Nothing New Under the Sun:

Cycles, Eternal Returns, Immortality

Gordon Fisher
gfisher@shentel.net

History is the science of things which do not repeat themselves.
--- Paul Valry (1871-1945), Variets IV.

1. But some things do repeat themselves, or nearly so -- cyclic or periodic or
recurrent processes. The stars, for example. The seasons have a way of running
through more or less the same stages every year. Some people have thought that this
is because the stars are moving the seasons, so to speak.
1
Devotees of astral religions
and various kinds of astrology have in the past attributed great importance to cyclic
processes in our skies (some still do). To look only at their faces, with your eyes
alone, it does appear that the stars, including our sun, and also our moon, only change
their positions as they whirl around us (so it seems). Nowadays we know they really
are changing in other ways, what with nuclear reactions and evolution of stars and the
like. Even a long time ago people knew about changes of celestial objects, what with
comets, meteors, the aurora borealis, an occasional supernova, and the like.
2
Quite
early on it was noticed that when things repeat themselves like this, they make
successful predictions possible. The positions of stars are especially notable in this
regard, the seasons of the year less so, and predicting the weather on a given day
presents formidable difficulties, but still, when people hear there is a 70% chance of
rain tomorrow, they are liable to go out with an umbrella. And, as a kind of bonus,
its easy to believe that if what happened before will happen again, then the suspicion
may arise that some things (such as us) are immortal, in some fashion.
3

2. A periodic motion of a body such as a star may be described as one which
takes place on a simple closed curve. A curve is closed if, whenever a body (or a
particle or a point or a following with your eyes) starts moving from any position on
the curve and keeps on going, the body returns (or your eyes, etc. return) to the
starting point. A curve is simple if a body, in returning the first time to its starting
position in such a motion, never goes through the same position twice (not counting

1
For an exhausting history of astrology and its relations with astronomy, see my book The Marriage and
Divorce of Astronomy and Astrology on this web site.
2
Periodicity of comets appears to have been unverified until the time of Newton, and many before that took
them to be non-periodic. The general view in those benighted times (comets are easier to see at night) was
that comets were omens, especially of disaster.
3
Speaking of views of immortality in the astral religion of the Stoics, Samuel Angus says: "[An]
occupation of the blessed was to be enraptured by the harmony of the spheres and to be carried around in
the chorus of the stars. If the music of earth could so intoxicate the soul and awake it to Corybantic
enthusiasm, how ravishing must be the sweet harmony produced by the rhythmic rotation of the spheres."
(The Religious Quests of the Graeco-Roman World, 1929, p. 281.) As E. C. Krupp says: "If we are
seeking immortality the sky is a good place to start." (Echoes of the Ancient Skies, The Astronomy of Lost
Civilizations, (1983), p. 63.)

the return to the starting position). The simplest kind of periodic motion takes place
on those simple closed curves we know as circles, rather than on ellipses or ovals or
more irregularly shaped simple closed curves. The circle is a fundamental model, or
metaphor or physiological event, in human perception and thought, a basic part of our
way of seeing the world. Circles seem to be especially recognizable in the motions of
celestial objects such as the stars, although on closer examination, one finds that the
planets of our solar system move on somewhat wobbly ellipses. In particular, our
earth moves on a path which is better represented by means of an ellipse than by a
circle, although even the ellipse is not a precise one like people learn about in
elementary mathematics. For some purposes, an ellipse can represent a good
approximation to the path of our earth around our sun, but in order to represent the
actual motion more accurately, such an ellipse must be distorted in accordance with
gravitational influences between the earth and other celestial objects besides our sun,
such as the other planets of our solar system, and especially by our moon. If one
wants to get even more precise, other effects would have to be worked in, perhaps
even to the point that such things as irregularities of shape on the surfaces of the earth
and the objects with which it interacts (such as people) are taken into account.
4

3. Up to the time of Johannes Kepler, star-gazers, from shepherds to
astronomers (including even Copernicus), considered that periodic motions of
celestial objects like the sun, planets and stars took place with uniform speed
(constant angular velocity) on circles. In geocentric systems, in order to account for
the motions of the planets, which sometimes appear from earth to reverse the
direction of motion on their paths, systems of circles called epicycles were used. The
planets were considered to be moving uniformly on circles whose centers are moving
uniformly on the circumference of other circles. One can see how this is done by
visualizing how our moon moves as our earth moves around the sun, as viewed from
the sun.
4. Once heliocentric systems came into use with Copernicus, Kepler managed to
extract from the accurate observations of Tycho Brahe some data that showed the
planets don't have circular orbits. This wasn't easy, since the orbits of the planets he
studied are quite close to being circular. Their eccentricity is small by human
standards.
5
It was even more difficult to overcome the long-held view of most
astronomers up to the 17
th
century that the most likely path for a perpetual periodic
motion is a circle. A person untutored in the mechanics of Newton may believe
naturally in a kind of circular law of inertia to the effect that if a body is started

4
If you want to think on a really big scale about interactions of our earth, or yourself, with the rest of the
universe, we have Machs principle, which is the assertion that the inertial effects of mass are not innate in
a body, but arise from its relation to the totality of all other masses, i.e., to the universe as a whole. (From
http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/M/Machspri.asp , 7 Jul 02.) Whole books have been written about
what mass is, but roughly speaking, its what makes a force necessary to speed a body up or slow it down.
Or, thats inertia, and mass is a measure of inertia. Mass is sometimes defined as quantity of matter, which
may lead one to wonder what matter is, and how to tell it from other things. For example, inertia is what
makes it hard for some people to get up in the morning, and the more mass (or quantity of matter) they
have, the harder it is. Ernst Mach was a physicist, and somewhat of a philosopher, who lived 1838-1916.
5
For ellipses, eccentricity doesn't refer to a displacement of the center, but to a number measuring how far
the ellipse departs from being a circle.
moving uniformly (with constant speed) in a circle, it will do so forever if no forces
act on it. As a matter of fact, no less and modern a person than Galileo believed in
such a principle. Today, of course, it is customary when using Newtonian mechanics
to formulate the law of inertia as applying to straight line paths rather than circular
ones.

5. Periodic motions in the heavens were often connected intimately with
fundamental personal and religious ideas. E. C. Krupp tells about the linking of
resurrection to cosmic cycles by way of the god Osiris of the ancient Egyptians. He
says: "First and foremost, Osiris was ruler of the dead. Depicted as a mummy, he
presided over the judgment of souls and offered new life, through resurrection, to
those who earned immortality by their proper conduct in this life." The myth of
Osiris involves his death and resurrection, "a theme that echoes the daily cycle of the
sun's death at sunset and its rebirth at dawn." However, Osiris is connected even
more closely to the moon. To see how, we need to know more about his myth. His
father was Geb, the earth, and his mother was Nut, the sky. Osiris became king of
Egypt and brought civilization to its people. He is connected with order, and
associated with the sky. He left Egypt for a time as a kind of missionary, and when
he returned to his sister and consort, Isis, he was killed by conspirators led by his
brother Set, who stood, Krupp says, for "sterility, the desert, mindless force, and
violence..... the personification of chaos."
6. According to Plutarch, Osiris was slain on the 17
th
day of the month of Athyr,
when the sun was in Scorpio, in the 28
th
year of his reign. The numbers are
significant. Although the moon completes its phases in 29 days, the number 28,
according to Krupp, was sometimes used symbolically for this interval. Full moon
was counted as the month's 15
th
day, but the moon looks full the day before and the
day after. By day 17, it is obvious the moon has started to wane. Osiris was the god
of the Nile, and also a moon god, because like the moon, the river and land wax and
wane, due to annual floods, cycle after cycle.
7. Krupp says: "The myth of Osiris continues with his resurrection. Isis
embalmed and mummified him, and through her help he was restored to everlasting
life. In numerous tombs and temples this aspect of his myth is incorporated into one
more celestial identity -- the constellation Orion. Orion and Sirius, the night's
counterpart to Isis, are often shown sailing in celestial boats, usually with Orion in the
lead looking back at his wife, who follows him in the nightly journey from east to
west. The sky is the pattern for the rest of the myth as well." The star Sirius became
the key calibrator of the Egyptian calendar. "The earth's orbital motion eventually
puts the sun in the same direction as Sirius, and even the night's brightest star is lost
in the glare of day. After disappearing from the night sky, however, Sirius eventually
reappears in the dawn, before the sun comes up. The first time this occurs each year
is called the star's heliacal rising, and on this day Sirius remains visible for only a
short time before the sky gets too bright to see it. In ancient Egypt this annual
reappearance of Sirius fell close to the summer solstice and coincided with the time of
the Nile's inundation. Isis, as Sirius, was 'the mistress of the year's beginning,' for the
Egyptian new year was set by this event. New Year's ceremony texts at Dendera say
Isis coaxes out the Nile and causes it to swell. The metaphor is astronomical,
hydraulical, and sexual, and it parallels the function of Isis in the myth."
8. "In Egypt," says Krupp, "Orion, like Sirius, is absent from the night sky for
70 days. This period is equated with the time Osiris spent in the transitional
underworld. It is also equal to the stipulated period for the process of mummification.
Orion's heliacal rising occurred a few weeks before the reappearance of Sirius and the
Nile flood. Egyptian agriculture depended on the Nile. Without the river there would
be no Egypt -- only desert, the sterile domain of Set. With the summer's flood, life
and water returned to the soil. Seeds were planted and nourished by the Nile. For
Egyptians, the three seasons of farming and the seasons of the Nile were the same,
and they named them accordingly. Each marked an important change in the
landscape: Inundation, Emergence, and Low Water. There is a simple cycle here --
birth, growth, death -- and with the next annual flood and new year, rebirth. This
cycle is the essence of Egypt. It is paralleled by the myth. It is played out in the sky.
What we see in the lights overhead is the itinerary of cosmic order. Because it
governs everything, it is reflected in the entire world. It is the core of our
consciousness. It defines what is sacred and makes the sky the domain of gods."
6

9. The extraction of periodicity, of cycles and circles, from patterns and motions
in the heavens is nearly universal. Wyatt MacGaffey reports about the BaKongo
people of Central Africa, and in particular, Lower Zaire: "Kongo cosmology is
implicit in all Kongo myths and rituals, which it endows with the sense of power and
meaning they have for the actors. The Kongo universe is divided into two parts such
that, in different aspects, the relations between the two are relations of time, space,
and cause. The people themselves speak of the two parts most often as 'this world'
(nza yayi) and 'the land of the dead' (nsi a bafwa). The worlds are separated by a
body of water, traditionally called Kalunga but most often referred to as nlangu,
'water', m'bu, 'ocean', or zadi, 'great river' or by various other ordinary words for
water, pools, and rivers." The simplest way to visualize these relationships is in terms
of a circle in which there is a circular movement from the world of the living to the
world of the dead and back again. These worlds are "in mirror opposition within a
static and repetitive universe .. Life is a cyclic or oscillatory movement between
the worlds, resembling the path of the sun."
7

10. MacGaffey calls this "the reciprocating universe." He quotes A. Fu-kiau's
description: "The N'Kongo thought of the earth as a mountain over a body of water
that is the land of the dead, called Mpemba. In Mpemba the sun rises and sets just as
it does in the land of the living. Between these two parts, the lands of the dead and
the living, the water is both a passage and a great barrier. The world, in Kongo
thought, is like two mountains opposed at their bases and separated by the ocean. At
the rising and setting of the sun the living and the dead exchange day and night. The
setting of the sun signifies man's death and its rising his rebirth, or the continuity of
his life. BaKongo believe and hold it true that man's life has no end, that it
constitutes a cycle, and death is merely a transition in the process of change. In the

6
E. C. Krupp, Echoes of the Ancient Skies, The Astronomy of Lost Civilizations, 1983, p. 16-22.
7
Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa, The BaKongo of Lower Zaire, 1986, p. 43.
following song from the Lemba rite we perceive this understanding of the continuity
of life. Death is a way of changing one's body and location; he will continue in the
cycle on earth.

N'zungi! n'zungi-nzila.
N'zungi! n'zungi-nzila.
Banganga ban'e! E,ee!

Man turns in the path.
He [merely] turns in the path;
The priests, the same."
8


11. However, in counterpoint with this cyclicity, there is a kind of non-cyclic
time among the BaKongo, according to MacGaffey. He says: "The picture I have
drawn of a reciprocating universe implies that the dead are recycled though this
world. In fact, reincarnations are regarded as abnormal intrusions marked by
dangerous ambiguity."
9
MacGaffey quotes K. E. Laman: "Those sojourning in the
other world live for a very, very long time. When they grow weak from age, they
shed their skins as snakes do, are rejuvenated, and become sturdy and strong. Then
they live again, weaken, shed their skins, and are renewed once more. After shedding
their skins five or six times they become water simbi and go to live in pools, wherever
there are very hard rocks, and there they settle with those who have previously
become bisimbi."
10

12. MacGaffey continues: "From such texts we can conclude that the
successive 'deaths' of the dead reduce their mobility, their individuality, and their
ability to participate directly in the affairs of the living. Each cycle of their existence
is more remote than the last and more impressive as it approaches the universal. This
concept, which I call "the spiral universe," entails a partially linear or nonrepetitive
sense of time and organizing the varieties of the dead in an oriented, paradigmatic
series extending from living men through living and dead mediators to Nzambi [God,
Creator of the Universe] ..... As the dead become more remote, they become more
like stones, resistant to subsequent transformation by the organic processes that
change the living, animals, and plants. Minor local spirits (bisimbi and bankita) are
said to be smooth round stones from the bottom of a river. The spirits of political
domains are represented by appropriately larger boulders."
11
Thus the circular paths
of life and death for a living being differ from cycle to cycle, and some amount of
liveliness in lost in each cycle. In mathematical terms, the path of existence is a spiral
or helix, whose projection on a plane forms a circles, or at any rate a simple closed
curve.

8
A. Fu-kiau, Le Mukongo et le monde qui l'entourait (N'kongo ye nza yakun'zungidila), 1969, p. 26-30,
quoted by MacGaffey, ibid., p. 43-45.
9
MacGaffey, ibid., p. 63.
10
MacGaffey, ibid., p. 74, quoting K. E. Laman, Cahiers, collected 1912-1919; simbi, plural bisimbi, =
local spirit(s).
11
MacGaffey, ibid., p. 75-76.
13. It may be that once all relevant conditions at some instant are known,
something that will happen later or happened earlier can be determined. This is a
fundamental aspect of the mathematical system of the world of Newton, which
formed the basis for what has become known as classical mechanics. According to a
strong version of this principle commonly associated with Laplace, once all the
relevant conditions are known, assuming that all the relevant conditions can be
known, everything that will happen afterward can be predicted, and everything that
happened before can be retrodicted. At least this is possible for God, or, one might
say, by a Laplacian Intelligence of some sort, not necessarily supernatural.
14. When objects move in cycles, the same conditions occur again -- and again,
and again, and again, forever. The successive events or states of some processes can
be associated with times arranged on a circle, a time circle, with each position on the
circle corresponding to a time. If we start from some time corresponding to a position
on a time circle, we eventually return to the same position. The length of time to
traverse the circle once is a period. After one period, it may be that the events of the
process are repeated in the next period in the same order as in the previous period,
barring catastrophe, and so on, period after period.
12
The processes are then periodic,
cyclic, or recurrent. A cycle of a process consists of the successive states of a process
during one period.
15. If the universe, including you and me, is entirely a collocation of objects
(perhaps made up of elementary physical particles, or some such) whose motion or
activity is cyclic in this way, we may wish to conclude that each of our lives has been
and will be repeated infinitely often, down to the last detail. We may, for example,
envisage that nothing is lost or gained in any of these cycles, and the total time taken
for each cycle remains the same, in such a way that the universe will at some point
begin to repeat itself, with exactly the same events taking in a following cycle, and
we may envisage that this kind of repetition will take place over and over.
16. Explicit ideas of periodicity and cycles probably go back to prehistoric
times, and were likely to have been inspired by observations of celestial phenomena.
By the time of the ancient Greeks, such ideas were well known. Stanley Jaki says:
"The classical Greeks' firm advocacy of an eternal world became a distinctive feature
of their world view and science. Their concept of the eternity of a finite world,
repeating itself in every Great Year, also anticipated to a surprising degree the idea of
an oscillating universe, the favorite choice of many cosmologists of our day..... In the
genesis of scientific ideas ... there is no well-defined starting point. The concept of an
oscillating universe forms no exception to this rule. It is the most recent type of
cyclic cosmological models the origin of which go back to very early times, to the
misty epochs of prehistory."
13


12
In mathematical terms, we may parameterize the underlying circle used to represent times in which a
periodic process takes place with the angles a rotating radius makes with some one fixed reference radius.
As far as the angles are concerned, we may take an angle of, say, 60 degrees or /3 radians to be the same
angle as one of 420 degrees or 4/3 radians, although we may interpret the latter to indicate that the
rotation has consisted of going through every point of the circle once, and then additionally going through
the first 1/6 of the circle again, in a clockwise direction.
13
Stanley Jaki, Science and Creation, 1974, p. vii and p. 1.
17. Otto Neugebauer cites a "cosmic period" given by Sosigenes (2
nd
century
C.E.), called a "perfect year" consisting of 648,483,416,738,540,000 ordinary years,
obtained by multiplying periods for Saturn (265 yrs), Jupiter (427 years), Mars (284
years), Venus (1151 years) and Mercury (480 years) with a 25 year period for the
moon (having to do with the first day of an Egyptian year of exactly 365 days in
which a lunar month begins) and a 1461 year period for the sun (having to do with the
coincidence of the rising of the star Sirius just before sunrise and the beginning of an
Egyptian year which "wandered" since it was defined to consist of exactly 365 days).
The idea was that a given configuration of these important objects which wander with
respect to the fixed stars would form again after this length of time.
14


18. Neugebauer explains that for the ancient Greeks, a complete lunar-solar
cycle (with respect to the earth) consisted of a relation of the form x years = y months
= z days, where x, y and z were usually positive integers, although sometimes
fractions were used. A year here is the time for the earth to rotate around the sun
once with respect to the fixed stars; a month is the time for the moon to rotate around
the earth once with respect to the fixed stars; and a day is the time for the earth to
revolve on its axis once -- or the equivalent as viewed from earth. For example, the
cycle of Calippus is given as 76 years = 940 months = 27759 days. A partial equation
of the form x years = y months is also called a luni-solar cycle. For example, the one
given by 19 years = 235 months is the Metonic cycle. The Metonic cycle is only off
by about 2 hours. Given that a year consists of exactly 365 days, it can be seen that
the Calippus cycle is the shortest complete luni-solar cycle based on the Metonic
cycle (using integers). This seems to have motivated the definition of a solar year as
consisting of exactly 365 days.
15


19. Similar definitions can be given for planet-solar cycles, of the form x years
(time for earth to rotate around sun) = y rotations of the planet with respect to the
fixed stars as seen from earth (sidereal rotations) = z conjunctions or oppositions of
the planet with the sun as seen from earth (synodic periods). For inner planets
(between the earth and sun), conjunctions can be used, and refer to planet and sun
having the same longitude with respect to the stars (the planet is above, below or
"transiting" the sun). For outer planets, oppositions can be used, and refer to planet
and sun being on opposite sides of the earth with respect to the stars. This is where
the cycles for the planets come from in the perfect year of Sosigenes. For example,
the Babylonians knew of a cycle 265 years = 9 sidereal revolutions = 256 synodic
periods, and they knew of similar cycles for the other planets (moon and sun
excepted). The numbers of years in these cycles were combined with the 25 year
lunar period and 1461 year Sothic period (Sothis = Sirius) based on the Egyptian
calendar to give the Sosogenic "cosmic period".
16
There is no firm commonly-
accepted definition of what constitutes a great year or perfect year, etc., as there is for
lunar-solar or planet-solar cycles. Periods ranging from the 19 years of the Metonic

14
Otto Neugebauer, A History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy, 1975, p. 560-565, 605-606.
15
Neugebauer, ibid., p. 615-616.
16
Neugebauer, ibid., p. 560, 605-606.
cycle to the large perfect year of Sosigenes have been honored with names of this
sort.
17

20. Another example of a cycle discovered by the Greeks is that of Philolaus. It
starts with a period of 59 lunar years (defined to consist of 12 synodic months,
periods from one conjunction of the moon with the sun to the next), with 21 synodic
months intercalated, giving a total of 729 synodic months. The Philolaic cycle is
defined by 279 synodic months = 21505 days = 59 "years" consisting of exactly
364 days. Neugebauer observes that the 21505 days arise from considering a
synodic month to consist of exactly 29 days (729 times 29 ), and a year of 364
days is exactly what's needed for there to be 59 years in 21505 days (divide
21505 by 59). He concludes that this length of a year is the result of numerological
speculation combined with a commonly accepted rounded value of 29 days for the
synodic lunar month. He notes too that the number 729 in the cycle had special
significance to the Pythagoreans, who associated it with the sun. According to
Plutarch, they also associated powers of 3 with celestial bodies, in particular 9, the
square of 3, with the earth, and 27, the cube of 3 with the moon. And 729 is at the
same time the cube of 9 and the square of 27.
18

21. It is interesting to speculate on how much of this sort of numeration, or
numerology, so popular in Hellenistic times and later was founded and propagated by
people who didn't understand the true purpose of lunar-solar cycles -- to make the
natural time units of months, years and days match in some nice way. According to
Neugebauer, the chief motive for the numerological speculations was to make
parapegmata, which were kinds of calendars used to make weather predictions.
These are to be distinguished from civil calendars, made to mark reigns of kings,
civic festivals, and the like.
22. In Plato's Timaeus, a great year is the time taken for the principal wandering
celestial objects -- the sun, moon and 5 planets known to Plato -- to return to given
initial positions with respect to the fixed stars, or designated constellations. Cornford
remarks that the idea of a great year is an ancient one, although to begin with it seems
to have referred only for the time taken for the sun and moon to return to given initial
positions with respect to the stars.
19
Plato doesn't give a length of the great year in
the Timaeus, although in the Republic he mentions, in an obscure passage, 12,960,000
= (3600)
2
= (3 x 4 x 5)
4
as the number of days in a great year, taken as 36,000 solar
years of 360 days each.
20

23. Pierre Duhem observes: "An eternal being, the Universe was at the same
time, according to Aristotle, according to all the pagan philosophers of India and
Chaldea, of Greece and Rome, a periodic being. After each Great Year, it began a
new life, completely like the one which just expired. Each Great Winter brought back
a kataklysmos, a flood; each Great Summer was marked by an ekpyrosis, a great fire.
What first struck learned Christians in this theory was not its opposition to Catholic

17
Neugebauer regards the construction of periods of the latter type as having been a kind of numerological
game. Neugebauer, ibid., p. 618.
18
Neugebauer, ibid., p. 619.
19
Plato, Timaeus, translated by Francis Cornford, as Plato's Cosmology, 1937, p. 116-117.
20
Plato, Republic, translated by Francis Cornford as The Republic of Plato, 1941, footnote p. 269.
dogmas, but rather the analogies with Biblical traditions."
21
However, the early
Christian Origen (c. 185-253 C.E.), soon saw a conflict of ideas of a periodic universe
with Christian doctrine.
24. Mircea Eliade makes a case for a fundamental and universal pattern of
ontology, a conception of being and reality, which he attributes to archaic, premodern
or "traditional" societies. "In the particulars of his conscious behavior," Eliade says,
"the 'primitive', the archaic man, acknowledges no act which has not been previously
posited and lived by someone else, some other being who was not a man. What he
does has been done before. His life is the ceaseless repetition of gestures initiated by
others..... Basically ... the life of archaic man ... although it takes place in time, does
not bear the burden of time, does not record time's irreversibility; in other words,
completely ignores what is especially characteristic and decisive in a consciousness
of time. Like the mystic, like the religious man in general, the primitive lives in a
continual present..... That, for a primitive, the regeneration of time is continually
effected ... is proven by the antiquity and universality of certain beliefs in respect to
the moon. The moon is the first of creatures to die, but also the first to live again."
25. Eliade stresses the importance of lunar myths (like that attached to Osiris) in
the organization of early theories concerning death and resurrection, fertility and
regeneration, initiation, and so on. The moon's phases yield a unit of time, the month,
more easily arrived at than the solar year. They also yield an idea of "eternal return".
By extension, the cycle of the moon's phases serves as an archetype for the birth,
growth, decrepitude and disappearance of other entities. Thus one can speak of a
"lunar" structure of becoming. This is an optimistic metaphor, since it seems that the
disappearance of the moon is never final, and there will always be a new moon.
Thus, as long as vegetation cycles are "lunar" in structure, there will be new harvests,
and as long as groups of people are "lunar", there will always be new groups of
people. If a flood, volcano, submersion of a continent, plague, starvation, war or
other calamity wipes out one group, another group will arise. If groups of people are
strictly "lunar", the same groups will arise again. However, more loosely, new
groups on the general model of the old will arise.
26. Eliade goes further: "The death of the individual and the death of humanity
are alike necessary for their regeneration. Any form whatever, by the mere fact that it
exists as such and endures, necessarily loses vigor and becomes worn; to recover
vigor, it must be reabsorbed into the formless if only for an instant; it must be
restored to the primordial unity from which it issued; in other words, it must return to
"chaos" (on the cosmic plane), to "orgy" (on the social plane), to "darkness" (for
seed), to "water" (baptism on the human plane, Atlantis on the plane of history), and
so on..... [The] eternal return reveals an ontology uncontaminated by time and
becoming..... the primitive, by conferring a cyclic direction upon time, annuls its
irreversibility. Everything begins over again at its commencement every instant. The
past is but a prefiguration of the future. No event is irreversible and no
transformation is final. In a certain sense, it is even possible to say that nothing new
happens in the world..... Time but makes possible the appearance and existence of

21
Pierre Duhem, Le Systme du Monde, 1913, v. 2, p. 447.
things. It has no final influence upon their existence, since it is itself constantly
regenerated..... it is ... probable that the desire felt by the man of traditional societies
to refuse history, and to confine himself to an indefinite repetition of archetypes,
testifies to his thirst for the real and his terror of "losing" himself by letting himself be
overwhelmed by the meaninglessness of profane existence."
22

27. Eliade quotes Henri-Charles Puech: "Dominated by an ideal of
intelligibility which finds authentic and full being only in that which is in itself and
remains identical with itself, in the eternal and immutable, the Greeks regarded
movement and change as inferior degrees of reality, in which, at best, identity can be
apprehended in the form of permanence and perpetuity, hence of recurrence. The
circular movement which assures the survival of the same things by repeating them,
by bringing about their continuous return, is the perfect and most immediate
expression (hence that which is closest to the divine) of the absolute immobility at the
summit of the hierarchy. According to the famous Platonic definition, the time which
is determined and measured by the revolution of the celestial spheres is the mobile
image of immobile eternity which it imitates by moving in a circle. Consequently
both the entire cosmic process and the time of our world of generation and decay
develop in a circle or according to an indefinite succession of cycles, in the course of
which the same reality is made, unmade, and remade, in conformity with an
immutable law and determinate alternations. The same sum of being is preserved;
nothing is created and nothing lost; moreover, certain thinkers of dying antiquity --
Pythagoreans, Stoics, Platonists -- went so far as to maintain that within each of these
cycles of time, of these aiones, these aeva, the same situations recur that have already
occurred in the preceding cycles and will occur in subsequent cycles -- and so ad
infinitum. No event is unique, nothing is enacted but once (for example the
condemnation of Socrates); every event has been enacted, is enacted, and will be
reenacted perpetually; the same individuals have appeared, appear, and will appear at
every turn of the circle. Cosmic time is repetition and anakuklosis, eternal return."
23

28. Such doctrines of eternal return are, on the whole, optimistic. Eliade
contrasts the ancients who believed in such doctrines with ourselves: "... archaic man
certainly has the right to consider himself more creative than modern man, who sees
himself as creative only in respect to history. Every year, that is, archaic man takes
part in the repetition of the cosmogony, the creative act par excellence..... "
24

29. However, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) found deep
despair in such a doctrine. He says among his last notes that stamping "becoming"
-- that which is temporal and transitory -- with the character of "being" -- that which
is unchanging and eternal -- is the greatest exercise of our will power, and the peak

22
Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, or Cosmos and History, 1954, p. 5-6, 86-92; translation
by Willard Trask and enlargement by Eliade of Le Mythe de l'ternel retour: archetypes et retypes et
rpetition, 1949.
23
Henri-Charles Puech, "Gnosis and Time", in Man and Time, 1957, p. 40-41); in Eliade, loc. cit.
24
Eliade, ibid., p. 156.
of human meditation. The closest we can come to this, he thinks, is the realization
that everything returns and has returned, over and over.
25

30. Nietzsche asks: "Are not all 'values' lures that draw out the comedy without
bringing it closer to a solution? Duration 'in vain,' without end or aim, is the most
paralyzing idea, particularly when one understands that one is being fooled and yet
lacks the power not to be fooled. Let us think this thought in its most terrible form:
existence as it is, without meaning or aim, yet recurring inevitably without any finale
of nothingness: "the eternal recurrence". This is the most extreme form of nihilism:
the nothing (the 'meaningless'), eternally!"
26
Nietzsche spoke of the idea of eternal
return as "the most oppressive thought" (in Der Wille zur Macht), "the most abysmal
thought" (in Also sprach Zarathustra), "the heaviest burden" (in Die Frhliche
Wissenschaft). And in "Der Genesende" ("The Convalescent"), in Part III of Also
sprach Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote:
O Zarathustra, his animals said to him, to those who think like us, all things
themselves dance: they come and hold out their hands and laugh and run -- and
come back.
Everything goes away, everything comes back; the wheel of being rolls on
eternally. Everything dies, everything blooms again; the year of being runs on
eternally.
Everything breaks, everything is joined once more; the same house of being
builds itself eternally. Everything leaves, everything greets itself again; the circle
of being remains true to itself eternally.
27


31. Zarathustra had just gone through a period of acute suffering, and is
overcome by the thought that he must do so again, over and over, if all things return.
(Nietzsche underwent great physical suffering in his life). Nevertheless, Zarathustra's
animals tell him:

For your animals know well, O Zarathustra, who you are and must become:
Behold, you are the teacher of the eternal return.
Behold, we know what you teach: that all things return eternally and we
ourselves with them, and that we have already existed eternally often, and all
things with us.
You teach that there is a great year of becoming, a monstrously great year: that
must like an hourglass always turn over once again, so it can run down and run
out once more.


25
Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Wille zur Macht, 1884-88 paragraph 286; quoted by Rudolf Wendorff on p. 452
of his Zeit und Kultur, 1980; section 617 in the translation The Will to Power by Walter Kaufman and R. J.
Hollingdale, 1967.
26
Section 55 of the translation by Kaufmann and Hollingdale.
27
Nietzsches Werke in zwei Bnden, 1958, vol. 1, p. 490-494, my translation.
so that all these years are equal to themselves, in the largest things and also in
the smallest, so that we ourselves in each great year are equal to ourselves, in
the largest things and also in the smallest.

And if you wanted to die now, O Zarathustra: Behold, we also know what you
would say to yourself: . . . . .

Now I die and vanish, you would say, and all at once I am a nothing. Souls are
as mortal as bodies.
But the knots of causes in which I am entangled return again, they will create
me again! I myself belong to the causes of the eternal return.
I come again, with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent --
not to a new life or better life or similar life.

I come again eternally to the same and self-same life, in the largest things
and also in the smallest, to teach again the eternal return of all things,

to bring word again of the great noon of earth and man, to proclaim again
superman to man.
I gave my word, I break my word: my eternal fate wants it , as proclaimer I
perish!
The hour has now arrived that he who perishes blesses himself. This ends
Zarathustra's perishing.
28

Thus Nietzsche tries to turn his pessimism into joyful acceptance, gladdened by his
immortality, repetitive as it is, and promising as it does unending suffering.
32. On the other hand, to the extent that people identify themselves with
processes in time, with the making of history which does not repeat itself, to this
extent people have abandoned "the paradise of archetypes and repetition" (Eliade).
This is a kind of "fall" into history, in which people become conscious of their
freedom, or what they take to be their freedom. For some, this freedom, this
irreducible creativity, in which nothing in the future will be just as it was in the past,
leads to a kind of terror of history". This is especially forceful in times of rapid
change and upheaval. Where will it all end, people ask? O the times, the customs,
they say! In some of the great religions of the world, people have faith that in some
way they can retain their freedom and creativity, thus giving up the cyclic repetitions,
and yet overcome the terror of history by attaining another kind of relief -- nirvana,
reunion with the elements, heaven, a workers' paradise.
33. Jaki, in concluding his book on eternal returns, suggests that science as
found in Christian cultures failed to develop in the other great cultures of the world
because "They all were dominated by a pantheistic concept of the universe going
through eternal cycles. By contrast, the only viable birth of science took place in a
culture for which the world was a created, contingent entity. To make this point is

28
ibid., p. 492-494.
not merely a reply to a past issue. The reply seems to have a direct relevance to the
gravest perplexity of the modern, scientific world. The very roots of that perplexity
form a mirror-image of the age-old need to make a choice between two ultimate
alternatives: faith in the creator and in a creation once-and-for-all, or surrender to the
treadmill of eternal cycles."
29
There is a hint here of enlisting Christian and Jewish
beliefs about the nature of historical time as opening the way to the development of
science (in a present sense of the term). Still, it appears that natural sciences, as we
have come to know them, began in some important respects before Christian or even
Jewish times, in some ways, among some people. A good deal of that science grew
out of contemplation of seemingly eternal cycles in the heavens. To be sure, one may
argue over how far natural sciences, or to use a less anachronistic term, natural
philosophies, should be separated from religious beliefs. We have some records to
show that such separation began in ancient Greece by the 5
th
century B.C.E., but who
knows when such separation really began?
34. Nietzsche started his career as a classical philologist, a specialist in the
language and literature of ancient Greece and Rome. In his first book, he argued that
we can't fully appreciate the ancient Greek tragedies unless we recognize the
potentially destructive and irrational forces which underlie them.
30
It appears that the
idea of the eternal return was planted in Nietzsche's mind by passages from the
ancient Greek philosophers, and perhaps also from ancient Hindu works, to be
reinforced later by his studies of the natural sciences of his time.
35. There is a remark attributed to Eudemus (a student of Aristotle's, lower
300's B.C.E.) by Simplicius (500's C.E, about 800 years later) which runs as follows:
"But if one may believe the Pythagoreans, that the same events will recur
individually, and I shall be talking to you holding my stick as you sit here, and
everything else will be as it is now, then it is reasonable to say that time repeats
itself."
31

36. Again, Eusebius, Bishop of Emesa in the 4
th
century C.E., wrote: "Socrates
and Plato and each individual man will live again, with the same friends and fellow
citizens. They will go through the same experiences and the same activities. Every
city and village and field will be restored, just as it was. And this restoration of the
universe takes place not once, but over and over again -- indeed to all eternity without
end. Those of the gods who are not subject to destruction, having observed the
course of one period, know from this everything which is going to happen in all
subsequent periods. For there will never be any new thing other than that which has
been before, but everything is repeated down to the minutest detail."
32


29
Jaki, ibid., p. 357.
30
Die Geburt der Tragdie aus dem Geiste der Musik, 1872, later called Die Geburt der Tragdie, Oder:
Griechentum und Pessimismus, 1886; cf. Walter Kaufmann's introduction to his translation of The Birth of
Tragedy into English, 1967.
31
Translated by W. K. C. Guthrie in vol. 1 of his History of Greek Philosophy, 1967, p. 281.
32
Quoted by G. J. Whitrow, Time in History, 1988, p. 43, who quotes it from E. Bevan, Later Greek
Religion, 1927, p. 30-1, describing a view of the Stoics found, for example, in Nemesius, cf. mile Brhier,
Chrysippe et l'ancien stocisme, 1910, p. 155-156.
37. There is an extended myth of an eternal return in Plato's dialogue, the
Statesman, probably written between 365 and 362 B.C.E. Here is part of it:
Stranger. Listen then. There is an era in which the god himself assists the
universe on its way and helps it in its rotation. There is also an era in which he
releases his control. He does this when its circuits have completed the due limit
of the time thereto appointed. Thereupon it begins to revolve in the contrary
sense under its own impulse -- for it is a living creature and has been endowed
with reason by him who framed it in the beginning..... In the one era it is assisted
on its way by the divine cause, receiving a renewal of life from its creator, an
immortality of his contriving. In the other era, when it has been released, it
moves by its innate force and it has stored up so much momentum at the time of
its release that it can revolve in the reverse sense for thousands of revolutions,
because its size is so great, its balance so perfect, and the pivot on which it turns
is so small..... the revolution of the heaven is sometimes in its present sense,
sometimes in the reverse sense.
Young Socrates. How would you state its significance?
Stranger. This change of motion we must regard as the most important and the
most complete of all "turnings back" occurring in the celestial orbits.
Young Socrates. It would seem so.
33

38. In the myth, there is an continual alternation of two ages which will take
place as long as the universe lasts. The length of each age is a great year. In any one
of the ages, motions in the universe are the opposite of those in the previous and
succeeding age. In one of the ages, the process leads to the Golden Age, in the other
the process leads away from the Golden Age. It is said that we are presently in one of
the ages leading away from the Golden Age. In an age moving toward the Golden
Age, men start out old, rising from the earth, and gradually grow younger. Such an
age is a time of happiness and plenty, without strife, pain and toil. At the time at
which the universe begins to change direction, moving from one age to the next, there
are great cosmic disturbances, especially fires and floods. In an age moving away
from the Golden Age, men are born, grow old and die, returning to earth. But in the
next age, they rise again from the earth, gradually grow young, and disappear (into
their mothers' wombs? if so, where then?). The reversal of the process of birth and
growing old in is, in effect, a resurrection of the dead, a reversal of the process of
death, in which bodies are put back together and spring forth alive from the ground
where they will ordinarily have been buried.
34

39. Martin Ostwald says in a synopsis of Plato's Statesman in an edition of
Skemp's translation edited by him: "The folk stories of the age of Kronos and of the
earthborn men, and the story of Atreus and Thyestes, are traces in the folk memory of
cosmic changes which recur in great cycles. In the real 'age of Kronos' a god takes
personal charge of the universe and, through his assistant divine guardians, of the

33
Plato, Statesman, from 269c - 270c, translation by J. B. Skemp, 1952.
34
Cf. D. S. Russell, The Method and Message of Jewish Apocalyptic, 1964, p. 214-215, and Bruce Lincoln,
Myth, Cosmos, and Society, Indo-European Themes of Creation and Destruction. 1986, p. 135.
men and creatures in it. Life is supported without labor. There are no wars and no
politics. Men and beasts share this paradise and are born in full maturity from the
earth. They live from maturity to infancy in the opposite course to us and disappear
in utmost infancy into the earth to be the seed of further generations of the earthborn.
But we live in the so-called age of Zeus, which must persist until the universe, now
revolving on its own initiative and increasingly forgetful of the divine guidance,
comes so near to disruption and "the bottomless abyss of unlikeness" that the god
takes pity and resumes control. He makes the universe 'ageless and deathless' by his
aid; it is neither of these in its own right."
35

40. "Just as the shepherd can exercise his rule over a willing herd," Ostwald
says, "because he is different from and naturally superior to it, so the rule of the gods,
by virtue of their natural superiority, was then accepted by the men who were then in
their charge. It was by reason of a similar kind of natural superiority that the
Guardians were said to govern in the Republic..... in relegating the shepherd-king to a
distant past, when the government of the earth was divine and when the universe
rotated in a direction contrary to its present course, the state of the Guardians in the
Republic is now rejected because it does not answer to the requirements of the world
as it exists under the dispensation of Zeus. We are now living in an age in which the
king and statesman is a man governing men, and in which, consequently, the problem
of ruling is different, since the statesman is like and not naturally superior to his
subjects."
36

41. There are a number of other statements by pre-Socratic Greek philosophers
about "other worlds." However, sometimes it's hard to decide whether they mean
other worlds in our own universe, other worlds composing a universe coexisting with
ours but somehow separated from ours, or other worlds preceding or succeeding the
one we are in now.
42. Explicit ideas about cosmic cycles must be very old, and most certainly
were closely connected with the repetitions of celestial phenomena: the repeating
phases of the moon, movements of the sun according to the seasons, repeating
patterns of the stars, and so on. It may be, though, that the Stoic idea of cosmic
cycles which repeat themselves exactly, in every detail, comes from astrology. So
says Auguste Bouch-Leclercq: "The Stoic doctrine of apokatastasis, or periodic
renewal of the world by conflagration (ekpyrosis) or by flood (kataklismos), at the
end of a great year can without doubt be traced to Heraclitus and the Pythagoreans;
but the idea that the renewed world must reproduce exactly the preceding one could
well be of astrological origin..... the Stoics invoked the authority of Berosus, who
attributed the cause of the conflagration to the meeting of the planets in Cancer, and
of the flood their meeting in Capricorn (Seneca, Q. Nat., III, 29...) The Stoic
Heraclitus
37
... knows that the conjunction of the seven planets in the same sign leads
to a synchysin tou pantos [chaos of all things]. Scaliger
38
relates ... that, the

35
Martin Ostwald, foreword to Plato's Statesman, translated by J. B. Skemp, Liberal Arts Press, 1957, p.
xxx.
36
Ostwald, ibid., p. xvii.
37
Not the presocratic Heraclitus.
38
Joseph Justus Scaliger, called "the greatest scholar of the Renaissance", 1540-1609.
astrologers having announced in 1579 the conjunction of all the planets in the month
of September 1586, humankind lived for seven years in terror."
39

43. Numerous pre-Socratic Greek philosophers held that the universe is cyclic.
Empedocles (fl. middle of the 5
th
century B.C.) stated that the universe had moved
from a homogeneous harmony of the 4 elements, under the rule of Love, to the
present (for him) state of organized heterogeneity under the rule of Strife, and would
move back again to homogeneity, and continue to cycle in this way. The atomists
held that this universe will eventually disperse, and new ones will continue to arise,
including possibly one identical to the one we now have. Plato says in the Timaeus
that the universe whose genesis he describes there in mythological terms will exist
eternally. But this seems to mean as a stage for cycles. Aristotle held that the
universe had no beginning, and will have no end, a view which had been held by
Xenophanes (c. 570-470 B.C., earlier than Empedocles). This too doesn't preclude
cycles. Generally speaking, however, in the Aristotelian view the transformations of
the physical universe are analogous to the birth-growth-death-rebirth cycles of living
beings, while in the Stoic view the transformations of the physical universe, including
periodic destructions and renewals, are birth-growth-death-rebirth cycles of a living
being -- the universe itself.
44. Pierre Duhem interprets some fragments of Philolaus, the presocratic
Pythagorean, as follows: "Philolaus does not believe, like Anaximander,
Anaximenes, Heraclitus and Empedocles, that the world must be destroyed entirely in
order for an entirely new world to be born in its place. It is always the same universe
which remains. But in this universe, the lower part, that which is below the heavens
and which constitutes the cosmos proper, needs nourishment which supports its life.
This nourishment is furnished to it sometimes in the form of a deluge of fire and
sometimes in the form of a deluge of water. These deluges produce the total or
partial destruction of the things found on the surface of the earth. But at the same
time, each of them is a principle of regeneration for the cosmos."
40

45. Aristotle in his De anima (On the Soul) reports that "Alcmaeon says men
die because they can't attach their beginning to their end". Duhem interprets this to
mean that a necessary and sufficient condition for immortality is experiencing a
sequence of transformations in which the final state is identical to the initial state.
According to Duhem, Alcmaeon declares that each soul is immortal, that its life
forms a closed cycle, and the same soul undergoes an infinity of reincarnations all
similar to one another.
41
Simplicius, in his commentary on the Physics of Aristotle,
tells how Eudemus reported of certain Pythagoreans that they believed in world-
cycles in which all things including time itself are identical from cycle to cycle, not
merely similar or of the same kinds, so there is no way to distinguish one cycle from
another.
42


39
Auguste Bouch-Leclerq, L'Astrologie grecque, 1899, p. 33, note 3.
40
Pierre Duhem, Le Systme du Monde, 1913, v. 1, p. 77.
41
Duhem, ibid., p. 78.
42
Duhem, ibid., p. 79-80.
46. The idea that a flood marks the end of one cosmic cycle, and the beginning
of the next, is old. Eliade says that in the tradition of the Sumerians (c. 3
rd
millenium
B.C.E.): "Royalty had to be brought down from the sky again after the flood, for the
diluvial catastrophe was equivalent to the end of the world..... The same theme of the
Deluge is found in the Epic of Gilgamesh..... As has been well known since the
compilations made by R. Andree, H. Usener, and J. G. Frazer, the deluge myth is
almost universally disseminated; it is documented in all the continents (though very
rarely in Africa) and on various cultural levels. A certain number of variants seem to
be the result of dissemination, first from Mesopotamia and then from India. It is
equally possible that one or several diluvial catastrophes gave rise to fabulous
narratives. But it would be risky to explain so widespread a myth by phenomena of
which no geological traces have been found. The majority of the flood myths seem in
some sense to form part of the cosmic rhythm: the old world, peopled by a fallen
humanity, is submerged under the waters, and some time later a new world emerges
from the aquatic 'chaos'..... It is difficult to determine the cause of the flood in the
Mesopotamian tradition..... However, if we examine the myths that, in other cultures,
announce the coming flood, we find that the chief causes lie at once in the sins of men
and the decrepitude of the world. By the mere fact that it exists -- that is, that it lives
and produces -- the cosmos gradually deteriorates and ends by falling into decay.
This is the reason it has to be re-created. In other words, the flood realizes, on the
macrocosmic scale, what is symbolically effected during the New Year festival: the
"end of the world" and the end of a sinful humanity in order to make a new creation
possible."
43
Of course, there have been many different interpretations of the flood
myths prevalent around the world.
47. The ancient Babylonian theories of recurrence are described by D. D.
Russell: "The Cyclic Theory of the Ages assumed different forms in the ancient
world, in some at least of which the belief was expressed that the whole world
followed an ever-recurring cycle of change. Of particular significance in this respect
was the Great Year of the Babylonians, based on the movement of the heavenly
bodies, particularly the planets, and forming the center of complicated astrological
study. In the course of some thousands of years these bodies, in their rotation, came
round full circle at which point, it was believed, an old age was completed and a new
age begun. This new age had reference not only to the revolution of the heavenly
bodies, but also to the recurrence of terrestrial history. In its Babylonian form this
idea was associated with the sacred number 12,960,000 (= 60
4
= 3,600
2
), the
numerical expression of the law of the universe, which was believed to govern not
only the life of the universe but also the life of man. When applied to time it
represented 12,960,000 days or 36,000 years (taking 360 days as one year)
representing the Babylonian cycle, in one form of the theory at any rate. There is, in
fact, no unanimity about the duration of such cycles, 432,000 being another figure
sometimes given. It is to be observed that this figure, like the others, is also a
multiple of 60, the Babylonian system of numbering being sexagesimal."
44


43
Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, 1978, v. 1, p. 62-63; French, 1976.
44
D. D. Russell, The Method and Message of Jewish Apocalyptic, 1964, p. 214.
48. But there are those (including many of the Stoics themselves) who have
thought that the Stoic cycles are not to be regarded as rendering existence
meaningless, but as guaranteeing the constancy of the will of God. mile Brhier
says: "This rhythm of birth and corruption of the world reproduces itself perpetually,
and constitutes the rhythm of the life of the universal god, Zeus. The law of the
development of the world is rigorously the same during each period. The Stoic Zeus
is not a gambler whose power manifests itself by the diversity and richness of
combinations [like the uncaring gods of Epicurus]; it is a constant and closed will;
therefore each period will reproduce the preceding one identically; and since
everything is connected to everything else up to the most minute details, 'it is
evidently not at all impossible,' says Chrysippus, "that after our death, well after some
periods of time have been elapsed, we will be re-established in the very form which
we now possess'..... One sees that the eternal return symbolizes here the rigor and
constancy in the will of God who leads the world: it is an optimistic theory, an
assurance against change and instability. It is not necessary to emphasize how far the
thought of Chrysippus is from that of Nietzsche for whom eternal return means risk,
the absence of goals, the impossibility of progress, the dogma 'that frees man from the
slavery of ends'".
45

49. It is possible that the idea of eternal returns was picked up by the
Pythagoreans from the Hindus, or from what we now call the Middle or Near East,
who in turn may have influenced or been influenced by the Hindus. It is also possible
that the Hindus and Pythagoreans developed ideas of eternal recurrence more or less
independently. W. K. C. Guthrie says of links between the Pythagoreans and
Persians, Indians or Chinese that "the remarks of Zeller
46
have not lost their force: the
positive evidence is weak or non-existent, and the resemblances in doctrine are too
general to warrant any definite conclusions, and were certainly current in Greece
from a period which makes the hypothesis of borrowing from the further East
unlikely." The task of assigning influences on the Hindus, and of the Hindus on
others, is made difficult by the generally admitted lack of interest among the ancient
Hindu writers in dating their compositions.
47

50. In one of the Hindu classics, the Vishnu Purana, apparently composed or
recorded in the middle of the 1
st
millenium B.C.E. at roughly the same time the
Pythagoreans were composing their first works, there is a description of the length of
perennially recurring cosmic cycles called mahayugas, each composed of 4 ages
called yugas, together with a dawn and dusk for each yuga. Each mahayuga is said to
last 4,320,000 years. According to Jaki's transcription, the relative lengths of the 4
yugas in each mahayuga are in the ratio 4:3:2:1. The 1
st
yuga is 4 times the length of
the last, etc.; the length of the last yuga is 432,000 "ordinary" years -- presumably
solar or sidereal years. The number 4, and its realization as a square, are symbols of
perfection, and the 1
st
period is correspondingly a "golden age". The number 3 and
the triangle are regressions from 4 and the square. Labor, suffering and death appear
in the 2
nd
yuga of each cycle. The number 2 (and a straight line segment?) represent a

45
mile Brhier, Chrysippe et l'ancien stocisme, 1910, p. 155-156.
46
In Philosophie der Griechen, 1920's, p. 589-592.
47
W. K. C. Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy (1967), vol. 1, p. 251.
further regression, and the 3
rd
yuga of a mahayuga is a decadent age. The number 1
(and a point?) represent the losing throw in a dice game and the lowest regression.
The last yuga of a mahayuga is a thoroughly evil age. The onset of such a last yuga is
said to have occurred about 2000 years before the Vishnu Purana describing it was
written, so its author and readers knew they were facing 430,000 years of
consummate evil. One thousand mahayugas are said to constitute a kalpa, a day in
the life of the Brahma, one of the trinity of chief gods of the Hindus. This comes to 4
billion, 320 million years. Even the Brahma dies and rises again. According to the
Vishnu Purana, each life of the Brahma lasts about 311 trillion years -- more than 3
million million years. The lives of the Brahma are presumably the longest cycles of
all.
48

51. The Hindu philosophers who composed the Vishnu Purana appear to have
been fascinated by large numbers. This may be contrasted with Evan Connell's
remark that some American Indians tended to distrust anyone who counts over a
thousand.
49
It is easy to be numbed by large numbers to the point that one doesn't
really appreciate how big they are.
50

52. The Buddhists of ancient India also developed cyclic cosmologies.
Speaking of the Buddhists of the Lesser Vehicle
51
, A. L. Basham says: "As in all
Indian cosmologies the universe is cyclic. Over an enormous period of time
(mahakalpa) it goes through a process of evolution and decline, only to evolve once
more. The cycle is divided into four great periods (asankhyeya). In the first man
declines, and at last everything is destroyed except the highest heaven; the good go to
this heaven, and the sinners to the hells of other universes, which may at that time be
passing through different stages. The second period is one of quiescence. In the third
evolution again begins. The good karma of the beings in the highest heaven begins to
fail, and the 'World of Form', a lower heaven, evolves. A great being dies in the
highest heaven and is reborn in the World of Form as the god Brahma. As he is the
only living thing therein he is lonely. But other beings follow him from the highest
heaven to the lower. As Brahma was the first to be born in the World of Form, and
their birth agrees with his wishes, he imagines that he is the creator of the other gods,
and of all the world, which actually comes into existence through cosmic law.
Meanwhile the earth develops. as well as other earths. The first men are fairy-like
beings, but gradually they degenerate and become earth bound. The fourth period is
one of continuation, marked only by a regular pattern of comparative advance and
decline, forming a series of lesser cycles within the greater one. This process is
repeated for all eternity, but one great cycle is not exactly like the next. There are
'Buddha cycles' and 'empty cycles', and we are fortunate that we live in a Buddha

48
Stanley Jaki, The Science of Creation, 1974, Chapter 1, "The Treadmill of the Yugas".
49
Evan S. Connell, Son of the Morning Star, 1984, p. 383.
50
For example, if the national debt is 3 trillion dollars, and we stop accruing more debt, and at the same
time start paying off the one we have at the rate of one dollar a second, it will take about 100,000 years to
complete the payment. If the debt is 300 trillion dollars, it will take about 10 million years to pay it off at
the rate of one dollar a second. Or it will take 10,000 years if we pay it off at the rate of a thousand dollars
a second.
51
Hinayana, one of the three great divisions of Buddhism, found today especially in Sri Lanka, Burma,
Thailand, Cambodia and Laos.
cycle, in which four Buddhas (Krakucchanda, Kanakamuni, Kashyapa, and
Shakyamuni [a title of Gautama Buddha]) have taught, and a fifth (Maitreya) is yet to
come."
52

53. On the face of it, the cycles described by the Hindus and Buddhists are a
kind of Nietzschean Eternal Return. However, Keiji Hishitani says: "A recurrent
world process, as a cyclical movement, implies infinity to the extent that it lacks
beginning or end. But to the extent that it does arrive at an end, in a sense, by going
back to its beginning, its recurrent character signals a finiteness. It thus possesses, we
might say, a finitude of a higher order -- what has been called Eternal Recurrence.....
It is, when all is said and done, a meaningless endlessness, nothing more than the
umsonst ("in vain") that Nietzsche speaks of."

54. Hishitani asks: "Might not what Buddhism points to in the phrase "since
time past without beginning" belong to a different dimension? It is true, the kalpa is
thought of in terms of a closed temporal system complete in itself. And from a
succession of these kalpas a formal system of a higher order is conceived, leading in
turn to still higher and more encompassing systems. From an accumulation of
smaller kalpas, a greater kalpa is conceived, and from their accumulation, a still larger
one, and so on without end. In this case, however, all the time systems imagined one
after another in ever more encompassing spheres are all simultaneous. Consider the
rotation of the earth about the sun within the solar system, the whole of which, in
turn, moves about some other center. And then imagine an ever-widening circle of
such patterns continuing on out into infinity. It makes sense to speak of the earth's
involvement in all those movements simultaneously at each moment of time, at each
"now." So it is with the kalpas."
55. "What I am speaking of here," says Hishitani, "is something other than the
endlessly recurring system of identical time, in which the same world process returns
again and again in Eternal Recurrence. In Eternal Recurrence, a before and an after
are imagined in the successive repetitions of the same world-time; in that recurrence,
time is represented purely and simply as a straight line without beginning or end. But
in Buddhism, time is circular, because all its time systems are simultaneous; and, as a
continuum of individual "nows" wherein the systems are simultaneous, it is
rectilinear as well. Time is at once circular and rectilinear..... in newness without
ceasing, we see two simultaneous faces of time: one of creation, freedom, and infinite
possibility, and one of infinite burden, inextricable necessity. Newness is essentially
equivocal; thus, so is time."
53

56. In the Brahmavaivarta Purana, Vishnu, another of the trinity of supreme
Hindu gods, incarnated as a ten-year-old boy pilgrim, educates Indra. According to
Arthur MacDonell, Indra is the dominant god "in the realm of air", and the favorite
and national god of the Vedic Indians. Indra is also the god of battle. He is known
for protecting "the Aryan colour" and subjecting the black-skinned. He "sometimes
indulges in acts of capricious violence, such as the slaughter of his father or the

52
A. L. Basham, The Wonder that was India, A Survey of the Culture of the Indian Sub-Continent before
the Coming of the Muslims, 1954, p. 272-273.
53
Keiji Hishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 1982, p. 218-219, 221.
destruction of the car of Dawn', and "he is especially addicted to soma", an
intoxicating plant juice, "of which he is described as drinking enormous quantities to
stimulate him in the performance of his warlike exploits."
54

57. According to Jaki, Vishnu says to Indra: "I have known the dreadful
dissolution of the universe. I have seen all perish, again and again, at the end of every
cycle. At that terrible time, every single atom dissolves into the primal, pure water of
eternity, whence originally all arose..... Ah, who will count the universes that have
passed away, or the creations that have risen afresh, again and again, from the
formless abyss of the vast waters? Who will number the passing ages of the world, as
they follow each other endlessly? And who will search through the wide infinities of
space to count the Universes side by side, each containing its Brahma, its Vishnu, its
Shiva? Who will count the Indras in them all -- those Indras side by side, who reign
at once in all the innumerable worlds?" The last words of Vishnu to Indra are:
"Perishable as bubbles are the good and evil of the beings of the dream. In unending
cycles the good and evil alternate. Hence, the wise are attached to neither, neither the
evil nor the good. The wise are not attached to anything at all."
55

58. The determinism implied in the Puranas was regarded by Buddha as leading
to an inadmissible stasis. Kimar Kishore Mandal says: "In the course of our
discussion on Kala or time, stated in the Puranas and the later literatures such as
Kautilya's Arthasastra etc., we find the metaphysical problem has become implicated
with the grand problem of Ethics, viz, freedom and necessity. Time is the most
important factor in moral and religious activities. It seems almost certain that there
were thinkers in India who had made time the prius of creation. Time has in this line
of thought been identified with the personal God..... Now the question of supreme
importance for Ethics arises as to whether the course of world events is entirely
determined or there is scope for human-exertion to undo the dead-weight of past
Karma. It is the issue of freedom versus determinism. In India the School of Maskari
Gosala is credited with the theory of irrevocable fatalism. They were called
Akriyavadins. They did not believe in the efficacy of Karma or the value or disvalue
of moral action. The best course of action is to refrain from all acts and take the
events -- pleasurable or painful -- as a matter of course without either self-exaltation
or depression. This theory is the apotheosis of fatalism with its consequential
inactivism. It makes morality and religion absolutely nugatory." "Buddha," says
Mandal, "waged a relentless crusade against this dangerous heresy."
56


59. Astronomical cycles are found in many cultures. Miguel Len-Portilla says:
"It is certain that the universe of the Maya [of Central America] was populated with
countenances of gods, which were the forces acting in the quadrants of colors and in
the celestial and lower regions. But differing totally from any form of animism,
Maya thought had discovered the measurements of the cycles which with intrinsical
order rule whatever happens in the universe. The divine forces were neither

54
Arthur MacDonell, A History of Sanskrit Literature, 1900, p. 84, 86, 87.
55
(Stanley Jaki, The Science of Creation, 1974, Ch. 1, apparently quoted from a work by Heinrich Zimmer
in Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, 1946, edited by Joseph Campbell.
56
Kimar Kishore Mandal, A Comparative Study of the Concepts of Space and Time in Indian Thought,
1968, p. 39-40.
indeterminate nor obscure; their action can be foreseen by means of observations and
computations. In the inscriptions they commemorated with mathematical rigor the
moments in which the action of the god-periods had left their imprint in the world.
The elaboration of eclipse tables in their codices permitted them, for example, to
dialogue with the gods, ordering the ceremonies and manners of acting in terms of
what was going to happen because they already knew what the divine sequence of the
universe was to be. The entire life of the Maya thus presented itself oriented by a
cultural pattern manifested in their institutions essentially related to the theme of
time."
57


60. Evan Hadingham says: "The calendar priests were not removed from
everyday life. Then, as now, their knowledge must have been essential to the
ordering of the agricultural routine and the succession of festivities. Nevertheless, it
would be wrong to imagine that the Mayan skywatcher was preoccupied with creating
an efficient system for the management of earthly affairs. The evidence of their
elaborate inscriptions and bark books proves that their concerns lay elsewhere. They
seem to have been obsessed with the search for harmonious, resonating whole-
number cycles -- perhaps with the quest of one supreme whole number -- which
would divinely organize and unify both the heavens and human affairs. The
correspondences between these sacred numbers were sought in calculations that often
stretched far beyond a human lifetime..... An obsession with the flow seems to
characterize the Maya of all periods. The peculiar attitude of the Chamula [modern
Maya] toward time and space helps us to imagine something of the outlook of the
Classic Period astronomers. Just as the units of time invoked by the Quich shamans
are deities who affect the destinies of men, so we might expect the sacred calculations
of the ancient Maya to have an astrological, fortune-telling aspect."
58

61. However, Linda Schele and Mary Ellen Miller say: "The Classic Maya
embedded their history in a framework of time that they divided into an overlapping
set of cycles, each different in duration and reference. The prominence of calendric
material in Maya inscriptions was initially taken as evidence of an obsessive
fascination with time itself, but this assessment is no more true of the Maya than it is
of contemporary man. Time pinpoints the sequence in which events unfold and
memory takes form. The Maya developed their complex calendric system in order to
locate the events of their lives precisely within this temporal framework. The
information featured in their inscriptions -- the reason for the existence of those
monuments in the first place -- is the history of human events. The calendric systems
and the manner of recording points in time are the products of history itself. The day
on which I write this [says one of the authors] is Sunday, August 11, 1985. It is also
the 223
rd
day of the year; the moon is in the fourth quarter; there are 135 shopping
days until Christmas; it is a day in the second term of Reagan's presidency; it is a few
days after the fortieth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima
(which we perceive to have been the beginning of a new era); it is 142 days to the
beginning of the 150
th
anniversary year of the state of Texas; and it is the year of the

57
Miguel Len-Portilla, Time and Reality in the Thought of the Maya, 1968, p. 107-108.
58
Evan Hadingham, Early Man and the Cosmos, 1984, p. 202-203.
300
th
anniversary of the births of Handel, Mozart and Bach. We have all experienced
each of these ways of referring to a day in our calendar, and we accept them as the
normal ways of acknowledging benchmarks in the passage of time. Although the
Maya used a different system of benchmarks, their purpose was the same."
59

62. Still, it appears that the Maya had an elaborate system of divination, or
understanding, connected with their calendar, in a way that only those who believe
deeply in astrology do (in a general sense of astrology, meaning predicting the future
by means of the stars by any method). Barbara Tedlock studied this system among
some modern Maya, in the municipality of Momostenango in highland Guatemala.
She went to the extent of serving a formal apprenticeship in the divining technique
with a local adept, and was initiated as a diviner in 1976. She says: "The
Momostecan calendar embraces both the 260-day cycle and the 365-day solar year,
with the four Classic Maya Year-bearers, or Mam, systematically linking the two.
The 260-day cycle is conceived as linked firmly to worldly or earthly affairs,
mirroring no astronomical period but rather the period of human gestation. Past
ethnographic accounts of this cycle contain various conflicting opinions as to what its
first day is, but a comparison of the present results and those of previous studies
indicates that there is no fixed first day..... Thompson and others have sought to fix
the divinatory meanings of the days to an etymologically constructed symbol system.
But actual Quich divinatory practice reveals that the days are interpreted not through
the apparent meanings of their names but through a series of mnemonics that are
frequently linked to the names by paronomasia [sound play]."
63. "In addition to the counting and interpretation of the 260-day cycle,"
Tedlock says, "Momostecan divination employs another major technique, the
interpretation of jumping or twitching movements in the blood and muscles of the
diviner, movements that reflect, on a microcosmic level, the flashing of sheet-
lightning over the lakes of the macrocosm. The divinatory interpretation of blood
movements is reported over a wide area of Mesoamerica..... The systems of
interpretation for the day names (among the Quich in general) and for the blood
movements (among Momostecans and perhaps more broadly) are dialectical rather
than analytical in their logical patters. Although some days are predominantly
negative and others are predominantly positive, no one day name is totally negative or
totally positive in its possibilities. In the blood system, the paired terms
proximal/distal (with reference to the fingers) and flesh/bone are in analytical
positive/negative opposition; however, the front-back, left-right, over-under, inside-
outside, and rapid-slow pairs are in an interpenetrating, dialectical relationship."
64. "Quich resistance to the replacement of old customs with new ones is
based, in part," Tedlock says, "on Quich conceptions of time. As in other matters,
thought proceeds dialectically rather than analytically, which means that no given
time, whether past, present, or future, can ever be totally isolated from the segments
of time that precede or follow it. This does not mean that innovations must be
resisted but that they should be added to older things rather than replacing them. My
own teacher, in addition to employing traditional agricultural techniques and rituals in

59
Linda Schele and Mary Ellen Miller, The Blood of Kings, 1986, p. 317.
his milpa [a kind of agriculture], unhesitatingly used insecticides and commercial
fertilizers..... Even such successive creations and cataclysmic destructions of the
world as are described in the Popol Vuh involve no analytical compartmentalization
of time; rather, each age retains heritages from all previous ages..... Accumulation
appears again in the list of predecessors that a lineage priest-shaman recites before his
shrines, or the statement of one such priest-shaman that 'these shrines are like a book
where everything -- all births, marriages, deaths, successes, and failures -- is written
down.' Theoretically, there is no limit to the potential length of such a book. This is
an important point because too much emphasis has been laid on the cyclical or
repeating nature of the Mesoamerican concept of time, in order to contrast it with
Western lineal or historical time, From the point of view of the 260 day cycle and the
blood movements, time and events certainly repeat themselves, but when the day
Junajpu or a movement on the back of the body points to the deed of an ancestor, as
they have pointed many times before, the questions next asked will be directed
toward discovering the uniqueness of that deed and the actual name of the ancestor.
The investigation of the events of another time, then, involves a dialectic between the
cyclical and lineal aspects of time."
60

65. Of the 260 day cycle, Anthony Aveni says: "Where in our calendar months
become bricks in an edifice of years, there is sound archeological evidence that by
200 B.C. the Maya had developed a system of counting the days in units of 260.....
There is nothing like the 260-day divinatory cycle anywhere else in the world..... But
why 260? And where did the 13 come from?"
61

66. Aveni suggests that the 20 comes from the numbers of fingers and toes most
humans have. This may sound outr, but numerous languages show evidence of
using for the number 20 a word related to a word for "man". If 260 days was taken as
an average gestation cycle for humans, then 13 may have arisen from the fact that 260
divided by 20 is 13. However, Aveni notes that the basic agricultural cycle in
highland Guatemala is also about 260 days, called a tzolkin. There may also be a
relation with the average length of time it takes between appearances of the planet
Venus as morning or evening star, which is in round numbers 263 days. Aveni notes
that "the average duration between successive halves of the eclipse season, at 173
days, fits into the tzolkin in the ratio of 3 to 2." This may seem contrived, but there is
evidence that the Maya used the tzolkin to predict positions of Venus and occurences
of eclipses. There is a another 260 day cycle of significance in tropical latitudes,
related to the interval the sun spends north as opposed to south of the overhead
position. Where then did the tzolkin come from? Aveni believes there is no one
answer. But he says: "Once a Maya genius may have recognized that somewhere
deep within the calendar sustem lay the miraculous union, the magical crossing point
of a host of time cycles: 9 moons, 13 times 20, a birth cycle, a planting cycle, a Venus
cycle, a sun cycle, an eclipse cycle. The number 260 was tailor made for the Maya

60
Barbara Tedlock, Time and the Highland Maya, 1982, p. 174-177.
61
Anthony Aveni, Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks and Cultures, 1989, p. 197.) The period of 260
days is known as the Mayan tzolkin.
and the tzolkin count, interwoven by so many temporal threads, became the grand
fabric of Maya timekeeping."
62

67. Aveni proposes that the Mayans used a Venus calendar in the way other
astronomers have used a solar calendar. He suggests that the "Venus Table" in the
Dresden Codex (a Mayan document inscribed on bark) is an accurate ephermeris for
making predictions of Venus positions. "For more than four hundred years," Aveni
says, "Maya priests were increasingly careful about getting the table right. I have
also implied that the Maya developed their Venus calendar in exactly the same way
Old World astronomers worked at patching up their solar timekeeping system."
63
The
great Mayan god Quetzalcoatl appears to have been connected with the planet Venus.
68. "The whole document," Aveni says, "gives the impression of a very exact
system of Maya astronomy tightly bound to astrology..... The very notion that true
astronomical knowledge lies buried beneath ritualistic constraints rings a dissonant
chord in our ears..... We regard astrology as a mystical drag force that would damp
out any illuminating results the Maya might have envisioned about the way things
behave in the heavens -- just ask any modern astronomer what he thinks about
astrology! Rather, religious thought seems to have been the motivating force that
spurred on the Maya sky watchers. They were always looking for better ways to meet
the challenge of harmoniously mediating the affairs of nature, society, and the
gods..... Astronomy, astrology, history, politics, and pure numerology -- this
seemingly unlikely set of bedfellows conspired to create one of the most unusual
timekeeping schemes ever devised by any ancient civilization."
64

69. Norman Hammond outlines the structure of the ancient Maya calendar:
"This structure has two basic forms: repeating cycles of days, each of a different
length; and a cumulative count of days from a single base in the past. Our own
calendar is comparable: the days of the week form a repeating cycle of 7, Sunday to
Saturday, followed again by Sunday; the days of the month form another repeating
cycle from 1 to 31 (or 30, or 28/29 in February), after which the next month begins
with 1 again; and the months of the year form a third cycle, from January to
December, and back to January. Parallel with these repeating cycles, each moving
like the cogs of a clock mechanism at different speeds, we have a cumulative count of
days beginning with the official date of the birth of Christ nearly two thousand years
ago. In this count, year succeeds year, so that 1981 follows 1980 and neither will
ever repeat: we can use the repeating and cumulative counts to fix a single day
forever in time -- "Friday, April 16, A.D. 1982" defines a unique and unrepeatable
fragment of eternity. "
70. Hammond goes on: "The Maya used several cycles of days, of which the
two most important were the Sacred Round of 260 days and the approximate solar
year of 365 days. The Sacred Round combined the repeating cycle of numbers 1-13
with 20 day names ... so that any particular combination would recur in 13 x 20 or
260 days; the day name and the number changed together: 1 Imix, 2 Ik, 3 Akbal ... as

62
Aveni, ibid., p. 201, 202.
63
Aveni, ibid., p. 233.
64
Aveni, ibid., p. 229, 251.
we might say Monday 1, Tuesday 2, Wednesday 3, and so on. The approximate solar
year consisted of 18 months ... each of 20 days, plus a terminal period of 5 days.
Each of these months had an internal sequence of changing numbers: 1 Pop, 2 Pop, 3
Pop,... comparable with our January 1, January 2, January 3, and so forth. The first
day (or perhaps the last) of each sequence of 20 days was called the "seating" of the
following month, so that instead of 20 Pop we have the seating of Uo. The two
cycles proceeded simultaneously, so that any one day could be designated in both, as
in 3 Akbal 1 Pop; since the two cycles are of unequal length, this pairing of 3 Akbal
and 1 Pop could occur only once every 52 years, and this period needed for the
complete repeating of the two cycles is known as the Calendar Round. Such a
calendar was used over most of Mesoamerica, and the 52-year period was still of
great importance to the Aztec and the Maya at the time of the Spanish conquest. The
use of it survives to this day among the highland Maya of Guatemala and Chiapas."
71. "What does not survive," says Hammond, "and seems to have fallen into
virtual disuse with the collapse of Classic Maya civilization in the ninth and tenth
centuries, is the cumulative count of the days known as the Long Count, although
parts of it including the katun (20 years) and perhaps the baktun (144,000 days, or
400 years) remained enough in use to be reported to Landa. The Long Count begins
from a notional base date in August 3114 B.C., centuries before the first evidence of
the Maya as a people or their movement into the Maya Area. This date may represent
the latest creation of the world in Maya mythology, and forward from it the total
number of days elapsed were counted by the Maya and then divided into periods of
varying length. First they expressed the number of complete baktunob (-ob indicating
the plural form); then from the remainder the number of completed katunob, the
number of tunob (of approximately one year each), the number of months of 20 days
each (uinalob), and finally the remaining single days from 0 to 19, kinob. It is as
though we were to say on July 10, 1981, that since our base date, the birth of Christ,
there had elapsed one millennium of 1,000 years, nine centuries of 100 years, four
score years of 20 years each, no single years of 265 days, six months of 28-31 days,
and finally 10 days of the seventh month."
65

72. Although the Long Count is considered to begin in August 3114 B.C., the
Maya recorded much earlier dates. Hammond says: "Some of the numbers the Maya
reached in their fascination with time were very large -- on one inscription at
Quirigua a date 90 million years ago is recorded, and on another a period of 400
million years. In a sense the Maya were just playing with numbers, since even the
inauguration of the Long Count in 3114 B.C. lay beyond their memory and perhaps
beyond their history, but some concept of eternity consonant with the everlasting
nature of Bolon Dz'acab may also be indicated. One reason for this fascination with
the distant and less distant past was a notion that history was cyclical. We see this
most clearly in the historical-prophetical Books of Chilan Balam, where two katunob
with the same number, both for instance ending in the day 2 Ahau, will have the same
portents ..... Time was "an endless relay march to eternity." "
66


65
Norman Hammond, Ancient Maya Civilization, 1982, 1988, p. 107-109.
66
Hammond, ibid., p. 290.
73. The Bolon Dz'acab mentioned in the last paragraph was, it seems, the
harvest-god aspect of Itzam Na, the principle god in the Maya pantheon. The name
Itzam Na means literally Iguana House". Itzam Na is the creator and framer of the
universe, described to the Spanish clergy in Yucatan in the 16
th
century as an eternal
being. Hammond says that Itzam Na "was regarded as the god 'from whom all things
proceeded, and who was incorporeal,' and he was worshipped as the god of bountiful
harvest, of the sun, of the earth, and of rain... Itzam Na was clearly not a simple
lizard, nor for that matter a single lizard: as in many other facets of Maya life, their
great god was fourfold, each part assigned to one of the four world directions and
colors, so that there was a red Itzam Na of the east, a white of the north, a black of the
west, and a yellow of the south. This fourfold monster is often portrayed with
planetary symbols along its body, and Thompson suggested that the Maya saw it as
the framework of a house, na, "the roof and walls of which were formed by four giant
Itzams, upright but with their heads downwards," each forming "a side of the sky
from zenith to horizon: and even below that to form the floor of man's terrestrial
environment. 'The Itzam,' says Thompson, 'take on fresh functions when they
exchange their celestial locations for the floor of the world house.' As celestial
creatures they send rain to earth, as terrestrial ones 'they are the soil in which all
vegetation has its being, and now they receive that rain which formerly they
dispensed from on high." There is some evidence that the Maya believed that the
earth rested on the back of a great cayman floating in a pond, and Dennis Puleston
suggested that the patterns of raised fields, which produced essential crops, bore a
recognized resemblance to the scaly back of such a creature, an interpretation that fits
well with Thompson's."
67

74. The Aztecs of Mexico appear to have had a religion in which law and
chance are combined, and in which there are both repeating cycles and an end to
time. B.C. Brundage describes the equating by the 16
th
century Franciscan friar
Sahagn of the Mexican god Tezcatlipoca with both Jupiter, the king of the gods, and
Lucifer, the demonic archangel. Tezcatlipoca was known as Smoking Mirror, and He
Who Causes Things to Be Seen in the Mirror. "It is apparent," Brundage says, "that
Tezcatlipoca was a seer, that he had prevision and instruments for gaining hidden
knowledge. This clairvoyance is unique, for no other god is so described."
Tezcatlipoca was a god in the manner of an American Indian Shaman: "a sorcerer, a
trickster, a manic, a seer, and a shape shifter". As trickster, he is unpredictable,
though he himself foresees everything. "He is indeed Jupiter, the king of gods, but he
has no kingdom, for such would imply a polity and a purposive order. And he has
none."
68

75. Jacques Soustelle says that according to Aztec religion, when a man is born,
he "finds himself inserted automatically into [an everlasting] order and in the grasp of
the omnipotent machine. The sign of the day of his birth will govern him until the
day of his death..... His whole fate is subjected to the strictest predestination."
69
And

67
Hammond, ibid., p. 274.
68
B. C. Brundage, The Fifth Sun: Aztec Gods, Aztec World , 1979, p. 80. 82, 101.
69
Jacques Soustelle, Daily Life of the Aztecs, On the Eve of the Spanish Conquest, 1961, p. 112, translation
by P. O'Brian of La vie quotidienne des aztques la veille de la conqute espagnole, 1955.
yet Brundage says: "Fate operated on a man ... in less than a total way..... every child
came into the world with a ready-made destiny which was then culturally interpreted
to him. But one's fortune ... might still be altered..... Tezcatlipoca could be petitioned
... to the end that some mitigation of the misery attached to his particular fate might
be granted or that, at least, the sins which were so inexorably committed because of it
might be pardoned..... In short, the Aztecs did not adopt a wholly rigorous
determinism."
70

76. As to cycles, Brundage says: "The tonalpohualli or Sacred Year ... was the
charter or the constitution of the whole numinous cosmos, clearly denoting that which
was fortunate and desirable and that which was unfortunate and hateful. The tonalli
or day in this remarkable register came ultimately to signify one's fate, fortune, or
star. Fifty-two years made up the Aztec century..... The number 52 was arrived at
by the merging of the natural year with the tonalpohualli. If they were fitted together
and began with their first days coinciding, at the end of fifty-two natural years their
first days would again coincide..... This cycle was more than just a convenience in
reckoning for the Aztecs. Primarily it fulfilled their need to adequately define time.
Today we settle for a bleak extension of years into the future, all undifferentiated,
endless, without habitation. The Aztecs did not have our power to turn away from
time; they prepared in the wastes of eternity stopping places where the spirit of man
could briefly dwell before pressing on."

77. "Time ran out at the end of the fifty-two-year period," says Brundage.
"Quite literally the Aztec supposed it to expire and be replaced -- or not, as the case
could be -- by another series born out of the womb of night. If it were not replaced
and time indeed expired, catastrophe ensued and the celestial demons descended to
kill and eat the last of mankind. To deflect such an atrocity the Aztecs, on the last
day of the calendar round [the 52-year period], acknowledged the ending of time,
broke all their household idols, and threw them into the rivers. The public ritual
enacted at such times by Tenochtitlan and its neighboring Aztec cities was of a
splendor not often achieved in human culture..... There is a hill near Culhuacan on the
south side of present-day Mexico City called the Hill of the Star..... On this sacred
spot ... there took place a ceremony at the end of each calendar round..... The central
feature of this performance was fire..... The sign that ... the world would continue,
occurred when it was seen that the Pleiades did not come to a halt on reaching the
zenith at midnight but continued on in their course. As this night of the world's
danger began, a procession of priests ... came out of the darkened city..... Some time
before midnight these vicarial priests climbed the slopes of the sacred hill and took
their appropriate stances around the altar. The gods themselves did not know what
the outcome of time would be and their gathering here brought all the powers of
heaven and earth to witness the event..... At the appropriate time a distinguished
captive of war -- a ruler or at least a great captain -- was sacrificed, his heart being
ripped out and offered to the god of fire. In the cavity in the dead body a special fire
priest then placed the sacred fire board and fire stick and, whirling the latter between
his palms, elicited the first sparks of new fire..... This fire was then applied to a great

70
Brundage, ibid., p. 181-182.
pile of fagots on the temple terrace which grew into a magnificent bonfire, signaling
its joyful message across the night..... Time was purified and Xiuhteuctli had once
again shown himself beneficent."
78. But encompassing these 52-year cycles are some larger periods of time,
aeons, called "suns" by the Aztecs. "There were five of these suns or ages. They
were not cyclic, each repeating the other, but were unique and unrepeatable. They
were limited in number -- five was the maximum number. There will be no more.
They have been alike only in that each was an imperfect cosmic experiment ending in
collapse. The first four were past aeons; the fifth is the present one. Taken together
they make up the complete history of time, of gods, and of man..... This aeon [the
one we are in, the last one, the Fifth Sun] will end in earthquakes which will swallow
all things, and the stars will be shaken down from the sky. This will be the final end,
and it will occur "when the earth has become tired, when already it is all, when
already it is so, when the seed of earth has ended."
71

79. It has often been held that the cyclical time of ancient civilizations was
replaced by the linear time of doctrines stemming from Judaism, as found in
Christianity, Mohammedanism and Marxism. In the Introduction to vol. 4 of his
Order and History (1974), Eric Voegelin explains why he had to abandon a plan he
had been pursuing in the first 3 volumes, over a period of some 20 years. He says:
"When I devised the program I was still laboring under the conventional belief that
the conception of history as a meaningful course of events on a straight line of time
was the great achievement of Israelites and Christians who were favored in its
creation by the revelatory events, while the pagans, deprived as they were of
revelation, could never rise above the conception of a cyclical time. This
conventional belief had to be abandoned when I discovered the unilinear construction
of history, from a divine-cosmic origin of order to the author's present, to be a
symbolic form developed by the end of the third millennium B.C. in the empires of
the Ancient Near East. To this form I gave the name historiogenesis."
72

80. Voegelin describes a prime example of this linearization of time: "Some
implications of a symbolism that places a far from linear manifold of events on a
single line of time become plain in the Sumerian King List, probably conceived about
2050 B.C., after the expulsion of the Gutaeans and the Sumerian restoration of empire
through Utu-hegal of Uruk. Thorkild Jacobsen has unraveled the method of its
construction.
73
The Sumerian Empire was a manifold of city-states under local
dynasties, with an imperial organization superimposed, whenever one of the cities,
not always the same, gained ascendancy over the others through conquering
expansion. Whereas a critical historian would have to relate the parallel histories of
the cities, as well as the changes of ascendancy, the authors of the King List
constructed a unilinear history of Sumer by placing the parallel city-dynasties in
succession on a single temporal line of rulers, issuing into the restored empire of their
own time. The parallel histories of the cities were abolished, but nevertheless
absorbed into an imaginary, unilinear history of empire. One cosmos, it appears, can

71
Brundage, ibid., p. 20-29.
72
Eric Voegelin, Order and History, 1974, v. 4, p. 7.
73
Thorkild Jacobsen, The Sumerian Kinglist, Assyriological Studies, No. 11, 1939.
have only one imperial order, and the sin of coexistence must be atoned by
posthumous integration into the one history whose goal has been demonstrated
through the success of the conqueror. If it, then, be remembered that the imaginary
line of kings is extrapolated to its absolute point of origin in divine-cosmic events, so
that nothing extraneous to it has a chance of disturbing the one and only course
admissible, the construction appears as an act of violence committed against historical
reality. The relevant course of events descends ineluctably from the cosmic origin
down to the present of the authors whose society is the only one that matters. To the
aggressive overtones, finally, there corresponds an undercurrent of obsessive anxiety
above which the authors attempt to rise by the imaginative conversion of a temporal
gain into a possession forever..... An instructive instance of extrapolation into the
past is the previously mentioned Sumerian King List, to be dated ca. 2050 B.C. On
the basis of already existing dynastic lists of the city-states, as well as of epic and
legendary materials, it extrapolates the dynasties of the fictitious empire back to the
mythical Great Flood. The List was later expanded farther backward by prefixing to
it an "ante-diluvian" Preamble which informs us about the dynasties of the five cities
before the Flood. The Preamble opens with the formula: "When kingship was
lowered from heaven, kingship was (first) in Eridu"; the List after the Flood begins:
"After the Flood had swept over (the earth)) (and) when kingship was lowered (again)
from heaven, kingship was (first) in Kish." Both formulas symbolize the origin of
governance as the lowering of kingship from heaven; history begins when the order
ordained by the gods becomes incarnate in the temporal course of the world. A
speculation on the total course, comprehending also the future, is implied in the
Biblical historiogenesis inasmuch as the date of the exodus from Egypt is placed in
the year 2666 from the creation of the world, for the number 2666 is two-thirds of
4000. With the exodus, two-thirds of a world aeon of 4000 years, that is of one
hundred generations of forty years each, have run their course..... It is highly
probable that the numerical relations among the dynastic periods of the Sumerian
King List reflect a principle of numerical speculation in their construction..... Finally,
there must be considered the construction of genealogical tables in the Israelite
historiogenesis. Two different constructions are preserved for the table of the
descendants from Adam, and even three different ones for the descendants from
Shem, so that the fact of deliberate numerical speculation is beyond doubt..... About
the motives for introducing a numerical schema into the symbolism no more can be
said than the obvious. Back of the schemata lies a mysticism of numbers which
express the cyclical reality of the cosmos. Even in the early myth, thus, we encounter
a conception of the cosmos as structured by numbers that was still alive in the
philosophy of Pythagoras and Plato. The Israelite number of 4,000 years or the
Babylonian 600 saroi of 3,600 years each appear to be sacred or perfect numbers,
suitable to represent a cosmic aeon; and for the Sumerian King List I have pointed to
the probable combination of an hexagesimal speculation with the Great Year."
74




74
Eric Voegelin, Order and History, v.4, p. 65-66, 83-87.
81. And as to linear versus cyclic time, there are

The Words of the Preacher,
the son of David, king in Jerusalem.
Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toiled under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains for ever.
The sun rises and the sun goes down,
and hastens to the place where it rises.
The wind blows to the south,
and goes round to the north,
round and round goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.
All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.
All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done;
and there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there a thing of which it is said,
"See, this is new"?
It has been already,
in the ages before us.
There is no remembrance of former things,
nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to happen
among those who come after.

.....................................


So I saw that there is nothing better
than that a man should enjoy his work,
for that is his lot; who can bring him
to see what will be after him?
75



75
Ecclesiastes, 1.1-11, 3.22, Revised Standard Version.
82. On the other hand, in speaking of ancient Chinese cosmology, especially as
found in the T'ang dynasty (618-907 C.E.), Edward Shafer says: "The successive
stages of creation have no corresponding stages of universal dissolution much less a
cataclysmic Gtterdmmerung. Once started, the world keeps going. Obsessed with
the processes of time, the Chinese looked eagerly for the evidence of rhythms and
progressions within this final stage of evolution. What they discovered was cycles.
But there was not a glimpse of an "eternal return." The cycles are repeated, but are
never identical. It might be said that they are formally the same, but differently
colored. Each chimes a different celestial tune, but the tunes are all set to the same
mode. Possibly we can think of cosmic history since Grand Culmination
76
as a
journey through an infinite piece of neon tubing bent into a sine curve. Amplitude
and frequency are constant from alpha to omega, but each phase the formal
duplicate of his predecessor glows somewhat differently. Hue, saturation, intensity,
luster, iridescence, brilliance never recur in identical combinations, even through an
infinity of time. A spirit journeying through the endless grotto with its subtly
changing glass walls would arrive over and over again at a place where his past and
future course were exactly what they had been before, and he would learn to predict
the direction of his journey from any particular point, since he had traversed identical
paths frequently but he would never be able to guess the quality of the stage ahead,
however familiar its contours."
77


83. According to Shafer: "One such set of cycles was familiar to many peoples
of the world the one measured out by the precession of the equinoxes, which shows
as a gradual shift of the zodiacal position of the sun at the equinoxes. The rate of
change is about one sign of the zodiac for each 2,200 years, and the inevitable
passage through all twelve brings cosmic time back to zero, marked in many lands as
a time of the destruction and regeneration of the world. But although the Chinese
were aware of the fact of precession reasonably early they created no significant
doctrine of beginnings and endings from it. A world-cycle of greater astral
significance was that initiated by a conjunction of the Five Planers. Combined with
other rare astrological events, such as the addition of sun and moon to the spectacular
grouping, and the beginnings of 60-year and 60-day cycles, this juncture marked, in
one Han system [Han dynasty: 25-220 C.E.], the onset of a truly great era, lasting
23,639,040 solar years. Such a spectacular concatenation of celestial cycles was
impressive, but it had little to offer common humanity, either for agriculture, or in
astrology, or even as food for the imagination. The mind merely boggles at this
meshing of numberless cogs in a kind of invisible, icy clockwork. Eclipse cycles got
a fair share of the attention of cosmologists, since the prediction of both solar and
lunar eclipses was, for reasons of state policy, a major preoccupation of learned sky-
gazers. Unfortunately, until T'ang times, at least, their procedures were
oversimplified because of the requirements of a neat cosmic numerology. The same
was true of the Jupiter cycle, which played a great role in popular astrology. Taoist
philosophers had their own vast cycles of time, to which they applied the Indian and

76
Llast stage of creation in which an undifferentiated primitive stuff became yin and yang and then the
whole variety of nature.
77
Edward Shafer, Pacing the Void, T'ang Approaches to the Stars, 1977, p. 31.
Buddhist name of kalpas ..., lasting googols of years
78
..... Awesome as these vast
temporal frames were, they held little appeal to Chinese writers -- or even for most
Chinese "thinkers." Literary men preferred a much more primitive system which, so
to speak, got one's feet muddy. This was an old mythological topos that finds its
locus classicus in a tale about the lovely bird-clawed goddess Ma-ku, preserved in the
"Biographies of the Divine Transcendents." In it, the lady remarks to a fellow
immortal that since they last met she had "seen the Easter Sea thrice become
mulberry fields" a catastrophe which made it possible to walk dryshod to the holy
island of P'eng-lai..... it became an expression signifying the passage of eons of time,
comparable to our geologic periods which we have named "Cretaceous," "Permian,"
"Carboniferous," and the like. Indeed, at least one T'ang writer, Yen Chen-ch'ing,
who lived in the eighth century, made an unqualified connection between the mythic
fields and observed geological fact, He observed that rock formations near a Taoist
sanctuary on Mount Ma-ku, where the goddess had achieved divine powers,
contained the shells of gastropods and oysters. He took these to be relics of "the
alteration of the mulberry fields." "Mulberry fields" was an expression most
commonly heard from the lips of the perfected beings of the Tao, who could look
with equanimity upon cyclical catastrophes mere episodes in the lives of beings
who have learned the secret of eternal life."
79




78
googol: 1followed by 100 zeros; googolplex: 1 followed by a googol of zeros.
79
Shafer, ibid., 1977, p. 31-32.