Mabel Collins: When the Sun Moves Northward

Mabel Collins · Higher Ethics and Devotion Series · 53 pages

Mabel Collins's When the Sun Moves Northward, fifty-three pages in twelve chapters, arranged by the months from December through May under the heading “The Way of Initiation.” Collins is the author of Light on the Path, held complete elsewhere in this section together with the dispute over how it was written.

The organising idea is calendrical: the book follows the half of the year in which the sun moves northward, and treats each month as belonging to a stage of the way. December is the Birth Month, opening with a section on ceremonies and feasts and running through three chapters. January is the Love Vigil, in two chapters. February and March are taken together under the heading Human Life and Human Death, in three chapters — the longest single stretch of the book and the one at the turn of the year's darkest part. April is given to Good Friday and Easter Day across three chapters, and May, in a single closing chapter, to Transmutation. Setting the sequence against the Christian calendar while calling the whole a way of initiation is the book's characteristic move, and it explains why a work of this kind sits in a section otherwise made up of Indian, Greek and Persian material: the argument is that the same stages appear under whatever names a tradition gives them.

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