26,000 Year Cycles ... What's This All About?

 

1. Astronomy (Modern Science)

• The Earth’s axis wobbles like a spinning top.

• This wobble completes one full circle in about 25,772 years (rounded to ~26,000).

• Astronomers call this the precession of the equinoxes.

• Hipparchus of Nicaea (2nd century BCE) was the first to measure it in the West, noting that star positions shifted slowly over centuries.

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2. Greek Tradition

• Plato referred to the cycle as the “Great Year”.

• Later writers (like Cicero and Macrobius) used the term to describe a vast cosmic cycle after which the heavens supposedly reset.

• While not all Greeks agreed on the length, later interpreters equated it with the precessional cycle.

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3. Egyptian

• Many researchers (e.g. Schwaller de Lubicz, Bauval) argue that Egyptian temple alignments and myths about Osiris/Isis encode awareness of precession.

• The “Zep Tepi” or First Time in Egyptian myth is sometimes linked to a full cycle of cosmic renewal.

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4. Hindu / Vedic (Yuga System)

• The Yuga cycles (Satya, Treta, Dvapara, Kali) were often mapped onto long cosmic ages.

• Some interpretations set the full cycle at 24,000 years, very close to precession.

• Sri Yukteswar (19th–20th century) explicitly tied the Yugas to the precessional cycle, arguing that humanity rises and falls in consciousness along with it.

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5. Mayan

• The Long Count Calendar (5,125-year baktun cycle) is often considered one-fifth of a larger ~26,000-year cycle.

• The Mayans tracked celestial motions with extreme precision, and some scholars argue they encoded precessional knowledge in their calendar round and myth of world ages.

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6. Indigenous / Mythic Echoes

• Hopi, Navajo, and other Native American traditions speak of world ages that succeed each other in a repeating cycle.

• Many myths worldwide tell of repeated destructions and renewals (floods, fires, rebirths), echoing precessional “turnings.”

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7. Esoteric & Modern Writers

• Madame Blavatsky (The Secret Doctrine, 1888) referenced precession as tied to human spiritual cycles.

• G.I. Gurdjieff spoke of cosmic cycles influencing human destiny.

• Law of One (Ra Material) explicitly links the 25,920-year precessional cycle to “major cycles” of spiritual evolution, three of which make up the ~75,000-year harvest window.

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So who speaks of it?

• Hard science: Astronomers since Hipparchus.

• Ancient myth: Greeks, Egyptians, Hindus, Mayans, and many Indigenous world-age traditions.

• Esoteric/modern: Blavatsky, Yukteswar, Ra, and others who connect precession with human consciousness cycles.