Washington DC Monumental Core Shown to Be
Analogous to The Plan for the Milan Cathedral

The Greater Mysteries

The division between the lesser and greater mysteries is analogous to the division between the exoteric and esoteric versions of any religion, which is based in the fact that some people are not able to understand religous allegories (work symbolically). The lesser mysteries dealt with naturalistic phenomenon, and utilized mythologies derived from the monthly patterns of the moon and yearly patterns of the sun. The life of the sun, parallels that of vegetation, from life, to death to rebirth again in the Spring. The moon goes from new to full and back again, in an endles cycle of swelling and receeding. At the new moon, she and the sun are conjoined (royal wedding), while at the full moon they are seperated (exiled from one another) again.

These sexual metaphors, based on "seasonal observation of life in the fileds" were appropriate for the bulk of the population, because at that time life was still ruled by the old agricultural cycle; whereas today most people are informed of the passage of the seasons only by fluctuations in their gas and electric bills or the weight of their underclothes, as Graves says.

The greater mysteries dealt with cosmological issues like how things in general came into being, and what is the nature of God's plan for the creation. Cosmogeny refers to the class of myths dealing with the origins of the Universe and mankind. The biblical versions of Creation mostly entail the notion of a fall, or falling, based on the simplistic dualistic notion that God, heaven, all things good, and divine order are up, while man, matter, the world, all things bad, and disorder are down.

To Christians, the fall was precipitated by sin, opposing the will of God somehow; and for those who might have a hard time seeing how matter could oppose God, the image of Satan was invented. To them, it's not love that makes the world go 'round, it's sin. The great dichotomy is not male and female, but good and bad.

As you can well imagine, concentrating on the opposition of good and evil would produce some pretty limited mythological story lines, unless of course you can tie it somehow to other dichotomies. Sin mongers rarely develop sophisticated cosmologies, because they are stuck in the duality, and can't see through to unities.

(Helen Haste in her book "Sexual Metaphor" points out the social ramifications of these compounded dualistic notions. For instance, if god is good and up and earth is bad and down, and god is male while earth is female, by extension, male is good, and female is bad. This also applies to notions of "mind over matter".)

Emanation

The Greeks were more laid back about sin, so their cosmolgies are free from moralizing mostly. They call their version of creation, emanation, or "overflowing". To them, the world doesn't fall, but emanates from the One, the Godhead, if you will. The basic notion is that each sucessive level of emanation is contained within the previous one, sort of like boxes in boxes. Remembering that the Greeks depended on mathmatical and geometric models for their explanations, we can see a parallel between the emanation story and the notion that 1 is not a number, but merely represents the idea of number, and that all the positive integers are contained within it. Conceptually, all things derive from and return to the One.

Celestial Spheres

Realizing that mathematics and geometry may not be everyone's cup of tea, the Greek mythographers generated a story about the journey of the soul with a more naturalistic setting, the celestial spheres. According to the old philosopher's tales, the passage of the soul (or spirit in the case of matter), was effected through the Zodiac and seven planets (five planets and the sun and moon in modern terminology). Cicero informs us that "a soul has been supplied to men from those eternal fires which you call constellations and those having been released from their bodies inhabit that place which thou beholdest (in the sky)". The souls were thought to fall by virtue of their weight?

As in many cosmologies, there is a three-fold division. In this case we have the Zodiac, then the spheres of the planets, and finally the earth; that is the heavens, the earth, and some mediator. Considering each "planet" individually, gives us a nine-fold division. [Think of the ladder with nine rungs in Fulcanelli's description of the image of alchemy as a woman.] Nine is the number of justice, 3 x 3. If we add the Throne of God at the top, we get ten divisions; and the zodiac is shifted to the middle group to preserve a simple trinity.

7 Planets

I saw seven golden candlesticks; and in the midst of the golden candlesticks,
one like unto the Son of man, And he had in his right hand seven stars. [Rev 1]

This is a simple diagram of the sun and the planets featuring the ancient conception of their order of descent; that being Saturn (top), Jupiter (top right), Mars (top left), the Sun (center), Venus (bottom right), Mercury (bottom left) and the Moon (bottom). This helps us make sense of the concepts of the Gates of Capricorn and Cancer that we read about. The Gate of Cancer is the birth gate; and the moon, the last stop before reaching the earth, rules Cancer. The Gate of Capricorn is the death gate; and Saturn, the last stop before returning home, Saturn rules Capricorn. There is clearly a parallel with the lesser mysteries here, in that these "gates" or tropics mark the limits of the sun's path each year.

[Reflect for a moment on what has been said about the hexagon/hexagram and the cube. The image of the planets on the hexagram figure a cube with the planets and moon at six of the corners, the sun at the central corner, and the divine spark hidden at the eighth corner.]

How Many Spheres?

Other arists chose to depict the spheres as concentric circles, like this.

In this painting by Giovanni di Paolo, the earth is in the center as the world map, and is surrounded by the other three elements, water, air and fire. [Remember that the earth pulls double duty as both a planet and an element.] The bright red clearly divides the sublunar and translunary realms. Then there are the planets and the fixed stars and signs of the zodiac, and finally the Empyrean, or Throne of God.

The Geometer's Image of Ideal Cosmology

As it turns out, the number of rings in images like these vary, because theologians couldn't decide whether the empyrean occupied a definite sphere; and this proved to be a big problem for artists working in this area of depicting symbolisms visually.

The Cabala

The Cabala, as the perpetuation of the greater mysteries, utilizes a legend of the soul's journey through 10 spheres, based on the story of Jacob in the Bible (Gen 28), who dreamed and beheld a ladder set up on the earth, with it's top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God ascending and descending on it. Recalling that the Bible story begins with the so-called "fall" from heaven, it is reasonable to see imagery used in these stories that is associated with things coming down from the sky, like falling stars and lightning; and as a matter of fact, in Ezekiel 1 we read that "the living creatures ran and returned as the appearance of a flash of lightning".

Note what Jacob says upon waking; This is a gate of heaven. Then he took the stone that he had used for a pillow (lying down) and set it up as a pillar (Djed, obelisk), and he said, this stone which I have set up for a pillar shall be God's house, and of all that thou shalt give me I will surely give the tenth unto thee. And he called the name of that place Beth-el (the house of God), but the name of that city was called (named) Luz (light) at first.

This is an architectural allegory, as well as a Cabalistic one. It is the story of raisng the Djed pillar to form a symbolic connection betweeen the heavens and the earth, of God and man. A pillar is set up to serve as God's house, in other words a temple, albeit a simple one. The image is phallic, like the number 1 or the letter I. If Aleph, the first letter, is zero like the first Tarot Card the Fool, then Beth, the second letter is 1. And he called the Beth-el, the house of God, because Beth means house.

[Gimel is 2, the Priestess, dealt with earlier in realtionship to the 1:2 ratio and the rhombus. Daleth (Delta the triangle) is 3, and means a door or gateway, the matrix or womb; the Empress card.]

The city was called Luz or light at first (number 1) because the "One" of the emanation story is equivalent to the notion of light.

While literalists will read something about tithing into the story, cabalists focus on the number and word symbolism. The term one tenth is merely a restatement of the 1:10 ratio, which was the ratio used by Egyptian builders of obelisks. We find that this is the same ratio of the sides of the base of the Washington Monument to it's height; 55 to 555 feet.

---

Continue