Taking the Wheel of the Year a Step Further

Okay, so that photo has nothing to do with my article but I just like it. LOL. So I have always been into looking at society and culture and had an anthropology/sociology driven curiosity. This has led me to study generations, societies, cultures, history, and the like. I am also a witchy sort of person and have studied Wicca for 21 years. I have celebrated the wheel of the year for many years and adopted the philosophy that most Wiccans have, that life and nature are cyclical in nature, reoccurring through time on a repeat cycle that happens again and again. With some luck and applied wisdom, you create a spiral that progresses toward or away from something in a repeating pattern rather than staying on course without change.

This led me to consider the wheel of the year as something that applied in other areas of life. Of course, this may be old hat to some
(scientists) but for me it explained a lot of things and added perspective to even more. Consider if you will, that more than just the seasons take place on a wheel. Consider politics, government, economy, generations, religions, and philosophy on a wheel cycle just to start with a few of the biggies. Of course, consider this wheel theory/cycle theory as one that can be turned into a spiral if we look at the spiral as one that occurs when wisdom is applied to repeating cycles in order to evolve rather than being caught in a movie on repeat with no change.

Wikipedia.org states that “ Social cycle theories are among the earliest social theories in sociology. Unlike the theory of social evolutionism, which views the evolution of society and human history as progressing in some new, unique direction(s), sociological cycle theory argues that events and stages of society and history generally repeat themselves in cycles. Such a theory does not necessarily imply that there cannot be any social progress. In the early theory of Sima Qian and the more recent theories of long-term (“secular”) political-demographic cycles[1] as well as in the Varnic theory of P.R. Sarkar an explicit accounting is made of social progress.”

As you look at history, and begin to study philosophy, generations, and societal shifts such as religion, politics, and government you start to see that like the old adage suggests, history repeats itself. This led me to ponder whether having only recorded history to go by, if more than what we actually know has repeated in many other areas of pre-history (the time before recorded history).

Another example of repeating cycles is the cycle of generations. According to an entry in Wikipedia.org “The Strauss–Howe generational theory, also known as the Fourth Turning theory or simply the Fourth Turning, which was created by authors William Strauss and Neil Howe, describes a theorized recurring generation cycle in American history. According to the theory, historical events are associated with recurring generational personas (archetypes). Each generational persona unleashes a new era (called a turning) lasting around 20–22 years, in which a new social, political, and economic climate exists. They are part of a larger cyclical “saeculum” (a long human life, which usually spans between 80 and 90 years, although some saecula have lasted longer). The theory states that after every saeculum, a crisis recurs in American history, which is followed by a recovery (high). During this recovery, institutions and communitarian values are strong. Ultimately, succeeding generational archetypes attack and weaken institutions in the name of autonomy and individualism, which ultimately creates a tumultuous political environment that ripens conditions for another crisis.”

Now let’s take a look at government and political cycles. On the website nber.org, they discuss a theory of political and economic cycles in which they state that “We develop a theoretical framework in which political and economic cycles are jointly determined. These cycles are driven by three political economy frictions: policymakers are non-benevolent, they cannot commit to policies, and they have private information about the tightness of the government budget and rents. Our first main result is that, in the best sustainable equilibrium, distortions to production emerge and never disappear even in the long run. This result is driven by the interaction of limited commitment and private information on the side of the policymaker, since in the absence of either friction, there are no long run distortions to production. Our second result is that, if the variance of private information is sufficiently large, there is equilibrium turnover in the long run so that political cycles never disappear. Finally, our model produces a long run distribution of taxes, distortions, and turnover, where these all respond persistently to temporary economic shocks. We show that the model’s predictions are consistent with the empirical evidence on the interaction of political and economic cycles in developing countries.”

Taking a look at types of government, according to an entry in wikipedia.org it states “The Kyklos (Ancient Greek: κύκλος, IPA: [kýklos], “cycle”) is a term used by some classical Greek authors to describe what they saw as the political cycle of governments in a society. It was roughly based on the history of Greek city-states in the same period. The concept of “The Kyklos” is first elaborated in Plato’s Republic, chapters VIII and IX. Polybius calls it the anakyklosis or “anacyclosis”.[1]

According to Polybius, who has the most fully developed version of the cycle, it rotates through the three basic forms of government, democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy and the three degenerate forms of each of these governments ochlocracy, oligarchy, and tyranny. Originally society is in ochlocracy but the strongest figure emerges and sets up a monarchy. The monarch’s descendants, who because of their family’s power lack virtue, become despots and the monarchy degenerates into a tyranny. Because of the excesses of the ruler the tyranny is overthrown by the leading citizens of the state who set up an aristocracy. They too quickly forget about virtue and the state becomes an oligarchy. These oligarchs are overthrown by the people who set up a democracy. Democracy soon becomes corrupt and degenerates into ochlocracy, beginning the cycle anew.”

Now let’s take a look at religious cycles and a paper titled Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe Volume 36|Issue 4 Article 97–2016 Review of Sergeev’s “Theory of Religious Cycles: Tradition, Modernity, and the Bahá’í Faith” by Natalya Shelkovaya which states that “The main and very productive idea of the theory of religious cycles by M. Sergeevin Theory of Religious Cycles is to present religion as a living organism, which, like any living organism, passes through some stages: birth, development, maturity, dying and death. Sergeev identifies six stages (phases) of religion: formative, orthodox, classical, reformist, critical and post-critical. The process of formation of religious teachings, sacred texts, and sacred traditions takes place in the formative stages. ‘The orthodox phase cements the traditional foundations of religion by fighting heretical movements and their alternative scriptural interpretations. The classical phase reformulates sacred tradition by adding new interpretations to the canon. Reformists, on the contrary, purify tradition from the accumulated interpretations in order to return to the core of sacred teachings and restore the original faith’(7). The critical phase comes when immutable canons and traditions are crumbling, and the impression is that this religion is dying. But, as in nature, there is a continuous cycle of death and new birth. As in a living organism, the birth of a new spiritual tradition follows the apparent ‘death’ of its mother faith. Moreover, both the ‘mother religion’ and the ‘new-born faith’ continue to evolve. According to Sergeev’s theory, structural and systemic crises arise at certain stages of the development of religion and are the driving force behind its evolution. If the structural crises lead to modifications of religion, then the systemic crises lead to the emergence of a new faith from the depths of the old one. According to this approach, every crisis of religion is an impulse for the further development of religion and is similar to the ‘birth pangs’ in living organisms, which are frequently painful, but lead to the birth of a new organism”.

So my point to this article is that when you consider the things that are going on in the world, history repeats itself. Sometimes the view of things repeating can be negative, but not necessarily. Wisdom comes when you learn from the past. In any situation, what we are dealing with, has happened to someone, sometime before. It is this realization that there is nothing new about it that gives me comfort. I find that in this perspective, I can learn from my own mistakes and experience, as well as those that have come before me. There are many lessons in the past that we do not notice because we tend to think that things are always happening to us for the first time in history. That is not usually the case. This has happened before to someone at some point. Very little of what happens to the world is new.

For perspective, the virus we are facing at this moment in history, while the strain may be new, the crisis is not. Climate change cycles are also not new. Kevin Krajick on May 7, 2018 states that there are cycles in climate change. While our contribution to it may be new with technology, the cycles of impending doom to our planet are not new. The article on https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2018/05/07/milankovitch-cycles-deep-time/ states that “In the 1970s, scientists showed that that Milankovitch cycles have driven repeated warming and cooling of the planet, and thus the waxing and waning of ice ages over the last few million years. But they are still arguing over inconsistencies in data over that period, and the cycles’ relationships to rising and falling levels of carbon dioxide, the other apparent master climate control. Understanding how this all worked in the more distant past is even harder. For one, the frequencies of the shorter cycles have almost certainly changed over time, but no one can say exactly by how much. For another, the cycles are all constantly proceeding against each other. Sometimes some are out of phase with others, and they tend to cancel each other out; at others, several may line up to initiate sudden, drastic changes. Making the calculation of how they all might fit together gets harder the further back you go.

Kent and Olsen say that every 405,000 years, when orbital eccentricity is at its peak, seasonal differences caused by shorter cycles will become more intense; summers are hotter and winters colder; dry times drier, wet times wetter. The opposite will be true 202,500 years later, when the orbit is at its most circular. During the late Triassic, for poorly understood reasons, the Earth was much warmer than it is now through many cycles, and there was little to no glaciation. Then, the 405,000-year cycle showed up in strongly alternating wet and dry periods. Precipitation peaked when the orbit was at its most eccentric, producing deep lakes that left layers of black shale in eastern North America. When the orbit was most circular, things dried up, leaving lighter layers of soil exposed to the air.”

For me there is a bit of comfort in knowing that all things we believe are new are actually old. If we turn to history, we find the comfort of familiarity even though we ourselves are not familiar with the cycles, they were at some point, familiar to humans. It is unfortunate that we don’t have recorded data going back further into history than we do but there is technology out there being utilized to gain knowledge from the past. It is this knowledge that we glean by studying history that I find extraordinary. It was when I realized that all things have happened before and if I just dig deep enough I will find the wisdom of ancestors that I may apply to my current situation. Be it a negative lesson or a positive one, I can make use of their lives to deal with mine. It’s kind of like my mother always told me, “times don’t change, only names and particular details change.”