Symbolism of the Circle Dance of the Planets

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Planetary Rounds and Globes Series · 16 pages

Sixteen pages with an abstract and train of thoughts at the front. The claim placed at the head of that abstract governs everything after it: that the only difference between the exotericism of the Latin Church and that of the old astrolators lies in the arbitrary interpretation of emblems, symbols, allegories and even names which are shown to be identical in both.

The study works by putting matched pairs side by side and asking what separates them. The world, it says, is asked to believe that the planetary angels of the Church are divine beings and genuine seraphim, while these very same angels, under identical names and attached to identical planets, are the false gods of the ancients. The Kabeiroi are introduced as the highest planetary spirits, great and powerful gods commanding all daimons. The sharpest of the comparisons concerns dancing: the circle dance of the planets, prescribed by the Amazons for the Mysteries, is called lascivious when pagans perform it, while King David's dance — in which he uncovered himself before his maidservants in a public thoroughfare — is not, with the added observation that it was David who introduced Jehovistic worship into Judaea after long residence among the Tyrians and Philistines, where such rites were common. Borrowing is alleged in both directions: having taken Osiris from the Egyptians, the Church Fathers are said to have thought little of helping themselves to his brother Typhon. The seven-branched chandelier of the Israelites, like the wanderers of the Greeks, is given a purely astrological original meaning, and the passage that follows is the most quotable in the file — that symbol for symbol the sun is to be preferred to a candlestick; that one can understand how the latter came to represent the sun and planets but nobody can admire the choice; and that where there is poetry and grandeur in the sun as the Eye of Ormuzd or of Osiris, no particular glory is rendered to Christ by assigning him the trunk of a candlestick in a synagogue. The closing section introduces the doctrine of two suns, one adored and one adoring, and the seven double series of Cosmocratores.

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