Greetings Everyone and welcome back to our study of Albert Pike’s Morals and Dogma as we continue Chapter 25.
This time we will read Pike’s description regarding the ancients observations of cause and effect in relation to our own, and also we will read how these observations caused many ancient civilations to look to Taurus as a god.
And now, LET’S READ PIKE!
Perhaps we are not, on the whole, much wiser than those simple men of the old time. For what do we know of effect and cause, except that one thing regularly or habitually follows another?
So, because the heliacal rising of Sirius preceded the rising of the Nile, it was deemed to cause it; and other stars were in like manner held to cause extreme heat, bitter cold, and watery storm.
A religious reverence for the zodiacal Bull [TAURUS] appears, from a very early period, to have been pretty general, perhaps it was universal, throughout Asia; from that chain or region of Caucasus to which it gave name; and which is still known under the appellation of Mount Taurus, to the Southern extremities of the Indian Peninsula; extending itself also into Europe, and through the Eastern parts of Africa.
This evidently originated during those remote ages of the world, when the colure of the vernal equinox passed across the stars in the head of the sign Taurus [among which was Aldebarán]; a
p. 451
period when, as the most ancient monuments of all the oriental nations attest, the light of arts and letters first shone forth.
We read in these paragraphs how astronomical observations caused (causes) many to relate the effects of nature with the gods as they appear in the night sky.
Another instance of this cause and effect is related to the dog star Sirius that appears in the height of summer and summers hottest temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere. The Romans believed the bright star Sirius also emitted heat during the pitch black night, as if it were another sun.
This is why the height of summer is refeered to as “the dog days of summer.”
We learn that our senses of what seems to be the cause is not really the cause at all of any given effect.
We must always be cautious of believing what seems to be, as what seems to be may not at all BE in reality.
Next
The Arabian word AL-DE-BARÁN, means the foremost, or leading, star: and it could only have been so named, when it did precede, or lead, all others. The year then opened with the sun in Taurus; and the multitude of ancient sculptures, both in Assyria and Egypt, wherein the bull appears with lunette or crescent horns, and the disk of the sun between them, are direct allusions to the important festival of the first new moon of the year: and there was everywhere an annual celebration of the festival of the first new moon, when the year opened with Sol and Luna in Taurus.
David sings: "Blow the trumpet in the New Moon; in the time appointed; on our solemn feast-day: for this is a statute unto Israel, and a law of the God of Jacob. This he ordained to Joseph, for a testimony, when he came out of the land of Egypt."
The reverence paid to Taurus continued long after, by the precession of the Equinoxes, the colure of the vernal equinox had come to pass through Aries. The Chinese still have a temple, called "The Palace of the horned Bull"; and the same symbol is worshipped in Japan and all over Hindostan. The Cimbrians carried a brazen bull with them, as the image of their God, when they overran Spain and Gaul; and the representation of the Creation, by the Deity in the shape of a bull, breaking the shell of an egg with his horns, meant Taurus, opening the year, and bursting the symbolical shell of the annually-recurring orb of the new year.
We also refer to great financial times as a “bull market” in our modern times.
There is still an undercurrent of reverence paid to “the bull.” Though it has been lost in time as to why that reverence is often paid.
We might also consider that we as human beings tend to make our gods appear as we are comfortable with seeing them.
The ancients had no problem giving the bull its due regard.
In christianity, the western culture paints images of a white Jesus Christ nullifying his factual middle eastern appearance.
In Buddhism, we can trace images of the Buddha with his origins from India with rounder eyes, to hundreds of years of progreeion to the east where asians made images of the Buddha with more slanted eyes that made Buddha more like themselves in appearance.
Next
Theophilus says that the Osiris of Egypt was supposed to be dead or absent fifty days in each year. Landseer thinks that this was because the Sabæan priests were accustomed to see, in the lower latitudes of Egypt and Ethiopia, the first or chief stars of the Husbandman [BOÖTES] sink achronically beneath the Western horizon; and then to begin their lamentations, or hold forth the signal for others to weep: and when his prolific virtues were supposed to be transferred to the vernal sun, bacchanalian revelry became devotion.
Before the colure of the Vernal Equinox had passed into Aries, and after it had left Aldebarán and the Hyades, the Pleiades were, for seven or eight centuries, the leading stars of the Sabæan year. And thus we see, on the monuments, the disk and crescent, symbols
p. 452
of the sun and moon in conjunction, appear successively,--first on the head, and then on the neck and back of the Zodiacal Bull, and more recently on the forehead of the Ram.
The diagrammatical character or symbol, still in use to denote Taurus, ♉, is this very crescent and disk: a symbol that has come down to us from those remote ages when this memorable conjunction in Taurus, by marking the commencement, at once of the Sabæan year and of the cycle of the Chaldæan Saros, so pre-eminently distinguished that sign as to become its characteristic symbol. On a bronze bull from China, the crescent is attached to the back of the Bull, by means of a cloud, and a curved groove is provided for the occasional introduction of the disk of the sun, when solar and lunar time were coincident and conjunctive, at the commencement of the year, and of the lunar cycle. When that was made, the year did not open with the stars in the head of the Bull, but when the colure of the vernal equinox passed across the middle or later degrees of the asterism Taurus, and the Pleiades were, in China, as in Canaan, the leading stars of the year.
The crescent and disk combined always represent the conjunctive Sun and Moon; and when placed on the head of the Zodiacal Bull, the commencement of the cycle termed SAROS by the Chaldæans, and Metonic by the Greeks; and supposed to be alluded to in Job, by the phrase, "Mazzaroth in his season"; that is to say, when the first new Moon and new Sun of the year were coincident, which happened once in eighteen years and a fraction.
On the sarcophagus of Alexander, the same symbol appears on the head of a Rain, which, in the time of that monarch, was the leading sign. So too in the sculptured temples of the Upper Nile, the crescent and disk appear, not on the head of Taurus, but on the forehead of the Ram or the Ram-headed God, whom the Grecian Mythologists called Jupiter Ammon, really the Sun in Aries.
If we now look for a moment at the individual stars which composed and were near to the respective constellations, we may find something that will connect itself with the symbols of the Ancient Mysteries and of Masonry.
In thes paragraphs Pike offers a complete dissertation regarding the astrological importance of Taurus and ultimately suggests that these astrological signs relate well with Masonic ritual and freemasonry i general, and freemasonry itself relates directly to many ancient mysteries.
Once again, we should be reminded to keep our minds opened to ideas that do not seem like ideas that we may have been raised to know and revere.
More than likely, these ideas we revere and the god we might worship may well have evolved from these ancient stories, therefore in giving time to study the ancient mysteries, we just may find ourselves knowing our god and our reverences in a more meaningful way.
And, here is here I will end our study for today.
Thank you very much for continuing to study with me, and for your support of the efforts of The Universal Freemason Research Society.
