Spirit on the Brain

From childhood, we have seen stars (e.g., atop Christmas trees) represented as if they had five points, i.e., in the form of pentagrams.

Yet, stars themselves are not in any way five-pointed.

Where, then, does that symbolism of the five-pointed star come from?

The pentagram has long been associated with the planet Venus, and the worship of the goddess Venus, or her equivalent. It is also associated with the Roman Lucifer, who was Venus as the Morning Star, the bringer of light and knowledge. It is most likely to have originated from the observations of prehistoric astronomers. When viewed from Earth, successive inferior conjunctions of Venus plot a nearly perfect pentagram shape around the zodiac every eight years. (Wikipedia)

Our Earth, like all the planets in the solar system, orbits in an ellipse around the sun, spinning on its own axis as it does so, and creating alternating periods of day and night for each region on its surface as it spins. As it traverses that ellipse, the range of “fixed stars” and associated constellations visible to observers on the night side of the planet—that side facing away from the light of the sun—changes.

Because of that annual periodicity in the range of constellations that are visible at night, it is natural and common for the zodiac to be represented in the form of a circular “pie”—i.e., a “map of the ecliptic,” with the constellations inscribed around the perimeter. Further, since as early as the first millennium BC, that pie has been cut into twelve equal “slices,” with each of the latter corresponding to one zodiacal “sign,” from Aries through Pisces.

Now, the planet Venus is the brightest point-like object in the sky—brighter than anything, in fact, except for the sun and moon. It owes that luminary distinction to its proximity to the sun, and to being covered with an opaque layer of highly reflective clouds composed of sulfuric acid. Being alternately visible either just after sunset or just before sunrise, in a 584-day cycle, it has been known traditionally as either the Evening Star or the Morning Star.

Venus orbits the sun approximately thirteen times for every eight orbits (i.e., years) of Earth. Because of that near-”orbital resonance,” if the positions of Venus (relative to the fixed stars) are plotted on a zodiacal “pie chart” over a mere eight-year period, that planet will trace out a five-pointed star, within the circular representation of the zodiac.

If one knows the ecliptic … and can pinpoint the present position of the planets in relation to the constellations of fixed stars in the zodiac … it is possible to mark the exact place in the 360 degrees of the zodiac where the Morning star first appears shortly before sunrise after a period of invisibility. If we do this, wait for the Morning star to appear again 584 days later (the synodic orbital time of [Venus]) mark its position in the zodiac, and then repeat this process until we note [Venus] back on point one again (six notations on five different positions in the zodiac) as the Morning star, we will find that exactly eight years have passed. If we then draw a line from the first point marked to the second point marked, then to the third, and so on, we end up with a regular pentacle or pentagram [i.e., a five-pointed star]. (Symbols.com, 29:14)

Found scrawled in caves of ancient Babylonia, the five-pointed star was copied from the star shaped pattern formed by the travels of the planet Venus in the sky. (About.com)

The pentagram was probably discovered as a result of astronomical research in the Euphrates-Tigris region about 6000 years ago….

Isolated pentagrams have been found on broken fragments of burned clay in Palestine, in layers dating from around 4000 BC. It was a common sign among the Sumerians around 2700 BC. (Symbols.com, 27:21)

Like the moon, the stars, and everything else in the sky as viewed from the Earth, Venus rises in the east, regardless of whether it is rising in the morning or in the evening. It is thus not merely the Morning Star, but also, in its own way, the Star of the East—which, in its primitive zodiacal representation, is again a five-pointed star within a circle. (Of course, even early astronomers could tell that Venus is actually a planet rather than a star, simply by observing how quickly it moved through the heavens. Still, the object has indeed traditionally been called a “Star.”) When that “Star” rises in the morning, it may continue to be visible near the sun even after sunrise—when seen from the Earth, Venus never strays more than 48 degrees from the sun. In that case, it will appear to be a point-source of white light, in a blue sky.

The aforementioned apparent “orbital resonance” between Earth and Venus is not actually dynamically significant: on timescales of thousands of years or more, the relative position of the two planets is effectively random. More accurately, every eight years the “starting point” of the pentagram traced out by Venus shifts in the zodiac by 1.5 degrees. That is the pentagonal star rotates within its containing “circular” zodiac—a phenomenon which would have been visible within the lifetime of even a single prehistoric astronomer, or at most over several generations. (It is unlikely that the early Egyptians, for example, lived past the age of thirty [Blackmore, The Meme Machine, p. 30].)

So, we have the movements of the planet Venus giving rise, quite naturally and unavoidably, not merely to a five-pointed star, but more colorfully to the idea of a Star of the East, as symbolized by a rotating five-pointed (white-light) star (in a sky-blue background) within a containing circle.

The fact that the brightest object in the night-time sky traces out a slowly-rotating pentagonal star (with respect to our one planet only) in its traversing of the zodiac is, of course, nothing more than dumb luck in how our solar system was thrown together. (Venus is the only planet in our solar system “that can clearly be identified with a simple graphic structure unambiguously derived from a plotting of its astronomical movements in space.”) Yet, that mere coincidence has not stopped the phenomenon from spawning important religious symbolisms and calendars in cultures around the world, where the five-pointed star contained within a circle is treated as if it were a sign from God Himself, which was then imagined to be reflected by the same Creator in the microcosm of the human body.

Thus, from Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi:

During deep meditation, the single or spiritual eye becomes visible within the central part of the forehead. This omniscient eye is variously referred to in scriptures as the third eye, the star of the East, the inner eye, the dove descending from heaven, the eye of Shiva, the eye of intuition, etc….

“[Lahiri Mahasaya] touched my forehead. Masses of whirling light appeared; the radiance gradually formed itself into the opal-blue spiritual eye, ringed in gold and centered with a white pentagonal star”….

Why color the outer (zodiacal) ring gold? Presumably because that ring represents all the stars of heaven, and the gods (in constellations and otherwise) therein. (The alchemists’ [and astrologers'] symbol for gold was actually a circle with a point at its center.) Gold, as we know, does not rust, and has long been a symbol of purity and royalty.

[T]he Kriya Yogi learns, and practices daily, a technique known as Jyoti Mudra, the purpose of which is not only to see but to pass the life force and consciousness through the spiritual eye into infinity. (Swami Kriyananda, The Essence of the Bhagavad Gita, p. 355)

The astral spiritual eye, as described by Yogananda, was simply borrowed from early astronomical observations—it doesn’t really exist as a “third eye,” and thus won’t be seen by any meditator except in an Imagination Run Amok way. But why, then, would that symbol of the physical macrocosm have been internalized, to be used as one of the most important images upon which one is advised to meditate, in the kriya yoga path? For that matter, why appropriate any primitive symbol of the macrocosm—from the World Axis (“of the spine”) to the hemisphere-like dome (“of the sky/skull”)—and use it not merely as a pragmatic image upon which to concentrate, or as an architectural principle in the building of temples and houses, but as a pretend-aspect of a nonexistent, microcosmic subtle body? Why would extended focus upon such a transplanted symbol/structure be supposed to raise one’s consciousness and ultimately to yield transcendent spiritual experiences?

The answer, I suspect, has to do with the sympathetic-magical mindset of our distant, primitive ancestors, when they were developing their external rituals and (later) internalized visualizations, the latter of which we now consider to be esoteric techniques of meditation. That is, “content” techniques of (kundalini, etc.) meditation may well have arisen as attempts at mimicking, and thus literally encouraging, a climbing of the World Axis to reach the Pole Star, in precisely the same way as pins stuck into a voodoo doll are believed to cause real pain to the actual person in whose image the doll was constructed.

In our “esoteric” meditations the “pins” exist only in imagination, and the “doll” is an equally imagined “subtle body” rather than, say, a physical ladder or smoke-hole in the roof of a yurt. But the difference between that and the mindset of the literal voodoo practitioner is only in the degree of abstraction—a natural and inevitable improvement in the slow evolution of our species. The central expectation that the sympathetic magic will work, and the primitive reasons for that expectation (i.e., that “like affects like”) are no different.

So, in meditating on the five-pointed star at the center of the golden ring, we are riding in sympathetic magic along with the brightest “star” through the literal sky-heavens, i.e., through the literal abode of the gods. That is the “transcendence” to which the ancient sages of India aspired, when visualizing the spiritual eye.

And we, as “spiritual seekers,” have received those primitive-mindset techniques, and taken them not for the “abstract voodoo” that they are, but rather as real means toward effecting spiritual transcendence via the visualized manipulation of imagined astral and causal bodies. Beautiful.

The whole edifice is built on primitive ideas of magic which never worked in the first place, any more than homeopathy works today. (In defense of most consumers of homeopathic remedies, they at least are probably ignorant of the “like affects like” theory underlying the quack/placebo medicine, and so are not generally guilty of explicitly endorsing the magical worldview from which that “medicine” arose. Not so for the doctors who prescribe those ineffectual “sugar pills,” nor for the manufacturers of the same “candy.”) No surprise, then, that when the methods of meditation we use, from mantras to attempts to raise a kundalini “energy,” are tested with competent experimental protocols, they amount to nothing more than techniques of relaxation, having no greater, measurable effect than the placebo/control techniques against which they are tested. After all, how much effect should “mental voodoo” have?

The best part about the (cf. content-meditation) Star of the East is this:

[I]n the year of Treya’s fortieth birthday, a teacher of both of us, Da Free John, began saying that the ultimate enlightened vision was when one saw the five-pointed cosmic star, in a very real and direct way….

And it is held that, at the precise moment of death, the great five-pointed cosmic star, or the clear light void, or simply great Spirit or luminous Godhead, appears to every soul….

[Treya] had simply had this vision, of the luminous cosmic star, in a very real and direct way. Thus upon actual death, I thought to myself, Treya would simply be seeing her own Original Face, and not for the first time.

Da was just borrowing that idea and symbol (uncredited) from Yogananda, and Wilber then swallowed it whole, while conveniently overlooking the fact that, as even a novice student of kriya/raja yoga would know, merely seeing that (astral! not causal or Ultimate) Star was never the goal—you’re supposed to pass your consciousness through it in daily meditation, not merely at death. Regardless, the only thing real about any of that was the motions of the planet Venus, as observed by primitive astronomers/astrologers and then plotted against the ecliptic in early star charts; the rest is just internalized rituals and Imagination Run Amok.