Homo Sideralis & the Kingdom of Heaven
Apokalypsium VI
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HOMO SIDERALIS
A Study of Archaeoastronomic Consciousness:
Its Emergence, Its Legacy and the Heir to Its Estate.
On Earth As It Is In Heaven
[The Lord] took [Abram] outside and said, “Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.”
Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”
All things on Earth are the ripples of astronomical action, whether recent or remote. This fact about life on our planet is so obvious that it is rarely ever seriously considered. Even the most grossly physicalistic analyses disclose this. In fact, modern naturalism says it most persuasively to the modern mind.
The layering of the Earth’s material into a many-circled core, mantle, lithosphere and crust is a consequence of its former existence as a droplet of glowing hot matter in a protoplanetary disk. The fossil of this once-whirling wheel of dust, gas and plasma is the relatively uniform orbital plane of the planets. The velocities and composition of all of these objects are an inheritance from the primordial wheel which bore them.
The molten dynamo at the core of the Earth responsible for the formation of continents, mountains, oceanic trenches, all volcanism, earthquakes, etc. Is what remains of the heat of the sun from those remote millennia when these liquefied metals were directly exposed to the solar radiation that smelted them down in the first place. The rivers that water the land pour out from the mountains formed by these tectonic events.
The wind patterns of the Earth, driving ocean currents and defining local climes everywhere are direct consequences of thermal pressure gradients formed by unequal distributions of heat from the sun.
It can be said then that at every level, all physical events trace back to the stars. Either what they are doing in the present or what they were doing in the past. This is remarkably consonant with ancient intuitions, even if the material processes alone admit of no detectable agency. This is of course a reductive picture, but it is an unassailable fact that all planetary processes would be impossible if not for the energy and materials supplied by stars.
In light of this, our ancestors’ enduring and pervasive belief that the stars were the visible images of cosmic intelligences appointed by the creator to orchestrate terrestrial events seems not so naive. They were in fact, thousands of years ahead of the rational and empirical process which only now vindicates their inconceivably well-tuned intuitions.
The monuments built by these peoples to align themselves with the heavens, and the lengths they went to to achieve this (evinced by the grandeur of the Henges, Pyramids and Ziggurats) suggest that no expense was spared in ancient man’s relentless pursuit of celestial perfection.
The prevalence of these titanic constructions across ancient cultures around the globe is a clear indication of their efficacy. They are the fossilized proof that rituals of cosmological integration were a powerful predictor of a culture’s ascendancy over adversaries, elements and time. It made no difference at all where that culture happened to be situated; everywhere that this form of thinking emerged, it dominated.
The archaeoastronomer represents a highly adaptive human type: he is a specimen of an ancient bloodline so perceptive, persistent and technically skillful that few vestiges remain of civilizations unlike his own. What traces can be found are curiosities to us, or else are irrelevant.
Archaeoastronomic man was the protagonist of an epoch. As soon as his mode of being appeared, all the others were cosigned to the footnotes of another people’s history; they became the background noise to the tale of a dynasty whose coming they failed to perceive.
The deeply embedded collective memory of this prehistoric shift is almost certainly the origin of the persistent idea that beings from the stars were the architects of these monumental constructions.
It seems intuitively correct that concentrated efforts to synchronize human and celestial activity — to make things on Earth as they are in Heaven — would strongly correlate with civilizational potency and endurance if, as we have seen, the stars are indeed the conductors of all terrestrial motions.
(All this notwithstanding, one must strain to find any tangible resemblance between the intuitive and perceptual prowess of these cultures and the intellectualized, digital astrology of modernity. I do not imply that our own facsimile belongs to the lineage from which it claims descent.)
An attempt to unite the archaic and modern cosmologies and position ourselves in the resulting universe confronts us with a shadow of design.
To the formative motions whence the planets came, we must ascribe intentional precision. We must infer an invisible government of cosmic intelligence which the blunt instruments of our astronomy cannot reveal, and whose existence the axioms of secular empiricism forbid us to conceive.
To connect our present subject with our prior study of the creation account, we must recognize that the motions of the heavenly bodies are the clearest echoes available of the primordial divine pronouncement, irrespective of whether or not these reverberate at an accessible register.
We must imagine then that the motes of dust which formed these heavenly bodies were not just pulled together by blind physical forces, but some impossibly coherent will with which those forces move in perfect unison.
The music of the angels and the music of the spheres are one and the same to the ancients. The ever-radiant burning ones who sing before the throne of the most high, are aflame with the still-beating rhythm of Edenic creation. They are uncorrupted by the fall of man to which they bore witness.
Knowing this, we may reach a more exact understanding of how and why the pareidolic visions of the stargazers informed the symbolic vocabulary of the prophets who would come after them.
The stars are a Rorschach Test. The only substantive difference between the star-watching of the magi and the cloud-watching of children is the relative permanence of the stellar ink blots. The activities themselves are identical.
The consequence is that the mythologies of the constellations reveal to us the enduring sensory and intuitional biases of a people. The celestial globe of a given culture is then a self-portrait of its collective unconscious psyche.
If one gazing at an asterism perceives in it a snake, this may be an idiosyncrasy and pass away at the end of the individual’s life. But if all one’s siblings and cousins alike see the same snake, it is less probably an accident that those stars remind them all of a serpent.
If this family’s entire village see the snake and they all continue to see it whether or not they will it to be so, we must assume this serpent is contagious and persists in the sky and in their sight because of profound commonalities in the underlying substrate of their cognition.
Knowing this as well as the practical necessity of astronomy in the ancient world, it seems a near-inevitability that all cultures would populate the night sky with shared unconscious material. Thereafter, there is an identical Darwinian process one level up: the more adaptive archetypal arrays propagate into the future while the less adaptive pass away.
This means a star map fashioned by the sages of some long-abiding tradition encodes the “psychic operating system” of its creators. Moreover, it means that in some subtle, but profound Platonistic sense, these images are “actually there.”
In remote antiquity, when these psychic dominants were at the peak of their power, the practice of astrology functioned as both a form of cosmology and collective psychology at the same time. It could easily be argued that the separation of these disciplines is an artifact of modern epistemology.
From this we can see the relationship between the constellations (celestialized archetypal images) and constellation (conscious recognition of and interaction with teleological objects).
The teleological object is a more abstract picture of what the constellations in the sky actually are.
Constellation (the verb) is the embodied application of that understanding.
We can recognize readily now, a clear resemblance between the prehistoric emergence of archaeoastronomic consciousness and our historical juncture. We can see also that the visionary remnant church (addressed in the previous essay), the new heaven and the new earth are all inextricably bound. In reality, the three are one.
There will come out of the technological ice age, a small population, broadly united by adaptations converging toward consonant and complementary psychological profiles, tuned by the same field of what is now supranormal phenomenology.
The members of this population will perceive and interpret symbolic patterns in a resonant manner, for which reason they will be able to achieve a much greater degree of coherence and coordination than other groups. In the same way, they will see the patterns which will thereafter become the new heaven — that which others do not or cannot — and it will come to pass that out of these will come the peoples of the new earth.
(As an aside: it seems probable that the present dissolution of anything resembling a cultural mythos (as explored in the Artistic Famine) may be regarded as a sign that the “Ragnarok” of a waning pantheon of archetypes is upon us. It may also be taken as evidence of the incapacity of those at the summits of the culture industry to perceive or trace the emerging proto-mythology of the era to come. This is most likely because the rising spirit of that age correctly perceives them as its enemies.)
As soon as one sees the pattern, one sees also that it is cyclic and has clearly happened before. Hence the structural features shared across religious traditions; almost always including a story about a flood.
