CIRCLES OF WATER: THE GALAXY IN SOUTH AMERICA

It is quite possible that the Vedic civilization precedes the Egyptian Isis cult, since the Mother of God is always depicted as the flower who rises from a lotus as an earth goddess. She precedes all earthly expressions of power, including kingship. Secular or royal power is Female, or more commonly in the West, is known to be granted by a prospective king’s contact with a female being of a divine nature.

This is an ancient formula reflecting of the same Gnostic Christian view that the prior miracle giving rise to the concept of Savior himself came from miracle of the Immaculate Conception of Mary. We don’t find the Father lurking much behind Mary in the colonial-era Christian iconography, as found by a leading independent researcher on the ‘Galactic Alignment’in his book  -- John Major Jenkins. The said event is a rare astronomical phenomenon that brings the solstice sun into alignment with the center of the Milky Way galaxy every 12,960 years.

2012, the end-date, where we are at now, does not signal the end of time but rather the beginning of the ascension stage of the development of human consciousness, according to John Major Jenkins who is a leading independent researcher of ancient Mesoamerican cosmology and has worked with the highland Tzutujil and Quiche Maya. 

We have long anticipated the year -- 2012 with much dread or fear of earth’s destruction or with the jubilation of globally celebrating the coming maturity of Humanity. Moira Timms, author of Beyond Prophesies states: “Galactic Alignment brings us full circle, into the re-membering and re-cognition of the wisdom of our own ancient origins – re-connecting us with ‘whole’ consciousness and initiating us into the ‘mystery of mysteries.’ A profound work of epochal importance for our historic moment."

Colonial architecture provides an interesting support for the Isis origin of the Virgin in Washington D.C. We have another name for this great country: it is also called ‘the United States of the Virgin.’ I have done an article on it in this weblog and it’s archived. It is a galactic knowledge that draws our attention to the connection between mythology and cosmology and it didn’t bring anything new to the Americas, however. Mayan, Aztec, Incan, and virtually all native civilizations in the Americas already knew about and had an appreciation for the Milky Way as earth’s Great Mother, as mythologized by the Maya. It is pointed out here that the Maya were probably the most cosmologically advanced civilization in the Americas, and they recognized the Galactic Center as the womb of the Great Mother – the source and origin of the Sun and all life. ‘Circles of Water’ come as a life-giving-mother motif, and so Jenkins’ original and groundbreaking research on the Maya presents a sweeping look at the world’s esoteric traditions in terms of a central and compelling idea that times of galactic alignment might be also times of transformation, according to Vincent Bridges, co-author of A Monument to the End of Time. 2012 is a watery year,perhaps to remind us of the operation of the Circle of Waters.

When Spain’s invasion occurred, indigenous Americans saw in the Virgin Mary atop the Spanish churches, a reflection of their own deepest beliefs about the Cosmic Mother. Both ideologies -- religion and astronomy stem from a metaphysical understanding of the role played by the Galactic Center in human spirituality, although both worlds were oblivious to the galactic roots of their beliefs during the early ages of the colonial period. Jenkins says: Suffice it to say that colonial religious architecture in Mexico and Central, and South America honors the Virgin Mary as the deity that is Most High, above the worlds of duality and death. 

*I used to wonder before I came upon Jenkins' book Galactic Alignment the idea why I placed a statue of the Holy Mother with Child high above the tallest structure in our sala or living room, as I couldn't find a place for our Lady in the usual expected place, the Altar in the big room reserved for the enthroned Sacred Heart of Jesus.  Where to place the Holy Virgin was a quandary for me, but the thought suddenly hit me to put her up on top of an old aparador a relic from our lola's spanish house which I chose to reign in the midst of our sitting arrangement of chairs and sofas.  Did my guardian angel suggest that to me intuitively?  


    In Incan cosmology, and Peru was home to a thriving Incan empire, when the Spanish conquistadores arrived, we find clear evidence that the Milky Way was of great interest. And the Galactic Center was symbolic of a life-giving motif. Jenkins: When I say “galactic” I simply mean ideas and beliefs involving the Milky Way, our galaxy. Gary Urton’s At the Crossroads of the Earth and the Sky, remains the best source for the galactic sky lore of the contemporary Quechua Indians of highland Peru. Urton did his research or field work in the village of Misminay, not far from Cuzco. The life-giving Vilcanota River that runs through the town of Misminay symbolizes the Milky Way galaxy where our solar system is contained, and is oriented to the Milky Way at agriculturally important times of the year.

In South America, the region of the Milky Way with its Galactic Center is overhead in its sky. When you view its pristine conditions in the high altiplatino of Peru, it’s impossible for you to ignore the nuclear bulge in its connecting Sagittarius-Scorpio constellations. In addition to the great cleft running north of Sagittarius that is of great interest to the Maya, many dark-cloud features along the Milky Way were identified by the Inca, namely, the Fox, Toad, Tinamou, Snake, and Mother Llama and her suckling baby. The latter two represent the life-nurturing quality that we see in the Virgin Mary motif. Jenkins considers the Mother Llama and her baby’s location in the Galactic Center is of symbolic significance. The Fox is close by, and William Sullivan in his book, The Secret of the Incas, argues that the Fox is involved in Incan precessional mythology.

One more thing: regarding the Fox. In the current battle for supremacy of the US leftist media as anti- Trump noisy adversary to topple the latter, what emerges as a sly, unsinkable opponent in defense of Trump the conservative GOP president-elect is the FOX's news.  Why the Fox?  Is it the inspired choice of the Mother of God for the war on the devil's attempt to destroy America?


The Scorpio constellation is also of symbolic significance to the Quechua, and was thought as a plow for farmers, or a storehouse or in a larger sense, a granary, symbolic of abundance. The opposite side of the Milky Way near the Pleiades, is also significant, both the tail of Scorpio and the Pleiades are thought of as storehouses (of sustenance). The sun passes through the Scorpio side around the December solstice, and the life-giving rain is generated by the passage.


Incan cosmic consciousness has been noted by the Spanish chronicler Molina. He reported in his journal that just after December Solstice, the people of Cuzco threw food, coca, gold, spices, clothing and other things into the water behind a dam above the city, a symbolic ritual of giving back to Mother Earth what has been given them. After sunset, they opened the floodgates and the water poured through the streets of the city, scouring everything in its path and sweeping all the buried offerings that were left on the curb side. Below the city, where two the Rivers Tallumayu Huatanay meet, runners were waiting. They helped the offerings channel into the Vilcamayu River and then began a riverside race to a point where the river drops steeply into a canyon, ultimately to merge with the Amazon and the (northern sea) Atlantic Ocean.

Interesting to modern-day astronomers and esotericists is the fact that the ceremonial event took place during a time of the year when the Milky Way angled southeast-northwest overhead at sunset. Along the side of the Vilcamayu River people held lanterns to light the runners’ way. The Milky Way itself, ablaze with points of light, reflected the dramatic spectacle on Earth. Gary Urton wrote that the procession along the Vilcamayu River was equivalent to a journey along the Milky Way – the implied ultimate goal being the northern sea: meaning heaven. In this tradition the entire Sacred Valley of the Vilcamayu River reflects the Milky Way, and the ceremony facilitates what Urton calls “the cosmic circulation of water.” As above, so below.

The release of the renewing waters of life was keyed to the Sun’s alignment with the Milky Way galaxy. "As above, so Below" -- the ancient wise men would sum it up. Hadn’t the ancient Filipinos known about this ancient Incan religious system of renewal involving the “circulation of water,” an agricultural process that was essentially inspired by cosmological insights involving the galaxy? Now we still mourn a recent tragedy of enormous proportions involving the loss of numerous lives and properties in the Cagayan de Oro valley and neighboring areas in Mindanao that were swept away to the sea carried by cut logs that rolled down from the mountains during the December solstice of 2011, a catastrophe that would have been prevented if the consciousness of the people during this period of time extending perhaps several generations had assimilated a transcendent perception about this law of the Circles of living-Water. An incling of the Wholeness of Life may have manifested in these islands as a reversal of the desire to accumulate wealth by a rapacious need to do illegal logging for one, and mine for gold and other precious minerals by using chemicals that poison the rivers, and surroundings.

Here we encounter the crux of Rene Jean-Marie-Joseph Guenon critique of Western civilization. Modern civilization has become divorced from the transcendent realm which in former ages was consciously integrated into daily life. The modern world which fails to understand the meaning of the word transcendent as well as the meaning of the word intellect. In the traditional usage which corresponds to the Sanskrit word for mind, buddhi -- intellect means the perception of transcended realities, the faculty that can perceive the acitivity of the higher worlds. Notice that this doesn't correspond to the modern idea of being "intellectual" or "smart." What we see here is intellect as a faculty of perceiving, directly our relationship with higher realities rather than something someone acquires through study and schooling.

Notice how the Incans and Mayans of the indigenous tribes in South America had no claim to having studied in sophisticated schools or colleges in urban centers, and yet they had the intellect or faculty to perceive directly their relationship with higher realities as seen in their ceremonial rituals of the Circles of living Water, and their way of life. It is ironic that modern civilization effectively erodes the original buddhi mind of pure intellection that is the birthright of everyone, even while it educates and indoctrinates us. More to the point, the myth of progress allows modern civilization to masquerade as the most sophisticated in all human history. For Guenon and the other Traditonalist writers, however, this is a reversal of the true situation.

Modern civilization is not the result of progress, it is the civilization of the Kali Yuga, the darkest age, in which humanity obsessed with materialism, has been completely removed from a direct experience of connection with the higher Source.

Guenon may have experienced some kind of direct intellectual illumination at an early age. France was in horrendous upheaval during World War I, Guenon was thirty years old, and he knew that the world was heading in the wrong direction, writing his book, East and West, translated into English by Martin Lings. After the war, antireligious sentiment among the the French intelligentsa indicated that new levels of decadence were imminent, and for Guenon this meant a further distancing of humanity from its traditional roots. He wrote more books about the causes of modern civilization's downward spiral. According to Jenkins, Guenon was greatly concerned with the metaphysical processes of spiritual transcendence --the dynamics to emerge signifying the terminal phase of Kali Yuga where we are happily coming out of now. Any thoughts?

COMMENTS: Fr. Joey de Leon, SJ
Ateneo de Manila -- This is very interesting.

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO APOSTLE THOMAS

Now that we have reached the Universal plane, the pinnacle or topmost area of the Mayan Calendar, the heavens, We the People have to, according to Monoimus, a Gnostic teacher, to learn to “Abandon the search for God and the creation outside yourself, by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is within you who make everything his own and say, ‘My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body. Learn to see the sources of your sorrow, joy, love, hate… If you carefully investigate these matters, you will find God in yourself.’


And at this most critical time of our Human Evolution you and I would, whether we like it or not, encounter these sources of our sorrow, joy, love, hate right in our midst. For example, there’s so much misunderstanding generated by so much concern for finding what’s wrong (called accountability ) with the previous administration in government, feeling so righteous about ourselves as an investigating dark force, dark, because we in power have lost our own direction in the Fog that has befallen Syria. Syria is symbolic of any country in the world today where its people are in uprising and protesters are being killed by a government that is confused and severely chaotic and bizarre in its lack of discernment about the question of the duality between good and evil.


Recently, Professor Helmut Koester of Harvard University has suggested that the collection of sayings in the Gospel in the Gospel of Thomas although compiled circa 140, may include some traditions older than the gospels of the New Testament, ‘as early as, or earlier, than Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John. Scholars investigating the Nag Hammadi find inside a jar in an ancient cave by archeologists, tell the origins of the human race in terms very different from the usual readings of Genesis: The Testimony of Truth, for example, tells the story of the Garden of Eden from the viewpoint of the serpent!


Here the serpent, long known to appear in Gnostic literature as the principle of divine wisdom, convinces Adam and Eve to partake of the knowledge while “the Lord threatens them with death, trying jealously to prevent them from attaining knowledge (gnosis), and expelling them from Paradise when they achieve it.’ Another text, mysteriously entitled the ‘Thunder, Perfect Mind,’ offers an extraordinary poem spoken in the voice of a feminine divine power:

For I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin…
I am the barren one.
And many are her sons…
I am the silence that is incomprehensible…
I am the utterance of my name.

Please read and reread the above lines and find out who it is among our feminine leaders in these islands of 7,107, past and present, embody some of the above traits… not necessarily all of them which collectively represent the many diverse women of the world and in particular, our own women here and working abroad. Focus is on the one whose ‘silence is incomprehensible’ while she’s the object of ‘being honored and simultaneously scorned.’ You can easily guess who, as she is a former president of this republic, currently held in hospital arrest, charged with various plunder cases whose evidence may yet to be seen to stand in court. These different texts range in a significant diversity, then, according to my source: The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels, who got her doctorate from Harvard University in 1970, taught at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she chaired the department of religion, now the Harrington Spear Professor of Religion at Princeton University, participating with other scholars in editing several of the texts from Nag Hammadi.


Why were these texts (ranging from secret gospels, poems, and quasi-philosophic descriptions of the origins of the universe, to myths, magic, and instructions for mystical practice) buried – and why have they remained virtually unknown for nearly 2,000 years? Their suppression as banned documents and their burial on the cliffs at Nag Hammadi, it turns out, were both part of a struggle critical for the formation of early Christianity. We have long known that many early followers of Christ were condemned by other Christians in the middle of the second century as heretics, but nearly all we knew about them came from what their opponents wrote attacking them. This sounds familiar as we experience a similar effect of a press or media that is evidently controlled by the current dispensation. Here, I am just reporting briefly what the scholars of the ancient texts found at the cliff at Nag Hammadi have assessed.

Elaine Pagels asks: Does not such teaching – the identity of the divine and human, the concern with illusion and enlightenment, the founder who is presented not as Lord but as spiritual guide – sound more Eastern than Western? For example: the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas relates that as soon as Thomas recognizes him, Jesus says to Thomas that they have both received their being from the same source: Jesus said, ‘I am not your master. Because you have become drunk from the bubbling stream which I have measured out … He who will drink from my mouth will become as I am. I myself shall become he, and the things that are hidden will be revealed to him.’ Some scholars have suggested that if the names were changed, the ‘living Buddha’ appropriately would say what the Gospel of Thomas attributes to the living Jesus. Could Hindu or Buddhist tradition have influenced Gnosticism?


The British scholar of Buddhism, Edward Conze, suggests that it had. He points out that ‘Buddhists were in contact with the Thomas Christian (that is, Christians who knew and used such writings as the Gospel of Thomas and used such writings in South India). Trade routes between the Greco-Roman world and the Far East were opening up at the time when Gnosticism flourished (A.D. 80- 200); for generations, Buddhist missionaries had been proselytizing in Alexandria. We note too, says Pagels, that Hippolytus, who was a Greek-speaking Christian in Rome (c. 225), knows of the Indian Brahmins – and includes their tradition as part of the heresy:

There is … among the Indians a heresy of those who philosophize among the Brahmins, who live a self-sufficient life, abstaining from (eating) living creatures and all cooked food… They say that God is light, not like the light one sees, not like the sun nor fire, but to them God is discourse, not that which finds expression in articulate sounds, but that of knowledge (gnosis) through which the secret mysteries of nature are perceived by the wise.


Since parallel traditions may emerge in different cultures at different times, such ideas could have developed in both places independently, our scholars aver. What we call Eastern and Western religions, and tend to regard as separate streams, were not clearly differentiated 2,000 years ago. Research on the Nag Hammadi texts is only beginning: Pagels and company look forward to the work of scholars who can study these traditions comparatively to discover whether they can, in fact, be traced to Indian sources.

We find these problems familiar in our own experience. The term ‘Christianity,’ especially since the Reformation movement in England, has covered an astonishing range of groups. Those claiming to represent ‘true Christianity’ in the 21st century can range from a Catholic cardinal in the Vatican to an African Methodist Episcopal preacher initiating revival in Detroit, a Mormon missionary in Thailand, in the Philippines, or the member of a village church on the coast of Greece. Yet Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox in Russia agree that such diversity is a recent – and deplorable – development. According to Christian legend, the early church was different. Christians of every persuasion look back to the primitive church to find a simple, purer form of Christian faith.


In the apostles’ time, all members of the Christian community shared their money and property; all believed the same teaching, and worshipped together; all revered the authority of the apostles. It was only after that golden age that conflict, then heresy emerged: so says the author of the Acts of the Apostles, who identifies himself as the first historian of Christianity.