As Brahmâ's Night is of equal duration, one Day and Night of Brahmâ would contain 8,640,000,000
360 of such days and nights make one Year of Brahmâ equal to 3,110,400,000,000
100 such Years constitute the whole period of Brahmâ's Age, i.e., Mahâ Kalpa, 311,040,000,000,000
These are the exoteric figures accepted throughout India, and they dovetail pretty nearly with those of the Secret Works. The latter, moreover, amplify them by a division into a number of Esoteric Cycles, never mentioned in Brâhmanical popular writings—one of which, the division of the Yugas into Racial Cycles, is given elsewhere as an instance. The rest, in their details, have of course never been made public. They are, nevertheless, known to every “Twice-born” (Dvija, or Initiated) Brâhman, and the Purânas contain references to some of them in veiled terms, which no matter-of-fact Orientalist has yet endeavoured to make out, nor could he if he would.
These sacred Astronomical Cycles are of immense antiquity, and most of them pertain, as stated, to the calculations of Nârada and Asuramaya. The latter has the reputation of a Giant and a Sorcerer. But the Antediluvian Giants—the Gibborim of the Bible—were not all bad or Sorcerers, as Christian Theology, which sees in every Occultist [pg 074] a servant of the Evil One, would have it; nor were they worse than many of “the faithful sons of the Church.” A Torquemada and a Catherine de Médicis certainly did more harm in their day, and in the name of their Master, than any Atlantean Giant or Demigod of antiquity ever did, whether named Cyclops, or Medusa, or yet the Orphic Titan, the anguipedal monster known as Ephialtes. There were good “giants” in days of old just as there are bad “pigmies” now; and the Râkshasas and Yakshas of Lankâ are no worse than our modern dynamiters, and certain Christian and civilized generals during modern wars. Nor are they myths.
He who would laugh at Briareus and Orion ought to abstain from going to, or even talking of, Carnac or Stonehenge.
remarks somewhere a modern writer.
As the Brâhmanical figures given above are approximately the basic calculations of our Esoteric System, the reader is requested to carefully keep them in mind.
In the Encyclopædia Britannica we find, as the last word of Science, that the antiquity of man is allowed to stretch only over “tens of thousands of years.” It becomes evident that as these figures may be made to fluctuate between 10,000 and 100,000, therefore they mean very little if anything, and only render still denser the darkness surrounding the question. Moreover, what matters it that Science places the birth of man in the “pre- or post- glacial drift,” if we are told at the same time that the so-called “Ice Age” is simply a long succession of ages which
Shaded without abrupt change of any kind into what is termed the human or recent period ... the overlapping of geological periods having been the rule from the beginning of time.[150]