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.

Position 3 in Its Cycle collects the third stage of five world age schemes, and it is the clearest point in this group of taxonomy nodes where the same number means genuinely different things depending on how long the scheme runs. Joachim of Fiore's Age of the Holy Spirit and Mappo, the Age of the Dharma's Decline in East Asian Buddhism, both treat position three as their scheme's final stage, since both traditions divide their history into exactly three ages. For Joachim it is a still future age of liberty and direct spiritual understanding. For Mappo it is the opposite, the age in which only the Buddha's teaching survives as words alone, practice and attainment both already gone.

Hesiod's Bronze Age and the Jain Sushama-dushama sit at the same position inside longer schemes, five ages and six ara respectively, so position three is a midpoint for them rather than an ending. Hesiod's Bronze race is violent and short lived, destroyed by its own hands, while Sushama-dushama is a genuinely transitional age, more happy than unhappy, the point at which Jain cosmology says decline first becomes noticeable and, notably, one of only two ara in the entire twelve part cycle in which liberation is still held to be possible. The Third Sun simply continues the Aztec sequence, ruled by the rain god Tlaloc and ended by a rain of fire. Read across the group, position three shows how little a bare ordinal number can say about a stage's weight without knowing the length of the cycle it belongs to.