In a book on prophecies I borrowed towards the end of May, I came across references to two unusual studies about history and cyclical patterns. History, for the purpose of this simple blog entry, I define as the course of events a nation or a group of nations sees unfold as a result of the decisions of individuals in power. The people at the helm are therefore those who shape the course of events we describe as ‘history’. Paradoxically, the advocates of cycles believe that both individuals and countries go – or some would write ‘evolve’ – through cycles. In one theory, these cycles consist of multiples of the same number, 360 (which is the number of degrees a circle has), and culminate in the number associated with the ‘zodiacal year’: 25,920 (which is equal to 360 times 72; 72 years being the time it takes our planet to ‘wobble’ along its axis of rotation by a single degree – see the quote at the bottom* of this page, which is taken from René Guénon’s article ‘Some remarks on the doctrine of cosmic cycles’, which was published in 1937 in the Journal of the Indian Society of Oriental Art, on pages 21 and 28).
This theory is explored in greater detail in Gaston Georgel’s Les rythmes dans l'histoire: historique et cycles secondaires, cycles cosmiques et synthèse de l'histoire, applications, the third edition of which was published in Milan, Italy, nearly half a century after the first, i.e. in 1981 versus 1937. However, it was in the first few paragraphs of the second book (Georges Barbarin’s Les destins occultes de l'humanité, Paris, 1946) that I read the paragraph which prompted me to write this short entry.
Here is a rather literal translation into English, so as to preserve the original syntax of Georges Barbarin’s text:
As early as 1863, as Professor Raphaël Dubois wrote in La Vie Universelle, the Belgian captain Brück maintained that historical facts present 4-year-, 10-year-, thirty-year-, 500-year- and a thousand-year-long cycles, all related to magneto-electric telluric variations. Drawing upon a considerable number of facts, the Belgian commander S. Millard refined and developed the ideas of his compatriot and established the possibility that the evolution of wars could be determined scientifically. In France, Colonel Delauney showed, for his part, that our colonial pushes and our great wars have an absolutely periodic character and are related to sunspots. Furthermore, interesting research has been carried out by Abbé Moreux, director of the Bourges Observatory, particularly with regard to the relationships existing between the variations of sunspots, the magneto-electric currents of the globe, the aurora borealis and the alternation of peace and war. Similar observations have been made for other scourges, such as cholera and the plague, famines, economic and financial crises, human migration, etc.
As
I
think that when I first went through the text whilst walking uphill
(the public counters of the University library of Lausanne are open
until 8pm on Thursdays and on a nice evening it makes for a pleasant
walk back home to snail upwards at a leisurely gait with a book in my
hands), I misread this passage and wrongly assumed that this professor
Dubois published his article in 1863 when it was Rémy Brück who did
so. For Prof. Dubois to have done so, he would have had to have been a
rather precocious science writer because he was born in 1849 and he
died in 1929. Furthermore, according to the French National library,
the first issue of La
Vie Universelle (a quarterly publication of the
International Biocosmic Association) came out in May 1906 and
the last in 1939 (https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb328894437).
By
perusing through some of the works of Raphaël Dubois, I was able
to find that he was quite fond of the idea that history might
develop in a periodic
(the first meaning of which is ‘Of
or pertaining to the revolution of a celestial object in its
orbit.’) fashion (e.g. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k56006631/f51.item)
and that the quote had appeared in a
shorter form in an anti-war pamphlet he published in 1919, La paix par la science et le
protectorat rhénan (see https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k33778465/f9.highres
and https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k33778465/f10.highre)
and that he then expanded it (to correspond almost verbatim to
the quote used by Georges Barbarin, with the exception
of the very last phrase about human migration) on pages 46
and 47
of Dubois’s Lettres
sur le pacifisme scientifique et l'anticinèse,
second edition, Paris, 1927.
* their [Réné Guénon was referring to ‘cyclical periods’] principal base in the cosmical order is the astronomical period of the precession of the equinoxes, the duration of which is 25920 years, so that the equinoxial points arc deplaced by one degree in 72 years. This number 72 is precisely a sub-multiple of 4320 = 72 X 60, and 4320 in its turn is a sub-multiple of 25920= 4320 X 6 ; the fact that with regard to the precession of the equinoxes one finds again the numbers bound up with the division of the circle, is still another proof of the truly natural character of the latter. p.27
Link
http://www.the-savoisien.com/blog/index.php?post/Georges-Barbarin-Les-destins-occultes-de-l-humanite (found on https://duckduckgo.com/?q="Georges+Barbarin")