Vast is the antiquity and universality of the Zodiac.

Book excerpt: The antiquity and universality of the Zodiac can be traced back to the earliest Theogonies. It was not the Greeks who invented the Zodiac, for the simple reason that they did not yet exist as a nation thirty-seven centuries B.C. The dodecahedron is a perfect number and one among many signs of the Zodiac that the Sun visits in twelve months. It was in honour of that sign that Moses divided his nation into twelve symbolical tribes. Berosus predicted future events by the Zodiac; and the time fixed by him for the conflagration of the world, and another for a deluge, comes at every renewal of the cycle of the sidereal year of 25,868 years. The Hindus date their Kali-Yuga from the great periodical conjunction of the planets at 3,100 before the birth of Christ. Diogenes Laërtius carried back the astronomical calculations of the Egyptians to 48,683 years before Alexander the Great. The cycle of Initiation was a reproduction in miniature of that great series of Cosmic changes to which astronomers have given the name of tropical or sidereal year. Just as, at the close of the cycle of the sidereal year (25,868 mortal years), the heavenly bodies return to the same relative positions as they occupied at its outset, so at the close of the cycle of Initiation the inner man may regain the pristine state of divine purity and knowledge, from which he set out on his cycle of terrestrial incarnations. The connection of the twelve Jewish patriarchs with the Zodiac is a tacit “divine” recognition of the “chosen people of God,” whose finger has purposely traced in heaven, from the beginning of creation, the numbers of these patriarchs. Even the banners of these tribes are claimed to have exhibited the same symbols as those of the zodiacal signs. In the universe of differentiated matter everything is mathematically co-ordinated and mutually related in its units. Replace God with of Karma, and he will become an Eastern axiom. Why see in the Pisces a direct reference to Jesus, one of several world-reformers, when that constellation shines as a symbol of all past, present, and future Spiritual Saviours who dispense light and dispel mental darkness? The Jews had evidently and undeniably borrowed their chronology from the Chaldeans, along with their gods. Of the 432,000 years of the Chaldean divine Dynasties they made 4,320 lunar years from the world’s creation to the Christian era; as to the Babylonian and Egyptian Gods, they transformed them as quietly and modestly into Patriarchs. The Zodiac existed hundreds of million of years before the Christian era. Each planetary conjunction is a climacteric year of humanity. All Sun-gods had been mystically connected with the constellation of Taurus, which was called “the great city of God and mother of revelations” and “the interpreter of the divine voice.” The ansated Egyptian cross or Tau, the Jaina cross or Svastika, and the Christian cross have all the same meaning. No peoples or nations, except the Christians, gave the significance to the Dragon that is given to it now. The Serpent was the symbol of Wisdom; and the Taurus, sacred in every Cosmogony, the symbol of physical or terrestrial generation. It was from the Hindu systems of astronomy that the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, and even the Jews derived their knowledge. It is the antiquity of the nations of the East which has erected their scientific fame. For patience accumulated knowledge; and prolonged experience produced wisdom. Time itself was their teacher; they knew the motions of the heavenly bodies during these intervals because they had seen them; and the duration of the Hindu people on earth is the cause of the fidelity of its records and the accuracy of its calculations. The descent and re-ascent of the human soul cannot be disconnected from the Zodiacal signs, and it feels more natural to believe in the mysterious sympathy between the metaphysical soul and the bright constellations, and in the influence of the latter on the former, than in the absurd notion that the creators of Heaven and Earth have placed in Heaven the types of twelve vicious Jews. In esoteric philosophy Patriarchs are the progenitors of the human race, the “Mind-born Sons” of Brahmā. They are the nursery and fountainhead of human beings. This is the occult meaning of the Biblical Patriarchs, of their genealogy, and of their descendants dividing among themselves the earth. First 7 are mentioned, then 10, 21, and so on. The Jewish Patriarchs were pastors, not priests.