Well... that's pretty tough. I go with allegorical/symbolic approach with a touch of preterism and a touch of futurism.
Dunno what you mean by 'events happen repeatedly within "the" time.'
Are you familiar with the works of Joseph Campbell?
"A decisive, enormous leap out of the confines of all local histories and landscapes occurred in Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium b.c., during the period of the rise of the ziggurats, those storied temple towers, symbolic of the Axis Mundi, which are caricatured in the Bible as the Tower of Babel. The leap was from geography to cosmos, beyond the moon, whereupon the primal, limited, and limiting tribal manner of thought (which the Hebrew prophets chose deliberately to retain) was by the Gentile nations left behind. That was the period when writing was invented; also mathematical measurement, and the wheel. The priestly watchers of the night skies at that time were the first in the world to recognize that there is mathematical regularity in the celestial passages of the seven visible spheres - the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn - along the heaven-way of the Zodiac.
And with that, the idea dawned of a cosmic order, mathematically discoverable, which it should be the function of a governing priesthood to translate from its heavenly revelation into an order of civilized human life. The idea of the hieratic city-state made its appearance at that time, with kings and queens symbolically attired, enacting together with their courts an aristocratic mime in imitation of the celestial display, the king crowned as the moon or the sun, his queen and the other members of their court as planetary presences.
And when the celestial signs appeared that were interpreted as marking the end of an eon, the kings and queens, together with their courts, were ceremoniously buried alive. Sir James G. Frazer, in The Golden Bough (12 volumes, 1907-1915), published evidence from many parts of the world of the practice of such rites. Buried courts have been unearthed from Sumer and Egypt to China.
Some notion of the whole profoundly conceived, macro-microcosmic import of such courtly mimes may be gained from a consideration of the mathematics of the mythological and actual cycles of the calendars to which such rites were attached. For example, in the Hindu sacred epics and Puranas (popular tellings of ancient lore) the number of years reckoned to the present cycle of time, the so called Kali Yuga, is 432,000; the number reckoned in the "great cycle" (mahayuga) within which this yuga falls being 4,320,000.
But then reading one day in the Icelandic Eddas, I discovered that in Othin's (Wotan's) warrior hall, Valhöll, there were 540 doors, through each of which, on the "Day of the Wolf" (that is to say, at the end of the present cycle of time), there would pass 800 divine warriors to engage the antigods in a battle of mutual annihilation. 800 X 540 = 432,000. And so I asked myself how it might ever have come to pass that in tenth-to-thirteenth century Iceland the same number of years were reckoned to the present cycle of time as in India.
In Babylon, I then recalled, there had been a Chaldean priest, Berossos, who, c. 280 b.c., had rendered into Greek an account of the history and mythology of Babylonia, wherein it was told that between the time of the rise of the first city, Kish, and the coming of the Babylonian mythological flood (from which that of the Bible was taken), there elapsed 432,000 years, during which antediluvian era, ten kings reigned. Very long lives! Longer even than Methuselah's (Genesis 5:27), which had been of only 969.
So I turned to the Old Testament (Genesis 5) and counting the number of antediluvian patriarchs, Adam to Noah, discovered, of course, that there were ten. How many years? Adam was 130 years old when he begat Seth, who was 105 when he begat Enosh, and so on, to Noah, who was 600 years old when the flood came: to a grand total, from the first day of Adam's creation to the last drop of rain of Noah's flood, of 1,656 years. Any relation to 432,000? Julius Oppert, a distinguished Jewish Assyriologist of the last century, in 1877 presented before the Royal Society for Sciences in Göttingen a paper on "Dates in Genesis," in which it was shown that in 1,656 years there are 86,400 seven-day weeks. 86,400 / 2 = 43,200.
And so it appears that in the Book of Genesis there are two contrary theologies represented in relation to the Deluge. One is the old tribal, popular tale of a willful, personal creator-god, who saw that "the wickedness of man was great in the earth...and was sorry that he had made man on the earth...and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, 'I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the ground, man and beast and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them' " (Genesis 6:5-7).
The other idea, which is fundamentally contrast, is that of the disguised number, 86,400, which is a deeply hidden reference to the Gentile, Sumero-Babylonian, mathematical cosmology of the ever-revolving cycles of impersonal time, with whole universes and their populations coming into being, flowering for a season of 43,200 (432,000 or 4,320,000) years, dissolving back into the cosmic mother-sea to rest for an equal spell of years before returning, and so again, again, and again.
The Jews, it will be remembered, were for fifty years exiled from their capitol to Babylon (586-539 b.c), when the were subject, willy nilly, to Babylonian influences, so that although the popular, exoteric version of their Deluge legend is from the period of David's kingdom, tenth century or so b.c., the exquisitely secreted indication of a priestly knowledge, beyond that, of a larger, cyclic version of the legend - where the god himself would have come into being and gone out of being with the universe of which he was the lord - is post-Exilic, as are, also, the genealogical datings of Genesis chapter 5, which are so very nicely contrived to join the 600 years of Noah's age at the time of the flood to furnish a total of exactly 1,656."
[...]
"540 X 800 = 432,000, which in the Hindu Puranas, or "Chronicles of Ancient Lore," is the number of years reconned to the kali Yuga, the present cycle of time, which is to be the last and shortest of four cycles that together compose a "Great Cycle" or Mahayuga of 4,320,000 years, which is to end in a universal flood. By what coincidence can this number have appeared in both in India and in Iceland in association with a mythology of recurrent cycles of time? For as told further in the Eddas,
Now do I see the earth anew
Rise all green from the waves again;
The cataracts fall, and the eagle flies,
And fish he catches beneath the cliffs.
In wondrous beauty once again
Shall the golden tables stand mid the grass,
Which the gods owned in days of old.
The fields unsowed bear ripened fruit,
All ills grow better, and Baldr comes back;
Baldr and Hoth dwell in Hropt's battle-hall,
And the mighty gods.
One cannot help but think of the prophesied Day of Doom of the New Testament (Mark 13), which, according to Rev. 21:1, is to be followed by "a new heaven and a new earth; for the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more." Can the number 432 have been associated with the Biblical cycle as well as with the Hindu cycle and the Norse? We read further in the book of the revelation beheld on the Greek island of Patmos by St. John:
And there came unto me one of the seven angels which had the seven vials full of the seven last plagues, and talked with me, saying, Come hither, I will shew thee the bride, the Lamb's wife. And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and shewed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God, Having the glory of God: and her light was like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal; And had a wall great and high, and had twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels, and names written thereon, which are the names of the twelve tribes of the children of Israel: On the east three gates; on the north three gates; on the south three gates; and on the west three gates. And the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and in them the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb. And he that talked with me had a golden reed to measure the city, and the gates thereof, and the wall thereof. And the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth: and he measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand furlongs. The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal. And he measured the wall thereof, an hundred and forty and four cubits, according to the measure of a man, that is, of the angel. And the building of the wall of it was of jasper: and the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass. And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones. The first foundation was jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, a chalcedony; the fourth, an emerald; The fifth, sardonyx; the sixth, sardius; the seventh, chrysolyte; the eighth, beryl; the ninth, a topaz; the tenth, a chrysoprasus; the eleventh, a jacinth; the twelfth, an amethyst. And the twelve gates were twelve pearls: every several gate was of one pearl: and the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass. (Rev. 21: 9-21)
12,000 X 12,000 X 12,0000 stadia = 1,728 billion cubic stadia, which, when divided by 4, equals 432 billion. Moreover, in Rev. 13: 18, it is declared that the number of the name of the "beast rising out of the sea, with ten horns and seven heads, with ten diadems upon its horns and a blasphemous name upon its heads" (Rev. 13:1), is 666; whereas 6 X 6 X 6 = 216, which is half of 432.
The earliest known appearance of this number was in the writings of a Chaldean priest of the god Marduk, Berossos, who, c. 280 b.c., composed in Greek a synopsis of Babylonian myth and history in which it was reported that, between the legendary date of the mythological flood, ten kings ruled in Sumer through a period of 432,000 years. The universal flood there reported in the same as that of Genesis 6-7, of which the earliest known account has been found on a very greatly damaged cuniform tablet from the ruins of Nippur, of a date c. 2000 b.c. There the ancient tale is told of a pious king Ziusudra, last of the line of ten long-lived antediluvian monarchs of the city of Shuruppak, who, while standing by a wall, heard a voice advising him to build himself an ark."
The Inner Reaches of Outer Space
