Cosmic Cycles

This section covers the vast temporal cycles some traditions place behind ordinary history: the four yugas of Hindu cosmology, world-ages that run in a repeating sequence of enormous and variously reported length, and the seven rays of Theosophical writing, cycles of a quite different, modern kind.

The two are placed together because both frame human life within a cycle far larger than a lifetime or a calendar, but their provenance could hardly be more different, one an inherited Puranic scheme of great antiquity, the other assembled in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The atlas keeps the layers distinct. The yugas belong to classical Hindu cosmology, with lengths given in the Puranas that differ between texts and reach into the hundreds of thousands and millions of years. The seven rays are a construction of the Theosophical movement, elaborated at length by Alice Bailey on a foundation in H. P. Blavatsky.

Presenting them under one heading is a matter of shared scale, not shared authority; each entry states plainly where its scheme comes from and how firm or contested its details are.