Section XL. Secret Cycles.
The former five-year cycle comprehends sixty solar-sidereal months of 1800 days, sixty-one solar months (or 1830 days); sixty-two lunar months (or 1860 lunations), and sixty-seven lunar-asterismal months (or 1809 such days).
In his Kâla Sankalita, Col. Warren very properly regards these years as cycles; this they are, for each year has its own special importance as having some bearing upon, and connection with, specified events in individual horoscopes. He writes that in the cycle of sixty there
Are contained five cycles of twelve years, each supposed equal to one year of the planet (Brihaspati, or Jupiter) ... I mention this cycle because I found it mentioned in some books, but I know of no nation or tribe that reckons time after that account.[639]
The ignorance is very natural, since Col. Warren could know nothing of the secret cycles and their meanings. He adds:
The names of the five cycles or Yugas are: ... (1) Samvatsara, (2) Parivatsara, (3) Idvatsara, (4) Anuvatsara, (5) Udravatsara.
The learned Colonel might, however, have assured himself that there were “other nations” which had the same secret cycle, if he had but remembered that the Romans also had their lustrum of five years (from the Hindus undeniably) which represented the same period if multiplied by 12.[640] Near Benares there are still the relics of all these cycle-records, and of astronomical instruments cut out of solid rock, the everlasting records of Archaic Initiation, called by Sir W. Jones [pg 351] (as suggested by the prudent Brâhmans who surrounded him) old “back records” or reckonings. But in Stonehenge they exist to this day. Higgins says that Waltire found the barrows of tumuli surrounding this giant-temple represented accurately the situation and magnitude of the fixed stars, forming a complete orrery or planisphere. As Colebrooke found out, it is the cycle of the Vedas, recorded in the Jyotisha, one of the Vedângas, a treatise on Astronomy, which is the basis of calculation for all other cycles, larger or smaller;[641] and the Vedas were written in characters, archaic though they be, long after those natural observations, made by the aid of their gigantic mathematical and astronomical instruments, had been recorded by the men of the Third Race, who had received their instruction from the Dhyân Chohans. Maurice speaks truly when he observes that all such
Circular stone monuments were intended as durable symbols of astronomical cycles by a race who, not having, or for political reasons, forbidding the use of letters, had no other permanent method of instructing their disciples or handing down their knowledge to posterity.