The Unifying Language

Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet
Director, Aeon Centre of Cosmology
Tamil Nadu, South India
aeon@vsnl.com 

            I would like to add something more to Ms Lori Tompkins’ presentation of my work with Time and the Yugas of Hindu Tradition (Vedic Heresies, AR No. 42) by offering another view of the problem in a way that readers of varied cultural backgrounds can perhaps understand more easily. This will also demonstrate how closely ancient traditions across the globe held to a common cosmic code. There was a single thread of knowledge weaving through these cultures: the Measure of the Year. Whatever of the higher knowledge Tradition had to offer, it can still be discovered today through that measure of 365, or the Earth’s orbit of the Sun.
            To appreciate this fact, I will use the so-called Kali Yuga measure of 432,000. It is not an actual astrological age, the commonly held interpretation in India, but more appropriately a constant. When we take 432,000 to be seconds of degrees of celestial longitude, as Lori Tompkins has pointed out, they equal five Earth days (5x24x60x60=432000). In most ancient traditions, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Maya, and so on, these five days were considered ‘out of the calendar’. They were special days set aside for a sort of germination, or time-seeding and incubation. So, the Kali Constant (KC) is merely that same period of five days given its proper due in Vedic tradition; it too is set apart from the reckoning; but it is all-important for cracking the code. This is applicable to the Earth year as mapped out in the Tropical Zodiac, as well as the greater cycles of the Precession of the Equinoxes.
            Post-Vedic pundits miss the point, however, by considering the Yugas to be four in all. This is contrary to Vedic tradition since Vishnu in his famous act of measuring the universe, as recorded in the Rig Veda, takes only three strides. These three do correspond to the astrological ages very precisely, as I have discussed in a number of publications. Thus, using the constant of Kali, 432,000 seconds of degrees of celestial longitude, we then build this super structure of Time as experienced on Earth; multiplying it by 2 we have the measure (always in seconds of longitude) of Dwapara Yuga, then by 3 and the Treta Yuga. The last is the perfected measure of the four-square immortal creation, the Satya Yuga or the Age of Truth: KC multiplied by 4. This is similar to St John’s Holy City in The Revelation: four-square as well as cosmological. The Vedic Seer built his ‘city’ with Time; the Christian mystic with visionary geometry. But both made use of the same astrological ‘vault of heaven’.
            We note that the key is 2 and 3 and 4, the very numbers of the Constant reversed; at the same time, 234 BCE was the momentous Cosmic Dawn, when the two circles converged, greater and smaller, cosmic and Earthly, or Precessional and Tropical, and we entered the last round of the Yugas at the convergence point, 0 degree Aries.
            There is a legitimate problem we Earthlings face when seeking to reconcile ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’, and in the process in reconciling celestial (sidereal) longitude of degrees, minutes, and seconds with our Earth experience of the year (Tropical/seasonal, balanced on the Equinoxes and the Solstices): those same 360 must become 365, with a discrepancy of five days ‘out of the calendar’.
            Leonardo da Vinci has bequeathed a most elegant demonstration of this problem, with both a key indicating how the two can be reconciled, as well as the cause for the surplus. In his famous drawing, sometimes called the Vitruvius Man, there is Man in a Circle and in a Square. This famous geometrical drawing graphically describes the problem; Leonardo portrays the ‘fall’ of humankind in a singular manner, circle to square. Man in the Square is a victim of this seemingly irreconcilable discrepancy – a measure of the human being’s disharmony, as it were. The point is further made by observing that the centre of the Circle-Man is located at his navel, while in the Square-Man it is at his reproductive organ. That circle is ‘heaven’, the square is ‘earth’. A plunge into materiality, Leonardo notes, nails the human creature to a sexual atavism that becomes his cross.
            The Circle Man experiences the full scope of that heavenly/celestial longitude, all 360 degrees of his circle, liberated from the bondage of atavism. But the densification required of a material creation on Earth creates the addition of 5 over 360 – our Earth year. Leonardo graphically portrays the problem which the ancients understood so well: the transcription of the celestial sphere into our Earth time is conditioned by our dense materiality. He portrays it almost as a crucifixion.
            However, Leonardo takes us a step further. He does not leave us with this hopeless situation by escaping the problem as religions have done with their concept of heaven after death; or as most paths of Indian yoga do through trance or samadhis, or else Buddhism’s nirvana, all of which do demand a transcending of our planetary and cosmic base entirely.  If this is indeed the condition we ‘fall’ into by taking birth on this third planet from the Sun, Leonardo offers the reconciliation by the fact that it is this single Man who is both heaven and earth simultaneously: the human being is that totality which includes his physicality. It is not one or the other, but both at the same time. The only transcending required is to establish a new pivot or axis.
            Put another way, in his drawing Leonardo has brought about the convergence between the Precession of the Equinoxes and the Tropical Zodiac – the measure of ‘heaven’ and the measure of ‘earth’. I have designed a similar convergence in my key to a cosmic consciousness, The Gnostic Circle.
            It can all be reduced to those blessed five days ‘out of the calendar’, the Kali Constant. No wonder that in ancient times they were central to the traditional Festival of Light at the December Solstice, the beginning of the zodiacal Capricorn – a segment of the zodiac nationally honoured even in India today, though the date is miscalculated. The ancient Seers called it kali because it means ‘the dark’ – that is, a period when germination and incubation take place since those 432,000 seconds of degrees of longitude are indrawn before the new dawn of the new year, cosmic or earthly. Post-Vedic pundits then went on to miss the forest for the trees and actually promulgated the notion that these 432,000 are Earth years; and if, as they claim, the count started with the passing of Sri Krishna in the Age of Taurus, then we have another 427,603 years to go before we emerge out of this black night! No wonder we have invented means of mass destruction and even total annihilation. If such a scenario is true, if this endless night of the soul is all that awaits us for hundreds of thousands of years, then by all means, let’s end it now!
            Happily, the ancients were not so irrational. Hindu pundits of the Post-Vedic persuasion – practically the only school in existence today – must rethink their calculations and rediscover exactly what the exercise is all about, what it is they are supposed to measure.