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 5 in Its Cycle collects the fifth stage of three world age schemes, and unlike the positions before it in this taxonomy, every member here makes the same claim about itself: this is the age its own tradition holds to be happening right now. Hesiod's Iron Age is the age he says he himself laments living in, marked by toil, sorrow and injustice, warning that it will worsen further before Aidos and Nemesis, shame and righteous indignation, finally abandon the earth. The Fifth Sun is the current and, Aztec tradition holds, the final cosmic age, born at Teotihuacan when the god Nanahuatzin threw himself into a divine fire to become the sun Tonatiuh, and fated to end in earthquakes, a destiny already encoded in its own day name, Movement. Dushama, the fifth of the six Jain ara, is likewise held to be the age now in progress, marked in Jain cosmological texts by suffering and moral decline, with one further, harsher age still to come before the cycle turns.

None of the three traditions coordinated this claim, and each reaches it by a different route, a poet's lament, a myth of successive suns, a doctrine of measured cosmic ara. What position five shows, read as a group, is how widely separated cultures converge on describing their own present moment as a late, difficult stage in a longer decline, even while disagreeing completely about what began the decline or what will end it.