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The Star Larvae Hypothesis
Nature's Plan for Humankind
Part 2. Star Larvae

Astrotheology and Astral Religion

The universality and persistence of astral themes in religious art and lore testify to humankind’s stellar longing and ultimate identity.

During the ages of thought preceding the scientific age, the idea that the universe was alive seemed commonsensical. The perception of nature as animate included everything from the smallest bug to the entire cosmos, including the stars of the night sky, which were conceived of as not only being alive, but super-alive: divine. Those twinkles that dot the night sky are nearer to God than we, and they hold some interest in human affairs, according to the ancient philosophies. In the context of modern science, such a notion is meaningless. But the star larvae hypothesis revives the old conception. The astral theme persists in religious symbolism, and the star larvae hypothesis elevates it to a sublime portent.

Stellar allusions and imagery appear early in cultural history. The astral motif is conspicuous already in the ritual practices and art of shamanism. This hunter-gatherer religion uses trance induction to produce visions of the spirit world. Anthropologist Joan Halifax explains that the "realization of a solar identity" experienced by the tribal priest, or shaman, during ritual trance reveals to her or him the "deepest structures of the psyche." The shaman seems to receive input from an astral dimension. Halifax surveys the shamanic tradition in "Shaman : The Wounded Healer" (Thames and Hudson, 1982), and there includes examples of beaming, radiant human forms found in shamanic art, reflecting the psyche's stellar core.

Cult religions of dynastic Egypt also saw stars as animate beings, taking them to be the liberated souls of the ancestors. Persisting through Chaldean astrology and its influence on Hellenic thought, into medieval theology, and on into the revival of Hellenism during the Renaissance, the astral motif retained a prominent place in religious sensibility. The divine status of stars crossed effortlessly from the Pagan to the Christian world. It passed from Patristic Fathers, such as Origen, through the retention of Aristotelian cosmology in the medieval world, to Renaissance philosophers, such as Ficino, Bruno and the later angelologists, such as Dee and Fludd. It was fundamental to Hermetic magic as well and has a discernable counterpart in Jewish Kabbalism.

The Christian connection is perhaps underappreciated, but American revolutionary Thomas Paine was adamant about his belief in the astrological origins of Christianity. In his essay on the origins of Freemasonry he explains,

"The Christian religion and Masonry have one and the same common origin: both are derived from the worship of the sun. The difference between their origin is, that the Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun, in which they put a man whom they call Christ, in the place of the sun, and pay him the same adoration which was originally paid to the sun, as I have shown in the chapter on the origin of the Christian religion.

In Masonry many of the ceremonies of the Druids are preserved in their original state, at least without any parody. With them the sun is still the sun; and his image in the form of the sun is the great emblematical ornament of Masonic lodges and Masonic dresses. It is the central figure on their aprons, and they wear it also pendant on the breast of their lodges, and in their processions. It has the figure of a man, as at the head of the sun, as Christ is always represented."

In a letter to his friend, Andrew Dean, Paine elaborates,

"Everything told of Christ has reference to the sun. His reported resurrection is at sunrise, and that on the first day of the week; that is, on the day anciently dedicated to the sun, and from thence called Sunday - in Latin Dies Solis, the day of the sun; and the next day, Monday, is Moon-day. But there is no room in a letter to explain these things."

Online sources that elaborate on Christianity's astral origins include Zeitgeist, The Pharmacratic Inquisition, and Truth Be Known.

Spiritual attainment expresses itself as solarization in these graphic examples from Australia (left) and Mexico (right).

The rise of scientific rationalism during the eighteenth century essentially knocked Renaissance occultism off the stage of intellectual preoccupation. With the early successes of modern laboratory experimentation and feats of mechanical engineering, Enlightenment science retired the longstanding metaphor of nature-as-organism and replaced it with the modern metaphor of nature-as-mechanism. This change swept aside the old conception of living stars, though astrology continues to attract a devoted following.

Religious figures receive coronal treatments even today, as in the glowing images of Jesus, Mary, and the saints in Catholic art. The concept of transfiguration is a naked appeal to stardom. From the biography of a medieval Christian mystic, Mircea Eliade cites a dramatic account of an (essentially shamanic) transfiguration experience:

"As this light continued to shine with ever increasing brightness and became like a midday sun shining in splendour above him, he saw that he was himself at the centre of the light and that the sweetness invading his whole body from so near filled him with joy and tears. He saw the light unbelievably uniting with his flesh and gradually pervading his limbs. He saw this light finally invading his body, his heart and his bowels, the whole light invading his whole body and turning him completely to fire and light."

In "The Two and the One", Eliade collects this and similar accounts of what he calls "the mystical light." He argues that the mystical essence of religious sensibility includes such transfigurations. The Buddhists' "clear white light of the void" and similar metaphors corroborate the universality of this archetype. Eliade documents varieties of mystical experience that include not only the mystical light, but also "mystical flight," the sensation of ascendance, along with instances of precognition, an intuitive sensing of future events. Illuminated entities, enlightened beings, and ascended masters populate the firmaments and astral planes of ancient occult cosmologies as well as various "New Age" cults of today. Evidence of these themes throughout the writings of comparative religion points to a well-developed complex in the psyche that revolves around stellar attributes and anticipates human participation in the stellar life cycle. We star-struck, starry-eyed humans are driven toward the heavens by our stellar nature. "Every man and every woman is a star," declared the notorious English occultist Aleister Crowley. Through his hermetic investigations he had distilled the collective calling of humankind.

This grand calling expresses itself not only through personal psychology, but also through the history of humankind collectively. The most historically significant civilizations, according again to Mircea Eliade, embrace the solar/stellar themes of astral religion. If shamanism is the default mode of religion in hunter-gatherer societies, then a ceremonialized expression of the stellar calling through ritual sun worship seems to be the corresponding form in agrarian societies.

The cosmic trances of shamanism and mystical revelation became collectivized and vitiated into orthodoxies of faith and belief as human labor became more regimented and specialized under agrarianism. Lunar, atmospheric, and then terrestrial inspirations gave rise to pantheons and legalistic doctrines, and transcendental experiences gave way to collective pageantry. This seems to be the general pattern of religious development.

However, a handful of civilizations resisted the tendency to reorient religious sensibility from the sky to the earth. Rather than sprout a multiplicity of nature gods, they retained an overt solar orientation. Eliade, in "Patterns in Comparative Religion", characterizes a peculiarity of the most intensely sun-centric civilizations. The sun remains the primary focus of the religion, he observes, among those civilizations that show the greatest historical progress.

"It is really only in Egypt, Asia, and in primitive Europe that what we call sun worship ever attained sufficient popularity to become at any time, as in Egypt for instance, really dominant. If you consider that, on the other side of the Atlantic, the solar religion was developed only in Peru and Mexico, only, that is, among the two 'civilized' peoples of America, the only two who attained any level of real political organization, then you cannot help discerning a certain connection between the predominance of sun religions and what I may call ‘historic’ destinies. It could be said that where 'history is on the march,' thanks to kings, heroes, or empires, the sun is supreme."

The halos, auras, nimbuses, and coronas that crown the assumptive and ascending heads of Catholic, Hermetic, and Alchemical sacred art testify to the persistence of the solar archetype in religious sensibility. Even the revered, adored, and glorified luminaries of popular culture are called by their fans, "stars." The star larvae hypothesis suggests that even such innocuous conventions evince a nascent intuition of the evolutionary program. Stardom resides in terrestrial human beings and expresses itself psychologically as the illumination or enlightenment of the individual and collectively as the cult(ure) of the sun and of a future Heaven beyond Earth. But the star larvae hypothesis is more than an exposition of archetypal psychology. It proposes that the archetype of the astral divinity is a blueprint for a literal historical event. The engineering of the event is the task at hand.

Admittedly, the foregoing begs several questions. Among them is that of the origin of the larvae and their appearance on the incubator planet. This consideration returns us the to the scientific side of the argument.

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