2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helpers prepared a 2012 annual report for Theosophy Watch.

Here’s an excerpt:

19,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform. Theosophy Watch was viewed about 96,000 times in 2012. If it were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take about 5 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Reincarnation of Pets

IN an ideal world, perfect harmony and balance between man and nature would be the norm.

Thus, the keynote of Mme. Blavatsky’s worldview was the just and moral treatment of all the beings in nature, the First Object of the Theosophical Society, Universal Brotherhood.

This foundational teaching of Theosophy is expressed in The Secret Doctrine, Summing Up #5, which states that “everything in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is conscious,” and is “endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on its own plane of perception.”

Consequently, Mme. Blavatsky was adamant in opposing animal exploitation and cruelty. She spoke out forcefully against sport hunting, foxes, birds and big game, and most strongly against vivisection — animals used in biological experiments:

“If these humble lines could make a few readers seriously turn their thoughts to all the horrors of vivisection, the writer would be content.”

Pet Reincarnation

Updated and republished at:

Reincarnation of Pets

Cauldrons and Cupcakes

“I am confident that there truly is such a thing as living again, that the living spring from the dead, and that the souls of the dead are in existence.”
– Socrates

Most of you will know that we have a new pup, Harry, in our household. You might also be aware that we lost our beloved dog Charlie at the beginning of September, after a wonderful 17 years of friendship and family.

I’m beginning to wonder if these two beautiful boys might be one and the same.

When I first met Harry last week he boldly walked over and climbed into my lap.  He seemed to be uncommonly comfortable with me, and since I brought him home this young dog hasn’t spent a moment fretting over his mum (he was unweaned) or his litter mates.  I’ve never known a puppy to behave like this.

When we arrived at…

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The Solar Mother

WHAT is the winter solstice, and why do so many people around the world bother to celebrate it, as they do every year at this time?

“The word ‘solstice’ derives from the Latin sol (meaning sun) and statum (stand still),” explains the NY Times Op-Ed Contributor in the article”There Goes the Sun.”

The phenomenon reflects what we see on the first days of summer and winter at dawn for two or three days.

At that time the sun seems to linger for several minutes in its passage across the sky, before beginning to double back.

Winter in the northern hemisphere marks the annual return of an ancient solar festival. Indeed, “turnings of the sun” is an old phrase, used by both Hesiod and Homer. The novelist Alan Furst has one of his characters nicely observe, “the day the sun is said to pause,” recalls the NY Times Op Ed: “Pleasing, that idea…

As though the universe stopped for a moment to reflect, took a day off from work. One could sense it, time slowing down.”

But the event has deeper, metaphysical implications. Both the Sun and the human heart are the two greatest life-givers we know. Indissolubly interconnected, according to occult teachings, both radiate continuously a powerful aura of biological and regenerative energies.

“The real substance of the concealed (Sun) is a nucleus of Mother substance,” Blavatsky writes in The Secret Doctrine (1:290, xxi). It is the heart and the matrix of all the living and existing Forces in our solar universe.

“As its substance is of a different kind from that known on earth, the inhabitants of the latter, seeing through it, believe in their illusion and ignorance that it is empty space,” she says (1:289, xix). Yet there “is not one finger’s breath (angula) of void Space in the whole Boundless Universe.”

Ancient astrology and astronomy identify many ancient temples, and pyramids around the world connected to solar symbology. Such sites and mounds are considered mere burial tombs by mainstream archeologists, most of whom are disinterested in spiritual traditions.

But at the time of their construction these sites were in fact intended, wrote H. P. Blavatsky in Isis Unveiled (1:270), to be sacred places of initiation. Describing the Spiritual Sun, called “Agni,” the ancient Rig-Veda declares, she says, “His radiance is undecaying …

…the intensely-shining, all-pervading, unceasing, undecaying rays of Agni desist not, neither night nor day.”

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Saving the World

YOU must not think that the gods are without employment, declared Synesius, the Greek bishop of Ptolemais.

The idea is developed by theosophist W. Q. Judge in his article “Cycles,” about the duty of the ancient gods to watch over humanity.

“For this providence is divine and most ample, which frequently through one man pays attention to and affects countless multitudes of men.”

“For they descend according to orderly periods of time,” Synesius wrote,

“… for the purpose of imparting a beneficent impulse in the republics of mankind.”

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Describing these descending Gods, Synesius of Cyrene, a Neoplatonist as well as a bishop says: “For there is indeed in the terrestrial abode the sacred tribe of heroes who pay attention to mankind, and who are able to give them assistance even in the smallest concerns.”

“This heroic tribe is, as it were,” Judge quotes in his article, “a colony from the gods established here

“…in order that this terrine abode may not be left destitute of a better nature.”

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12.12.12

PLATO the ancient Greek Sage, along with Socrates and Aristotle, laid the philosophical foundations of Western Culture.

It was the irrepressible Plato who famously insisted that deity geometrizes in fabricating the Universe.

In his dialogue Timaeus (c. 360 B.C.) he says “there is a fifth figure (made of twelve pentagons), the dodecahedron. God used this as a model for the twelvefold division of the Zodiac.”

“Various models have been proposed for the global geometry of the universe,” Wikipedia explains.

“In addition to the primitive geometries, these proposals include the Poincaré dodecahedral space, a positively curved space consisting of a dodecahedron whose opposite faces correspond (with a small twist).

This was proposed by Jean-Pierre Luminet and colleagues in 2003 and an optimal orientation on the sky for the model was estimated in 2008.”

Photograph of a Roman dodecahedron from Wikipedia.

Wrote H. P. Blavatsky in Isis Unveiled: “The solution of the great problem of eternity belongs neither to religious superstition nor to gross materialism.

“The harmony and mathematical equiformity of the double evolution — spiritual and physical — are elucidated only in the universal numerals of Pythagoras, who built his system entirely upon the so-called ‘metrical speech’ of the Hindu Vedas.”