zodiac and the insertion of Libra

[Michael B-C]

The spring of becoming that was Aries-Gemini now heralds in the summer of being - of life itself - via the Gate of Cancer.

CANCER - the crab

Argo – The Ship



For the ancients it was through the gate of Cancer that the soul, now fully formed as a human child, formally re-entered the earthy world from the divine realm, (and later on in the cycle, exits through the opposite gate in Capricorn to re-join the heavenly union).

The Greeks tell how the crab was dispatched by Hera to bite hold of and grip the foot of Hercules as he struggled with the many-headed Hydra (note how this echoes the vulnerable “heel of immortal Achilles”.) In early Mesopotamian myth, Ninurta – the prototype of Hercules – battles with a turtle and falls into a pit where it kept gnawing at his feet with its claws. It is thus via the grip of the crab that the hero is rooted into matter and thus becomes vulnerable to its sway over him, symbolizing the limitation applied by all physical incarnation.

For Cancer opens the door into the mass form of humanity at large.

The crab lives half on the earth, and half in the water. It the sign, therefore, of the soul dwelling in the physical body but predominantly living in the water, which here is symbolic of emotional, feeling nature.

Cancer is ruled by the moon, which is always the mother of form, controlling the waters and the tides. Therefore, in this sign form is dominant, and constitutes a considerable handicap. The crab builds its house or shell and carries it upon its back; this is a sign of the emotions, of vulnerability to others opinions, of over sensitivity and a desire to hide away, of retreat behind that which has been constructed as being certain and safe.

In the mass, instinct rules; therefore, Cancer is also the sign of instinct, of herd life, of mass reaction with its watery state representing the subconscious mind, hereditary instinct, and the collective imagination.

It stands, individually, for the totality of the life and the consciousness of the cells in the body, and of that instinctive, collective life, which is largely subconscious in man, but which always influences his physical body and, subjectively, his lower mind and emotional being.

This sign is known as “the womb” but is also sometimes referred to as “the coffin”. It is associated with hidden life, of a veiling form, and of a potent struggle with material reality.

The symbolism of Cancer, immersed in the mass, leads to the prevalence of unconscious behaviour in sway to the greater whole, and therein lies the danger for the aspirant.

In a single word – control. Food for the moon…

For if one traces Cancer back to its most ancient roots we find it had close associations with death, the underworld, and the Snake, the bašmu-serpent – which literally means ‘the serpent with a womb’…

I think that is why the designer of this zodiac arch, Nicholas, deliberately designed his image of Cancer to reflect a double image of a Bishop’s mitre with a malevolent and cunning face:



I don’t think this heretical message could be much clearer: the church itself, organised mass Christianity, is nothing but a crab waiting to grip the seeker of truth by his ankles from birth (baptism) and control his life by immersing him thereafter in watery lies. I have reversed this picture so as to see the human figure more clearly, but in the original the face/mouth is pointing upwards as if to say from here on in, I control the destiny of mankind – like a serpent hidden inside the womb of Christ.


ARGO

For some particular reason Nicholas calls Argo, the ship, Pistrix, a name normally reserved for Cetus, the sea monster. However, the word can also mean ‘a light oared vessel’ – hence the likely use here to denote Argo, the ship. Yet it is equally likely that Nicholas wanted to reiterate the warning of Cancer – that the ship of being that carries you through the waters of life can also become a monster….

Of course Argo was the ship that in Greek mythology bore Jason and his 50 Argonauts off on their great quest in search of the Golden Fleece…

Argus was selected to build the ship, and he was said to have constructed the ship under Athena's guidance. Athena (wisdom) with the help of Argus put a piece of a sacred oak on the prow of the ship that was taken from the sacred grove of Zeus at Dodona. This sacred piece of wood has the ability to speak in times of danger and advise Jason on what to do. Argus did such an excellent job constructing this ship that at the time it was referred to as the most seaworthy ship ever seen.

The constellation Argo Navis originally stretched all the way from Cancer to Capricorn and was one of the largest of the ancient constellations (but now dismantled… how interesting!) The brightest of its 64 stars was given the name of a ship's pilot from another Greek legend: Canopus, pilot of Menelaus' ship on his quest to retrieve Helen of Troy. Sound navigation becomes clear as a central message. The importance of its symbolism covers the entire life of the aspirant from the time he takes incarnation until he has reached his living end.

The word “ship” is quite frequently used in a symbolic sense, speaking of the “ship of state”, the “ship of salvation”, and was regularly used to denote the church on earth as “God’s ship”. Again the designer appears to planting an esoteric warning here…

For any idea of security, of progress, and of the achieving of a way out, and of the carrying of a vast crowd of pilgrims in search of golden treasure or a new and freer home, is subtly undermined by the thought that in the wrong hands the ship itself could well become a sea monster…

Hints here of the vital importance of the aspirant being able to sail through life with ‘a clean machine’, fit for the purposes of the storms and tribulations that await its passenger in life. Without this solid foundation and not mistaking a sea monster for a ship, the journey cannot in the end be successful. The incorporation of the sacred oak of Dodona hints at the importance of raising one’s consciousness so as to receive the intuitive messages from the higher realm which serve to guide one from the prow of one’s ship (the higher awareness).

As with Taurus, Argo was often presented as being only seen via its front half – that is half in and half out of the ‘waters’…



There is a deep mystery in this which may have connections to precession and the ‘emergence’ into our realm of other realities at certain specific times when the stars ‘align’… but this isn’t the space to explore this further… but here this can be said to reiterate the challenge and gift of our being half out and half in nature…

As long that is we do not end up fully submerged by the keen grip of Cancer….

 

[Michael B-C]

Following the bridge from becoming into being in the sign of Cancer we come to the royal state of being itself, Leo the lion.


LEO - The Lion
ERIDANUS - The River


If Cancer is the sign of mass being then Leo is the zodiac symbol of individualization, of the human being who comes to know him/herself to be an individual and learns through awareness as the Self. The high summer of one’s life.

And so commences a lifetime of struggle between the draw to belong and a call to authenticity of being...

Leo signifies the kingly power inherent in each bodily soul to be itself, to become self-assertive and self-actualized, true to its calling come what may… to stand its ground in life and leave a distinct mark upon it… giving no ground to others and the blanketing summons of the herd…

However, implicit within this struggle is the potential for wilful pride, for the personality to form in such a way that it leads to a self-certain and self-focused blinding, where the strength of persona takes over and becomes seduced by the power of its own roar and the lower-reasoning mind…

Without a strength of ferocious will, this sense of individualised purpose, the soul in matter can make no progress – but equally Leo is the sign in which vanity and self-consideration can blind the disciple that progress is being made when it is not – for Leo is the battlefield where a spiritual war needs to be won - because without willing and accepting a defeat for the false personality and with it the emergence of what will become in Aquarius (its opposite sign) full awareness of shared universal consciousness, the self-assertive Leo will fall foul of the traps laid for it that its pride and boastfulness blinds it from seeing.

Traditionally the constellations most closely associated with Leo are that of Hydra, the serpent, and the series of minor but highly symbolic constellations that go with it – Crater the cup and Corvus, the raven.

All three sum up in their significance the great challenge facing those in search of the work. As Leo, the king, the individualized soul, starts upon the work, he/she must come to realise that the serpent of illusion, the snake of matter, must eventually be overcome by summoning up from within the messenger bird, the Raven, who can fly to the higher realm and bring back cooling water – water that is held both within the cup of suffering which is also the cup of redemption – it is the cup that every human being must drink before the end, full of what has been distilled from experience in matter - and thereby defeat the lure of mindless death.

The earliest known visualisation of these constellations (minus the cup) is from Babylon, uniting the Lion with the Serpent-winged dragon and the Raven, which pecks at the tail of the serpent, unseen by both lion and dragon (death present at the very outset of life?) as they stride forth in search of mastery.



Astrological tablet, Uruk, Seleucid period, ca. 200 BCE. The illustration shows the verso and recto sides of the same tablet denoting the zodiacal constellations of Leo, Hydra, Corvus and Virgo (hand copies: E. Weidner, 1967, and F. Thureau-Dangin, TCL IV 12).


The four points of the fixed cross of the zodiac all fall in the middle of a season—Taurus in the middle of spring, Leo in summer, Scorpio in autumn, and Aquarius in winter: Taurus (the symbol of creative force expressing itself through desire), Leo (as the lower reasoning mind coming to learn it must be ‘sacrificed’), Scorpio (where the aspirant finally hangs upon the cross, dying to illusion so as to regain immortality/reality) and Aquarius (where the light of universal consciousness brings about the final sacrifice of the individual life and its merging back in the universal whole).

Lion and bull in combat at ancient Persepolis​

This is not the place to dwell too long on a vast subject known as the Lion Bull conflict – a multifaceted symbolic battle that went on for many, many centuries in ancient Mesopotamia and from where, as it was transferred to early Greek culture as it adopted the polis city-state model of political organization from the Fertile Crescent, the Lion emerged as victor.



Two lions ravage a fallen bull. The central pediment of the Hekatompedon temple, the predecessor of the Parthenon at the Acropolis of Athens, built in the late sixth century BCE during the Archaic period of Greek history.


In some sense this struggle for dominance represented a slow shedding of very ancient values (knowledge) as the power of the centralised state and the centrality of victory in warfare as the signifier of divine right to rule became the norm, (which I suspect also included the suppression of ancient understanding about certain cosmic-cometary realities), but from an esoteric perspective it heralded in the increasing pre-eminence of visible material brute force over the slow and subtly cultivating natural order. For if the bull is taken as the eternal life-giving principle, the lion can be interpreted as the dynamic force that actively and forcibly activates its release. The lion thereby becomes symbolic of the result of known action within time, always eating away at the hidden and subtle eternal life principle. Man and his actions forcibly mastering the subtle hidden forces and bending them to his will.

In the symbolic language of Sumer, the lion is the great solar animal. Just as the light of the sun never varies, the lion exemplifies the clear light of awareness of eternity. The bull represents the lunar principle, which, waxing and waning in a constant cycle, exemplifies consciousness in the field of time. While the lion-consciousness is eternal and unchanging, the bull-consciousness, like the light of the moon, follows an eternal cycle of death and resurrection.

Sun consciousness defeating or mastering moon consciousness. The bright, eternal sun is indeed so powerful and seductive, yet its blinding light blocks out from sight the nuances and fluxes revealed only by ever changing moonlight.

In esoteric law a reuniting of sun vision with moon vision was a central teaching of the alchemical process – without this the blinding sun will leave you only seeing what vainglorious eyes want to see, not what is there, hidden from plain sight in the subtle shades of the night.


The body of the bison/bull (moon) and the lion (sun), united in one whole aspect with the creative body of the goddess. The Chauvet caves of France, 30,000 BCE in the Aurignacian period of the Paleolithic.


ERIDANUS

So why did the architect chose not to select the nearby Hydra but rather turn to the opposite side of the sky and choose Eridanus?

Eridanus is depicted in ancient sky charts as a flowing river, starting from Orion and flowing in a meandering fashion past Taurus, and intertwining with Cetus (the sea monster) and Fornax (the furnace) and ending around Phoenix (the bird of resurrection) in the southern sky. There is a very ancient tie between a lion headed sea monster and Cetus the sea monster... and Eridanus is therefore a kind of sea monster off shoot and the whole pattern seems in some way to mirror the Leo, Hydra, Crater, Corvix matrix.



Cetus from Al-Sufi’s Uranometry

Eridanus was later connected to the myth of Phaethon, who took over the reins of his father Helios' sky chariot, but didn't have the strength to control it and so veered wildly in different directions, scorching both Earth and heaven. Zeus intervened by striking Phaethon dead with a thunderbolt and casting him to Earth. The constellation was supposed to be the path Phaethon drove along; in later times, it was considered a path of souls. Since Eridanos was also a Greek name for the Po (Latin Padus), in which the burning body of Phaethon is said by Ovid to have extinguished, the mythic geography of the celestial and earthly Eridanus is complex.

In it is likely this whole Eridanus pattern holds memory of previous cataclysm. It is likely that it is very ancient and takes us back to the time of Tiamat and the battle of the gods in the skies.

Was this why the architect chose it to companion Leo? That the fate of the royal individual in matter is interlinked with celestial sky monsters that return and return to devour those unwarily tangled up in the illusory serpent of life…?

We will come back to this because the architect seems to reiterate this point over and over when he again ‘misplaces’ associations when he links Cetus to Scorpio/Libra and Hydra to Capricorn as the complex completes its foundations on the top step of the staircase of death…

 

[msasa79]

One reason Capricorn is at the bottom now becomes clearer if one first remembers that one is intended to read the whole design as one ascends from the Stairs of Death - for Capricorn is associated with the stage of death - in all its forms (physical and spiritual) - when the aspirant is ready to let go of all selfish worldly desires and ambitions. There is more to this configuration than that, but I think it is implicit as a reason for not ending with Pisces as would have been the absolute norm of the time.

This may also be connected to the idea that there were actually two paths by which one could travel the complete circle - clockwise being the norm for all those who stumble unconsciously blindly through life without ever learning anything other than its troubles and turmoils, and anticlockwise, the path taken consciously by those few who have already absorbed its complex, multifaceted lessons and are therefore ready to ascend... therefore this design, beginning with Capricorn/death and ending at Aquarius/the sign of giving selflessly to the world, may be a way of suggesting to the keen eyed that this design is intended for those few who have already broken through to this way of being in the world...

If I understand the above quoted passage correctly, the last 4 posts describing the 'human advancement/development' starting with Aries through Leo (and ending with Pisces) present the "clockwise path", right?

If so, what's exactly the purpose of such detailed exposition of that "normal path" of Zodiac, with elaborations of the constellations that were apparently paired to zodiacal signs in arrangement and presentation of the other "counterclockwise path", when you say in the quoted passage that this "normal clockwise path" is

for all those who stumble unconsciously blindly through life without ever learning anything other than its troubles and turmoils,

indicating that nothing can be actually learned from it, considering the people who 'walk along that path'?

 

[Ioannis.Astarte]

Reading Chapter 66 or the Wave Series and came upon this:

"To the left of the portal are 11 images of the zodiacal constellations. There are 11, rather than the statutory 12, because Scorpius and Libra are merged as one, in the image of a scorpion grasping in its chelae, or claws, the balance of Libra..."

"The zodiac was changed by taking the pincers away from the Scorpion and creating out of them the sign of Libra. This image was one of a woman holding a balance scales, usually blindfolded."

"...the insertion of the sign of Libra was designed to take power away from human beings, to take their hands away, to prevent them from seeing, to make them defenseless. Is this imagery close?"

I was taken aback by this because I'm a Libra and my wife is a Scorpio, as is my Dad....oh and one of my daughters...and my father-in-law...and my niece. Of course, I began contemplating mine and my wife's relationship with this new info in mind. In general, I would characterize myself as the one trying to "see", while she doesn't have much interest in doing so, none that I can discern anyway.

Just something I thought you all might find interesting.

I do have a question. Where can I find more info on Virgo and Scorpio being split up by Libra?

There is some information about this on the "Secret Teachings of all Ages by Manly P. Hall

"Those who hold the opinion that before its revision by the Greeks the zodiac consisted of only ten signs adduce evidence to show that Libra (the Scales) was inserted into the zodiac by dividing the constellation of Virgo Scorpio (at that time one sign) into two parts, thus establishing "the balance" at the point of equilibrium between the ascending northern and the descending southern signs. (See The Rosicrucians, Their Rites and Mysteries, by Hargrave Jennings.) On this subject Isaac Myer states: "We think that the Zodiacal constellations were first ten and represented an immense androgenic man or deity; subsequently this was changed, resulting in Scorpio and Virgo and making eleven; after this from Scorpio, Libra, the Balance, was taken, making the present twelve." (The Qabbalah.) "

 

[Olivierlejardinier]

There is some information about this on the "Secret Teachings of all Ages by Manly P. Hall

"Those who hold the opinion that before its revision by the Greeks the zodiac consisted of only ten signs adduce evidence to show that Libra (the Scales) was inserted into the zodiac by dividing the constellation of Virgo Scorpio (at that time one sign) into two parts, thus establishing "the balance" at the point of equilibrium between the ascending northern and the descending southern signs. (See The Rosicrucians, Their Rites and Mysteries, by Hargrave Jennings.) On this subject Isaac Myer states: "We think that the Zodiacal constellations were first ten and represented an immense androgenic man or deity; subsequently this was changed, resulting in Scorpio and Virgo and making eleven; after this from Scorpio, Libra, the Balance, was taken, making the present twelve." (The Qabbalah.) "

Hi @Ioannis.Astarte, thanks for sharing this information with us, may I suggest you to post an intro in the newbie's thread as to get a proper welcome, let others know about your presence amongst members and share how you discovered this forum ?

Found a pdf of the book you mentionned : "Secret Teachings of all Ages" and for those interested here's the wiki bio of the author (a notorious freemason).

 

[Claus]

There is some information about this on the "Secret Teachings of all Ages by Manly P. Hall

"Those who hold the opinion that before its revision by the Greeks the zodiac consisted of only ten signs adduce evidence to show that Libra (the Scales) was inserted into the zodiac by dividing the constellation of Virgo Scorpio (at that time one sign) into two parts, thus establishing "the balance" at the point of equilibrium between the ascending northern and the descending southern signs. (See The Rosicrucians, Their Rites and Mysteries, by Hargrave Jennings.) On this subject Isaac Myer states: "We think that the Zodiacal constellations were first ten and represented an immense androgenic man or deity; subsequently this was changed, resulting in Scorpio and Virgo and making eleven; after this from Scorpio, Libra, the Balance, was taken, making the present twelve." (The Qabbalah.) "

Hi @Ioannis.Astarte, I can see that this was your first post.
Since you are new you may want to make your introduction in the Newbies & Important Notices to All Members area.
Tell something about you and how you found the forum, I am excitet to read about it.