Note
A power point presentation titled Return of Vishnu - (55mb ppt) was presented at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), New Delhi, India - July 13, 2009

Slowly an image began to form in my mind’s eye of what the city of Varanasi, India might look and feel like before I set eyes and foot upon it. The impressions I had of Varanasi were so many that trying to combine them into a meaningful collage comprised of stories and myths with the Ganges River reflecting all the ghats under the Milky Way was not an easy thing to do. And as these images all began to form a picture in my mind’s eye they would sometimes appear in dreams, and sometimes in a moment of reflecting on ancient India while visions of Shiva and Parvarti came to make Varanasi their home. And once I imagined an asura, sitting quietly in disguise pretending to be a deva, awaiting the amrita (soma) churned from the milky ocean and poured from the golden pot (kumba) for the gods to gain immortality. However, the asura was caught in his disguise as a deva by Surya and Chandra (sun and moon) and Vishnu disguised as the beautiful Mohini, and who was pouring the amrita for the gods, immediately beheaded the asura with his sudarsan cakra. The amrita, the sacred liquid churned from the milky ocean giving immortality to all who drank it, only reached the asura’s throat only so that his head become immortal. He would wait eternally for the chance to devour the golden rays of the sun during a lunar eclipse because of his revenge of being denied immortality with his whole body. His head would be known as Rahu the dragon eater, and his tail would be known as Ketu. These two parts of the asura’s body would be known as the north and south nodes of the moon creating an axis of eternal tension between what is desired and what is remembered.

On July 22nd Rahu appears once again to consume the sun and this time plunge the city of Varanasi into darkness. But Shiva will appear floating high in the heavens and bestow boons on all his devotees doing their oblations in the Ganges River and he will rise in the heavens as a brilliant pillar of light (sthanu) penetrating the three worlds and forever reminding his devotees he will always be with them and never forsake them in times of darkness and despair.

This mythical representation of a full solar eclipse, which takes place as of this writing in 108 days, and with Shiva having 108 names there is one name for each day left before I see the full solar eclipse at Varanasi. Writing about Varanasi without actually seeing it, hearing the chants or being filled with the smells coming from countless cremation pyres and sweet odors from all the incense is very difficult to imagine. Consequently, what will be the final impressions of Varanasi that will be forever seared upon the deepest recesses of my mind, never to be erased from memory unless the very universe itself were to vanish or if never another breath were taken or a star seen in the heavens?

For all the pundits who have provided their insights for the reasons Varanasi remains the preferred place to release a human soul on this planet, there has to be some explanation for this to be so. As a pilgrim, who has already climbed the sacred mountain of Lingaparvata in Southern Laos in 2006 to honor Lord Shiva, a trip to Varanasi fulfills a quest to be in the presence of a celestial awakening; the likes of which will not happen again in this century. And if starlight and star lore are married forever in a twilight language, known only by a few shamans whose dismembered bodies were able to fly away to those distant stars to hear that language of the gods, then that language will be heard again when the most auspicious of relationships takes place between heaven and earth over the sacred city of Varanasi on July 22, 2009.

So what might this language of the stars be trying to talk about when the Lord of the Moon greets the morning sun at Somnath before traveling over India? And what boon were all the holy men across India, Bhutan, Nepal and Tibet about to receive from this most auspicious celestial sign occuring over their land since the beginning of time? What instinctual forces were born by the great gods Varuna and Mitra to give humanity the curiosity to look into the heavens and wonder what those twinkling lights were trying to say?

Placing one’s self into a time long past before sounds were ever uttered or marks drawn by our distant ancestors is of course extending our imagination to enter a fantasy like world because we of today have encumbered ourselves within a matrix of meaning and interpretations constituting the origins of the starry heaven and then imposing those interpretations on civilization for well over 2000 years. To be able to return to the time of the origins of consciousness when the concept of self was understood to be when man and god were of one mind is not possible. Yet scattered all over the earth are reminders of humankind’s early attempts to record the heavens either on bones, cave walls or stone temples sequestered in jungles or nestled on mountain tops demonstrating that our ancestors had a direct relationship with the stars as well a sense of their origins. This star sensibility has not changed nor has the desire to peer into the heavens over the millennia which is evident in the current day and age with a space ship appropriately called Atlantis whose occupants are repairing the Hubble space telescope while at the same time the European Space Agency placed into orbit the new Herschel and Planck space telescopes to measure the invisible wave lengths of the stars. Certainly the stars still captivate the attention of our species and there is a very good reason for doing so; they bring us closer to the divine beginnings and source or our beingness.

However, modern civilization began to utilize the knowledge of the stars through its own interpretations rather than attributing them to divine origins, and mortal cognition replaced immortal cognition or the divine intent behind the creation of the universe. But not all mankind ignored what the stars had to say because the stories told by our ancestors and embedded in myths have been deciphered and the grandest of epics, the creation of the universe, has come to life through the ability to decipher the many petroglyphs and hieroglyphs our ancestors left behind describing what they felt and saw in the heavens. From these petroglyphs and hieroglyphs it can be seen that every culture has left behind a trace of their wisdom and in some cases entire structures reminding the world of the great civilizations which once reigned upon this earth. But even with all the discoveries of ancient civilizations, of which many artifacts have been transported and displayed in museums around the world, the explorers and historians of these civilizations do not agree on the meaning of these cultures cosmologies. With such uncertainty of the wisdom our ancestors were trying to convey, modern man, using a mind set born of reason, has promoted a history of our ancestors which has forever sealed the deeper meaning of the original message, and in many cases is contrary to what cosmologists, archaeologists and archaeoastronomers feel was the original message. This disagreement of meaning that our ancestors attributed to the origins of the universe as well as the world we live in is best expressed by the French philosopher Mircea Eliade with his insightful contribution to the dilemma with his book, The Sacred and the Profane. What constitutes sacredness and what constitutes the profane? For many there is no understanding of this distinction, because the motivations which are deemed to be the most important for adapting to this world are based on surviving only by finding a way to tender all our needs. Man of today has become dependent on a financial arrangement with the world at the exclusion of any activity which does not incorporate that financial dependency. But the real sustenance for living comes from our conscious relationship with the heavens and because we are on this earth to receive the powers of the elemental forces of nature we are provided the opportunity to discover how to utilize these forces for our livelihood and growth rather than those dependent on money.

The controversy will continue as to what our ancestors were trying to tell us, but one message they left behind, which is well known and agreed upon by all scholars, is that the sun changes its position against the background of stars. Through the study of the Mayan calendrics, and the decipherment of the end date of 2012 being the end of a long 26,000 year cycle, has lead to a worldwide awareness of the precession of the equinoxes and the significance behind the arrival of the Aquarian age. That awareness alone has unleashed the most concerted effort to analyze the astronomical awareness which our ancestors left behind, and the meanings they attributed to peering into the heavens.

To be continued

References:

The “Asokan” Pillar Reading: John Irwin, “Asokan Pillars: A Reassessment of the Evidence: Parts I-IV,” Burlington Magazine: Part I, (Nov 1973), pp. 706-20; and Part IV, (Nov 1976), pp. 734-53. Optional: Part 2, (Dec. 1974), pp. 712-27; and Part 3, (Oct 1975), pp. 631-43.

Eclipses come and go without much interest for many, however the Hermetic astrologers of the mystery schools of Egypt and Greece knew that an eclipse created a tunnel to higher realms where they could communicate directly with the star gods and access their sacred wisdom. It was a cosmic thoroughfare and stellar gateway. Scientific tests have shown that during an eclipse, electromagnetic fields increased significantly, especially near sacred sites. What could it mean for us?
On July 22, 2009 a solar eclipse will occur, one that I believe is why 2012 is so cosmically significant.