How the World Ends and Begins Again: A Tour of Cosmic Cycles

Start with the age Hindu tradition holds we are living in now: Kali Yuga, the fourth and darkest of the four yugas, dharma standing on a single leg.

Zoom out to the whole cycle Kali Yuga belongs to: the mahayuga, 4,320,000 years in the standard Puranic count.

A named dissenter disagrees with that number. Sri Yukteswar reads the same tradition and gets 24,000 years, tied to the precession of the equinoxes.

A Greek poet, working independently, describes the same shape: five ages, Golden to Iron, each worse than the last, with no return promised.

Zoroastrianism keeps the four-act structure but gives it a fixed twelve thousand year span and, unlike the yugas, a definite ending.

That ending has a name: Frashokereti, the final renovation, when the struggle between good and evil resolves for good.

Mesoamerica tells the same kind of story differently: four prior worlds, each destroyed by a different disaster, with the present Fifth Sun expected to end in earthquakes.

Norse myth gives an ending without a promised new Golden Age at the start: Ragnarok, the death of the gods themselves, and only a hint of what comes after.

Jain cosmology refuses the question of a first age altogether: avasarpini and utsarpini turn into each other forever, with no creator and no beginning.

End with a different kind of measurement: the Buddhist five corruptions of the kalpa, which diagnose a degenerate age by its symptoms, war, false views, shortened lifespan, rather than by counting years at all.