Sacred Symbols of Initiation, and the Solstice

Celtic Woman

MANY witnesses believe that crop circle formations are a modern spiritual mythology, embedding symbol-encoded occult messages.

These living symbols appear mysteriously every summer in the fields of Wiltshire, UK and elsewhere, an enigmatic presence open to many interpretations.

Some observers maintain that the symbolic formations are ‘mandalas of hope’ for our troubled world, as Theosophical writer David Pratt concludes in his article “Crop Circles and their Message.”

“The basic element of crop glyphs is the circle,” Pratt believes , symbolize “unity, boundless space, and the universal creative spirit or godforce. Crop circles with rings and satellites

sometimes resemble diagrams of the chemical elements, with their orbiting electrons.”

The “Boundless Circle”

“Tacitly admitting the All-Presence of the boundless Circle,” H. P. Blavatsky explains in The Secret Doctrine, makes of it “the universal Postulate upon which the whole of the manifested universe is based.” 

“Although revolution and change often appear to be precipitated by things that happen to us from without,” theosophical astroblogger Lauren Coleman writes: “this process of revolution is also dependent on an inner evolution, an unfolding from within.”

Season of the Sun: Our Cosmic 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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