A curated selection of narrative threads, episodes, lyrics, excerpts, and quotes from across the archive.
Selected excerpts and passages.
He is able to discern that it was himself who at first was “without form and void” and who in virtue of that Fiat Lux! has at last become transformed from chaos and unconsciousness into a form so perfect and lucid as to become a co-conscious vehicle of Divine Wisdom itself.
Once we are committed to this ideology of cosmic evolution, the narrow five millennia of recorded history with their minor progressions, regressions, cycles, and sinusoidal curves appear terrifyingly diminished. And yet the neo-evolutionists would insist that their teachings are raising man to a higher rather than a lower place in the scheme of things. Far from being dethroned as the king of nature, he is restored to a grander position than he occupied before the Copernican revolution.
The first of these schemes derives from the fact that the generally accepted “flat earth” was, all of a sudden, proved to be a sphere by the voyage of Magellan’s ships around the world.
But there is one new and encouraging element present in most of the recommendations of today’s experts. They are recognizing the necessity of conceiving the world as one interdependent structure.
The term [revolution] derives from the Latin substantive revolutio, which was unknown in classical Latin but was used in the early Middle Ages by St. Augustine and other Christian writers.
Translated into Italian as rivoluzione in the early Renaissance and then into French and English as revolution, the term initially meant the return of a moving object to its place of origin—particularly the movement of celestial bodies around the earth.
Copernicans used it increasingly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to describe their unsettling new concept of the earth revolving—axially and orbitally—around the sun.
Another reason why the Greeks rejected Aristarchus’ Solar
System was its apparent failure to stand up to scientific scrutiny.
Aristarchus had built a model of the universe that was supposed to match reality, but it was not clear that his model was accurate.
Did the Earth really orbit the Sun?
It is not so much that certain educated men had not already theorized that Earth was round, but that with the return of the first ship Victoria the expedition’s wealthy financial backers had visual evidence that ships could circumnavigate the world and that because they could, Earth had to be a sphere.
To attain this transmutation, this metamorphosis of himself, he is taught first to purify and subdue his sensual nature; then to purify and develop his mental nature; and finally, by utter surrender of his old life and losing his soul to save it, he rises from the dead a Master, a just man made perfect, with larger consciousness and faculties, an efficient instrument for use by the Great Architect in His plan of rebuilding the Temple of fallen humanity, and capable of initiating and advancing other men to a participation in the same great work.
Egocentric attitudes may have been a contributory factor behind the dominance of the geocentric world-view, but there were other reasons for preferring an Earth-centred universe to Aristarchus’ Sun-centred universe.
One basic problem with the Sun-centred world-view was that it appeared to be simply ridiculous. It just seemed so utterly obvious that the Sun revolved round a static Earth, and not the other way round.
In short, a Sun-centred universe ran counter to common sense.
Underlying this Secret Doctrine was a profound philosophy of the creation or evolution of worlds and of man. The present humanity, in many quarters of the globe, has evolved on the intellectual plane so far that there now exist a very large number of persons capable of apprehending this old philosophy, and, at the same time, capable of understanding the responsibility incurred in misusing or misinterpreting it. A large number of persons have reached, on the intellectual plane, the state of manhood ; and are capable of partaking of the “fruit of the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil.” There is, therefore, no reason why this old philosophy should be longer concealed. On the other hand, there are reasons why it should be known.
It is evident that Teilhard does not resonate to the biblical world-view. Not only does he find it staticist and narrow, but he thinks that it is based upon “the Alexandrine” cosmology (whatever that might be). What Teilhard fails to grasp, however, is that the biblical Weltanschauung [world-view] is actually based, not upon any theory or abstract model of the universe, but quite simply upon sense perception.
In fact most of Copernicus’ book runs closely parallel with Ptolemy’s exposition, only the minimum changes being made to adjust the treatment of the Sun-centered theory; and most of the numerical constants are simply Ptolemy’s figures transformed.
Not unnaturally, Copernicus had not rid himself completely of the old Earth-centered terminology, and the centre of the universe for him is still the centre of Earth’s orbit.
In fact, a modern geometer might observe that as a matter of pure mathematics it makes no difference to the relation between them whether A revolves around B or B around A, as long as they are both regarded as points –
but psychologically there is a great difference.
A.M. Duncan (translator introduction)
Nicolaus Copernicus
On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
Sometimes this philosophy has been hidden from the public and at other times it has been placed in plain view – though always in such a way as to remain unrecognized by outsiders.
In his chapter of the antiquity of Masonry, [Captain George Smith] makes it to be coeval with creation, ‘when,’ says he, ‘the sovereign architect raised on Masonic principles the beauteous globe, and commanded the master science, Geometry, to lay the planetary world, and to regulate by its laws the whole stupendous system in just unerring proportion, rolling round the central sun.’
Some of these teachers we know and in a sense are not secret at all. Yet in many cases what they have to teach remains so. Some are not so well known, indeed, are hardly known at all. One can be a secret teacher in the sense of being unknown, but one can also be a secret teacher in the sense that what you teach is secret, hidden, obscured, or perhaps in some cases, even purposely disguised.
Just a month before, Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong had left their colleague, Michael Collins, aboard spaceship Columbia and walked on the moon, beating by five months President Kennedy’s goal of putting a man on the moon before the decade was out.
The old carpenter asked me if I really believed it had happened. I said sure, I saw it on television. He disagreed; he said that he didn’t believe it for a minute, that “them television fellers” could make things look real that weren’t. Back then, I thought he was a crank. During my eight years in Washington, I saw some things on TV that made me wonder if he wasn’t ahead of his time.
But the actual tendency of the geocentric system was, for the medieval mind, precisely the opposite. For the centre of the world was not a position of honor; it was rather the place farthest removed from the Empyrean, the bottom of the creation, to which its dregs and baser elements sank.
This – the evolution of man into superman – was always the purpose of the ancient Mysteries, and the real purpose of modern Masonry is, not the social and charitable purposes to which so much attention is paid, but the expediting of the spiritual evolution of those who aspire to perfect their own nature and transform it into a more god-like quality.
And this is a definite science, a royal art, which it is possible for each of us to put into practice; whilst to join the Craft for any other purpose than to study and pursue this science is to misunderstand its meaning.
The theory wraps all these errors and fallacies and clothes them in magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king. Its exponents are very brilliant men, but they are metaphysicists rather than scientists. Not a single one of the relativity propositions has been proved.
In the Middle Ages people believed that the earth was flat,
for which they had at least the evidence of their senses: we
believe it to be round, not because as many as one per cent
of us could give the physical reasons for so quaint a belief,
but because modern science has convinced us that nothing
that is obvious is true, and that everything that is magical,
improbable, extraordinary, gigantic, microscopic, heartless,
or outrageous is scientific.
They had to imagine the sun as something that does not move in relation to the earth and the earth even as something moving.
The study of cosmology shows how our relationship to the universe and our fellow humans is inextricably conditioned by our underlying belief systems and mythologies. As every thoughtful person realizes, the life of each civilization-and every individual-is influenced by underlying mythologies, whether sacred, scientific, secular, or profane.
In our century, psychology has shown that those who do not believe that their lives are shaped by an underlying mythology are always those who are the most captivated by its spell.
David Fideler
Jesus Christ, Sun of God
Ancient Cosmology and Early Christian Symbolism
And the one change of this kind implied by the abandonment of the geocentric system was, as is evident from what has already been said, the reverse of that often attributed to the new astronomy; to remove man from the centre of things was to raise him from his low estate.
They shall then know truth and, more than that,
they shall realize that from the beginning
truth has been in the world unrecognized.
“People need to be aware that there is a range of models that could explain the observations,” Ellis argues. “For instance, I can construct you a spherically symmetrical universe with Earth at its center, and you cannot disprove it based on observations.”
Ellis has published a paper on this. “You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds. In my view there is absolutely nothing wrong in that.
What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models.
A lot of cosmology tries to hide that.”
George F. R. Ellis
Scientific American
Another reason to adopt moderate skepticism concerns the very real danger that we might be deceiving ourselves in our beliefs, even when we think our beliefs are based on sound evidence.
One way in which this can happen is well captured by a lyric from “Nowhere Man.” We are told that the Nowhere Man is blind because he “just sees what he wants to see.”
To some degree or another, probably all of us suffer from this problem, a point that the Beatles note by saying of the Nowhere Man, “isn’t he a bit like you and me?”
People tend to notice those cases in their perceptual environment that conform to their beliefs, and simply not to notice cases that stand as evidence against those beliefs.
The Beatles and Philosophy
Nothing You Can Think That Can’t Be Thunk