There are two fundamentally different ways of situating oneself in time. One says: time has a beginning, a middle and an end — a creation, a history of salvation, a final judgment. This is the linear time of the great Abrahamic monotheistic religions. The other says: time is made of repeating cycles — seasons, sacrifices, generations, cosmic ages. This is the time of the civilization of the 7 Rivers and of the Rig Veda. These two visions of time are not merely different cosmologies: they produce radically distinct cultures, ethics and relationships to the world.
The Indus civilization has no temples, no revealed divine law, no hell, no obligation of faith. What I have read in the archaeological sources and in the Rig Veda sketches a society organized around the rhythm of the seasons and the rituals corresponding to them. Each spring, the Agnistoma sacrifice brings together heads of household. This is not an obligation under pain of damnation — it is a participation in the cosmic rhythm. The head of household must offer at least one sacrifice per year, during the spring full moons. This ritual system structures collective time in a cyclical manner: one returns each year to the same point on the cosmic calendar, one renews the bond with fire, with water, with the gods.
Linear time, on the other hand, is fundamentally historical. It needs an absolute beginning — Creation — and an end — the Judgment or the final Nirvana. Between the two, history is a path: one progresses toward something, or moves away from it. Sin, the Fall, redemption: all these concepts presuppose an oriented temporality, an arrow of time with a moral direction. In this framework, what is past does not return, and what is to come is definitive.
Vedic thought proposes something structurally different. The Brahman — the ultimate reality of which the Rig Veda speaks — is beyond time. It is not in time; it is that within which time unfolds. The cycles — daily, lunar, annual, cosmic — are expressions of this timeless reality. As Coomaraswamy writes, whom I encountered in my readings on this period, the Vedic perspective is that eternity is not an infinite duration but a dimension perpendicular to time. What we call the present is the only point of contact with that eternity.
What I take from all this is that the civilization of the 7 Rivers lived in a relationship to time that was neither the eschatological urgency of monotheism nor the linear progress of modernity. It was a relationship of participation: one inscribes oneself in cycles larger than oneself, one contributes to them through ritual, and these cycles mean that one always returns to the same point — but transformed. The Agnistoma of this spring is not identical to that of the previous year, even if it follows the same forms. There is repetition with variation, a return that is never a simple recommencement.
This vision has profound practical consequences. In a world of cyclical time, adaptation to climate change — such as that which Indus farmers carried out after 2200 BCE by shifting from wheat to millet and rice — is not a catastrophe or divine punishment, but an adjustment to the cycle. One observes, one adapts, one begins again. There is no narrative of fault or punishment. There is a pragmatic readjustment within the framework of a world that turns.
Linear time produces eschatological anxiety — fear of the end, a sense of urgency, the guilt of delay. Cyclical time produces something else: a confidence in return, a capacity to wait, a cosmic patience. These two relationships to time coexist in our contemporary world, often without recognizing each other. I believe that understanding Vedic cyclical time, as it manifests in the rituals and philosophy of the 7 Rivers, can offer a precious resource to a modernity exhausted by its own linearity.
