Vast Is the Antiquity and Universality of the Zodiac

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's First Proposition Series · 35 pages

Thirty-five pages with a full abstract and train of thoughts. *It is the file in this section with the most dates and figures in it*, and it can be read as a chronology as much as an argument. The epigraph is worth quoting for the temper of what follows: most men are guided by the understandings of others, not by their own.

The case is that the antiquity and universality of the zodiac can be traced back to the earliest theogonies, and it is argued from arithmetic. The Greeks did not invent it, for the simple reason that they did not yet exist as a nation thirty-seven centuries before Christ. The dodecahedron is called a perfect number and one of many signs the sun visits in twelve months, and it was in honour of that sign, the file says, that Moses divided his nation into twelve symbolical tribes. The astronomical calculations then accumulate: Berosus predicted future events by the zodiac and fixed times for a conflagration of the world and for a deluge at every renewal of the sidereal year of 25,868 years; the Hindus date their Kali-Yuga from the great periodical conjunction of the planets in 3,100 before Christ; Diogenes Laërtius carried the astronomical calculations of the Egyptians back to 48,863 years before Alexander the Great; and a cyclic or sidereal year, founded on the precession of the equinoxes, is given as 25,868 years, so that the larger cycle amounts to 4,242,352 solar years. The passage those figures build toward is the one that gives the file its purpose, and it is a moral rather than an astronomical conclusion: the cycle of initiation was a reproduction in miniature of the great series of cosmic changes astronomers call the sidereal year, so that as the heavenly bodies return at the close of the sidereal year to the relative positions they held at its outset, so at the close of the cycle of initiation the inner man may regain the pristine state of divine purity and knowledge from which he set out on his cycle of terrestrial incarnations. An esoteric chronology of the present fifth root-race follows.

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