75-year cycles ~ Firdar ~ Is it Time Again?

A piece at Common Dreams yesterday morning caught my attention. I felt fairly sure it would be possible to relate its content to some astrological cycle:

Said piece is by Paul Buchheit, War or Revolution Every 75 Years. It's Time Again.
He begins:

When Charles Dickens wrote "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" to begin "A Tale of Two Cities," he compared the years of the French Revolution to his own "present period." Both were wracked with inequality. But he couldn't have known that 75 years later inequality would cause the Great Depression. Or that 75 years after that, in our own present period, extreme inequality would return for a fourth time, to impact a much greater number of people. He probably didn't know that the cycles of history seem to drag the developed world into desperate times about every 75 years, and then seek relief through war or revolution.
It's that time again.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness;it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way. -- CHARLES DICKENS

Three cycles (225 years) ago, in the years before the French Revolution, inequality was at one of its highest points ever. While it's estimated that the top 10% of the population took almost half the income, as they do today, the Gini Coefficient was between .52 and .59, higher than the current U.S. figure of .47. The French Revolution began a surge toward equality that lasted well into the 19th century.

Two cycles ago, in Dickens' day of the 1860s, European inequality was again at a nearly intolerable level. It took the second industrial revolution and the U.S. Civil War to start correcting the economic injustices.

One cycle ago was the Great Depression. The New Deal, World War 2, and the laborious process of war recovery put an end to this third period of extreme inequality.
Now, nearly 75 years after we started World War 2 production, we again feel the agony of a wealth gap expanding, like grotesquely stretched muscle, to intolerable limits...................

Mr Buchheit ends his piece like this:

In our 'civilized' times people aren't being run down by noblemen or forced to eat grass. The aristocracy has learned a lot about suppressing crowds in 225 years. But they need to fear the growing revolution. They need to fear, as Dickens put it, "the remorseless sea of turbulently swaying shapes, voices of vengeance, and faces hardened in the furnaces of suffering until the touch of pity could make no mark on them."

Although I could sniff astrology here, 75-year cycles didn't immediately ring an astrological bell for me. Uranus' cycle is nearest, but almost 10 years adrift (84years).

Research brought to light something I'd studied years ago and forgotten: Firdar. From HERE

Derived from the mixed Arabic and Persian "al firdar", the alfridaria, or alfridaries, are a system of planetary periods of Persian origin first described as far as we know by Abu Mashar. Originally intended for the long term forecasting of historical events, they can also be used in predicting for individual charts.

If I were to attempt to explain the method of calculation things (and I) would be likely to rapidly fall into disarray! Enough to say, and passing readers will have to trust me on this, the full cycle is of 75 years!

From an explanation by Stephen Birchfield A.M.A. HERE

It will be useful for us to examine this teaching at the source, Abu Ma’shar -
“Each of the seven stars, and the Ascending and Descending Nodes, has certain determinate times, and each star administers to the native in accordance with its proper firdar. The firdar of the Sun, then, is 10 years; of Aphrodite, 8; of Hermes, 13; of the Moon, 9; of Kronos, 11; of Zeus, 12; of Ares, 7; of the Ascending Node, 3; of the Descending Node, 2 – altogether, they are 75.

Another full explanation of Firdar by one of today's best (in my opinion) astrologers, Robert Hand is HERE

Firdar establishes that a 75-year cycle does exist in astrology - ancient astrology. Whether this relates to the 75-year cycle seen by the author of the article first quoted is a matter worth pondering. My vote would be a "Yay". Astrology is all about time waves, and the cycle indicated by Firdar seems, to me, to represent something of a tide-turning, time-turning wave.