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:
720 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
subject of the adoration was settled upon, it was easy to make the
supposed events of his birth, life, and death, fit in with the Zodiacal
exigencies and the old traditions, though they had to be somewhat
remodelled for the occasion.
Thus what Kepler said, as a great Astronomer, becomes comprehensible.
He recognized the grand and universal importance of all such
planetary conjunctions, "each of which"—as he has well said— "is
a climacteric year of Humanity."* The rare conjunction of Saturn,
Jupiter, and Mars has its
significance and importance on account of
its certain great results, in India and China as much as it has in
Europe, for the respective M3'stics of these countries. And it is
certainlj' now no better than a mere assumption to maintain that
Nature had only Christ in view, in building her (to the profane)
fantastic and meaningless constellations. If it is claimed that it was
no hazard that could lead the archaic architects of the Zodiac, thousands
of years ago, to mark the figure of Taurus with the asterisk a,
with no better or more valid proof of it being prophetic of the Verbum
or Christ than that the alcph of Taurus means the "one" and the
"first," and that Christ was also the alpha or the "one," then this
"proof" may be shown to be strangely invalidated in more than one
way. To begin with, the Zodiac existed before the Christian era, at
all events; further, all the Sun-Gods—Osiris, for instance—had been
mystically connected with the constellation Taurus and were all called
by their respective votaries the "First." Further, the compilers of
the mystical epithets given to the Christian Saviour were all more or
less acquainted with the significance of the Zodiacal signs; and it is
easier to suppose that they should have arranged their claims so as to
match the mystic signs, than that the latter should have shone as a
prophecy for one portion of humanity, for millions of years, taking no
heed of the numberless generations that had gone before, and of those
that were to be born hereafter.
We are told
It is not simple chance that, in certain spheres, has placed on a throne the head
of this bull [Taurus] trying to push back a Dragon with the ansated cross; we
* The reader has to bear in mind that the phrase "climacteric year" has more than the usual
significance, when used by Occultists and Mystics. It is not only a critical period, during- which
some great change is periodically expected, whether in human or cosmic constitution, but it likewise
pertains to universal spiritual changes. The Europeans called everj- 63rd year the "grand
climacteric," and perhaps justly supposed those years to be the years produced by multiplying 7 into
the odd numbers 3, 5, 7 and 9. But 7 is the real .scale of Nature, in Occultism, and 7 has to be multiplied
in quite a different way and method than is as yet known to European nations.