AGES OF THE WORLD. The notion that the world or the cosmos, as a living thing, undergoes stages of development similar to those of a human individual is more than a poetic conceit; it is a ubiquitous belief, one that is frequently displayed in linguistic phenomena. For example, lying behind the English word world is an old Germanic compound, *wer-aldh, meaning "the life, or age, of man"; in Indo-European languages, the terms for "life" or "world" and terms designating temporal periods often shade off into each other, as in the Greek aion or the Latin saeculum.

Systems of Binary Periodization

The simplest form of world-periodization is a binary one: before and after, then and now, now and then. The distinction before and after is most frequently expressed in historicized form but often carries with it religious evaluation. Thus, while there are commemorative...