A Viconian Cycle is a term that defines the rise and fall and rise again of civilizations. ^[1] First coined by Terence McKenna, he used it to talk about Giambattista Vico's influence in Finnegan's Wake. ^[undefined]

In Vico's work The New Science, he talks about how history is cyclical (corsi e ricorsi). Vico was a proponent of a cyclical philosophy of history where human history is created by man and that the individual and society move in parallel from barbarism to civilization. ^[undefined]

Vico contends that social change produces cultural change and that culture is a system of socially produced and structured elements.

Because of this, there is a dialectical relationship between language, knowledge, and social structure; the knowledge of any society comes from the social structure of that society, explicable, therefore, only in terms of its own language.

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According to Vico, civilization develops in a cycle of three ages: the divine, the heroic, and the human.

The divine age relies on metaphor and myth to comprehend human and natural phenomena and to describe the culture and society that they are in.

An example of this are the stories in the Bible such as Adam and Eve, Noah's Ark, etc. The heroic age relies on synecdoche and metonymy to describe the feudal and noble institutions that embody idealized figures. An example of this is the king and the divine right to rule as well as the feudal caste system. The human age is characterized by democracy and reflection via irony and the rise of rationality leads to barbarie della reflessione or barbarism of reflection. ^[undefined]

In Finnegan's Wake, James Joyce adds a forth age, the chaotic age, which results from the corruption which ills the democratic age until it falters.

The chaotic age is a short and transitional age that returns society back to the divine age.

In the book, Joyce applies Vico's theory to the image of the history of mankind as depicted in the dream of the main character, Earwicker.

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