This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Position 1 in Its Cycle collects the first stage named in five unrelated schemes of world ages: Hesiod's Golden Age, the Aztec First Sun, Joachim of Fiore's Age of the Father, the Jain Sushama-sushama, and Shobo, the Age of the True Dharma in East Asian Buddhism. None of the five traditions influenced any other here, yet four of the five open their cycle with the same claim, that the starting condition is the best one available. Hesiod's Golden Age lives free of toil and grief under Cronus. Sushama-sushama is the most excellent of the Jain ara, an age of supreme happiness and lifespan at the very start of the world's long decline. Shobo is the age in which the Buddha's teaching, its practice and its attainment are all fully present together, before either begins to fail. The First Sun stands somewhat apart: it is simply the earliest of five successive worlds Aztec myth records, ended by jaguars rather than by any falling away, so its place at position one marks sequence rather than merit.
Joachim's Age of the Father is the plainest exception, a time of law and obedience rather than of ease, since his three ages rise in spiritual understanding rather than decline. Read together, the group shows both a common pattern, a first stage that later stages are measured against, and its limits: whether that first stage is remembered as a height already lost or as a beginning still building toward something greater depends entirely on which tradition is doing the remembering.