Ascending Kali Yuga
We now come to a consideration of world history as it followed the rise of the Autumnal Equinox on the Ascending Arc of the Zodiacal circle. The span from 498 to 1698 A.D. comprised the 1200 year period of the Ascending Kali Yuga. We have seen how the last Age (702 B.C. to 498 A.D.) of the Descending Arc was accompanied by the fall of mighty empires and civilizations and the gradual extinguishment of the lamp of knowledge which had so wonderfully illumined the Golden, Silver and Bronze Ages of the ancients. The equinoctial swing from the Descending to the Ascending Arc ushered in new races in new lands; new actors were assigned the leading roles in the historical drama for the new Age. The main scenes shift to new lands: Western Europe, Arabia, Mongolia and America.
A few countries, notably China and India, 1 survived the universal wreckage wherein lay the corpses of Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Sumeria, Crete, Greece and imperial Rome.
Whereas the Ages of the Descending Arc were from greater to lesser, from Golden down to Iron, the Ascending Arc Ages are the reverse, from Iron to Bronze, from Silver to Golden. When the year 498 AD 2 introduced the new Iron or Dark Age (Kali Yuga), the first Age of the Ascending Arc, the world broke with the past and started on a new journey of civilization which will culminate in the year 12,498 AD.
The peoples that spread from the Danube to the Great Wall of China, the nomadic tribes—not barbarians as the historians call them, but certainly without either a settled culture of their own or any practical knowledge of the ancient civilizations that were dying or dead by the time the last hour of the Descending Iron Age had struck—come forcibly into history with the fall of Rome before the conquering Goths and Vandals in the 5th century A.D., though various nomadic tribes had already settled in different European lands during earlier centuries. By the 10th century, the population of Europe differed greatly, racially, from that which had existed during the days of the Roman Empire. Nomadic blood had entered into the people of every European and Asiatic nation. Huns, Goths, Vandals, Alans, Franks, Teutons, Lombards, Czecks, Burgundains, Magyars, Bulgars, Slavs, Norsemen, Ephthalites, Indo-Scythians, Finns, Arabs, Turks, Avars, Angles, Saxons, Jutres, Picts and Scots—all migratory peoples, nomads who had previously wandered between summer and winter pastures in the lands between the Danube and China—had been invading and settling, century by century, in Europe, Africa and Asia. From these races, who intermarried with the peoples whose lands they conquered, our modern races have sprung.
As we are dealing in this article with the influence of the Ascending Equinox on the affairs of the world, we shall trace the gradual betterment of mankind that took place from the fall of Rome to the end (1698 AD) of the Ascending Kali Yuga.
The unifying force among the chaotic European states after their conquest by the nomadic peoples was their acceptance of Christianity. By the end of the 11th century, the Pope could appeal with success to the common sympathy of all Europe for the start of the first Crusade. The Age of Feudalism, from the 9th to the 14th centuries, has been called the "Dark Ages" by historians (appropriately enough, from the viewpoint of our Equinoctial time-chart, which places these centuries within the Ascending Dark Age) but feudalism served certain worthy ends in a period of universal insecurity and political confusion. The Crusades had at least two good results: they ended the outworn feudal system, and presented to the European gaze the far more advanced civilization of the Moslem world.
Arabia rose to great power in the 7th and 8th centuries of this Ascending Kali Yuga. Filled with proselyting zeal inspired by their religious leader, Mohammed (570-632), the Arabs conquered and converted peoples from India to Spain, and from the borders of China to northern Egypt. However, their chief contribution to the progress of this Dark Age was the scientific learning which they received mostly through their contact with the decayed but still glorious civilization of India, and which the Arabs disseminated to the Europeans. Many great universities dotted the Moslem world and influenced the later universities of Paris, Oxford and other European centers. The University of Cairo boasted 12,000 students from all parts of the world, so great was the Arab fame for knowledge in mathematics, physics, chemistry, medicine, pharmacy and the use of anesthetics. The introduction of the so-called Arabic numerals, brought from India, was a great stimulation to the European mind. In algebra and spherical trigonometry, the Arabs made great strides; they built astronomical observatories, and produced some of the best astrologers of the time. Their textile fabrics were of marvelous beauty. They followed scientific systems of farming and irrigation, and maintained free schools for the poor. From the Chinese, with whom they traded, came their knowledge of the manufacture of paper and the use of the magnetic needle in navigation. While the monastery schools in Europe were teaching the flatness of the earth, the Arabs were using globes to teach geography. Arabic translations of Aristotle and other Greeks were the introduction of Europe, in the 15th century, to the genius of Grecian thought and literature. Thus it was that the Arabs played a great constructive part in the onward march of progress during this first Age of the Ascending Arc.
From the 13th to the 17th centuries, we find a new world power, the Mongol nomads. The amazing empire of Jengis Khan stretched from the Black Sea eastward through China, and from Russia down to northern India. The capital of this vast empire was in Mongolia. The conquests of Alexander, Caesar or Napoleon fade into insignificance when compared with the extent of this Mongol empire. History tells us much of Mongol ruthlessness, but Jengis was not so wanton a conqueror as Alexander, and the former spared numberless cities and works of art. Complete religious toleration reigned throughout his empire—a boon indeed in a world torn by Christian and Moslem persecutions. The Mongol, courts of Jengis and later of Kublai Khan were the meeting places of all the learned men, merchants and religious representatives of the time. In many ways, the Mongols have played an extremely important role in transmitting and disseminating knowledge. Further, the intermingling of blood that went on between the conquering nomadic Mongols and their subjects, supplied an additional racial diversity to the peoples of the world—a diversity that seems to be a feature of the new Ascending Age, and particularly prominent when we reach the time of the settling of the New World.
"The Travels of Marco Polo," a book dealing with the 13th century experiences of a Venetian adventurer at the court of Kublai Khan, and in China, Japan, Persia, Burma, Sumatra and India as an official and envoy of the Mongol ruler, contributed to a widening of the European viewpoint and interests and was the start of a vigorous intercourse between East and West that proved immensely profitable and instructive to the Europeans, the Mongols also furnished a series of six able rulers in India, of whom Akbar, in the 16th century, was the most beloved. For these reasons, and notwithstanding the barbarous devastations of Hulagu, Timurlane and the Ottoman Turks, we can realize that the Mongols played a major part in furthering the progress of the world during the Ascending Dark Age.
Europe struggled to throw off her chains one by one. The insurrection of the Hussites in Bohemia in 1419 marked the first of the religious wars which finally destroyed the vast temporal power of the Papacy, and released experimental science from ecclesiastical restraint. The widespread Peasant Wars of the 14th century ushered in an era of revolt against social inequality and of claims for the rights of labor that has continued down to our present day. The great revival of learning in Europe started in the 15th century with the introduction of the printing press and paper manufacture. The Renaissance of intellectual vigor which brought the Middle Ages to a close was due to the rediscovery of the old classical culture, the thought of ancient Greece and Rome, of Babylon and Egypt. The distinctive tongues of modern Europe achieved a standard in the 14th and 15th centuries through the literary labors of Dante in Italy, Chaucer and Wycliffe in England, and Luther in Germany, stimulating the growth both of a national spirit and a national literature in the various European countries. The 15th and 16th centuries saw the start of courageous exploration and the voyages of Columbus to the New World and the discovery by Vasco da Gama and Magellan of new ocean trade routes to the Orient, resulted in an era of widespread prosperity in Europe.
Names of great thinkers, scientists, writers and artists begin to enter the history of Europe as the Iron Age ascends to its closing centuries. Roger Bacon was the isolated splendor of the 13th century, but the 14th and 15th centuries shone with the genius of Shakespeare, Spencer, Cervantes, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Francis Bacon and Harvey. Paracelsus was one of the great alchemists, physicians and astrologers of this period. The same centuries produced those pioneer astronomers who laid the foundations of modern astronomical science: Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler and Galileo. 3 Newton came a century later, and the change, in 1698, from the Iron Age to the Bronze or Dwapara Yuga, occurred during his lifetime.
The 17th century, which brings the Ascending Dark Age to a close, saw a world vastly superior to that of the 5th century, when the momentous climb of the Autumnal Equinox began. The last century of this Kali Yuga witnessed the spread of republican sentiment, with notable results in England, under Cromwell, and in Holland. The same century saw the settling of European colonists in the New World. The stage was admirably set for the next and greater Age (Dwapara) at the start of the 18th century.
That the Kali Yuga of the Ascending Arc, whose history we have been reviewing, was a time of countless woes, of ignorance, wars, plagues and cruel religious intolerance, is beyond dispute. It was an Iron Age, the darkest span of a 12,000 year Equinoctial Arc. Human misery is the principal theme of the last two Dark Ages. However, we have seen in the preceding article that the Kali Yuga of the Descending Arc (702 B.C.-498 AD) sank from comparative enlightenment at its start to social and political chaos and intellectual stagnation at its end. The Kali Yuga of the Ascending Arc reversed this sequence. Thus has the Equinoctial Age time-chart, advocated in this series, proved its truth and its worth.
A point of great interest must be mentioned here. The works of Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher and scientist who taught the heliocentric theory of the universe, came to the attention of Copernicus through the revival of European interest in classical culture, and inspired the great Pole to obtain proof of the truth of the heliocentric theory. Two thousand years elapsed between the times of Pythagoras (582-507 BC) and Copernicus (1473-1543), and each of these two great scientists was born a thousand years away from the year (498 AD) which marked the change between the Descending and Ascending Arcs of the equinoctial cycle. Because Pythagoras was born in Kali Yuga of the Descending Arc, he was one of the last teachers in the ancient western world to maintain the heliocentric theory, and by the time the Autumnal Equinox had reached the nadir of its Descending Arc, the false geocentric theories of Aristotle and Ptolemy had gained full acceptance. The Equinox traveled a thousand years on its Ascending Arc before Copernicus arose to revive the heliocentric theory, and, because he was born in Kali Yuga of the Ascending Arc, he was one of the first founders of modern astronomy, and succeeding centuries saw his work carried on with greater and greater accuracy and expansion.
In fact, the great age of Hellenic glory—the 6th and 5th centuries BC, 4 when Thales, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Phidias, Pericles, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Meton, Anaxagoras and many other great intellects produced the last great oasis of creative culture in the desert of the Descending Dark Age—has a perfect correspondence in time, according to our Age-Chart, with the next great intellectual revival in the western world. The 15th and 16th centuries, which witnessed the rise of so many stars of learning, are as distant from the nadir, on one side of the equinoctial cycle, as the 6th and 5th centuries BC are on the other side. Thus we glimpse—through the connection of the World Ages with the great cycle of equinoctial precession—the measured epochs of our history, and the repetition of opportunity that occurs at equidistant points in that cycle.
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1The spiritual and cultural roots of India and China were too firmly embedded to be uprooted by the "equinoctial storm" that swept the other great nations of antiquity into oblivion. The destiny of India and China seems, comparatively, timeless; one 24,000 year equinoctial cycle does not see either the beginning or the end of their racial cycles. These cradles of civilization will live to regain all that they have lost during the Dark Ages of the world.
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2This particular year merely measures to the last exact coincidence of the two (Fixed Star and Equinoctial) Zodiacs. The change from one Age to another is not, of course, confined to the one given year; rather, the change manifests itself not only after but also before a new Age. See page after Diagram I (p8) for the length of the transition periods which occur between the Ages, and which combine the influences of those two Ages which they connect.
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3Biographical histories seldom mention that many of the most eminent founders of modern European astronomy were also devoted students of astrology. Such were Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Newton, Regiomontanus, Flamsteed, first Astronomer Royal of England and the founder of the Greenwich Observatory, and the famous 16th century mathematicians, Jerome Cardan, Lord Napier of Merchiston and Johann Morinus.
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4These were also the centuries that produced, in the Orient, Guatama, Confucius and Lao-Tze.