version in this page has been translated and edited by me from my book "La rueda del tiempo" (in English, "The Wheel of Time") and will hopefully be published in both hard cover and paperback very soon. Some excerpts from the book, both in English and Spanish, can be found here. A good amount of contents (only in English) may be found here.

If you have any questions regarding this page or the book,
feel free to email me at
miguelgoitizolo@gmail.com

Home

Search Engine Optimization and SEO Tools