Blavatsky on the Secret Cycles

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's Second Proposition Series · 18 pages

Eighteen pages drawn from "Cycles and Avataras" in Blavatsky Collected Writings volume XIV and from the material on the secret cycles, with a contents page listing its parts. *This file is labelled for a different series from the one it is listed under* — its own running heading throughout reads "Secret Doctrine's Third Proposition Series," while its closing page of suggested reading points back to the Second, which is the section that lists it.

The argument turns on a set of numbers. The record of a world-saviour's life is called emblematical and to be read for its mystic meaning, and the figures 432 are said to carry a cosmic evolutionary significance — the combination of 4, 3 and 2, with ciphers added according to the cycle or manvantara concerned, being described as pre-eminently Hindu and as remaining a secret even where some of its features are disclosed. Applied to the Christian narrative, the claim is direct: that the names and characters in the synoptic gospels and in John are not historical, and that the compilers, wanting to show their Master's birth as a cosmic and divinely pre-ordained event, attempted to coordinate it with the end of the secret cycle of 4,320. The rival explanation offered by others — a cycle of thirty-three solar years, seven months and seven days, the soli-lunar period in which the sun gains a year on the moon — is dismissed as fitting the facts no better. What the cycle actually relates to, on this account, is the pralaya of the races in their periodical dissolution, before which a special avatāra always descends and incarnates. The later pages turn technical, on the interchange of Krittika and Ashvini, on Bentley's opinion, and on a proof drawn from the Bhagavad Gita.

Read the full text (PDF, 0.9 MB, 18 pages)