Belongs To Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Cosmological Age gathers the entries in this atlas that describe an entire scheme of cosmic time rather than one stage inside a scheme. The four zodiacal ages, Aquarius, Aries, Pisces and Taurus, are the best known members: each is a roughly two thousand year span defined by the constellation the spring equinox point is passing through, itself a consequence of a single larger cycle, the Great Year, in which the wobble of Earth's axis carries that point backward through the zodiac over about 25,772 years. The Great Year is therefore both a member of this group in its own right and the astronomical clock the four zodiacal ages are read off, the group's clearest case of one member explaining the others.

The Stoic Cosmic Cycle and the Empedoclean Cosmic Cycle belong here for a different reason: neither divides time into a sequence of named stages the way Hesiod's five ages or the Hindu yugas do. Both describe the whole cosmos repeatedly dissolving and reforming, in Stoic doctrine by a universal conflagration governed by the divine fire the Stoics called Logos, in Empedocles by the alternating dominance of Love and Strife over four eternal roots. What unites every member here is scale and kind: a cosmological age names how time itself is structured or repeats, not a numbered turn within an already fixed sequence, which is what the position groups elsewhere in this taxonomy record instead.