Controlled comparison vocabulary
Ten ways communities organize futures and time
These are navigational lenses, not boxes that erase local terminology. A tradition may appear in more than one model.
01
Linear judgment and renovation
History moves toward a culminating judgment, restoration, renewed creation, or definitive settlement.
Boundary: Do not assume that traditions sharing a final renovation share the same agent, sequence, anthropology, or view of matter.
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02
Revelatory apocalypse
A disclosure of hidden heavenly meaning interprets crisis, judgment, or salvation through symbolic visions and authoritative revelation.
Boundary: Apocalypse is a literary and religious category, not a universal synonym for catastrophe.
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03
Cyclical dissolution and renewal
Worlds, ages, dynasties, or cosmic conditions decline and recur, dissolve and re-form, or require periodic restoration.
Boundary: The end of one cycle is not automatically a final end of the cosmos.
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04
Calendrical and ritual recurrence
Calendars, festivals, dynastic reckoning, or repeated rites renew time and preserve social or cosmic order.
Boundary: A calendrical rollover is not a terminal prophecy unless a source explicitly makes it one.
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05
Liberation from recurring existence
The central aim is release from rebirth, conditioned existence, ignorance, or material entrapment rather than victory inside history.
Boundary: Individual or communal liberation must not be collapsed into world destruction.
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06
Ancestral co-presence and continuity
Ancestors, land, law, the living, and future generations remain active relations across permeable temporal or spatial boundaries.
Boundary: Ancestral time is not merely a distant mythic past, and public summaries must respect community knowledge boundaries.
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07
Cosmic and ecological maintenance
Ritual, moral, ecological, political, or reciprocal action continually sustains balance and prevents local or cosmic disorder.
Boundary: Maintenance systems may have no doctrine of a final-world ending at all.
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08
Prophetic and political restoration
A movement imagines the removal of oppression, restored sovereignty, economic justice, sacred kingship, or a transformed social order.
Boundary: Political restoration, anticolonial struggle, and cosmic judgment may overlap without being identical.
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09
Empirical hazard and existential risk
Probabilistic scientific or policy analysis evaluates hazards, systemic collapse, or long-term threats under stated assumptions.
Boundary: A scenario, confidence interval, or model projection is not prophecy or certainty.
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10
Indeterminate, spatial, or mixed futures
The public evidence does not support one final-world model, or several temporal and spatial orientations coexist.
Boundary: Absence of a final-world doctrine is a positive finding, not a research failure.
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