 |
Dear reader, my name is Luis Miguel
Goitizolo. Below is an abstract from my book The
Wheel of Time -
A Study in the Doctrine of Cosmic Cycles which I recently
translated from my Spanish original and will shortly be
published in the United States.
 |
The Universal Doctrine
The notion of Ages or Eras ended by violent cataclysms is
common to the traditional cultures from all around
the world, from the most primitive to those that
reached a higher level of civilization. They may
differ in number, length and in the characteristics
of the evoked catastrophes, but at the same time the
coincidences are extremely significant: in the
majority of cases, as you will see below, the Eras are four
or seven, their lengths are “circular”, and the
disasters that finish them are usually floods and
conflagrations that occur in alternate fashion and
are attributed to planetary influences.
Seven Eras of the
World
Thus, for instance,
according to Latin scholar Varro (116 BC – 27 AD),
the Etruscan annals recorded seven preterit ages
whose ends had been announced to men by diverse
celestial prodigies. On its part, “Bhaman Yast”,
one of the books from the Avesta, speaks of
seven World ages or millennia; according to
Zoroaster, the prophet of Mazdeism, at the end of
each there are signs, wonders and a great chaos all
over the World. A Buddhist text, Visuddhi–Magga,
in its Chapter “Cycles of the World”, says there are
seven ages separated by global catastrophes of three
kinds – by water, fire, and wind – at the end of
which there appears a new Sun; after the seventh
Sun, the World bursts in flames. Curiously enough,
this notion of seven “Suns” also appears on the
Sibylline books, where it is said that we are now in
the seventh Sun (though yet two more are prophesized
to come), on the Mexican Annals of Cuauhtitlan,
written in Nahuatl tongue around 1570 on archaic
sources, which likewise allude to seven epochs or
“Suns” (the “Chicon–Tonatiuh”); and among the
aborigines at North Borneo, who assert that six
previous Suns having now perished, the present one
is the seventh to light up the World.
On the other side of the World, in North America,
the legends of the Hopis, who from old were
apparently familiar with the fact that the Earth
rotates on its axis, speak rather of four ages or
“worlds”. Having the three previous ones succumbed
to fire, snow, and water, the current World would be
the fourth (another version says the fifth), which
will in turn be consummated when the Earth stumbles
on its own axis as a great blue star, referred to as
“Sasquasohum”, precipitates upon it. Apparently,
however, the humankind will have to go through seven
worlds in total.
The scheme of seven ages or Eras is also predominant
in the mysterious Chaldean legends about seven
“kings of kings,” the last of whom, Xisuthros (the
biblical Sisera) saves
his kin from the great flood; in the seven Manus of
the Hindu tradition, in which also the last one, Satyavrat, with the name Vaivasvat, saves a few
chosen from the flood; and in the seven “Edomite
Kings” from the Hebraic Cabbala, who like the
previous ones govern by turn upon seven “Earths”
that may be taken both in a temporal and spatial
sense.
Some
variations in the number of Ages
Seven “Earths” appear as well in the Islamist
esoterism, in this case governed by seven “Poles”
(in a presumable allusion to the phenomenon of
precession of equinoxes), a reference which also
figures among the ancient Egyptians, who apparently
recorded seven successive Pole Stars; and on its
part the Rabbinical tradition, which crystallized on
the post Hebrean Exile, asserts that there have been
six successive re-creations of the Earth, after an
equal number of global catastrophes; on the fourth
Earth lived the generation of the Babel Tower, and
now we are on the seventh. According to Philo, the
Jew philosopher born around 20 BC, some perished by
floods, others by conflagrations.
On the other hand, in an obvious correspondence with
the seven “days” of the biblical Creation, we have
seen
elsewhere that the Hermetic tradition refers to
seven “creation days” of 25,920 years each – the
length of a precessional cycle.
As
can be seen, the notion of seven ages or Eras is
common throughout the World, which manifests an
almost absolute concordance on this mater among most
traditions. There are, however, a few exceptions.
The Icelandic Edda rather refer to nine ages, such
as the Sibylline books (yet preterit ones) and the
Hawaiian and Polynesian legends do. As to the
Chinese tradition, it talks about ten kis or
ages since the beginning of the World till
Confucius’ times, and the Sing–li–ta–tsiuen–chou,
an ancient encyclopedia that deals with the
periodicity of nature’s convulsions, refers to the
very long periods of time between each other –
though without specifying their number – as “great
years”; the same is true of texts by Sse Ma–chien
and Mo–tzu, which allude to large floods and long
periods in which order and cataclysms alternate on
Earth.
The
Quaternary Scheme
By contrast, other
traditions, like the Greek (derived partially from
the Hindu), the Tibetan, and particularly those from
Central and South America, which will be addressed later on, stick more strictly to a scheme of four
ages.
We have seen, for instance, that the Greek and Roman
traditions talk about four preterit Ages of Mankind,
equivalent to the four yugas of the Hindu tradition;
and in India itself, apart from Bhagavata Purana and
other Puranas, other sacred books like the
Rig
and Yajur Veda allude as well to four preterit ages,
though differing in the lengths of each. Also, it is
not unlikely that the Buddhist tradition according
to which out of the one thousand Buddhas who appear
on a kalpa, only four have manifested till now, may
be related to the four yugas that make a maha–yuga and to the one thousand
maha–yugas that make a kalpa;
as to the Buddha Maitreya, who is to appear at the
end of the cycle to inaugurate a new “millennium”,
he is clearly identical with the avatara Kalki of
Hinduism and with other inaugurators of the coming “millennium”,
such as the “Christ of Glory” of Christianity and
the Messiah of Judaism and even the Maddhi, “the
well guided”, of Islam. And here is another
remarkable coincidence: both the avatara Kalki and
the “Christ of Glory” from Revelation 19:20 ff are
supposed to appear riding a white horse.
A few
Universal Symbols
On the other hand, the
quaternary scheme very closely correlates with
certain universal archetypal forms which, while
dramatically separated from one another in space and
time, do not vary in their innermost essence.
For example, according to the Hopi people, since the
arrival of the white man in North America, we are on
a fifth and final “World”, worse than the four
previous ones, which will aggravate with the
desertion of the four “cosmic guards” who look after
the columns that support the universe. On their
part, the Mayas believed in four bacabs who
played a similar role and were identical to
Atlas of the Greeks, who copied it in turn from
the Orientals. (Atlas actually supports the heavenly
vault, not our planet.) In turn, the Egyptians
received from the Sumerians the tradition of four
giants who supported the heaven’s cover, and who
were correlated with four great mountains (one was
Mount Ida, in Greece, another stood on the Atlas
mountain range in Morocco). In China there also
existed this tradition: four guardians look after
the World’s columns, surrounding a fifth element
(identified with the Emperor); when Kung-kung, an
evil spirit, broke one of the columns with his head,
taking advantage of the guardian’s negligence, all
water from heaven fell down, causing a tremendous
deluge. Again, the Scandinavians believed in four
guardians correlated in turn with the swástika,
another universal symbol (yet of unpleasant
remembrance because of Nazism), which is the same as
that of the Hindus and Greeks and the Olin of the
Aztecs (the “Sun” of Earthquakes), who in turn took
it over from the Toltecs; and here we have another
archetypal form that spread out over the World in
a virtually identical manner.
Up to here we have reviewed a number of global
symbols and traditions in which the numbers four and
seven play a prominent role.
Another common symbol to all of the World’s cultures
and civilizations is that of a “Cosmic Egg” which,
in as much as an image of the perpetual dissolution
and rebirth of the universe, bears a close
resemblance with the “myth” of Phoenix, which is
similarly found in civilizations ranging from the
Hindu to the Chinese – where it appears as the myth
of Pan-ku –, the Egyptian, and even the Inca:
for example, it is known that on the main wall of
the Ccoricancha temple, in Cuzco, there was a
representation of the “Cosmic Egg” that would later
on be replaced with the Sun’s image that met the
Spaniards’ eyes.
Back to
the Quaternary Scheme
But we are deviating from the versions related to
the scheme of four ages, among which the most
typical probably are the Mesoamerican accounts
preserved in sacred books such as the Popol Vuh
and the “Quiche Manuscript” where, as mentioned
above, they are consistently referred to
as “Suns” – although this time they are four, not
seven. The Aztecs, for example, who apparently
collected these traditions from the Teotihuacans,
who in turn would have received them from the Olmecs,
differentiated four “Suns” that ended in an equal
number of destructions of the World: the first by
jaguars that devoured all men (another version says
by the “God of the Night”), who at the time were
giants; the second by hurricanes, the third by a
shower of fire (or by the “God of Fire”), and the
fourth by a great deluge. Though with slight
variations, mainly in the order of “Suns”, this
tradition was disseminated throughout the Maya
world, and there is a significant fact: the four
destructions in all cases are correlated to the four
traditional elements.
Also the Incas, farther South, believed that time
unfolds by cycles and that every so often the
universe was challenged by great upheavals, times of
distress referred to as “Pachacuti”. Chroniclers of
the conquest of America, like Fray Buenaventura
Salinas, transmitted the tradition of the four ages
previous to the Inca Empire. The last age would have
lasted 3,600 years, an emblematic “circular” figure
that if divided by ten, becomes the number of the
circle degrees and that of the priestly days of the
year: 360, an exceptionally sacred number to the
majority of traditions from all over the World.
Thus we enter the area of lengths; but we had better deal with
it on the
next page.
Lima, May
2010
View previous: The Kali
Yuga
View next: The
Circular Numbers
A Message from The Author
Dear Friend,
Ever since I was
a youth I was fascinated by Oriental wisdom and particularly by the Hindu
doctrines. However, it was not until a few years ago that I undertook the task
of studying the ancient doctrine of cosmic cycles from different perspectives,
though mainly using the most relevant sacred texts from all around the world. In
time, I felt the urge to write a book about my studies in that matter in my
mother tongue, Spanish, which I titled "La rueda del tiempo" (in English, "The
Wheel of Time"). It is excerpts of that book and other original articles dealing
with similar topics which I will start publishing through this medium as of
today.
More recently, after some years as a networker promoting various programs, I
decided to translate my book into English, a task that was successfully
completed a few month ago. And over the past weeks and months I have been
publishing excerpts of this translation, as well as other original articles in
English that also deal with similar topics, on various online media of the
United States and other countries.
Thank You,
Luis Miguel Goitizolo
Lima - Perú
miguelgoitizolo@gmail.com
HOME
|