Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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Cosmological Age

11 of 37 entries in Ages. Click any to see everything it connects to.

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The astrological ages tied to the slow precession of the equinox through the zodiac, together with the Great Year concept that frames the whole precessional cycle and the Stoic cosmic cycle that ends the world in fire before it begins again. None of these carries a numbered position the way the ages below do, because the years at which one age yields to the next are themselves disputed among the astrologers who track it, so no fixed count was imposed.

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A Cycle Rather Than a Stage

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.

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View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.