Divine Heliolatry Is Neither Astrolatry nor Idolatry

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Planetary Rounds and Globes Series · 24 pages

Twenty-four pages opened by a full abstract and train of thoughts — a contents page which states each position the study takes and gives the page where it is argued — so a reader can see the whole shape of the argument before entering it. The frontispiece is a third-century BCE sun dial from Ai Khanoum in the Musée Guimet.

The distinction the title turns on is between honouring a spirit through a visible body and worshipping the body itself. The ancients are said never to have mistaken the stars for gods or angels, nor the sun for the highest God, but to have worshipped only the Spirit of all, while reverencing minor gods identified with the hosts of angels, cherubs and planetary archangels. Saturn the Father of Gods is carefully separated from his namesake the ringed planet — the two called identical in one sense only, as physical man is identical with his soul. Against that, astrology is noted as having been proclaimed a sinful science and tabooed by the churches along with occultism, and the file presses the point that if Mars personifies the strength of the one impersonal Deity, Mercury its omniscience and Jupiter its omnipotence, then what is called pagan superstition has become the religion of the civilised nations. The evidence assembled is comparative and largely numerical: the Dalai Lama's mitre with seven ridges in honour of the seven Dhyani-Buddhas, Brahmā's seven rays and seven Rishis in seven Svargas, China's seven pagodas, the seven Cyclopes, seven Demiourgoi and seven Kabeiroi of the Greeks. Michael is identified as regent of Saturn and informing spirit of the sun and Jupiter, with the observation that the Sabaeans distinguished the planet from its god far more carefully than Roman Catholics distinguish their angels from their stars — leading to the study's sharpest claim, that the dogmas and rituals of the Roman church read like pages torn from the history of occultism, plagiarised and then distorted.

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