Blavatsky on the Ancient Theory of Cycles

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's Second Proposition Series · 9 pages

Nine pages from The Theosophist of July 1880, republished in Blavatsky Collected Writings volume II, under the running heading "on the ebb and flow of human progress." The frontispiece is by Tanielle Childers.

The article's interest is that it reports a change of intellectual weather rather than merely asserting a doctrine. The theory of cycles, it says, was first propounded in Vedaism, taught by various Greek philosophers and defended by the theosophists of the Middle Ages, before being flatly denied by the wise men of the West — and it is now coming back into prominence, contrary to the usual rule, at the hands of the men of science themselves. What follows is a list of what was actually being counted at the time, and it is the most concrete part of the piece: statistics of wars; of the periods at which great men appear, taken as recognised by their contemporaries irrespective of later opinion; of development at large commercial centres; of the rise and fall of arts and sciences; of cataclysms such as earthquakes and epidemics; of periods of extraordinary cold and heat; and of the cycles of revolutions and of the rise and fall of empires — all subjected to minute mathematical calculation. Even the occult significance of numbers in the names of persons and cities is noted as receiving unwonted attention. The conclusion drawn is a double movement: while a great part of the educated public runs into atheism and scepticism, an evident current of mysticism is forcing its way into science. That is read as the sign of an irrepressible need in humanity to assure itself that there is a power paramount over matter — an occult law governing the world which we should study and adapt ourselves to rather than blindly deny and break our heads against.

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