Of Solstices and Apocalypses: of Saturn and the Golden Age

Solstitial and "apocalyptic" annotations on the celebration of Christmas and the end of the Year, on the archaic doctrine of the "gates" of the Cosmos and of the Year and on the eschatology of the ancient Sidereal Religion, passing from the Greco-Roman tradition to the Hindu one the Christian one.

di Beatrice Udai Nath

Originally posted on the author's blog, Visionaire. Cover: Tibetan cosmological mandala of the sixteenth century.

AvadhΕ«t, with Maya silence disappears. By observing the action of the Navagraha you arrive beyond merit and demerit. Human is the power of the union of Shiva and Shakti. [Gorakh Bodh, verse 56]


The Sidereal Religion

In a not so distant time the proto-philosophers, priests and poets, had observed the stars to discern a plan and a divine presence in their cyclical and regular occurrence. A Platonic dialogue, probably apocryphal, theEpinomis, collects the thesis according to which the stars, with their gait would be a direct image of the divine will, precisely because of their regular motion, different from that of animals and men and therefore closer to truth.

First of all, let us turn our thoughts to the fact that, as we are saying, these two species of living beings - let us repeat it - are both visible, one, it would seem, is entirely made of fire, the other, on the other hand, of earth; and, while the terrestrial element moves in disorder, the fiery one moves in a rigorous order. Now, what moves without an order, which, for the most part, the living beings of our world do, must be considered without reason, instead, what moves with order, following the path of heaven, must be considered proof. the existence of a form of intelligence. Being constantly animated by the same motion and the same speed, being always subjected to the same forces and always exercising the same influences, is enough to demonstrate that there is a life marked by reason. For men, therefore, it should have been proof of the fact that the stars and their entire motion of revolution are governed by intelligence, the observation that they always have a regular behavior, since they have been traveling, for an extraordinarily long time, a fixed path. since the dawn of time, without deviating either downward or upward, or changing behavior from one time to another, so as to wander madly out of orbit. For many of us this phenomenon, that is the fact that the stars always move and behave in the same way, seemed to indicate the exact opposite: the stars are devoid of soul. So the multitude followed these fools, to the point of considering the human race endowed with reason and life only because it moves freely; the divine one, on the other hand, devoid of reason because it is animated by an always identical motion; yet man, rising to what is most beautiful, noble and precious, should have understood that it is necessary to attribute intelligence to what always acts in the same way, with regularity and for the same causes: that is to the nature of the stars, the most beautiful to behold, which produces what is needed by all living beings, in a dance that, in terms of trends and movements, surpasses all other dances in beauty and elegance.

This late and apocryphal book is a model of the "religion of the stars”, That observation capable by itself of regulating the life of men on the celestial intelligence, making them simple and exemplary as Gods themselves, blessed and enlightened, connoisseurs of the Truth:β€œ At this sight, the fortunate spectator is first struck by wonder; then he is driven by the desire to learn how much human nature is possible, in the conviction that only in this way will he be able to live the noblest and happiest life ever and, once dead, go to the proper places of virtue. Just like a man initiated into the mysteries, unitary in himself and sharing in a single knowledge, he spends the rest of his time as a spectator of the most beautiful realities that sight can offer Β».

Therefore, unlike us, the ancients recognized in the stars a glaring divinity, which under the eyes of all dictated the divine will, before men attributed names and prerogatives to the anthropomorphic gods. Like this, the Solstices, phenomena that to those observers appeared macroscopic and full of meaning, twice a year opened a numinous and firm space, in the midst of the changing seasons, turning its course in an ascending and descending direction. Not because this influenced a naive and naturalistic mind, but instead, precisely in the astronomical phenomenon, supernatural, independent spaces were inserted, which seemed to reveal not the naturalness of terrestrial cycles, but the eternal present that sustained them from its inscrutable depth.

At this point, to talk about the Solstice, we must report the classic quotations of Homer and Porphyry which elucidate, participants in the religion of the stars, on the meaning of the solstices, or the passages that open in the annual course of the Sun. The splendid exceptions, in regular motion daily. Homer described inOdyssey (XIII, 109-112) the mysterious cave on the island of Ithaca, in which two doors opened: "The cave has two doors, one from Borea, accessible to men; the other, from the Noto, is of the gods and through it no men pass, of the immortals it is the wayΒ». Porfirio explains these obscure verses The cave of the nymphs where it exposes the transit on the ecliptic of the sun according to the ancient cosmogony:

Since the cave constitutes the image and symbol of the world, Numenius and Chronicus his companion say that there are two extremities in the sky, of which one is no more southern than the winter tropic, and the other is no more northern than that. summer. The summer one is in Cancer, while the winter one is in Capricorn. And since Cancer is very close to the earth for us, with good reason (its sign) is attributed to the Moon which is close to the earth. While Capricorn, being invisible more than the southern pole, is attributed to that which by far is the most distant and highest of all wandering (celestial bodies), that is to Kronos. […] Therefore, those who speak of divine things posited to be two (the number) of these inputs: Cancer and Capricorn; And Plato speaks of two mouths. Of these, Cancer is the one for which souls descend, and Capricorn the one for which they ascend. But Cancer is northern and suitable for descent, while Capricorn is southern and suitable for ascent. And the parts of the North are proper to the souls who descend towards the generation. And rightly the entrances of the cave facing Boreas descend for men, while the southern parts are not proper to the gods, but to those who ascend to the gods. For this reason (the poet) says way not proper to the gods, but to the immortals, also common to the souls who are immortal in themselves or in essence.

At this point, it is necessary to understand that the solstitial moment of winter was not invented by a religion conceived by man or revealed by God, but was given by itself, under the eyes of all, in the nature of the sky. What we call Christmas was established in Roman times, under the influence of the secret cults of Mithras, which were, as happens today, spied and known even by the uninitiated and become unexpectedly popular, so it was decided that the date of December 25, and more precisely VIII Kalendas Januaris, was the dies N. Invicti, dies Natalis Sol Invicti.

He who sails on a boat (the sun) shows the lordship that rules the cosmos. As the pilot presides over the rudder remaining distinct from the ship, so the sun presides over the rudder of the whole cosmos by remaining separate from it. And as from the top of the bow the pilot directs everything, giving with his slight movement the first principle of the course, so, on a much higher level, the god from the top of the principles of nature indivisibly generates the primordial causes of the movements . [Egyptian Mysteries]

Christmas was therefore fixed by the emperor Aureliano il 25th December, when from the apparent pause that occurs starting from day 21, the solar star visibly rose above the horizon, resuming its cycle. The Roman Church, completely ignorant of which was the true date of birth of Jesus, accepted this same anniversary, assuming the figure of him to that of the True Sun, that Light foretold by the Scriptures.


Lucas Cranach the Elder, the Golden Age, 1530

The Golden Age

But long before those foreign cults came to give new names to perennial things, the time of year had been established sacred and celebrated from ancient times, with other founders. It happened that Saturn arrived in Lazio in exile, after Jupiter had conquered and defeated it, and found asylum with King Janus. He stayed with him, to govern in the period that was called theGolden Age, in which there were no inequalities or social conflicts and everywhere there was abundance and peace. A nineteenth-century dissemination work summarizes the events that bind Saturn to Janus and the Golden Age:

Saturn, having lost the sky and the empire, took refuge in that part of Italy where Rome was later built, and which had the name of Lazio from the Latin word Later, perhaps because Saturn hid there looking for an asylum. Janus, a native of Thessaly, and having become king of Lazio, lovingly welcomed the exile Nume, and made him a companion in the supreme power. Saturn, out of gratitude for his generous hospitality, endowed him with so rare intelligence and such prudence, that he never forgot the past, and foresaw the future; whence it was said that Janus had two heads o two faces to know both one and the other, and therefore had the nickname of two-faced. The reign of Saturn and Janus in Italy was called the Golden Age, that is the reign of the Gods and the first age of the world, because under their wise government men lived simply and naturally good, virtuous, in peace, enjoying the goods of the earth. , spontaneously produced by it. But the following ages, troubled by new needs, to satisfy the strenuous arts to which they were born, were denominated by silver, copper and iron, to signify the subsequent misdirection of mankind. [from Course in mythology, or, History of the gods and heroes of paganism: For the explanation of the classics and monuments of fine arts by François-Joseph-Michel Noël, Charles-Pierre Chapsal, Pietro Thouar, 1861].

Janus becomes, by the grace of Saturn, the mysterious divine figure to whom the month of January is dedicated, which opens and closes the doors (ianuae) of the annual cycle:

Everything that you see around you, the sky, the sea, the clouds, the lands, everything is closed and open at will by my hand. I have the mastery of the entire immense world, it is up to me alone to upset its hinges. [...] A god with a double and, sometimes, even quadruple face, Janus was invoked with numerous titles: Patulcius "who opens everything" and Clusius "who closes everything", Geminus "double" and Bifrons "two-faced". With these characteristics Janus extended his dominion over the double sphere of inputs and outputs, in eternal conciliation of opposites: past and future, back and forth, internal and external, etc.. Giano clearly expresses that precise moment of transition in which past and future coexist in the present; he is therefore [...] also a god of time, a god of the sun that rises and sets and who is therefore conscious at the same time - thanks to his two faces - of the night he leaves behind and of the day he encounters. [Ovid, Glories]

Janus is therefore benefited from the "gift" of Saturn, from the divination of time, that is to be at the center of the two directions, ascending and descending, which mark the turn of events, those that finally disappear from memory and those that emerge unknown to reveal themselves in the future. Janus seems to inhabit the "void", to have the gift of yogic discernment, so with the detachment, which is the spiritual gift of Saturn, his vision is located beyond time, where temporal events are semi-contained, when they are still or forever unknown to mere mortals. From the happy association of the wise Janus with the powerful and ousted Saturn, the time of their reign, dictated by detachment and clairvoyance, will be defined as the Golden Age, when men lived for a period in full happiness. In the descriptions that want them to feed on the spontaneous fruits of the earth, they seem to live like Yogis on the very breath of nature. In the Roman tradition, however, it is Saturn, like Osiris in Egypt, who teaches the Italics the art of agriculture, with which the breath of nature is profitably combined with human work. In fact, according to Varro and Macrobius, Saturn derived from the verb evening (sow).

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The toponymy of Rome still recalls the mythical double kingdom: Janus, from his home on the Monsignor Ianiculus, and that of its benevolent host Saturn, Monsignor Saturnius, and which in the future would be known as the Capitol. In Renaissance painting, the Golden Age topos is represented as a garden in which naked men and women dance around the fountain of eternal youth, the fountain of ragweed, which nourishes all without inequality and free from disease. Perhaps mindful of this, the pantomime of happiness - now long gone - was celebrated with the Saturnalia which took place in Rome from 17 December for a few days, presumably until the solstice, in which social roles were reversed or abolished, as a brief and fleeting glimpse of the happy age perhaps, but also as an irremediably melancholy joke of intoxication, in which a servant could become "king" for one day, and then everything would return to its place. The temple of Saturn, where the precious state treasury was kept, closed again, and the statue, sprinkled with oil, was wrapped in tight woolen bandages, so that it could not further manifest the liberality that was only granted to him in the periods dedicated. And his doors closed until the next year.

THEEpimonides, the passage of which we cited at the beginning, however, seems to indicate the faculty of the planet Saturn when deciding who would be those who better than others, such as Janus, can discern the will of the heavens and the stars, a first portrait of "born under Saturn", He who" was born with great effort ", as a wise legislator, who would have had alternating fortunes as a magician and prophet, or as an artist and a priest, even for a long time to come:

No one will ever be able to convince us that there is, for the mortal kind, a virtue greater than devotion to the gods: it must be said, unfortunately, that it could not take root in the noblest natures, due to a profound ignorance. The best natures are those that are born with great effort, but, once formed, they are truly precious. Indeed, when a soul accepts slow and opposite movements in itself, in moderation and gradually, it will have a good character.: will admire courage, will be inclined to temperance and, most important of these natural gifts, will have the ability to learn and remember; in short, he will be able to fully enjoy these things, to the point of becoming a lover of science. It is not an easy task for these natures to be generated, but, once born and favored by adequate education and training, they will have the power to dominate, in the best possible way, the mass of those who are inferior to them, thanks to the strength of their thinking, their actions and their ability to speak of the gods in the right way and at the right time, referring to the sacrifices and purification rites that concern gods and men, without resorting to subtle attitudes, but truly honoring virtue : the latter, of all, is the most important aspect for the good of the whole city.

Vincent Cartari, Saturn, from Le Images of the GodsΒ of the Ancients, XNUMXth century

The Apocalypses

In Christianity, the onomastic memory of San Giovanni Battista and San Giovanni Evangelista marks the two solstices, using the assonance between the names of Janus and John. Their Name begins at the time of the Solstice, when the timeline of the year for a moment is stopped, stopped and opened, so that it can be observed and understood. To some ancient seers this passage had been revealed in vision as an apocalypse, or the revelation of hidden things: the moment in which time stops and it is as if the cosmos opens the veil to let us see its inner workings. So I'm there vision of Er and Empedontimo's vision, or Scipio's dream - and therefore the Apocalypse by definition, that of John, the seer who is precisely celebrated on this date - examples of this "apocalyptic" functioning of time: where the temporal dimension is as if it veils a underlying mechanism, of rotation, which informs the cosmic cycles, the transit of souls between life and death, and in equal measure the seasons.

What in the apocalyptic vision unfolds in cosmic form is the transitus animae, the vision of the circulation of the vital breaths, if one could see in them the passing of the gods and the departed, the unborn and the seasonal cycles, in the body of the universally deified yogi. Basically, the yogi could observe this cosmic Solstice if he stopped his mind and breath as the sun "stops" its course, to be reborn in its ascending cycle. This arrest is for the yogi the Golden Age, the opening of the well of nectar, from which descends the bliss of ecstasy, the happiness that would be dispensed to all vital channels, such as the living, the dead and the heavens.. What would the Yogi realize when he saw the cosmos rotate on its own axis, in the space of his own body, supported by the vital breaths? It would realize the One Being, in which the whole cosmos and its cycles are contained, which transcends all these elements, singularities and trajectories, as a consciousness transcends the sum of the organs and functions that support the body. He is (all) what he is, the subtle form of the existing, the form of the breath of all manifestations, which appear on the scenario of the living as an ascending-descending dynamic.

Thus Krishna shows himself to Arjuna in the The Bhagavad Gita, in fact in an apocalyptic scene. In the divine cosmic body all beings, past, present and future, are returning, devoured by Time and at the same time they re-emerge into life, according to the ascending or descending line of their actions. Just as the cosmos, likewise, has a motion of manifestation, or of expansion, similar to the day, and a contrary motion, nocturnal, of reabsorption and latency. At the end of the latency phase, as on awakening, living beings, demons and celestial creatures, take their places and start the cycle again. But at the bottom of all this, God, the Supreme Being, remains unchanged, as pure existence, in the diurnal and nocturnal phase, in the manifestation as in the reabsorption, in the light and in the dark, beyond the dualities. Whoever knows God knows this immutable foundation, which in the same way inhabits the conscience, as a witness to the change of states, and is not involved in the phases of expression and reabsorption of the world, is no longer subject to becoming, lives in eternity.

The cycle of life and death occurs through the same divine cosmic body, as a wave of his breath, described in the forms that are dynamized through his person. Like an apocalypse, the vision unfolded by Krisna shows the destiny of souls and the alternation of times. Vision is meant to show the time of mortals and eternal time, in their mutual relationship. Krishna is the Eternal, where every modification, which is fragmented over time, occurs simultaneously. Those who, with the sacrifice to their ancestors, have poured the scarific offerings, which re-enter like the seed through the rain, go and return from life to death and back to life. On the other hand, those who have grasped the upward thrust of the One, seeing it through the still sky of divine revelation, go towards immortality. In the West, the ancient seers understood this double passage that informs the Nature of Grace, with the vision of the Solstices: on one side of the solar year there is the door of men, on the other the door of the gods:

[Empedotimus] suddenly found himself alone, at noon, in a deserted place and said that he had witnessed (at that moment and in that place) an epiphany of Pluto and Persephone, who enlightened him on how the light rotates cyclically around the two deities, and who thereby realized the whole truth about (our) souls, in the form of visions which he directly observed. [Proclus, fr. 93]

The vertical movement, the one that goes from south to north, which is referred to in yoga as the way of the Siddhas, and this is what the Sun is preparing to do on the winter solstice, therefore called la Via degli Deic. Direction headed by Saturn, the old Cronos, the one who devoured his children, or the agricultural god, who keeps the seeds in the undergroundor, how it keeps the taxes of the citizens in the treasury. It devours because, at the right moment, the sow can bear fruit. It dries up, because the seed, in order to bear fruit, must first die, buried.

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The sacred is the place where the logic of cause and effect must produce a paradox, a place of absolute otherness, of non-causality - in this period, in which the sun enters the kingdom of Saturn, the immortal Child is born, the ascending motion, towards the eternal, the timeless: what Saturn cannot devour, which remains Puer Aeternus, never subjected to time. On December 25, with the resumption of the regular motion of the sun, in an ascending sense, the vertical disclosure, the beginning and the epiphany of this Revelation is therefore celebrated. The Sun, unconquered, returns to illuminate the earth. Starting from the darkest place, of lesser visibility, therefore of contrition and limitation, or of exile: the cave, the stone, the place where the Atman is hidden in the heart of man, divine seed. So this is the Puer Senex, which certain medieval representations of the Child Jesus describe as a newborn whose face is that of an elderly person. Because he is the Eternal, the unborn.

Freeze is the sky of the Birth of the Sun, the sky and the earth stop on Christmas night, according to the story of the Protoevangelium of James. Joseph wanders around the countryside looking for a midwife, there are shepherds camped around watching over the flocks, it is certainly not a winter period, but its meaning is unchanged. It is midnight when the day's cycle reaches a climax that marks the new beginning, like a solstice. "And I Joseph was walking, and behold, I was no longer walking. I looked into the air and saw that the air was astonished, I looked at the vault of the sky and saw it motionless, and the birds of the sky were still. I looked at the ground and saw a bowl and some workers lying around, with their hands in the bowl: and those who were chewing no longer chewed, and those who were bringing to their mouths no longer carried, but everyone's faces were turned upwards. And behold, some sheep were being led to pasture and not walking, but standing still, and the shepherd raised his hand to beat them with his stick, and his hand remained in the air. I looked at the current of the river and saw that the kids were resting their noses and not drinking; and in short all things, in a moment, were turned from their course". The shepherds, whose job is to watch over and watch over, therefore witness the prodigy, which manifests itself in all its power in the dark sky of that time.


Girolamo Olgiati, engraving from Relief of the Phanes of Modena, 1569

Aion, the Eternal Pantocrator

In the celebrations of Mitra, the first exhibited the birth from the Stone, which coincided with the winter Solstice, while a second celebration, twelve days later (as after a symbolic year) 6st January, on the anniversary of the birth of Aion. These two "births" represented the two ways in which Mithras was conceived, which one Time Lord. According to some authors, the first birth was understood as the time cycle, referring to the alternation of the year, and the second in reference to Infinite Time. Or, to put it in the words of Plato: "Time (Cronos) was the moving image of perfect Eternity (Aion)". Iconographically we find him depicted as a boy with a lion's head, with a scepter, a key and a lightning bolt in his hands, wrapped in a snake that completes seven and a half turns around his body, corresponding to the celestial spheres. In the XNUMXth century, in Egypt, together with the feast of the birth of the Sun, celebrated on the winter Solstice, Epiphanius described the birth of Aion celebrated on January 6:

Every year, at the sanctuary (Koreion) the Aion birth party was held. The faithful spent the night watching, accompanied by sacred music. At the first crowing of the rooster, some of them moved, holding torches, towards the underground chapel, from which they took a wooden idol, seated on a sort of litter, marked with five seals in the shape of a cross, one on the forehead, two on the hands, two on the knees. This idol was carried in procession, making seven times around the internal chapel of the temple, greeted with the sound of flutes and tambourines and with the singing of hymns. Finally, the image was placed in the crypt. When asked for an explanation of the mystery, the faithful replied: "On this day and hour the Virgin (Kore / Athena / Isis) gave birth to Aion".

Plutarch that says that Neith-Athena she was identified with Isis, whose title was Kore, among many others, and of which she writes: "In Sais, in the passage of Neith, which the Greeks identify with Athena, there was an inscription in which the Goddess expressed herself in these terms: β€œI am all that has been and will be, and no mortal has lifted my garment (ie, 'I am a virgin'); the fruit of my womb is the Sun ”». Aion is a word that shows the living marrow of myth and theology, Aion is the seed of the living, of all that lives, the Protogonos, he is father and mother, he inhabits the cosmos, he emanates it without emanation, he is. He is found in the "marrow", as the seat of life, therefore "vital force", the duration of human life, amplified in the duration of generations, to reach eternity without modification to the unlimited, incessant flowing time. It is the eternally embodied. The invisible luminous ruler of the living. He exists in manifestation, he is pure manifestation of himself, wrapped in the serpent of the Zodiac.

Light energy, consciousness of being, it is said Phanes, epiphany, showing oneself of being, naked, covered with stars, destiny of which he is master and lord, the central axis of the cosmos, which is a child, with the head of a lion, solar. Hermaphrodite, as are the men who inhabit the world he created, the golden age. And between Aion and Ianus there seems to be a common denominator, Vayu, the breath that passes through everything, the Vedic god of the wind and breath element of every living thing, the divine Pneuma who makes himself psichΓ©. The Prana, which controlled and purified, guides the yogi to the encounter with the Supreme, to the realization of the Self. He reveals himself to be the Self, the Absolute who lives in the heart of the living, who can be seen by the living. This appears to be there Star seen by the Magi, who set out to meet her directly, to personally observe what prodigy she is manifesting to the world: he will be a king, he will be the beginning of the new age. They arrive at the cave on January 6, to see Osiris / Aion appear before their eyes. born of the Virgin.

The Wizards, who know the celestial mechanism, the first universal religion, bow to him: the sidereal religion from which all traditional religions will originate. The first, the Sun Invict in time, like Prajapati it will be one and multiple, broken in creation, in the year, in the months, in the days and in the ritual expressions, as the Holy Body will be broken in the Eucharist, and Zagreus in the mouths of the Titans and thus hidden in the hearts of men; the second is unalterable, the unchanged origin of all that manifests itself in many, in life and death, in cycle and rebirth, he who is always reborn in the many who are born. He who is at the center of the guidelines of time, starting from him, the coils of time, the zodiacal cycle, crossed by the physical sun, wind around him. The two, the Sun that unravels and sacrifices itself in the year and the Phanes pantocrator, are one. Therefore the Magician, the Siddha, arresting time with his own breath, fixed the Sun at the dark background of his own temporal being, observes the Star happen, the unfolding of the Eternal in the still heart of time ...

Il Calendar di Alfredo Cattabiani reports numerous chronicles and legends of the Birth and Epiphany, including the Chronicle of Zuqnin. The Magi saw something "like a column of ineffable light which descended and stopped above the cave [...] And above it a star of light that cannot be described: its light was much greater than the sun, and it could not compete with the light of its rays; and as in the days of nissan the moon is visible by day and when the sun rises it is engulfed in the light of it, so the sun appeared when the star rose above us Β».

As soon as the star stopped above the cave "We saw", the Magi say,

still the sky opens like a great door and glorious men carry the star of light on their hands; and they went down and stood on the pillar of light, and the whole mountain was filled with its ineffable light in the human mouth. And we saw something like a man's hand, smaller in our eyes than the column and the star, such that we could not look at it, and we grew stronger and saw the star entering the Cave of Hidden Treasures, and the cave shone beyond measure; and we heard a humble and sweet voice calling us and saying: "Enter without doubting and with love, and you will see a great and wonderful sight." And we entered fearfully [...] And obeying his word, we cast our gazes and saw that ineffable light in the human mouth, which was concentrated in itself and appeared to us in the build of a small and humble man, and said to us: "Health to you, children of the Occult Mysteries".

The Christ who reveals his saving mission to the Magi by showing himself to each one with a different aspect: as a child, as a young man, as an ugly and afflicted man, or crucified or as he descends into the Underworld, meaning that he is the Unity in the multiple. Then the star accompanies them, providing them with food and making the journey easy, up to the cave of Bethlehem where the Magi see "the column of light coming down and stopping in front of the cave, and that star of light descends and stops on the cave, and angels at the his right and his left [...] And the column, the star and the angels entered and advanced into that cave where the mystery and the light of life had been born.". Having laid down their gifts and having listened to Christ, who once again reveals to them his mission as Savior, the Magi set out for the East; and while they are resting at the end of the first stage, "the sign of light" reappears, revealing itself:

I am in every place and there is no place where I am not; I am where you left me because I am more than the sun of which there is no place in the world that is without it, although it is one, and if it were to fail in the world, all its inhabitants would be in darkness. Much more am I who am the Lord of the sun, and my light and my word are greater than those of the sun.

Lucas Cranach the Elder, Adoration of the Child Jesus by St. John the Baptist, about 1530-40

Considerations on the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn

Finally, I conclude this short journey through the mysteries (high and ridiculous, because they are perfectly incomprehensible to those who have no practice), with a note on conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn which is appreciated in the skies of this Solstice and which fascinates the curious about astrology. Jupiter was actually the Lord of the gods, before the heliocentric cosmos supplanted him in theology even before in astronomy. Yet, as Son and Father, he is himself the Aion. And as such, his birth is threatened, preceded by a massacre of the innocent and then hidden in a cave, where he waits to be revealed. He is Zeus, the father of beings, before his children forgot him, like a Prajapati abandoned by herds. It is the story of him that repeats itself, one of the faces of the faceless, the Child. According to some, it was the alignment of Jupiter and Saturn that was seen by the Magi to divine the event of Birth.

The empire of the world belonged to Titan, because he was Saturn's elder brother; but at the request of Cybele, Titan gave him to his younger son, on condition that he did not raise male children. Saturn kept his covenants; and since Time is personified in him, which destroys all that he himself produces, the fable with well-arranged allegory pretended that he devoured his children. But we will see later how the imprudent promises, advised by unbridled and cruel ambition, come back to the detriment of those who make them. Meanwhile, Cybele, sister and wife of Saturn, had two children at birth, that is Jupiter and Juno, showed only this to her husband, and kept Jupiter hidden from him, offering him in his stead a stone which was immediately devoured by Saturn. And this she also did when she had the other two children Neptune and Pluto. Jupiter was given to educate the Nymphs of Mount Ida on the Island of Crete and the priests of Cybele, called Curetes, Gauls, Coribanti or Dactyls; and the goat Amalthea was his nurse. It is said that the Nymphs and the Coribants, who were later also priests of Jupiter, in order to better hide the cries of the Nume in swaddling clothes from Saturn, began to dance, playing cymbals and beating many bronze shields among themselves. Finally this caution did not apply, and Titan discovered the fraud; so in order not to see his sons Titans excluded from the throne, he waged war against Saturn, defeated him, and imprisoned him with Cybele in a narrow prison; but then Jupiter as a good son came to the head to free them both […]. Since Saturn heard from Destiny that Jupiter would usurp his kingdom, as soon as he was free, he waged war against him; but Jupiter won it; and fearing that his father would once again use to his detriment the freedom he had procured for him, he expelled him from Heaven. [from Course in mythology, or, History of the gods and heroes of paganism: For the explanation of the classics and monuments of fine arts by FranΓ§ois-Joseph-Michel NoΓ«l, Charles-Pierre Chapsal, Pietro Thouar, 1861]

We have already seen above how the story of exiled Saturn continues, having arrived in Lazio, near Janus. As we learn from mythological events, Saturn and Jupiter are the two sovereign rulers of destiny. Jupiter could be understood as the via Maestra, where one works and reigns as much as the commitment is proportional; they enjoy the fruits of this excelling, so they leave themselves continuity, like the numerous sons of Jupiter. Therefore Jupiter is expansion, conquest. The benefit that is expected from Jupiter, in reality, is subordinated to the will of the sovereign, to his favor. It is necessary that, like a Leda, the Olympic Lord is allowed to fecundate the field of his interest, and that he takes the form and ways that he will decide appropriate to his will. Therefore Jupiter is benevolent, resolver, fruitful, abundant, but acts obsessed with the nightmare of being devoured by death, which is the antagonist of creation, and therefore having to reproduce itself in a thousand forms, thus escaping death - as Prajapati did, of which he is a multiple among multiples, eponymous of multiplicity and multiplier - propagating his fecundity as such: to shine, reflected in a thousand forms and abilities, to excel. His name will be that of everything that excels, that attracts to itself, that seduces, that leads to represent oneself and to become exemplary. That is why the Indians call him the Master, because the real seed is knowledge, the real benefit is to solve the enigmas that will decree the King, and the previously insurmountable obstacles, and the best fruit is excellence in any field. Jupiter is that which of the human escapes death by multiplying, which continues and propagates, and which is a guide and a benefit for oneself and for others.

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Saturn is no less generous, but older, anterior, the same but previous event, now fixed; its sphere of action is control, rule, seal, and that limit it marks is the place of overcoming, where the old holds the new until it matures. His job is to keep the seeds until the time has come. Cronos guards the Aion, apparently holding it back and sacrificing it. Without his father Saturn, the Olympic story seems to suggest, there would be no Jupiter, but Jupiter is there in spite of Saturn and his threats. Faced with the massacre of the innocent, the newborn Jupiter, the seed of the world, the future Evo (Aion) must remain hidden in the cave, cared for by a goat, surrounded by bees. It is to withdraw from Saturn that this asceticism is imposed, which at the same time is Saturn itself, the restriction, the frugality, the expectation of a royal revelation that will come and that will establish a new season of events. Jupiter crowns, like a king, the earthly events of the human being, but Saturn is the strategist, who can project the duration and scope of destiny beyond its "natural" limit. Master of Janus, he knows the past and the future, the keystone of events that we individually perceive as discontinuous, he knows the ascent and descent of souls, he is the judge Time, the keeper and the threat of the secret birth of Aion. Beyond the sphere of Saturn, or of time, we access the overcoming of the individual dimension, of the minimum and private life that fascinates ordinary people, but holds them in Samsara. Saturn marks great and tragic destinies, sometimes very dark, but never banal.

So what happens when the conjunction occurs? It is a point of divination of the sense of destiny, of the superior strategy that guides our lives. It couldn't happen at a more auspicious time than the Winter Solstice, the kumba of four units, of Pranayama of the cosmos. This point of the year is full of seeds still buried ready to return to life, to get back into the circle of experiences. It is also the vertical door, where what has finished its earthly cycle, fully awake, ascends to a higher level, to the way of the Gods.

More than to us, to whom we are used to referring everything, we must think that a conjunction affects above all those who are being born. I reflected to myself that, despite the general concern that is projected on this event, in itself it is not comparable to the "explosive" tension of a conjunction Uranus-Saturn, for example. And something whispered in my ear to check my maternal grandfather's birth chart. It was from 1897. And there I find the Uranus-Saturn conjunction with which I was making the comparison. If the year itself does not present particular events, it was the β€œboys of '97” who left for the Great War, those born under the perhaps most dangerous conjunction that can be identified. This is because, in the face of major events, attention must be shifted to the wider world around and after us, which is the one strategically interested in the facts that are determined in heaven. We will certainly be called in our hearts to ask ourselves if we have done all we could, and if we have heard the voice of destiny-Saturn, and if we have brought it, despite weakness and hostility, to its best expression, just like Jupiter. But we cannot project more than this, because our future, already born, lies exactly behind us.

Finally here everything happens in Aquarius, to represent what everyone wanted, the Age of Aquarius: now that we have it in front of us it doesn't seem to be what he expected. A cold and lonely, narcissistic and hyper-technological season immediately arises, just like Aquarius. Opposite to the leonine warmth, where we hugged each other happily, like animals close in their loving and ferocious family and local herd - on the contrary the Aquarius like Ida and Pingala is the cold breath, intelligent, who loves distance, weaves relationships, but does not ties, knows, studies, but, not a little, judges, excludes, chooses, discriminates. But this is the breath of time, the flowing down and the rising breath. We are the "thing" that goes down and up, the immortal breath. As seeds from which everything is born and expands.

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