The Greeks have worked on this, they were searching for the “great cosmic year”, the rhythmic unit of universal evolution. From the era of Plato comes the idea of a universal cycle of 700.000 years, after which everything begins again. A later calculation to the II Century gives the universal year a duration of 9,977 earth years.
The conceptions of Plato and Aristotle are also cyclical. For Plato the perfect number by which universal events are governed is the “cycle of that which is created by God”. At the same time it is converted into one of the fundamental laws of ethics. Aristotle reaches similar results through very different roads: the mathematical and physical reflection. He said that there is only one perfect and lasting form of movement, that is circular, such as is shown by celestial bodies with the greatest purity. The transformation of terrestrial things are nothing more than movements in circles that are more or less perfect.
The Stoa that during 500 years has had a maximum influence on the intellectual formation of the Greeks and the Romans, proclaim the cyclical rhythm of universal events, explaining them as an eternal return to what is equal and not only similar. When stars return to being in the same position, a Socrates and Plato will appear again, and each individual person will be born again with the same friends and fellow citizens, he will suffer identically and will perform the same activities and, each city, place, nation and field will again arise in the same manner. Epicurean rejects as superstition the search for the great universal year and the theory of the third rebirth. “In nature, everything can return, but not in human life. Every human life is unique and individual and only for this reason does it have a value and an incentive. Man’s birth and death are accidents”.
In reference to this, says Richard Lewinsohn in his book “The revelation of the future”: “Now then, if millions of individual lives are not the same it would not be possible for entire repeated eras to exist for humanity”. It is true that the conception of the typical world of Epicurean does not leave an adequate margin for historical studies, because, what lessons could be taken out of history? The conception of Epicurean could be debated with multiple arguments. Isn’t man a living being? Is he exempt of the law that governs everything? I think that the mathematics of history of Dr. Deulofeu, that are facts, make the school of philosophy of the epicurean fall on the wayside.
In the Christian arena, in the beginnings of Christian literature, the 22 books of Saint Augustine “On the City of God”, it can be considered that the idea of the cyclical event is still alive. It is found with little change in the ecclesiastical texts: “.... that terrestrial states appear and succumb as a result of men’s sins”. In the “History of the Future” of the Jesuit Priest Antonio Vieira: “.... but at the end, there is always God’s kingdom, that which is terrestrial flows into the supernatural where everything is perfect and eternal, and where periodical catastrophes are already impossible”.
In the Renaissance the ancient example again starts the search for the great universal year. The word renaissance itself gives out a sense of cycle. The Italian humanist, Julio Cesar Scaliger, combines astronomical cycles with the tax collecting Roman period of fifteen years, period that is still used today as a unit of time in the papal bulla of 15 years. He thus obtains a cycle of 7,890 years. This cycle, that has the name of its discoverer: “The Julian Period”, had begun in the year 5,713 B.C., so that in Scaliger’s time in order to reach its end, 1,700 years would have to pass.
Nietzsche in his “Will to Power”, where he shows a magnificent song on the return to that which is equal, makes us understand that the cycle, for him, is no more than a vital principle, not a measurable magnitude. Other intellectuals of lesser importance found strength in their own era and showed that universal happenings are developed according to a fixed rhythm. In 1937 we have the case of a book that had the honor of being presented in the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of France by one of its members, “Les Rythmes dans l’Historie”, by Gaston Georgel. It is part of a cabalistic number upon discovering in a passage of the Bible the formula 77 x 7, being a product that is equal to 539. This figure provides the author with the key to the true knowledge of the course of history. Every 539 years, its duplicate (1,078) and its quadruplicate (2,156), also years derived from the same figure, historical events of the same type are to repeat themselves. Georgel, using his formula, has closely studies history and has discovered multiple parallels therein, some of them having small deviations, facts that, according to him, imply an affirmation of the thesis.
More persuasive parallels could be discovered using Sirius’ cycle of 1,461 years. If we go back as many years from the first world war, we arrive at the V Century, in which the expeditions of the Catalunian fields take place (451), the scene of the Battle of Marne, which is of extreme historical importance. Going back from the Second World War we arrive almost exactly to the year 476, considered to be the year on which the Western Roman Empire ends.
In the year 1725, the Neapolitan historian, Giambattista Vico, in his work “Principles of a New Science on the Common Nature of Nations”, he supports his views on an Egyptian formula and gives the names of “divine, heroic and human age”, to the three stages that every nation goes through.
In the cycle of state regimes that are founded in the Aristotelian division, democracy is followed by tyranny, the latter by the oligarchy, which is followed by democracy, and so forth. One hundred years after the appearance of “Scienza Nuova” by Vico, Augusto Compte considers that the European community goes through three spiritual phases: Theological, in which faith dominates everything; another Theological, in which critical reason acts harassed by doubt, and another, Positive in which the only determining factor of action is scientific knowledge.