Satya-Yuga

Satya Yuga (Sanskrit: सत्य युग), also called Krita Yuga (Sanskrit: कृत युग Kṛta yuga), is the first and most perfect of four Yugas or world ages described in the Hindu sacred scriptures. It stands at the beginning of a Maha Yuga cycle. The Satya Yuga is followed by the Treta Yuga. The Satya Yuga lasts four times as long as the Kali Yuga, i.e. 4 × 432,000 = 1,728,000 years. The Law of Life (Dharma) is fully realised in this age.

Satya means "truth", "righteousness" and "virtue", thus Satya Yuga is the "age of truth" or virtue. Kṛta is the past participle of kṛi, to do, which translates as "done", "completed", "accomplished". It is therefore the age of completion, of fulfilment. At the same time, Kṛta denotes the "four", the winning throw in the dice game that brings total victory. Less prosaically, the concept of completeness is associated with four: everything that is whole, self-contained and at rest has its four quarters (pāda) or stands on four legs.

Thus, the deity of Dharma, depicted as a cow, also has a stable stand in this Yuga, standing on four feet. The dharma here is to be understood as sanatana-dharma, the world law that upholds the order of Rita. Accordingly, in this age everything is ideal par excellence and as it should be: the Brahmins are holy, the kings are just, and peasants and artisans serve obediently and with full devotion.

In the Manusmriti, the "Law Book of Manu", the duration of the Satya Yuga is given as 4000 years plus a preceding and following transitional period of 400 years each, i.e. a total of 4800 years. According to the Bhagavata Purana, however, this figure is considered to refer to the time reckoning of the gods, where one year corresponds to 360 human years, the duration of the Satya Yuga in human years is therefore 4800 × 360 = 1,728,000 years.

Rudolf Steiner says about the Krita Yuga:

„Other impulses man has developed among men, and others when he lived among gods. A higher knowledge has always known this. Such a knowledge looked back to those ancient ages in which men were, so to speak, in direct intercourse with divine-spiritual beings. And direct contact with divine-spiritual beings had the effect that the soul felt it belonged to the divine-spiritual world. But this also produced impulses, forces in the soul, which were still divine-spiritual in a completely different sense than today's forces are. Where the soul worked in such a way that it felt it belonged to the higher world, there, out of this soul also spoke a will that came from the divine-spiritual world, of which one could say it was instilled, this will, because the soul lived among gods.

This age, when man was still one with the divine-spiritual beings, is spoken of as the golden age or Krita Yuga. This, then, is an ancient age, the essential course of which we must seek even before the Atlantean catastrophe.“ (Lit.:GA 118, p. 19)

Literature

• Heinrich Robert Zimmer: Indische Mythen und Symbole : Schlüssel zur Formenwelt des Göttlichen. Diederichs Gelbe Reihe 33. 7. Aufl. Diederichs, München 2000, ISBN 3-424-00693-9, p. 18-24
• Rudolf Steiner: Das Ereignis der Christus-Erscheinung in der ätherischen Welt, GA 118 (1984), ISBN 3-7274-1180-5 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org

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