Yes, this sense from theosophy that every cycle of the earth is as regular and natural as night follows day should be a way to make discussion of the Great Year more accessible. We see it in Gerald Massey with his description of Christianity as ‘equinoctial Christolatry’ setting the natural framework of Christmas and Easter as the basis of a cosmic myth. Looking for such natural cycles in the history of the earth, we can see that precession contributes to the observed climatic rhythm of the Milankovitch cycles linking with the shape of earth’s orbit to produce hundred thousand year patterns visible in ice cores. But our discussion here focuses just on precession as the framework for mythology.tat tvam asi wrote:That's an interesting take on it Robert. I like your vision of the Great Year as a natural cycle with the same effects as the sun or tide. It does sound very natural.
I think the main problem with using the Great Year as a framework for history is the lack of fit between the Great Year cyclic concept of a Golden Age ten thousand years ago and our usual anthropological and archaeological theories of cultural progress. The Vedas, Daniel, Hesiod, Virgil and Don Quixote give us the story of decline from a mythical Golden Age to a present Iron Age. Yukteswar links this cyclic vision to precession of the equinox, to say we are now on the upward path in a new bronze age after plumbing the depths of ignorance in the iron age of the Kali Yuga.
This cosmology of the Great Year matches directly to and encompasses the broad Biblical account used by Augustine of fall and redemption. In the bigger picture of the Great Year, the fall from grace in ~4300 BC is seen as the decline from a previous golden age and the redemption is understood in millennial terms against the Revelation account of the return of Christ in ~2150 AD as the dawn of the Age of Aquarius. We can set aside the creationist vision that sees this 7000 years as the whole of history by observing that the Bible itself enframes this time period within the longer story of the Great Year, through symbols including the Tree of Life and the tribulation.
The more significant problem in viewing the Great Year cyclic vision as natural is that it does not match to the scientific story of linear evolution from stone to bronze to iron to steel. How can we say that a world that was at a lower technological level, using tools of wood and stone, was somehow more spiritually advanced than today? This is where Theosophy, despite its scientific errors, offers a jarringly alternative conception of human evolution. I am now reading Out of Eden – The Peopling of the World by Stephen Oppenheimer. By grounding human expansion in DNA evidence, this book provides a decisive scientific explanation for our origins in Africa, and the path of expansion through Asia beginning 85,000 years ago, as I mention in my Blavatsky paper. We have not physically evolved in terms of intelligence for more than 100,000 years, so the question remains how recent myths such as Christianity may be grounded in very ancient wisdom. Could it be true that the upheavals of history have concealed the true nature of prehistoric high culture?
I have made a diagram of the observable heavens with the Milky Way as a straight line and the zodiac as a sine curve. This is a representation of the sphere of the sky. Similar diagrams of the sky can be made with the zodiac as a straight line and galaxy as a sine curve, or mapping the zodiac against the celestial equator instead of the galaxy.
In this diagram, the sun moves once from right to left each year and once from left to right each Great Year. Looking at the movement of the spring point, the place where the zodiac crosses the equator at the equinox, we see here that the Vedic Golden Age is centred on the top of this curve of the Great Year zodiac against the Milky Way, when the March equinox was in Leo 14,000 years ago, and the Iron Age is centred on the bottom of the curve, with the equinox in Pisces. The Milky Way galaxy is the axis for the eternal cycle of the Yugas. The model of the Yuga as a 24,000 year cycle matches directly to the model of the Great Year as analogous to a day with the galaxy as the horizon, correcting for the small error of an age of 2000 rather than 2147 years. In this physical cosmic version of the ‘Day of Brahma’ as discussed by Joseph Campbell, we can see that midday is the Golden Age, midnight is the Iron Age, and dawn and dusk are in the Silver Ages. This is a permanent stable physical cycle as old as the earth. As you say, it is purely natural.
A quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar draws the analogy between tides and history: “We at the height are ready to decline. There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, and we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures. (IV.ii.269–276)”. I sometimes feel that I missed my own flood tide when I was younger, fearing that all this material about the Great Year was too complex to discuss. However, I have devoted my life to study of the topic, and can see that ideas I had when I was 21 when I wrote my BA thesis on the Great Year and the Bible were too simple, although accurate in essence. Even so, I have faith that the songs I wrote at that time will soon be famous.
http://cervantes.thefreelibrary.com/Don-Quixote/101-1 includes Cervantes' version of the golden sticks, a story that Hamlet's Mill sees as linked to the Great Year.
I remain of the view that previous understanding of the Great Year has been too fragmentary to be explained clearly. This is why in Hamlet’s Mill we see evidence of widespread intuitive sense that precession provides the framework for mythology, but an inability to analyse the mythology against scientific evidence, as we are discussing here. People have lacked a coherent framework to lift the veil on the New Testament and have seen the imagery as through a glass darkly rather than face to face. The Finnish myth of the Sampo as a millstone that has fallen off its axis speaks of this forgetting of the Great Year as the framework of cosmic attunement. This theme of the Great Year as a millstone appears several times in the Bible as well. As we move now back towards a restoration of the Aquarius-Leo axis at the equinoxes, this sense of cosmic attunement will steadily become more accessible.My reason for seeing a continuity of Great Year knowledge is just due to the fact that its presence is evident in ancient myths with the 432 themes all over the place. It was known after the first century as well and has traveled along as veiled in our NT writings the entire time. Freemason's like Albert Pike are quoted admitting that Revelation concerns the ending on scale of Great Year in the sign of Aries. The Freemasons have obviously understood the astrotheological Great Year symbolism. I tend to think that higher level religious clergy understand such a reading as well. I see the evidence of a continuity of Great Year knowledge. The knowledge was available in the 1800's for Blavatsky. How did it get to her in the 1800's? She had to study and learn from available sources of information that had lasted from antiquity, continuously, into the modern era.
This comment reminds me of a beautiful short story by Isaac Asimov called Nightfall. It tells of a world with seven suns and permanent day, where astronomers find evidence of past high civilizations and predict collapse as resulting from a total eclipse occurring every few thousand years. They know what is coming but are powerless to stop it, and find themselves swept up in the fear of the dark when the eclipse starts.I can see how the Great Year is very natural and that it's a part of the natural evolution of life on earth. But I almost have to wonder if the ancients did understand the Great Year in those terms when devising the Golden Age mythologies and categorizing the ages in and out of darker "times". And if they did understand a natural cycle like this way back when, then they would have good reason for the continuity of an orderly effort on the part of those in the know to steer things according to the "times". The mystery schools are alleged to be intended as a way of continuing knowledge forward through the decline. It's the notion that the Egyptians may have seen that a cosmic fall - on the back end of the Great Year - was underway, and then sprung into action with the Pyramid building era's in order to make preparations for what they saw as a cosmic winter ahead. A very predictable cosmic winter to those with the knowledge of the earth’s precession. I wonder if they would be unknowing victims of the natural cycle that they acknowledged. It seems more probable to me that they would anticipate these changes coming in advance to their arrival, "Prophecy" as it were. The Prophecy of Revelation has to do with anticipating the forces of light winning over the forces of darkness during the Aquarian age. If it did start out as an Egyptian and Zoroastrian drama about the Great Year ending in Aries and was then translated into Greek and Christianized much later, as alleged, then that represents a sort of continuity of keeping this information traveling along through "time", likely with knowing participants in the mix among with the completely ignorant the whole way through.
The ancients had a detailed cosmology of the Ages, as indicated in the statue of Aion that I copied in the Yeats thread. However, the power of delusory ignorance was so great that the general populace simply could not comprehend a spirituality based on cosmic law, resulting in the historized literal account of Jesus that we have in the Bible. Yes there have been the hidden wise who kept alive the flame of cosmic knowledge through the Dark Ages, but we are now moving into a time when this secret knowledge may be openly discussed, so the misunderstanding produced by talking in code can be cleared up.
That is an excellent summary Tat, thanks. We are opening ways to look at such mysterious traditions as eschatology and astrology against an objective empirical framework. An essential point here is that the Great Year is a physical wobble of the earth itself, and this is why I insist on accepting mainstream science regarding the lunisolar torque as the physical cause of precession. The stars are simply markers of a slow terrestrial cycle, not dynamic causes of this cycle through some mechanistic action at a distance. The seasons wobble from side to side of the Milky Way galaxy over the course of the Great Year to produce a terrestrial cycle that is as real for the evolution of life as the shorter cycles of the day and the year.But that's just one perspective. And it doesn't exclude the possibility that the Great Year cycle is a natural cycle that affects life just like every other natural cycle on the earth. I like your perspective a lot. It doesn't have to with astrology and mysterious external forces, it has to do with what is happening on the earth itself while certain stars and constellations are the back prop. The age of Aquarius being a time when the back prop of these constellations has been a time of progress in terms of rising knowledge and awareness. Other times being times of forgetfulness. And the idea is that these myths are designed the way that are in order to carry certain knowledge over a vast period of time so that they will survive long enough to make it for countless generations into the distant future. There's the surface story line of the symbolism which offers great rewards for the preservation and continuity of the book of Revelation, for instance. A stern warning is given to all those who would add or subtract from the text. Eternal life is dangled as a reward for the continuity while hell fire and damnation is offered to those who refuse to honor the text and pass it along as absolute. I see lots of continuity and motivation for keeping these symbols moving through generation after generation towards the "time" period designated in the allegory.