Tag: Timaeus

Mircea Eliade: "Cosmic cycles and history"

Published on: Last updated on: Written by: Categorized into: Anthropology, Christianity, Esotericism, Extracts, Philosophy, Mito, History of Religions

"Even within the framework of the three great Iranian, Jewish and Christian religions, which have limited the duration of the cosmos to a certain number of millennia, and affirm that history will definitively cease in illo tempore, there are traces of the ancient doctrine of the periodic regeneration of history ยป: Very ancient doctrine that Eliade, in his essayโ€œ The myth of the eternal return โ€, finds in the Babylonian, Hindu, Buddhist, Germanic and Hellenic tradition.

Keep readingโ€ฆ

G. de Santillana: โ€œHistory to be rewrittenโ€. Reflections on "Ancient Fate" and "Modern Affliction"

Published on: Last updated on: Written by: Categorized into: Astrotheology, Extracts, Philosophy, Mito, History of Religions

(image: Gilbert Bayes, ananke, sculpture)

Extract from the essay by Giorgio de Santillana ยซHistory to rewrite", Written in 1968 and published the following year by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, later (1985) translated and published in Italy by Adelphi in the collection of writings entitled"Ancient fate and modern fateยป.

Preface and notes by Marco Maculotti. Our italics.

Keep readingโ€ฆ

A Science in Tatters: Survival of the Doctrines of Cyclic Time from the Timaeus to the Apocalypse

Published on: Last updated on: Written by: Categorized into: Astrotheology, Esotericism, Mito, History of Religions

di Andrew Casella
cover: William Blake, illustration for Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy

In the first article of this cycle [cf. Cyclic time and its mythological meaning: the precession of the equinoxes and the tetramorph], we have said that, at regular intervals, due to the precession, some alternations of constellations occur in the four cardinal points of the year. This is the reason why the sacred texts speak of certain "catastrophes" that determine some "submergence" of an old "earth" and the rise of a new one (at least up to a certain time in history). Each age of the world has its "earth", that is its ecliptic plane, delimited by the equinoxes and solstices, which emerges from the "sea", that is, from the demarcation plane of the celestial equator. When the points of the year are determined by other constellations, a new "earth" rises on the horizon, while the old one sinks below sea level.

Keep readingโ€ฆ