The Ancient Prophecy of Endings

Every civilization that has ever existed has told the same story. The world will end. Not might. Will.

The details differ. The timelines vary. But the core narrative remains. Creation is temporary. Order is fragile. And one day, everything returns to chaos.

The question is not whether they believed it. The question is why they all believed the same thing.

In ancient Mesopotamia, the universe was understood as a balance between chaos and order. The gods had fought to establish stability. But that stability was not permanent. When the balance tipped, the world would dissolve back into the primordial void.

It was not described as punishment. It was described as inevitability.

In Hinduism, the concept was refined into a precise cosmological framework. Time was not linear. It was cyclical. The universe moved through yugas. Ages of varying moral and spiritual quality.

Satya Yuga. The golden age. When gods walked among mortals. When truth and righteousness governed existence.

Treta Yuga. The age of decline. When virtue began to erode.

Dvapara Yuga. The age of imbalance. When darkness and light contested for dominance.

And finally, Kali Yuga. The age of corruption. The age of collapse. The age we are living in now.

According to Hindu cosmology, each cycle lasts tens of thousands of years. And at the end of Kali Yuga, the world does not simply continue. It is destroyed. Cleansed. Reset.

Vishnu, the preserver, takes his tenth and final avatar. Kalki. A warrior on a white horse, wielding a flaming sword. He arrives not to save the world, but to end it. To eradicate the corruption so completely that a new golden age can begin.

And then the cycle repeats.

But the yugas are not the final cycle. They are small cycles within a much larger one. The Maha Pralaya. The Great Dissolution.

Every 4.32 billion years, the entire universe collapses. Not just the physical plane. Not just Earth. Everything. The heavens. The lower realms. Even the gods.

All of it dissolves back into Brahman. The infinite source. The singularity from which all things emerge and to which all things return.

And then, after an immeasurable period of non-existence, Brahman exhales. And creation begins again.

The Mayans understood this too. Their calendar did not measure time as a straight line from past to future. It measured cycles. The end of one age and the beginning of another.

December 21, 2012, was not the end of the world. It was the end of the 13th Baktun. A 5,125-year cycle. The completion of one rotation in a much larger cosmic wheel.

Western media misunderstood it. Sensationalized it. Predicted apocalypse. But the Maya never claimed the world would end. Only that the age would change.

Because they, like the Hindus, believed in cyclical time. Creation. Destruction. Renewal. Over and over.

The Abrahamic religions adopted a different model. Linear time. A beginning. A middle. An end.

In Judaism, the apocalypse is tied to the coming of the Messiah. Not a god. Not an avatar. A human king. Descended from David. Who will rebuild the Third Temple in Jerusalem, defeat the forces of evil, and establish the Kingdom of God on Earth.

After that, the final judgment. The resurrection of the dead. The righteous rewarded. The wicked punished.

Christianity inherited this framework but changed the protagonist. The Messiah was no longer awaited. He had already come. And he would return.

The Second Coming. The final battle between Christ and the Antichrist. The establishment of the Millennial Kingdom. And then, the end of the world as it exists. The creation of a new heaven and a new earth.

Islam refined the narrative further. The Quran speaks of Qiyamah. The Day of Resurrection. A day when the universe itself will be dismantled.

The sun will be darkened. The stars will fall. The mountains will crumble. The seas will boil. The sky will split apart like a scroll being rolled up.

And then, all souls will stand before God. Judged. Sorted. Sent to their eternal destinations.

But buried within the Quran are verses that suggest something more profound than a simple end.

On that Day, the earth will be changed into another earth, and the heavens as well.

The Day when We will fold up the heaven like the folding of a written scroll. As We began the first creation, We will repeat it.

Not an ending. A reset. A return to the beginning. A new cycle.

The ancient texts do not describe a single apocalypse. They describe a process. A pattern. A mechanism built into the fabric of existence.

The Kabbalists understood this. In Jewish mysticism, creation is not a one-time event. It is an ongoing process of divine emanation. God pours light into existence. But the vessels that contain that light are fragile. Over time, they crack. Shatter. And when they do, the universe collapses back into the Ein Sof. The Infinite.

And then, it begins again.

The Hermetic texts describe the same principle. As above, so below. The universe breathes. Expansion. Contraction. Birth. Death. Rebirth.

The Norse myths speak of Ragnarok. The Twilight of the Gods. A final battle. The death of Odin. The destruction of the world tree. And then, from the ashes, a new world.

The Aztecs believed in five suns. Five ages. Each ending in cataclysm. We are living in the fifth. And it too will end.

Every culture. Every religion. Every mythology. The same story.

Why?

If these were isolated beliefs, they could be dismissed as coincidence. But they are not isolated. They are universal.

Either humanity has an innate psychological need to imagine an ending, or these stories are reflections of something real. Something remembered. Something encoded in the collective unconscious of our species.

Because if the ancients were right, then the apocalypse is not a future event.

It is a recurring one.

And we are simply waiting for the next turn of the wheel.