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 identity.

Before the age of secular science, common belief held that the universe was a living organism. Nature's animate character expressed itself through everything from the foragings of bugs to the cycling of the seasons to the rotation of the heavens. In this scheme the stars has a special status: they were more than merely alive; they were divinely alive. Those twinkles that dot the night sky are nearer to God than we, and they hold an interest in human affairs, according to the ancient religions. Modern science has to dismiss any such notion. But the star larvae hypothesis revives the old conception. The astral theme is perhaps the most persistent in the history of religion. The star larvae hypothesis regards it as a portent of future evolution, a spilling of information into culture from the phylogenetic program.

Stellar allusions are conspicuous already in the practice of shamanism. This hunter-gatherer tradition uses trance-inducing rituals to produce visions of a 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." In short, the shaman feels as if she or he is receiving personally meaningful input from an astral dimension. Halifax surveys the shamanic tradition in Shaman: The Wounded Healer and there includes examples of beaming, radiant human forms from shamanic art, depictions of the psyche's stellar core.

The astral calling expresses itself not only through the experiences of the shaman, but also collectively through culture and the march of history. If shamanism is the typical religion of hunter-gatherer societies, then a ceremonialized expression of the stellar calling seems to be the corresponding form in agrarian societies. Rituals, ceremonies, and pageantries tended to supplant the cosmic trance and mystical revelation of shamanism where farming became the dominant social mode. As human labor became increasingly fragmented, influences felt to be lunar, atmospheric, and finally terrestrial gave rise to pantheons and doctrines of faith and belief. The religious sensibility's solar inspiration/aspiration tended to get grounded.

But, rather than sprout a pantheon of nature gods, a handful of civilizations remained oriented toward the sun. Mircea Eliade, in Patterns in Comparative Religion, characterizes a peculiarity of the most steadfastly sun-centric civilizations. The sun remained the primary focus of the religion, he observes, in those civilizations that exerted the greatest historical import.

"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."

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

In Astrology and Religion Among the Greeks and Romans, Franz Cumont traces the spread of the sun's supremacy, and of astrotheology and astral mysticism in general, throughout the classical world. The theme expressed itself in mythic motifs such as Catasterism, the metamorphosis of ascended heroes into constellations:

"In Plato's view souls which have made a good use of their lives return to inhabit the heavenly bodies, which served as their dwelling-place before birth, and there partake of the bliss of a divine existence. Moreover, the Greeks [. . . ] had long before told how certain heroes of fable had been transported to heaven in reward for their exploits. Hercules, Perseus and Andromeda, the Dioscuri Castor and Pollux, and many others had thus been metamorphosed into constellations. 'Catasterism' forms the denoument of a number of mythological stories."

"The horses of fire and the chariot of fire, which carried Elijah in a whirlwind, are very probably the horses and chariot of the Sun. In the same way, when Mithra's mission on earth was fulfilled, he had been conveyed in the chariot of Helios to the celestial spheres [. . . .] The Emperors in particular were commonly reputed to become companions of the Sun-god after death, as they had been his proteges in life, and to be conducted by him in his chariot up to the summit of the eternal vaults."

The star larvae hypothesis favors this form of the motif, and so has to commend Christianity for its atavism, for staying true to the plan by instituting in dogma the bodily Ascension of Jesus and, in Catholicism, Assumption of Mary. In space, whatever is vulgar in the physical form is transformed into the sublime. But the physical body has to get there first. In the meantime, astrotheology keeps the religious sensibility focused on the evolutionary program.

Persisting through Chaldean astrology and its influence on Hellenic thought and into medieval theology and on into the revival of Hellenism during the Renaissance, the astral motif retained a prominent place in Western 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 Manichaean branch of Gnosticism held tight to the linkage of cosmos and spirit, solar and divine. Joan O'Grady, in Early Christian Heresies,summarizes the Manichaean scheme.

"According to the Manichaean myth, Satan invaded the Kingdom of Light. To fight against him, God created Primal Man, who was, for the Manichees, an Archetype—an original ideal pattern, not the first human being. Satan overcame his opponent and, although Primal Man was rescued by God, Satan robbed him of some particles of light and mingled these with five elements of the dark world. Out of these mixed elements God formed the visible world in order to deliver the imprisoned light. Primal Man and his helping spirits dwell in the Sun, and the twelve constellations collect any particles of light set free and pour them into the Sun. Here they are purified and can attain to God."

During the Renaissance, the revival of Hermetic-Hellenic philosophies brought with it a marked astral dimension, as Frances Yates notes in Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition,

"Egypto-Hermetic sun-teachings undoubtedly influenced Ficino's sun-magic, and they connected philosophically with Plato on the sun as the intelligible splendour, or chief image of the ideas, and religiously with the Pseudo-Dyonysian light symbolism. All these influences can be perceived, working together, in Ficino's De sole and De lumine. As we have tried to to outline in previous chapters, the concentration on the sun in the astral magic, led upwards through the Christian Neoplatonism of Pseudo-Dyonysius to the supreme Lux Dei, and in this way the sun very nearly is for Ficino what it is for Hermes or for the Emperor Julian, the 'second god', or the visible god in the Neoplatonic series."

American revolutionary Thomas Paine adamantly defended his belief in the astrological origins of the Christian faith. 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."

Even the apostle Paul invoked an aeronautical dimension when he describes the return of Christ in his first letter to the Thessalonians,

"For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel's call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord."

Web sites such as Zeitgeist, The Pharmacratic Inquisition, and Truth Be Known present in detail the case for Christianity's astronomical/astrological origins. And the coronal treatments of Jesus, Mary, and the saints in Catholic art preserve Christianity's astral connection. The description of Jesus' transfiguration is an overt premonition of stardom. Jesus is not alone. From the biography of a medieval Christian mystic, Mircea Eliade cites a dramatic account of a 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." The Buddhists' "clear white light of the void" and similar metaphors evince the universality of the stellar 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 the "New Age" cults of today as reliably as they do the ancient occult cosmologies.

Evidence of these themes throughout the world's religious writings points to a well-developed complex in the human 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.

The halos, auras, nimbuses, and coronas that crown the assumptive and ascending heads of Catholic, Hermetic, and Alchemical sacred art testify to the archetypal appeal of the solar. In today's pop culture, the revered, adored, and glorified luminaries are called by their fans, "stars." The star larvae hypothesis suggests that even such an innocuous convention as that evinces 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 historical events. The religious sensibility urges us to engineer an extraterrestrial environment for a transfigured humanity.

If astrotheology and astral religion intimate a future of illuminated evolutionary adulthood for our descendants, then what about the earliest evolutionary stages?

If biology is the larval form of the stellar organism, then how do the biological larvae originate and populate their incubator planets?

These questions reintroduce the scientific side of the argument.

The Empyrean, by Gustav Doré, from The Divine Comedy

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