When we remember, moreover, that Plato in the Timaeus cites the old Egyptian priest rebuking Solon for his ignorance of the fact that there were several such deluges as the great one of Ogyges, we can easily ascertain that this belief in the Heliakos was a doctrine held by the initiated priests the world over.
The Neroses, the Vrihaspati, or the periods called yugas or kalpas, are life-problems to solve. The Satya-yug and Buddhistic cycles of chronology would make a mathematician stand aghast at the array of ciphers. The Maha-kalpa embraces an untold number of periods far
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back in the antediluvian ages. Their system comprises a kalpa or grand period of 4,320,000,000 years, which they divide into four lesser yugas, running as follows:
1st. — Satya yug — 1,728,000 years.
2d. — Tretya yug — 1,296,000 years.
3d. — Dvapa yug —- 864,000 years
.4th. — Kali yug —— 432,000 years.
Total ————– 4,320,000 years.
which make one divine age or Maha-yug; seventy-one Maha-yugs make 306,720,000 years, to which is added a sandhi (or the time when day and night border on each other, morning and evening twilight), equal to a Satya-yug, 1,728,000, make a manwantara of 308,448,000 years; fourteen manwantaras make 4,318,272,000 years; to which must be added a sandhi to begin the kalpa, 1,728,000 years, making the kalpa or grand period of 4,320,000,000 of years. As we are now only in the Kali-yug of the twenty-eighth age of the seventh manwantara of 308,448,000 years, we have yet sufficient time before us to wait before we reach even half of the time allotted to the world.
These ciphers are not fanciful, but founded upon actual astronomical calculations, as has been demonstrated by S. Davis. Many a scientist, Higgins among others, notwithstanding their researches, has been utterly perplexed as to which of these was the secret cycle. Bunsen has demonstrated that the Egyptian priests, who made the cyclic notations, kept them always in the profoundest mystery. Perhaps their difficulty arose from the fact that the calculations of the ancients applied equally to the spiritual progress of humanity as to the physical. It will not be difficult to understand the close correspondence drawn by the ancients between the cycles of nature and of mankind, if we keep in mind their belief in the constant and all-potent influences of the planets upon the fortunes of humanity. Higgins justly believed that the cycle of the Indian system, of 432,000, is the true key of the secret cycle. But his failure in trying to decipher it was made apparent; for as it pertained to the mystery of the creation, this cycle was the most inviolable of all. It was repeated in symbolic figures only in the Chaldean Book of Numbers, the original of which, if
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now extant, is certainly not to be found in libraries, as it formed one of the most ancient Books of Hermes, the number of which is at present undetermined.
Calculating by the secret period of the Great Neros and the Hindu Kalpas, some kabalists, mathematicians and archeologists who knew naught of the secret computations made the above number of 21,000 years to be 24,000 years, for the length of the great year, as it was to the renewal only of our globe that they thought the last period of 6,000 years applied. Higgins gives as a reason for it, that it was anciently thought that the equinoxes preceded only after the rate of 2,000, not 2,160, years in a sign; for thus it would allow for the length of the great year four times 6,000 or 24,000 years.”Hence,” he says, “might arise their immensely-lengthened cycles; because, it would be the same with this great year as with the common year, till it travelled round an immensely-lengthened circle, when it would come to the old point again.” He therefore accounts for the 24,000 in the following manner: “If the angle which the plane of the ecliptic makes with the plane of the equator had decreased gradually and regularly, as it was till very lately supposed to do, the two planes would have coincided in about ten ages, 6,000 years
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Moe is the founder of GnosticWarrior.com. He is a father, husband, author, martial arts black belt, and an expert in Gnosticism, the occult, and esotericism.