1. India.
In India the doctrine appears in the form
of the four yugas, or ages, which make up the
mahâyuga (Great Year), a period lasting for
4,320,000
solar years. Each of the yugas differs
from its prede-
cessor much as the Ages of
Hesiod did, in that wicked-
ness and general
evil grow greater. The last yuga in
the series is
our own, and will come to an end with
a great conflagration followed by a
deluge. Between
each two ages there is a twilight and a dawn lasting
for one tenth of the duration of the preceding or fol-
lowing age. By the time the fourth age, the Kaliyuga,
has come to an end, the world is made
ready for the
beginning of a new Great Year. But Indian imagination
was such that the Great Years themselves were orga-
nized into groups of a thousand, called kalpas, a con-
cept which was introduced
at the time of the Emperor
Asoka, in the third century B.C. It should be
observed
that the yugas varied in length: the first,
the Satyayuga,
corresponding to the Golden Age in
Greek mythology,
was the longest; the Kaliyuga,
which began on 18
February 3102 B.C. will be the shortest. It is
interesting
that the four yugas have some of the
characteristics
of the human life-cycle in that the capacity for com-
mitting evils enters after childhood and
increases until
old age.
