08.14.11
Confusion over the cycles of the Great Year
I have not read your book, but I am puzzled as to why you would cite WHEE in that text. You could hardly have read that book. WHEE (World History and the Eonic Effect) makes unmistakably clear its rejection of any periodization based on cycles of the Great Year (which, to be charitable, transcend or predate their astrological exploitations and have significance for ancient thought systems, but none for modernity). The lore of the Great Year is not quite as daft as astrology, because it is a perfectly valid delineation of a cosmic clock, albeit one that fails to keep exact time! It is when they are applied to historical ages that they become deleterious. If I have referred to historical epochs at all it is because the ‘eonic effect’, by showing something else, shows how a cyclical pattern in world history is real, within the limits of the data which shows three historical epochs, de facto intervals based, not on cosmology, but on simply empirical discovery. Whether those cycles can be generalized is unknown. Since two and half cycles is not enough to generalize, I simply refrain from trying. I don’t need such a generalization (although an extension to the Neolithic is probably right).
I have categorically rejected the notion of an ‘Aquarian’ age, and any attempts to correlate a previous period to the Axial Age, etc… (Piscean, etc…)
The attempts to apply the Great Year to stages of history has always failed, for reasons I make clear.
The eonic shows why men of antiquity could be forgiven for suspecting an astronomical correlation: if you have incomplete information the guess at a correlation with the cycles of the Great Year can seem a revelation. The catch is that the period of the eonic effect (if that is real) would be 2400 years, while the cycles of the Great Year come out to about 2150. That slight difference iis fatal to the whole interpretation.
I would be interested in knowing what you make of WHEE in your book, but, again, I am baffled that you could cite such a critical work, bent on an expose of the Great Year lore.