the doctrine of Pythagoras as I have already revealed.[1] It was that of the mysteries and of all the sages of antiquity. Origen, who has opposed it, attributes it to the Egyptians, to the Pythagoreans, and to the disciples of Plato. It was contained in the sacred books of the Chaldeans, cited by Syncellus, under the title of livres géniques.[2] Seneca and Synesius have supported it as wholly in accordance with the spirit of the initiations.[3] What the ancients called the great year, was a consequence of this doctrine; for it was taught in the mysteries, that the Universe itself traversed, after a sequence of incalculable centuries, the same revolutions that it had already traversed, and brought around in the vast unfolding of its concentric spheres, as much for it as for the worlds which compose it, the succession of the four ages, the duration of which, relative to the nature of each being, immense for the Universal Man, is limited in the individual to what is called infancy, youth, manhood, and old age, and is represented on the earth by the fleeting seasons of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. This great year, thus conceived, has been common to all the peoples of the earth.[4] Cicero has plainly seen that it constituted the veritable basis of genethlialogy or the astrological science.ə Indeed if the future is composed of the past—that is, a thing already made, upon which the present is gradually unfolded as upon the circumference of a circle which has neither beginning nor end, it is evident that one can succeed, up to a certain point, to recognize it, whether by means of remembrance, by examining in the past, the picture of the whole revolution; or by means of prevision carrying the moral sight, more or less far, upon the route through which
- ↑ Dans mon 21e Examen, où j'ai cité particulièrement Diogène Laërce, l. viii., § 4.
- ↑ Syncell., p. 35.
- ↑ Senec., Quæst. Nat., l. iii., c. 30; Synes., De Provid., l. ii., sub fin.
- ↑ Plato, In Tim.; Ovid, Metam., l. xv., fab. v.; Senec., Epist., 35; Macrob., In Somn. Scip., l. ii., c. 2; Hist. des Voyages, t. xii., p. 529; Dupuis, Orig. des Cultes, l. v., in 12, p. 474; Bailly, Hist. de l'Astr. Anc., l. ix., § 15.
