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(More customer reviews)It is easy to look at the mysticism of the ancients and see nothing but unintelligible mumbo-jumbo. But while we are free to reject myth and mysticism as incorrect, we would be foolish to dismiss them as nonsense. There is simply too much articulation, sophistication, and structural rigor to these systems of practice and belief. Scientology they ain't.
But what were the ancients doing? Why did they devote so much time to the stars, the human body, and the connections they believed existed between them? The notion that myth encodes astronomical information was first advanced by Santillana and von Deschend in Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge And Its Transmission Through Myth. Levenda takes their work a step further by identifying in the various seven-step spiritual traditions of the world's religions a reference to the seven stars of the Big Dipper.
We in the modern West just don't look at the night sky very often. But in our ancestors' "world lit only by fire," the sky was much more important to daily life. For bronze age people sitting around the campfire, the celestial procession must have been a lot like television. Certainly they gave the stars at least the same depth of narrative significance we today find in Lost, the Hills, and professional wrestling. But was there more going on?
If you live in the Northen Hemisphere, Polaris is the fixed point around which the night sky rotates - the crown of the "axis mundi." In a world changed by the weather, the seasons, and inexplicable catastrophes, the Pole Star was the only constant. For people who took the notion of "heaven" literally, the Pole Star was an obvious candidate for the seat of God (or gods, or whatever). Levenda argues that the ancients of all (or many) cultures understood the seven stars of the Big Dipper as the seven-step "stairway to heaven." And he finds in their seven-step rituals a means of transcending the world of impermanence, achieving immortality, and ascending to communion with the Supreme.
This is pretty groundbreaking stuff and Levenda makes his argument in a very precise and scholarly way. This is, however, not the Jerry Bruckheimer-style thrill ride that readers of Sinister Forces-The Nine: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft (Sinister Forces) may be anticipating. Like Hamlet's Mill, this is a fairly dry book about one seriously mind-opening idea. Unless you are interested in the details of archaic wisdom traditions and the "connective tissue" between them, you may find yourself skimming. But there's no flakiness here either. This is a book that will be read by serious people for some time to come.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Stairway to Heaven: Chinese Alchemists, Jewish Kabbalists, and the Art of Spiritual Transformation
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