The Bulgarian Christians Have Preserved Ancient Sun Worship

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 10 pages

Ten pages that begin a long way from Bulgaria. The document opens with an extended passage from the Timaeus — the Second God splitting the world-soul lengthwise, laying the two parts against each other like a great cross, bending each into a circle, and setting the outer to the Motion of the Same and the inner to the Motion of the Other, the inner then divided into seven unequal circles. The footnotes identify these plainly: the Revolution of the Same is the celestial equator, the Other the ecliptic, and the sevenfold division the planets.

That framework is what the Bulgarian material is then read against. The argument is that customs still kept by Bulgarian Christians preserve, under Christian names and dates, an older solar religion whose structure the Timaeus describes philosophically — so that peasant observance and Platonic cosmology turn out to be two survivals of the same thing. It is a short piece, and one of the clearest illustrations in the series of the method the whole library rests on: that a rite whose meaning has been forgotten by those who keep it can still be read by someone who knows what it once meant.

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