Indian mythosophy II: The epoch cycle
For those who think the dark ages were over by 1700, you are wrong by 426700 years. It’s all just began. The last and the worst epoch of hindu time-cycle began about 5000 years ago, and it’s still a long time till it finishes up.¹ This epoch is named after Kali (कलि, as distinct from Kaali, the Goddess), a proverbial demon, who prevails over this age, and is generally held responsible for the mess we (mankind) find ourselves in today. The epoch has thus been named Kali-yug, and this is supposed be the epoch humanity falls into oblivion and ultimately, goes extinct.
I say ‘supposed to’, because ‘time’ in Hinduism is circular; you can observe it in the everyday conversation of Indians — the hindi word for ‘tomorrow’ is same as that of ‘yesterday’, कल (‘kal’) which is a derivative of the sanskrit काल (‘kaal’, time). Similarly, the four epochs, Satya, Treta, Dwapar & Kali come and go, over and over, again and again, in cycles. The duration of an entire cycle is disputed, but is generally accepted to be 4320000 years, which is not much considering the cosmic time scale. There has been many, and surely there is room for many, cycles to happen.
Further, it’s enlightening to see what really happens through these epochs. Each cycle begins with Satya-yug, when people follow Dharma (virtuousity? morality? ethics? I dunno) to the letter. The subsequent epochs see the gradual decline of Dharma until in Kali-yug, it has bottomed out and humanity goes extinct. Alongside Dharma, people diminish in stature (literally), weight and average lifespan — through the epochs. There’s also industrialisation and climate change recurring through each cycle, until it’s all reset at the next Satya-yug. This only begs the question: is the human species, our agriculture, science, industrialisation, or even Earth’s climate, cyclic? Has it all happened several times before?
A recurring motif
Cyclic time is not unique to Hindu mythosophy. In fact, it is widely prevalent across all cultures (China, Egypt, Aztec); every civilisation has observed the cyclic nature of day and nights, months and years — and come up with elaborate calculations regarding the age of the universe and the duraion of one universal cycle. (So has science, with our present knowledge of cosmology; but there’s no way to tell who’s right and who’s wrong). The details differ in places, e.g. the aztecs have the myth of five suns (we are in the era of the fifth sun now) — although the suns will not recur, i.e. the cycle happens only once.
It is important to distinguish true cyclic time from cyclic events. In true cyclic time, as depicted in the film Arrival (2016), time itself moves in a somewhat circular fashion, although the protagonist has difficulty experiencing this kind of behavior. The film starts with death of her baby; but only at the middle of the film she meets, for the first time, the yet-to-be-born-baby’s father. This smells of true cyclic time, which is notoriously hard to depict.
A similar time-behavior is found in many stories of Julio Cortazar, where
The progatonist of “La noche boca ariba” who in the twentieth century suffers from an accident on a motorcycle and dies in his hospital bed after surgery, is the same man who dies atop the Aztec pyramid… In the Aztec world, he becomes a victim of the ritual time of the “guerra florida” … sacrifice to insure the continuity of the universe
—Lanin A. Gyurko. Cyclic Time and Blood Sacrifice in Three Stories by Cortázar. Revista Hispánica Moderna. 35(4);1969:341–362
This behavior of time, where a character simultaneously experiences two instances of himself at different times, is something between cyclic-time and block-time (i.e. everything is happening at once). But this is still twsting time to a degree, i.e. pulling at the fabric of space-time.
All this is in contrast to linear time with recurring events, such as the in the story Nightfall by Isaac Asimov, where no actual time-twist is involved. (Spoiler here) In a distant planet called Lagash, which has not one but four suns around it, there is no night (and thus Lagashians have never seen the stars or the moon, obviously). Daylight, from one sun or the other, floods all parts of the planet all the time, except every 2500 years, when the stars and the only satellite of the planet line up for an eclipse, which lasts for half an hour. Naturally, the people of the planet, who have never experienced darkness in their lifetime, go insane in this period; and to find light, they burn up everything they can — homes, cars, buildings — until nothing remains and civilisation is reset.
‘You realize, of course, that the history of civilization on Lagash displays a cyclic character — but I mean cyclic!’
‘I know,’ replied Theremon cautiously, ‘that that is the current archaeological theory. Has it been accepted as a fact?’
‘Just about. In this last century it’s been generally agreed upon. This cyclic character is — or rather, was — one of the great mysteries. We’ve located series of civilizations, nine of them definitely, and indications of others as well, all of which have reached heights comparable to our own, and all of which, without exception, were destroyed by fire at the very height of their culture.
‘And no one could tell why. All centers of culture were thoroughly gutted by fire, with nothing left behind to give a hint as to the cause.
…There have been explanations of these recurrent catastrophes, all of a more or less fantastic nature. Some say that there are periodic rains of fire; some that Lagash passes through a sun every so often; some even wilder things. But there is one theory, quite different from all of these, that has been handed down over a period of centuries.’
‘I know. You mean this myth of the “Stars” that the Cultists have in their Book of Revelations.’
‘Exactly,’ rejoined Sheerin with satisfaction. ‘The Cultists said that every two thousand and fifty years Lagash entered a huge cave, so that all the suns disappeared, and there came total darkness all over the world! And then, they say, things called Stars appeared, which robbed men of their souls and left them unreasoning brutes, so that they destroyed the civilization they themselves had built up. Of course they mix all this up with a lot of religio-mystic notions, but that’s the central idea.’
This sounds surprisingly similar to the Hindu epoch-cycle, except for the duration (a cycle lasts 4320000 years). Whether the Hindu epoch-cycle is actual circular time or recurring events in linear time is not clear.
The cyclic universe theory
In principle (though not in the details), the epoch-cycle is similar to the cyclic universe theory, which states the universe oscillates between several expansions and contractions.² As per Steinhardt, the period between a ‘big-bang’ and a ‘big crunch’ is 1o¹² years. The conventional duration of universe from Hindu myths, a ‘kalpa’, is 1000 epochs³ = 1000 x 4320000 = 4.32 x 10⁹ years, which is an underestimation (although one must not put much confidence in mythologic units of measurement, which may have lost their meaning over time). However, the similarity in spirit is unmissable.
Next up, we’ll look at the weird sequence events that kicked off Kali-yug on this planet.
…
- Matchett, Freda; Yano, Michio (2003). “Part II, Ch. 6: The Puranas / Part III, Ch. 18: Calendar, Astrology, and Astronomy”. In Flood, Gavin (ed.). The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism. Blackwell Publishing. p. 390.
- Steinhardt, Paul J. Cyclic universe theory. https://doi.org/10.1036/1097-8542.176017
- Gupta, Dr. S. V. (2010). “Ch. 1.2.4 Time Measurements”. In Hull, Prof. Robert; Osgood, Jr., Prof. Richard M.; Parisi, Prof. Jurgen; Warlimont, Prof. Hans (eds.). Units of Measurement: Past, Present and Future. International System of Units. Springer Series in Materials Science: 122
