This tells of the World, its beginning, its convulsions and its
ending, and thus embraces the three minor cycles of the cosmogonical,
the cataclysmal and the eschatological myths.

Nature is known to man only as _force_, which manifests itself in
_change_. He is so constituted that "the idea of an event, a change,
without the idea of a cause, is impossible" to him. But in passing from
the occurrence to its cause the idea of Time is unavoidable; it presents
itself as the one inevitable condition of change; itself unwearing, it
wears out all else; it includes all existence, as the greater does the
less; and as "causation is necessarily within existence,"[165-1] time is
beyond existence and includes the nonexistent as well. Whatever it
creates, it also destroys; and as even the gods are but existences, it
will swallow them. It renders vain all pleasures, and carries the balm
of a certain oblivion for all woes.

This oppressive sense of time, regarded not in its real meaning as one
of the conditions of perception, but as an active force destroying
thought as well as motion, recurs continually in mythology. To the
Greek, indefinite time as Cronos, was the oldest of the gods, begetting
numberless children, but with unnatural act consuming them again; while
definite time, as the Horae, were the blithe goddesses of the order in
nature and the recurrent seasons. Osiris, supreme god of the Egyptians,
was born of a yet older god, Sev, Time. Adonis and Aeon acknowledge the
same parentage.[165-2] The ancient Arab spoke of time (_dahr_, _zaman_)
as the final, defining principle; as uniting and separating all things;
and as swallowing one thing after another as the camel drains the water
from a trough.[166-1] In the Koran it is written: "Time alone destroys
us." Here and there, through the sacred songs of the Parsees, composed
long before Aristotle wrote, beyond all the dust and noise of the
everlasting conflict of good and evil, of Ahura Mazda and Anya-Mainyus,
there are glimpses of a deeper power, Zeruana Akerana, Eternal Duration,
unmoved by act or thought, in the face of which these bitter opponents
are seen to be children, brethren, "twin sons of Time."[166-2] The
Alexandrian Gnostics, in their explanations of Christian dogmas,
identify Aeon, infinite time, with God the Father, as the source and
fount of existence; not merely as a predicate of the highest, but the
Highest himself.

This heavy-weighing sense of the infinity of