About “The Wheel of Time”

When I started my first version of La rueda del tiempo (in English, "The Wheel of Time") I was motivated by very special circumstances. A most precious, monumental Hindu holy scripture, the Third Canto of Bhagavata Purana, had come to my hands as if by accident, and I was marveled to learn that in such remote times the Hindus were already familiar with such advanced concepts as the expansion of the universe and the space and time relativity, both of them notions that the modern scientists would only become acquainted with from the Twentieth Century onwards. But what really amazed me were the huge lengths of time mentioned in relation to cosmic cycles. For instance, the Kali-yuga o "Dark Era", a cycle which clearly corresponds to the Age of Iron of the Greek and Roman traditions, would actually extend over 432,000 terrestrial years, a tenth of a human cycle of 4'320,000 years; and if its start was in 3102 BC, as recorded by Hindu astronomical texts, its end would arrive as late as 429,000 AD, without doubt a reassuring date in times of enormous global crisis as we are living now, but which does not absolutely correlate with data from other traditions announcing an imminent end for our troubled civilization.

The answer to my deep uneasiness would come a bit later, mainly in the form of an extraordinary article by René Guénon: Some Remarks on the Doctrine de Cosmic Cycles, originally published in French in 1937. Thanks to it, I was finally satisfied that such figures were essentially symbolic, as suggested by the fact that they are all multiple of nine – which precisely makes them "circular" o cyclic – and that they must be basically assimilated to the great cycle of precession of equinoxes, a key period of time in the development of mankind whose traditional length, 25,920 common years, also is a multiple of nine. True, at the same time I concluded that in the light of the most recent scientific discoveries, such lengths could also be taken in an approximately literal manner, something that Guénon could not be acquainted with in his time; but for the moment, it was fairly enough.

Then, as if by magic, came to my hands other articles, some of them very important and others that were not quite so, which helped me do a preliminary study and publish a first edition in 1998. This first literary endeavor contained some elements that have remained till now, the main one being my own calculation of the final date of the Kali-yuga and, therefore, that of the current human cycle. An additional element was a footnote, according to which such final date would appear to have been drawn nearer by a degree of such cycle, or 72 years - a phenomenon referred to in the texts as an overlapping of yugas.

Soon thereafter, however, I realized that this first version in Spanish not only contained some historical errors but also wrong quotes, so I tried to upgrade it by means of a second edition which was published and circulated for some years until – its cycle concluded – I opted for retiring it from circulation.

It is this version that I am now translating into English, which will be hopefully finished by the end of August of the present year, and trying to upgrade. But this story does not end here and, even at the risk of boring my blog readers, I will be back with more – lots more – very soon.