We go round and round in the night...

THE HISTORY CYCLES

The cyclical Theory of History states that all events occur in cycles. There are several cyclical forms, some of which have been discovered in ancient India, Babylonia, and Greece. However, there are two main forms - one of cosmic cycles and one of cycles in human affairs. Many times, the two are intertwined and interdependent. Likewise, one must also distinguish those thinkers, like Plato and Aristotle, who believed in periodic cataclysms and beginnings, from those, like the Stoics, who believed in the return of identical events.

The notion of the rhythmical recurrence of cosmic events may well have developed out of the characteristics of the solar year, the periodicity of the lunar phases, the round of the seasons in regular order, and the life cycle of the individual human being. That the idea of birth, maturation, senility, death, followed by rebirth interested the ancients is shown by the many myths in which this series of events is figured.

Friedrich Nietzsche called the idea that each cycle repeated the characteristics of its predecessor the "Eternal Recurrence". Heraclitus said, “Fire lives the death of air, and air lives the death of fire; water lives the death of earth, earth that of water.” This pattern of elemental transmutations becomes even clearer in Aristotle's teachings that altercations occur in definitely described manners. Fire changes to air by losing its heat and earth changes to water by losing its dryness. But Aristotle does not say that at one time the cosmos was entirely composed of one of the four elements and then produced the others step by step, after which they all eventually returned to their primitive material unity. Each year brings about a similar series of elemental changes but, as the only permanence is change, the whole is permanent. Here we explore the world as it undoubtedly turns out to be self-destructive and self-regenerative, almost like the godly phoenix, which can indeed be a symbol of the process.

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