Time on the largest scale

This section covers the vast temporal cycles some traditions place behind ordinary history: the four yugas of Hindu cosmology, world-ages that run in a repeating sequence of enormous and variously reported length, and the seven rays of Theosophical writing, cycles of a quite different, modern kind.

The two are placed together because both frame human life within a cycle far larger than a lifetime or a calendar, but their provenance could hardly be more different, one an inherited Puranic scheme of great antiquity, the other assembled in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.