Cyclology

Cyclology is the predominately High Rostran belief that the specific month, day, and year upon which one is born has some bearing on one's fate and the natural panoply of one's talents and qualities in life. Originating in the Rostran Esotericist tradition, with its epicyclist cosmology, cyclology has little grounding in scientific fact but is more popular in ostensibly secular spaces than the other aspects of that faith.

Summary

The Manifold Standard Calendar, a system of measuring time inspired heavily by native Rostran timekeeping practices, consists of twelve months (three per season) consisting of thirty days each. This cycle coincides with the lunar illumination cycles and the radiation flux of the Northern Tesseract and Southern Tesseract, which, alongside the presence of factors like dustwisps and other weather, are the determinants of how the sky looks at a given point in the natural cycle.   Rostran Esotericists concieve of the years as processing along a seven year cycle, with each year in the cycle representing one of the seven defining aspects expressed by the points of the ritual sigil. In cyclology, each month is also assigned an aspect, with every eighth month being considered 'null' for the purposes of cyclomancy, resulting in a 24 month cycle. Similarly, each day is assigned an aspect, with every eighth day being considered 'null,' resulting in a 60 day cycle. The first day of 'Year 0' on the Manifold Standard Calendar - denoting the end of The Curved Time in common reckoning - is set as the beginning of each of these cycles for this purpose. It should be noted that there are no 'null' years, meaning that the pattern does not repeat for many, many years. To escry the potentialities of an individual person, vehicle, or other major endeavor, those who believe in Cyclology match up the day, month, and year in which the thing in question was born or put otherwise into motion with the concurrent state of each of these cycles. The yearly, monthly, and daily cycles denote the subject's best primary, secondary, and tertiary aspects respectively. Together, these apsects are referred to as the subject's 'alignment.'

Cultural Reception

Some individuals throughout the history of Esotericism have attempted to live up to their cyclological alignments more than others; some reject the notion of auspicious and inauspicious days entirely, while others seek to live up to their assigned aspects with varying degrees of success. When a revered ancestor's legacy strongly embodies their cyclological alignment, they often recieve much greater attention from religious scholars than they would otherwise, and ritual sigils executed in their honor appear much more frequently in household worship practices. Projects great and small, from the founding of communities to the christening of seagoing vessels, will often be scheduled well in advance in the hopes that they will fall on an auspicious alignment with a minimal number of null aspects. For example, a child born on a triple Ixa alignment is considered predestined for a religious vocation, so a couple where one or both spouses are members of the clergy may attempt to time birth of their firstborn in the hopes of passing on the family profession. Those with particularly strong belief in cyclology may prove difficult to work with as outsiders to the culture, however, as the cycles do not squarely match with the Standard Calendar and, as such, inauspicious 'double null' days may fall on important business days, foreign holidays, or otherwise joyous occasions.

In Art

A set of nested wheels with 7, 24, and 60 segments is a common motif in Esotericist architecture. Some temples feature crank-actuated mechanisms with these wheels in a mutually tangent configuration to visually represent the current cyclological state of the spiritual cosmogony.

Anatomy of a Ritual Sigil


Cover image: by BCGR_Wurth

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