To Light a Thousand Lamps - The Theosophical Society

The Christian Message / 91
many there were. In Western Europe most countries celebrate
the coming of Three Kings at Epiphany, on January
6th. Some say they traveled from Persia and that is why
they were called Magi, meaning ‘‘great’’ in wisdom. Others,
like Augustine, believed that twelve wise men followed the
star. Somewhere along the line names were attached: Melchior,
Caspar (or Kaspar), and Balthasar. Purucker equates
them with three of the seven sacred planets: Melchior with
Venus, his casket of gold representing the light that Jesus was
to shed upon the world; Caspar who carried myrrh ‘‘in a
gold-mounted horn,’’ with Mercury; and Balthasar, who offered
frankincense, ‘‘pure incense,’’ with the Moon.* It
would appear that the wise men bringing gifts are symbolic of
qualities which Jesus would need in order to bring to birth
the Christos.
And the star? According to the German astronomer
Kepler (1571‒1630), while he was observing a rare grouping
of planets, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn in October 1604, he
was startled to find a stella nova or ‘‘new star’’ (a nova or
supernova, an exploding star) which remained brilliantly
visible for seventeen months. Kepler concluded that what
the Chinese astronomers had recorded as novae, both in
5 and 4 BC, gave credence to his view that the Star of
Bethlehem may well have been a conjunction of two phenomena:
a syzygy or planetary grouping of Mars, Jupiter,
and Saturn in early 6 BC and the explosive light discharge
that surrounds the ‘‘death’’ of an old star. May we not
suggest, then, that the so-called Star of Bethlehem could
*Ibid. 2:1105‒7.