This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
What makes Sri Yukteswar's yuga scheme distinctive is not just that it shortens the cycle, but what it ties the shortened cycle to. The Puranic mahayuga is not obviously anchored to anything observable; its 4,320,000 years are a religious and cosmological figure, not a measured astronomical period. Yukteswar's 24,000 year cycle, by contrast, is explicitly the precession of the equinoxes, the same slow wobble of Earth's axis this atlas's Great Year entry describes as producing the roughly 25,772 year cycle astronomers measure today. Yukteswar's figure is close to that measured period, near enough that a reader can see immediately what claim is being made: the yugas are not an arbitrary religious multiplier but a description, however imperfectly transmitted, of a real astronomical cycle.
This is why the dispute is not simply a matter of which authority to trust. It is a claim about what kind of thing a yuga was always meant to be. If Yukteswar is right, the mahayuga is fundamentally an astronomical unit that later scribal or doctrinal accretion inflated by a factor of roughly 180, and the moral and religious meanings mapped onto the four ages, Satya's completeness, Kali's decline, are laid over a cycle that was originally a description of the sky. If the Puranic reading is right, the astronomical resemblance is either coincidence or a much later, secondary association, and the numbers were always meant as the vast, symbolically weighted spans they read as on the page.
The present age carries the weight of this disagreement most directly. Standard Puranic reckoning holds humanity is deep in Kali Yuga, the darkest of the four, with tens of thousands of years still to run before Satya Yuga returns. Yukteswar's scheme holds the opposite: that Kali Yuga's low point actually passed around 500 CE, and that the present age is Dvapara Yuga of an ascending arc, moving toward greater understanding rather than away from it. Two readers of the same textual tradition can therefore hold opposite views on a question about their own moment in history, not as a matter of faith but as a disagreement about how a number in an old text ought to be read.