This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Position 2 in Its Cycle collects the second stage of five world age schemes: Hesiod's Silver Age, the Aztec Second Sun, Joachim of Fiore's Age of the Son, the Jain Sushama, and Zoho, the Age of the Semblance Dharma in East Asian Buddhism. In three of the five traditions this stage is already a step down from the one before it. Hesiod's Silver Age is a childish, foolish and violent race that Zeus destroys for refusing the gods due honor. Sushama is a happy age, but Jain cosmology describes it as already lower than Sushama-sushama in stature, lifespan and happiness. Zoho keeps the Buddha's teaching and its outward practice, but the attainment that practice is meant to produce is held to have already failed, so what remains only resembles the true Dharma of the first age.
The Second Sun and the Age of the Son break that pattern in opposite directions. The Second Sun is simply the next world in Aztec myth's sequence, ruled by Quetzalcoatl and ended by a hurricane, carrying no claim of decline built into its number. The Age of the Son moves the other way entirely: in Joachim's Trinitarian reading of history, his three ages rise toward greater spiritual freedom, so the second age, corresponding to the New Testament and grace mixed with law, is an advance on the first rather than a falling away from it. Position two, across this group, names where a stage sits in sequence far more reliably than it names whether that stage is worse than the one it follows.