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Two poets, each writing from INSIDE the degraded age, each dating themselves against a lost golden age · and each betraying knowledge that the dark age is a corridor, not a terminus. The Purana states it outright (a seed-remnant carried across the boundary into the restored Krita age); Hesiod admits it in a single subjunctive ('or been born afterwards'). The interregnum is survivable and temporary in both, and both texts are themselves artifacts produced inside the gap they describe.
At the close of the Kali age, after Kalki: 'the minds of those who live at the end of the Kali age shall be awakened, and shall be as pellucid as crystal. The men who are thus changed by virtue of that peculiar time shall be as the seeds of human beings, and shall give birth to a race who shall follow the laws of the Krita age, or age of purity.' The dark age is explicitly an interval with a scheduled end: 'the Krita age shall return.'
set against Hesiod, Works and Days 106–201
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