Apokatastasis

a-po-ka-ta-STA-sis

greek: ἀποκατάστασις (Apokatastasis)

Definition

Apokatastasis (Greek for "restoration" or "return") is the Stoic-Hellenistic idea of the Great Year — an enormous cosmic cycle in which all seven traditional planets return to their starting positions at the same moment, putting the universe back into its original state. The word also names a narrower Egyptian astronomical event: the moment the heliacal rising of Sirius — its first dawn reappearance after a season hidden — once again falls on day one of the civil year, completing a Sothic cycle of roughly 1,461 years.

In Tradition

In Stoic thought, and in the Hellenistic-era astrology that took the idea up, apokatastasis grounds a picture of time as cyclical: history eventually reaches a layout identical to its origin, and a fresh cycle begins. The idea sits underneath Hellenistic notions of cosmic recurrence, planetary periods, and the predictive weight given to long-cycle techniques.

In Practice

Hellenistic astrologers and philosophers reach for apokatastasis when they think about the outer limit of astrological time — the span after which planetary configurations would exactly repeat. Censorinus's De die natali (139 CE) records the most famous historical apokatastasis: the heliacal rising of Sirius landing on the first day of the Egyptian civil calendar, which fixes a Sothic-cycle anchor of around 1,461 years. The same vocabulary turns up in Hermetic and later Neoplatonic discussions of cosmic renewal, and in modern reception it is sometimes invoked to motivate the very long planetary periods — Saturn-Jupiter conjunction cycles, Great Year estimates — that Renaissance and modern astrologers inherited from the Hellenistic stream.

Historical Origin

Apokatastasis is attested in Stoic cosmology (Chrysippus, 3rd century BCE), in the Egyptian-astronomical tradition Censorinus reports (De die natali, 139 CE), and in the Hermetica (Greek originals, 1st-3rd century CE). Egyptian Sothic-cycle reckoning is documented by Lepsius (1849) and worked out further in modern critical editions of Censorinus and the Hermetica.

Etymology

Origin: Greek. Meaning: Restoration, return, re-establishment.

Further Reading

  • Brian Copenhaver, Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius
  • Marshall Clagett, Ancient Egyptian Science (Vol. II: Calendars, Clocks, and Astronomy)