onawah
8th December 2025, 21:02
The Yugas: How An Ancient Doctrine Of Cyclical Time Solves The Mystery Of the Great Pyramid
The Hermetic Age #008: The Divine History of Sri Yukteswar
Dan/World Astrology ReportDan
Dec 08, 2025
https://substack.com/home/post/p-181014000
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!6cuA!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F92727a0e-49d7-4fa5-808d-2d79bf57d035_1024x1024.webp
"The revision to the Indian yuga cycle doctrine of cyclical time by the Indian mystic Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri holds extraordinary explanatory power. It provides an elegant explanation for many of the enduring mysteries of history, including the greatest mystery of all: the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Astrology’s greatest gift is its ability to confer meaning on the twists and turns of fortune, to help us perceive structure and purpose in life where otherwise we might see only chaos and contingency. In and of themselves, the succession of vicissitudes that make up the story of a life often mean little. When seen from the panoramic scale astrology provides, their purpose can come into sharp focus.
A consulting astrologer is treated regularly to vivid demonstrations of how strokes of apparent bad luck—the ending of a relationship, the loss of a job, a debilitating illness—play a role in driving a life where it needs to go. A client might come to realise: “It hurt to get fired from the bar, but if it hadn’t been for that, I’d never have taken up meditation…” To perceive purpose in life, we have to zoom out.
The same is true of history.
In The Astounding Astrology Of The Axial Age, we saw how an extremely rare triple conjunction of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto around 577 BC coincided with the dawn of Karl Jaspers’ Axial Age, a time when the seeds of almost all the major faiths of the world today were sown. Remarkable figures, including the Buddha, Pythagoras and Confucius, walked the Earth at the same time, teaching human beings new ways of being, living together or achieving transcendence.
But we might well ask: why then? Why 577 BC? An astrologer’s answer might simply be: because the planets said so. Because it was time. But we can do better—if we zoom out.
This series was originally intended as a study of the 492-year Pluto-Neptune synodic cycle, something I’ve spent recent years thinking deeply about. I thought I could tell a compelling story about modernity through the lens of this single cycle.
I’ve since come to feel that this tight focus would leave too much unsaid. The tale needed a more cosmic perspective. It needed context—and that context will come from understanding a far longer cycle, one embedded in the mythical traditions of ancient people across the world: the precession of the equinoxes.
The doctrine of the Yugas
The precession of the equinoxes, whereby the stars rising at a fixed time of year gradually slip backwards through the zodiac, is believed by contemporary astronomers to generate a cycle lasting some 26,000 years.
As we saw in In Astrology, Think Spirals, Not Cycles, there are at least two primary systems for understanding how the quality of time changes over the course of this cycle. One is the astrological ages, favoured in the West, which divide this span of time into twelve sections, each allocated to one of the twelve signs of the zodiac. It’s this scheme that gives rise to the famed notion of the Age of Aquarius.
The other is the Indian yuga cycle—or, to be more precise, the mapping of the yugas onto the precessional cycle by Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri (1855-1936), an Indian mystic who lived at the turn of the 19th century. It’s this system that we’ll focus on in this article—and see how it holds an incredible amount of explanatory power.
Sri Yukteswar was the guru of Paramahansa Yogananda, best known as the author of the spellbinding book Autobiography of a Yogi and as the man who brought the powerful pranayama technique of Kriya Yoga to the West.
Bringing Vedic wisdom to America was one of the great projects of Yogananda’s lineage, and with that goal in mind, in 1894 Sri Yukteswar published a book that was to become highly influential in astrological circles: The Holy Science. In that text Sri Yukteswar sought to show the many parallels between Vedic and Christian spiritual teachings.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!NJZD!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd13b444b-a996-45b4-ac34-de0f3cf43a61_600x981.jpeg
But the book is best known for remarks Sri Yukteswar makes in its introduction, which opened up a new perspective on India’s ancient yuga cycle doctrine, which sees history unfolding in an unending sequence of four great ages, during which consciousness, and connection to the divine, shift over vast stretches of time.
The doctrine is laid out in various Vedic texts, including the great war epic, the Mahabharata, where it’s stated that the whole cycle, one Mahayuga, lasts 12,000 years. As we move from one yuga to the next, dharma, best translated as “virtue”, declines. The Satya Yuga, the “Golden Age”, when we’re in closest connection with the divine and dharma is at its highest, lasts 4,000 years; then comes the Treta Yuga, when dharma declines by one quarter, lasting 3,000 years; then the Dwapara Yuga, when dharma declines by another quarter, lasting 2,000 years; and finally the Kali Yuga, the lowest of the four ages, when dharma is at its lowest, lasting just 1,000 years. It’s generally supposed that after the Kali Yuga ends, there’s an instant return to the Satya Yuga, a quick shift from darkness to light—an usual idea when we consider that astronomical cycles never work like this.
Similar doctrines are found across the ancient world and to this day, including among the ancient Greeks, Persians, Maya and the Hopi of the Southwestern United States. The Greek poet Hesiod spoke of not four but five “ages of man”, which chart a similar process of descent, from the Golden Age of Cronus, to the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, the Heroic Age and down into the benighted Iron Age, when humans live a life of toil and suffering.
According to the yuga doctrine, each age is bookended by transitional periods called sandhi, which govern the shift from one period to the next. Each yuga begins with a “dawn”, lasting one-tenth of its length, and ends with a “twilight”, also lasting one-tenth of the major period. So, the Satya Yuga lasts 400 + 4,000 + 400 years = 4,800 years, the Treta Yuga lasts 300 + 3,000 + 300 = 3,600 years, the Dwapara Yuga lasts 200 + 2,000 + 200 = 2,400 years and the Kali Yuga lasts 100 + 1,000 + 100 years = 1,200 years.
But here’s the rub. The Mahabharata speaks of this cycle in terms of “years of the gods” or “divine” years, each of which is said to last 360 human years. This brings the length of the entire yuga cycle to 4,320,000 years. In other words, we’re dealing with a cycle that’s commonly believed to play out over vast stretches of cosmic time, far too long to be genuinely meaningful for mere humans. The Kali Yuga alone is said to last 432,000 years, and according to traditional belief, it began in 3102 BC after the end of the Mahabharata War. Thus, we may as well forget about ever experiencing anything other than materialism, illusion and ignorance for the foreseeable future.
Enter Sri Yukteswar. In his opening remarks to The Holy Science, he outlines what he believes to be the true formulation of the yuga cycle, claiming there had been mistakes in the transmission of the doctrine over the years, just as one might expect during the Kali Yuga, the age of illusion. Sri Yukteswar claimed the true cycle should be measured in human, not divine, years, and consists of both an ascending and descending phase, each lasting 12,000 years for a total of 24,000 years. This idea of a gently rising and falling cycle has much to recommend it, given that it more closely resembles cycles we see in nature, like that of the year and the waxing and waning synodic cycles of the planets.
Of course, 24,000 years is very close to the length of the precessional cycle. Indeed, in The Holy Science, Sri Yukteswar explicitly ties the yugas to the cycle of precession, perhaps one of his greatest contributions. But the reader will note a discrepancy: Sri Yukteswar’s 24,000-year cycle is around 2,000 years short of the current measured speed of precession of almost 26,000 years. Was Sri Yukteswar—and the sacred texts he was drawing from—simply wrong? Or does the speed of precession change over the course of the cycle, as Walter Cruttenden writes in his book on the subject, Lost Star of Myth and Time? We simply don’t know.
Here, some advice for the confused reader: I suggest taking Sri Yukteswar’s claims both seriously and lightly. People today, especially in the West, tend to demand certainty over the validity of ideas. We’re forever searching for the One, True System with all the answers. I’ve found that when it comes to spirituality, we’re better served by taking ideas more lightly, considering the strengths and weaknesses of different systems, and being comfortable with their contradictions. Look for confluence between different systems, rather than expecting one of them to explain everything.
/https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ioXy!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffa338515-7937-42b2-a6c0-82ddc1589283_678x1000.jpeg
In their excellent book The Yugas, Joseph Selbie and David Steinmetz explore Sri Yukteswar’s ideas in depth, and I’ll be drawing on their work in this piece.
Sri Yukteswar specifies the years when each age in the current cycle began, as follows: The peak of the Satya Yuga, which Selbie and Steinmetz call the “Spiritual Age”, came in 11500 BC, when the ascending Satya Yuga gave way to the descending Satya Yuga. The descending Satya Yuga gave way to the descending Treta Yuga, the “Mental Age”, in 6700 BC. That was followed by the descending Dwapara Yuga, the “Energy Age”, in 3100 BC. And finally, in 700 BC, came the start of the descending Kali Yuga, the “Material Age”. The “bottom” of the current cycle came in 500 AD, when the descending Kali Yuga gave way to the ascending Kali Yuga, and the transition from there into the ascending Dwapara Yuga arrived in 1700. Yes, for Sri Yukteswar, the dark age is already over.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!wQp_!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7777c60f-5000-47d3-8e94-76ee3bf07aae_300x376.jpeg
Most usefully for an astrologer, Sri Yukteswar describes the quality of life during each of the ages. In the Kali Yuga, the Material Age, “the human intellect cannot comprehend anything beyond the gross material of this ever-changing creation, the external world.” In the Dwapara Yuga, the Energy Age, “the human intellect can then comprehend the fine matters or electricities and their attributes which are the creating principles of the external world.” In the Treta Yuga, the Mental Age, “the human intellect becomes able to comprehend the divine magnetism, the source of all electrical forces on which the creation depends for its existence.” And in the Satya Yuga, the “Spiritual Age”, “the mental virtue is then in its fourth stage and completes its full development; the human intellect can comprehend all, even God the Spirit beyond this visible world.”
The reader might wish to take some time to review the Chart of the Yugas diagram above. What may strike you is how the beginning of the descending Kali Yuga, in 700 BC, came just over a century before the triple conjunction of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto around 577 BC that we discussed in The Astonishing Astrology of the Axial Age. I believe this is no coincidence, and we’ll return to this later in the series.
Before we go on, I want to address a crucial question: Why should the reader take Sri Yukteswar’s framework of history seriously?
A great saint
I assume readers are already open to the idea that the cycles of the planets are synchronised with the rhythms of history. I doubt you’d be reading a newsletter called “World Astrology Report” otherwise. But there’s clearly a qualitative difference between planetary cycles and Sri Yukteswar’s claims about the architecture of time. After all, well-established principles of astronomy and mathematics mean we can be pretty sure there really was a triple conjunction of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto around the year 577 BC. When Sri Yukteswar tells us that “the descending Dwapara Yuga began in 3100 BC”—well, we just have to take his word for it, and I can understand why some readers might find this more difficult to swallow.
After all, all sorts of mystics, philosophers, renegade historians and, yes, certified cranks have proposed idiosyncratic metaphysical frameworks of cyclical history over the years, from the Renaissance abbot and occultist Trithemius, to traditionalist philosopher René Guénon, to Oswald Spengler in his The Decline of the West. Even an astrologically open-minded reader could be forgiven for giving a single long-dead mystic’s historical schema a good deal less credibility than the movements of the planets. So again, why trust Sri Yukteswar’s framework?
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2LyV!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7580a9a6-a65e-4a7b-81a6-4c613fbfa0da_666x1000.jpeg
Well, if you’ve read his student Paramahansa Yogananda’s spellbinding Autobiography of a Yogi, you won’t need much convincing that Sri Yukteswar was a remarkable human being. Yogananda, an extraordinary figure himself, revered his guru, who initiated him into the technique of Kriya Yoga, a powerful pranayama technique said to rapidly accelerate spiritual development. Sri Yukteswar himself learned it from his own guru, the householder Lahiri Mahasaya, who is said to have been initiated into the technique in a cave in the Himalayas by the legendary immortal yogi and guru Mahavatar Babaji.
In Autobiography, Yogananda describes Sri Yukteswar performing many miracles. He heals a man using nothing but his intent. He controls the weather. He reads students’ minds. Perhaps most memorably, he appears to Yogananda long after death, describing to him the architecture of the spirit world.
It’s up to the reader to decide how much credibility to give these accounts. I sense nothing but truth and earnestness from Yogananda, and take him at his word. Sri Yukteswar wasn’t just “some guy”—he was a man of astonishing abilities, as well as an extremely accomplished astrologer. (Oh, and he’s one of the luminaries who appears on the front cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, in the very top-left of the image, right next to Aleister Crowley, in case a Beatles endorsement helps.)
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!s8CK!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa5ea042b-dfa1-4254-ae9b-c8ca471e9189_341x409.jpeg
Of course, I realise those arguments won’t convince everyone. Nor should they. What’s more important is the explanatory power of Sri Yukteswar’s yuga cycle. I’ve found that his framework explains certain facts about the broad sweep of history better than any other, including the remarkable advancement of certain ancient peoples—like the Egyptians.
The Great Pyramid and the Dwapara Yuga
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!BfmG!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdf040f62-2271-4f30-8ec7-859ce91aca0c_2000x1125.jpeg
There’s a controversy raging today over a problem of history, clear to anyone with a reasonably open mind: the linear model of history, which sees knowledge, technological advancement and social justice progressively improving as time goes by, doesn’t match reality. A growing number of renegade researchers like Graham Hancock, Robert Bauval and John Anthony West have engaged in deep studies of ancient cultures without feeling bound to the conclusions considered “acceptable” by mainstream academia. They’ve judged that ancient people were far more advanced than we’re generally led to believe, and knew many things we’ve forgotten today. With help from the modern podcast circuit, their arguments are finding a wide audience today, and I think that’s simply because the mainstream narrative stands on very shaky ground.
Foremost among the many “inconvenient” truths of history is the existence of a singular structure: the Great Pyramid of Giza, conventionally estimated to have been constructed around 2500 BC. The first mystery we have to deal with when it comes to the Great Pyramid is how it was built at all. It’s composed of more than 2.3 million limestone and granite blocks. Some weigh as much of 100,000 pounds and were transported to the site from as far away as 500 miles.
The Great Pyramid was also constructed with incredible precision. Its base deviates from being perfectly level around its entire circumference by less than 7/8ths of an inch. Selbie and Steinmetz quote Christopher Dunn, an engineer and author of The Giza Power Plant: “The bald fact is that the Great Pyramid — by any standard old or new — is the largest and most accurately constructed building in the world.” As more and more people are screaming from the rooftops these days, this structure could not have been built by so-called “primitive” people.
What’s more, Dunn believes the pyramid had a very specific purpose. He argues that its dimensions and weight were perfectly calibrated to resonate with the seismic pulse of the Earth, which is generated by tiny shifts in its crust. Dunn argues that using the piezoelectric properties of quartz, the Great Pyramid could literally generate electricity. In other words, it was a kind of power plant. Of course, Dunn’s is just one of many wild theories about the true purpose of this remarkable structure. But many of them, perhaps most of them, hold that the Great Pyramid harnessed principles of frequency and resonance in some way we have yet to fully understand.
This idea becomes particularly interesting in light of Sri Yukteswar’s timeline of the yugas. For him, the Dwapara Yuga began in 3100 BC with a 200-year “dawn”, which ended in 2900 BC, not long before the Great Pyramid was built. Again, the essence of the Dwapara Yuga, the Energy Age, is that we become able to comprehend “the fine matters or electricities and their attributes which are the creating principles of the external world.”
What’s more, we need an explanation for the fact that over time, useful and potentially empowering knowledge was lost. Most scholars believe the Great Pyramid was constructed during the reign of the Pharaoh Khufu, in around 2580 to 2560 BC. Yet it’s inarguably the most advanced structure built over the entire span of Egyptian civilisation. Later pyramids stand today in ruins, while the Great Pyramid maintains its form.
In Sri Yukteswar’s timeline, the construction of the pyramid would have come close to the start of the Energy Age, after descent from a higher age, the Treta Yuga or “Mental Age”. While the linear model of progressive history is troubled by the existence of the Great Pyramid, Sri Yukteswar’s model comes into its own. Such a feat was possible because, well, we were smarter back then. What’s more, we had abilities we eventually lost—magical abilities.
Magic in the Dwapara Yuga
Selbie and Steinmetz write that the Dwapara Yuga is characterised by three things: awakened intellect, self-interest, and energy awareness. Where Treta Yuga people had direct perception of how thoughts create reality, Dwapara Yuga people perceived and manipulated energy, a step down in potency.
Nothing as imposing or impressive as the Great Pyramid had been constructed in earlier times, not because human beings hadn’t been able to, but because they hadn’t needed to. Selbie and Steinmetz say this: “If the ancient Egyptians understood the laws of energy yet did not have an established tradition of mechanical technology (not needed in Treta Yuga), harnessing the earth’s seismic power in this profoundly simple and ecologically harmonious manner may well have been the natural result.”
The transition into Dwapara Yuga, from 3400 to 2900 BC, also saw the emergence of the first writing system, in the form of Sumerian cuneiform, which has been dated to about 3200 BC. Why might a technology like writing emerge at the transition between the Mental Age and the Energy Age? Well, bear in mind that for Sri Yukteswar, this transition involved a degradation of our mental abilities. Writing things down is what you resort to when memory fails you.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!bJah!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F214b7f1c-5602-41a9-bd15-0e806020d4d9_1600x1135.jpeg
During the same period, we also find evidence of the first large cities. This, together with the emergence of writing, has led mainstream scholars to conclude that “civilisation” began in the 4th millennium BC, around the time of the transition into the Energy Age.
But again, is the building of cities really a sign of advancement? Selbie and Steinmetz argue that one of the developments that characterise the Dwapara Yuga is rising self-interest. Self-interest expresses itself in a particular human activity: commerce. That’s what cities are for—they’re centres of trade.
Intriguingly, according to Sri Yukteswar the transition from ascending Kali Yuga into our current age, the ascending Dwapara Yuga, came between 1600 and 1900. We’d expect to see a rise in self-interest over that time—check—which would express itself in growth in the activity of trade and urbanisation—check. Here’s a chart showing the growth of the urban population over recent centuries:
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!u696!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2d31a695-b1a1-4d2e-87b5-ac0670d53336_2560x1183.jpeg
Sri Yukteswar’s model of time, and only his, elegantly explains why urbanisation first appears in the 4th millennium BC—and is soaring again now.
The pursuit of self-interest aside, at the essence of the Dwapara Yuga is the awareness of energy. According to Sri Yukteswar, the full transition into the Energy Age ended in 1900. At that time, one of the world’s most famous people was the very master of electricity himself, the genius inventor Nikola Tesla. Consider what are probably his best-known words: “If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.” Such figures tend to be exquisitely in touch with the times.
Traditional practices that manipulate energy, like acupuncture and qigong, date to the descending Dwapara Yuga. Interesting, then, that in our own ascending Dwapara Yuga, they’re experiencing a revival today—as is another facet of life in Dwapara Yuga: the practice of magic.
The ancient Egyptians are the very archetype of the magical civilisation. The occult and magical practices in huge swatches of the modern world can be traced back to them. Indeed, through the Hermetica, Egyptian magic drove a transformation of European society in the early modern era, ultimately leading to the birth of modern science. Later in the series, we’ll see how this happened when, and only when, the astrological time was right.
You might well ask—if the Dwapara Yuga is characterised by the widespread practice of magic, why isn’t magic more popular in our own ascending Energy Age?
I’d suggest thinking this question through. The famous magician Dion Fortune defined magic as “the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will”. Now consider the sheer ubiquity today of advertising and corporate logos. Then ask: what is advertising, but a spell that attempts to change the consciousness of the target, in accordance with the will of the advertiser? What is a logo, but an intentionally charged sigil?
We live in a deeply magical age. That has only grown more true since the Dwapara Yuga began in 1900. Today, we’re seen less and less as objects to be compelled into action by force, more as energetic forces to be cajoled, deceived and manipulated. Yes, this is progress.
The core claim to reckon with in Sri Yukteswar’s framework is that we’ve already left the Kali Yuga behind. By his reckoning, this is not the worst of times. How do you feel about that?
In the next piece, we’ll think more about the Kali Yuga, from 700 BC to 1700 AD, a period that saw the birth of two major faiths, Christianity and Islam, best described as “salvation religions”. They oriented followers away from this world, and towards the next one, demanding sacrifice, self-denial and martyrdom. Astrologers might sense here the flavour of the zodiacal sign of Pisces, and they’d be right. In the next piece, we’ll take this thread further, and explore how the Kali Yuga and the Age of Pisces were one and the same. "
The Hermetic Age #008: The Divine History of Sri Yukteswar
Dan/World Astrology ReportDan
Dec 08, 2025
https://substack.com/home/post/p-181014000
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!6cuA!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F92727a0e-49d7-4fa5-808d-2d79bf57d035_1024x1024.webp
"The revision to the Indian yuga cycle doctrine of cyclical time by the Indian mystic Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri holds extraordinary explanatory power. It provides an elegant explanation for many of the enduring mysteries of history, including the greatest mystery of all: the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Astrology’s greatest gift is its ability to confer meaning on the twists and turns of fortune, to help us perceive structure and purpose in life where otherwise we might see only chaos and contingency. In and of themselves, the succession of vicissitudes that make up the story of a life often mean little. When seen from the panoramic scale astrology provides, their purpose can come into sharp focus.
A consulting astrologer is treated regularly to vivid demonstrations of how strokes of apparent bad luck—the ending of a relationship, the loss of a job, a debilitating illness—play a role in driving a life where it needs to go. A client might come to realise: “It hurt to get fired from the bar, but if it hadn’t been for that, I’d never have taken up meditation…” To perceive purpose in life, we have to zoom out.
The same is true of history.
In The Astounding Astrology Of The Axial Age, we saw how an extremely rare triple conjunction of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto around 577 BC coincided with the dawn of Karl Jaspers’ Axial Age, a time when the seeds of almost all the major faiths of the world today were sown. Remarkable figures, including the Buddha, Pythagoras and Confucius, walked the Earth at the same time, teaching human beings new ways of being, living together or achieving transcendence.
But we might well ask: why then? Why 577 BC? An astrologer’s answer might simply be: because the planets said so. Because it was time. But we can do better—if we zoom out.
This series was originally intended as a study of the 492-year Pluto-Neptune synodic cycle, something I’ve spent recent years thinking deeply about. I thought I could tell a compelling story about modernity through the lens of this single cycle.
I’ve since come to feel that this tight focus would leave too much unsaid. The tale needed a more cosmic perspective. It needed context—and that context will come from understanding a far longer cycle, one embedded in the mythical traditions of ancient people across the world: the precession of the equinoxes.
The doctrine of the Yugas
The precession of the equinoxes, whereby the stars rising at a fixed time of year gradually slip backwards through the zodiac, is believed by contemporary astronomers to generate a cycle lasting some 26,000 years.
As we saw in In Astrology, Think Spirals, Not Cycles, there are at least two primary systems for understanding how the quality of time changes over the course of this cycle. One is the astrological ages, favoured in the West, which divide this span of time into twelve sections, each allocated to one of the twelve signs of the zodiac. It’s this scheme that gives rise to the famed notion of the Age of Aquarius.
The other is the Indian yuga cycle—or, to be more precise, the mapping of the yugas onto the precessional cycle by Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri (1855-1936), an Indian mystic who lived at the turn of the 19th century. It’s this system that we’ll focus on in this article—and see how it holds an incredible amount of explanatory power.
Sri Yukteswar was the guru of Paramahansa Yogananda, best known as the author of the spellbinding book Autobiography of a Yogi and as the man who brought the powerful pranayama technique of Kriya Yoga to the West.
Bringing Vedic wisdom to America was one of the great projects of Yogananda’s lineage, and with that goal in mind, in 1894 Sri Yukteswar published a book that was to become highly influential in astrological circles: The Holy Science. In that text Sri Yukteswar sought to show the many parallels between Vedic and Christian spiritual teachings.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!NJZD!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd13b444b-a996-45b4-ac34-de0f3cf43a61_600x981.jpeg
But the book is best known for remarks Sri Yukteswar makes in its introduction, which opened up a new perspective on India’s ancient yuga cycle doctrine, which sees history unfolding in an unending sequence of four great ages, during which consciousness, and connection to the divine, shift over vast stretches of time.
The doctrine is laid out in various Vedic texts, including the great war epic, the Mahabharata, where it’s stated that the whole cycle, one Mahayuga, lasts 12,000 years. As we move from one yuga to the next, dharma, best translated as “virtue”, declines. The Satya Yuga, the “Golden Age”, when we’re in closest connection with the divine and dharma is at its highest, lasts 4,000 years; then comes the Treta Yuga, when dharma declines by one quarter, lasting 3,000 years; then the Dwapara Yuga, when dharma declines by another quarter, lasting 2,000 years; and finally the Kali Yuga, the lowest of the four ages, when dharma is at its lowest, lasting just 1,000 years. It’s generally supposed that after the Kali Yuga ends, there’s an instant return to the Satya Yuga, a quick shift from darkness to light—an usual idea when we consider that astronomical cycles never work like this.
Similar doctrines are found across the ancient world and to this day, including among the ancient Greeks, Persians, Maya and the Hopi of the Southwestern United States. The Greek poet Hesiod spoke of not four but five “ages of man”, which chart a similar process of descent, from the Golden Age of Cronus, to the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, the Heroic Age and down into the benighted Iron Age, when humans live a life of toil and suffering.
According to the yuga doctrine, each age is bookended by transitional periods called sandhi, which govern the shift from one period to the next. Each yuga begins with a “dawn”, lasting one-tenth of its length, and ends with a “twilight”, also lasting one-tenth of the major period. So, the Satya Yuga lasts 400 + 4,000 + 400 years = 4,800 years, the Treta Yuga lasts 300 + 3,000 + 300 = 3,600 years, the Dwapara Yuga lasts 200 + 2,000 + 200 = 2,400 years and the Kali Yuga lasts 100 + 1,000 + 100 years = 1,200 years.
But here’s the rub. The Mahabharata speaks of this cycle in terms of “years of the gods” or “divine” years, each of which is said to last 360 human years. This brings the length of the entire yuga cycle to 4,320,000 years. In other words, we’re dealing with a cycle that’s commonly believed to play out over vast stretches of cosmic time, far too long to be genuinely meaningful for mere humans. The Kali Yuga alone is said to last 432,000 years, and according to traditional belief, it began in 3102 BC after the end of the Mahabharata War. Thus, we may as well forget about ever experiencing anything other than materialism, illusion and ignorance for the foreseeable future.
Enter Sri Yukteswar. In his opening remarks to The Holy Science, he outlines what he believes to be the true formulation of the yuga cycle, claiming there had been mistakes in the transmission of the doctrine over the years, just as one might expect during the Kali Yuga, the age of illusion. Sri Yukteswar claimed the true cycle should be measured in human, not divine, years, and consists of both an ascending and descending phase, each lasting 12,000 years for a total of 24,000 years. This idea of a gently rising and falling cycle has much to recommend it, given that it more closely resembles cycles we see in nature, like that of the year and the waxing and waning synodic cycles of the planets.
Of course, 24,000 years is very close to the length of the precessional cycle. Indeed, in The Holy Science, Sri Yukteswar explicitly ties the yugas to the cycle of precession, perhaps one of his greatest contributions. But the reader will note a discrepancy: Sri Yukteswar’s 24,000-year cycle is around 2,000 years short of the current measured speed of precession of almost 26,000 years. Was Sri Yukteswar—and the sacred texts he was drawing from—simply wrong? Or does the speed of precession change over the course of the cycle, as Walter Cruttenden writes in his book on the subject, Lost Star of Myth and Time? We simply don’t know.
Here, some advice for the confused reader: I suggest taking Sri Yukteswar’s claims both seriously and lightly. People today, especially in the West, tend to demand certainty over the validity of ideas. We’re forever searching for the One, True System with all the answers. I’ve found that when it comes to spirituality, we’re better served by taking ideas more lightly, considering the strengths and weaknesses of different systems, and being comfortable with their contradictions. Look for confluence between different systems, rather than expecting one of them to explain everything.
/https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ioXy!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffa338515-7937-42b2-a6c0-82ddc1589283_678x1000.jpeg
In their excellent book The Yugas, Joseph Selbie and David Steinmetz explore Sri Yukteswar’s ideas in depth, and I’ll be drawing on their work in this piece.
Sri Yukteswar specifies the years when each age in the current cycle began, as follows: The peak of the Satya Yuga, which Selbie and Steinmetz call the “Spiritual Age”, came in 11500 BC, when the ascending Satya Yuga gave way to the descending Satya Yuga. The descending Satya Yuga gave way to the descending Treta Yuga, the “Mental Age”, in 6700 BC. That was followed by the descending Dwapara Yuga, the “Energy Age”, in 3100 BC. And finally, in 700 BC, came the start of the descending Kali Yuga, the “Material Age”. The “bottom” of the current cycle came in 500 AD, when the descending Kali Yuga gave way to the ascending Kali Yuga, and the transition from there into the ascending Dwapara Yuga arrived in 1700. Yes, for Sri Yukteswar, the dark age is already over.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!wQp_!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7777c60f-5000-47d3-8e94-76ee3bf07aae_300x376.jpeg
Most usefully for an astrologer, Sri Yukteswar describes the quality of life during each of the ages. In the Kali Yuga, the Material Age, “the human intellect cannot comprehend anything beyond the gross material of this ever-changing creation, the external world.” In the Dwapara Yuga, the Energy Age, “the human intellect can then comprehend the fine matters or electricities and their attributes which are the creating principles of the external world.” In the Treta Yuga, the Mental Age, “the human intellect becomes able to comprehend the divine magnetism, the source of all electrical forces on which the creation depends for its existence.” And in the Satya Yuga, the “Spiritual Age”, “the mental virtue is then in its fourth stage and completes its full development; the human intellect can comprehend all, even God the Spirit beyond this visible world.”
The reader might wish to take some time to review the Chart of the Yugas diagram above. What may strike you is how the beginning of the descending Kali Yuga, in 700 BC, came just over a century before the triple conjunction of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto around 577 BC that we discussed in The Astonishing Astrology of the Axial Age. I believe this is no coincidence, and we’ll return to this later in the series.
Before we go on, I want to address a crucial question: Why should the reader take Sri Yukteswar’s framework of history seriously?
A great saint
I assume readers are already open to the idea that the cycles of the planets are synchronised with the rhythms of history. I doubt you’d be reading a newsletter called “World Astrology Report” otherwise. But there’s clearly a qualitative difference between planetary cycles and Sri Yukteswar’s claims about the architecture of time. After all, well-established principles of astronomy and mathematics mean we can be pretty sure there really was a triple conjunction of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto around the year 577 BC. When Sri Yukteswar tells us that “the descending Dwapara Yuga began in 3100 BC”—well, we just have to take his word for it, and I can understand why some readers might find this more difficult to swallow.
After all, all sorts of mystics, philosophers, renegade historians and, yes, certified cranks have proposed idiosyncratic metaphysical frameworks of cyclical history over the years, from the Renaissance abbot and occultist Trithemius, to traditionalist philosopher René Guénon, to Oswald Spengler in his The Decline of the West. Even an astrologically open-minded reader could be forgiven for giving a single long-dead mystic’s historical schema a good deal less credibility than the movements of the planets. So again, why trust Sri Yukteswar’s framework?
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2LyV!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7580a9a6-a65e-4a7b-81a6-4c613fbfa0da_666x1000.jpeg
Well, if you’ve read his student Paramahansa Yogananda’s spellbinding Autobiography of a Yogi, you won’t need much convincing that Sri Yukteswar was a remarkable human being. Yogananda, an extraordinary figure himself, revered his guru, who initiated him into the technique of Kriya Yoga, a powerful pranayama technique said to rapidly accelerate spiritual development. Sri Yukteswar himself learned it from his own guru, the householder Lahiri Mahasaya, who is said to have been initiated into the technique in a cave in the Himalayas by the legendary immortal yogi and guru Mahavatar Babaji.
In Autobiography, Yogananda describes Sri Yukteswar performing many miracles. He heals a man using nothing but his intent. He controls the weather. He reads students’ minds. Perhaps most memorably, he appears to Yogananda long after death, describing to him the architecture of the spirit world.
It’s up to the reader to decide how much credibility to give these accounts. I sense nothing but truth and earnestness from Yogananda, and take him at his word. Sri Yukteswar wasn’t just “some guy”—he was a man of astonishing abilities, as well as an extremely accomplished astrologer. (Oh, and he’s one of the luminaries who appears on the front cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, in the very top-left of the image, right next to Aleister Crowley, in case a Beatles endorsement helps.)
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!s8CK!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa5ea042b-dfa1-4254-ae9b-c8ca471e9189_341x409.jpeg
Of course, I realise those arguments won’t convince everyone. Nor should they. What’s more important is the explanatory power of Sri Yukteswar’s yuga cycle. I’ve found that his framework explains certain facts about the broad sweep of history better than any other, including the remarkable advancement of certain ancient peoples—like the Egyptians.
The Great Pyramid and the Dwapara Yuga
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!BfmG!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdf040f62-2271-4f30-8ec7-859ce91aca0c_2000x1125.jpeg
There’s a controversy raging today over a problem of history, clear to anyone with a reasonably open mind: the linear model of history, which sees knowledge, technological advancement and social justice progressively improving as time goes by, doesn’t match reality. A growing number of renegade researchers like Graham Hancock, Robert Bauval and John Anthony West have engaged in deep studies of ancient cultures without feeling bound to the conclusions considered “acceptable” by mainstream academia. They’ve judged that ancient people were far more advanced than we’re generally led to believe, and knew many things we’ve forgotten today. With help from the modern podcast circuit, their arguments are finding a wide audience today, and I think that’s simply because the mainstream narrative stands on very shaky ground.
Foremost among the many “inconvenient” truths of history is the existence of a singular structure: the Great Pyramid of Giza, conventionally estimated to have been constructed around 2500 BC. The first mystery we have to deal with when it comes to the Great Pyramid is how it was built at all. It’s composed of more than 2.3 million limestone and granite blocks. Some weigh as much of 100,000 pounds and were transported to the site from as far away as 500 miles.
The Great Pyramid was also constructed with incredible precision. Its base deviates from being perfectly level around its entire circumference by less than 7/8ths of an inch. Selbie and Steinmetz quote Christopher Dunn, an engineer and author of The Giza Power Plant: “The bald fact is that the Great Pyramid — by any standard old or new — is the largest and most accurately constructed building in the world.” As more and more people are screaming from the rooftops these days, this structure could not have been built by so-called “primitive” people.
What’s more, Dunn believes the pyramid had a very specific purpose. He argues that its dimensions and weight were perfectly calibrated to resonate with the seismic pulse of the Earth, which is generated by tiny shifts in its crust. Dunn argues that using the piezoelectric properties of quartz, the Great Pyramid could literally generate electricity. In other words, it was a kind of power plant. Of course, Dunn’s is just one of many wild theories about the true purpose of this remarkable structure. But many of them, perhaps most of them, hold that the Great Pyramid harnessed principles of frequency and resonance in some way we have yet to fully understand.
This idea becomes particularly interesting in light of Sri Yukteswar’s timeline of the yugas. For him, the Dwapara Yuga began in 3100 BC with a 200-year “dawn”, which ended in 2900 BC, not long before the Great Pyramid was built. Again, the essence of the Dwapara Yuga, the Energy Age, is that we become able to comprehend “the fine matters or electricities and their attributes which are the creating principles of the external world.”
What’s more, we need an explanation for the fact that over time, useful and potentially empowering knowledge was lost. Most scholars believe the Great Pyramid was constructed during the reign of the Pharaoh Khufu, in around 2580 to 2560 BC. Yet it’s inarguably the most advanced structure built over the entire span of Egyptian civilisation. Later pyramids stand today in ruins, while the Great Pyramid maintains its form.
In Sri Yukteswar’s timeline, the construction of the pyramid would have come close to the start of the Energy Age, after descent from a higher age, the Treta Yuga or “Mental Age”. While the linear model of progressive history is troubled by the existence of the Great Pyramid, Sri Yukteswar’s model comes into its own. Such a feat was possible because, well, we were smarter back then. What’s more, we had abilities we eventually lost—magical abilities.
Magic in the Dwapara Yuga
Selbie and Steinmetz write that the Dwapara Yuga is characterised by three things: awakened intellect, self-interest, and energy awareness. Where Treta Yuga people had direct perception of how thoughts create reality, Dwapara Yuga people perceived and manipulated energy, a step down in potency.
Nothing as imposing or impressive as the Great Pyramid had been constructed in earlier times, not because human beings hadn’t been able to, but because they hadn’t needed to. Selbie and Steinmetz say this: “If the ancient Egyptians understood the laws of energy yet did not have an established tradition of mechanical technology (not needed in Treta Yuga), harnessing the earth’s seismic power in this profoundly simple and ecologically harmonious manner may well have been the natural result.”
The transition into Dwapara Yuga, from 3400 to 2900 BC, also saw the emergence of the first writing system, in the form of Sumerian cuneiform, which has been dated to about 3200 BC. Why might a technology like writing emerge at the transition between the Mental Age and the Energy Age? Well, bear in mind that for Sri Yukteswar, this transition involved a degradation of our mental abilities. Writing things down is what you resort to when memory fails you.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!bJah!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F214b7f1c-5602-41a9-bd15-0e806020d4d9_1600x1135.jpeg
During the same period, we also find evidence of the first large cities. This, together with the emergence of writing, has led mainstream scholars to conclude that “civilisation” began in the 4th millennium BC, around the time of the transition into the Energy Age.
But again, is the building of cities really a sign of advancement? Selbie and Steinmetz argue that one of the developments that characterise the Dwapara Yuga is rising self-interest. Self-interest expresses itself in a particular human activity: commerce. That’s what cities are for—they’re centres of trade.
Intriguingly, according to Sri Yukteswar the transition from ascending Kali Yuga into our current age, the ascending Dwapara Yuga, came between 1600 and 1900. We’d expect to see a rise in self-interest over that time—check—which would express itself in growth in the activity of trade and urbanisation—check. Here’s a chart showing the growth of the urban population over recent centuries:
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!u696!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2d31a695-b1a1-4d2e-87b5-ac0670d53336_2560x1183.jpeg
Sri Yukteswar’s model of time, and only his, elegantly explains why urbanisation first appears in the 4th millennium BC—and is soaring again now.
The pursuit of self-interest aside, at the essence of the Dwapara Yuga is the awareness of energy. According to Sri Yukteswar, the full transition into the Energy Age ended in 1900. At that time, one of the world’s most famous people was the very master of electricity himself, the genius inventor Nikola Tesla. Consider what are probably his best-known words: “If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.” Such figures tend to be exquisitely in touch with the times.
Traditional practices that manipulate energy, like acupuncture and qigong, date to the descending Dwapara Yuga. Interesting, then, that in our own ascending Dwapara Yuga, they’re experiencing a revival today—as is another facet of life in Dwapara Yuga: the practice of magic.
The ancient Egyptians are the very archetype of the magical civilisation. The occult and magical practices in huge swatches of the modern world can be traced back to them. Indeed, through the Hermetica, Egyptian magic drove a transformation of European society in the early modern era, ultimately leading to the birth of modern science. Later in the series, we’ll see how this happened when, and only when, the astrological time was right.
You might well ask—if the Dwapara Yuga is characterised by the widespread practice of magic, why isn’t magic more popular in our own ascending Energy Age?
I’d suggest thinking this question through. The famous magician Dion Fortune defined magic as “the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will”. Now consider the sheer ubiquity today of advertising and corporate logos. Then ask: what is advertising, but a spell that attempts to change the consciousness of the target, in accordance with the will of the advertiser? What is a logo, but an intentionally charged sigil?
We live in a deeply magical age. That has only grown more true since the Dwapara Yuga began in 1900. Today, we’re seen less and less as objects to be compelled into action by force, more as energetic forces to be cajoled, deceived and manipulated. Yes, this is progress.
The core claim to reckon with in Sri Yukteswar’s framework is that we’ve already left the Kali Yuga behind. By his reckoning, this is not the worst of times. How do you feel about that?
In the next piece, we’ll think more about the Kali Yuga, from 700 BC to 1700 AD, a period that saw the birth of two major faiths, Christianity and Islam, best described as “salvation religions”. They oriented followers away from this world, and towards the next one, demanding sacrifice, self-denial and martyrdom. Astrologers might sense here the flavour of the zodiacal sign of Pisces, and they’d be right. In the next piece, we’ll take this thread further, and explore how the Kali Yuga and the Age of Pisces were one and the same. "