The Message of the Stars

Every year the Sun makes what the Heindels call a "circle dance" through the twelve signs. In summer, with the Sun in Cancer and its neighbours, the world is all germination and mating. In winter, under Saturn, it goes "dumb, dull and drear", and we live on what the summer grew.

That is the fast clock. The book's opening chapter is about a second one running inside it: the slow backward drift of the equinox through the same signs, which the authors say produces "the great changes which we know as Evolution."

So the zodiac in this book is one Sun keeping two times. The yearly round shapes a season; the precessional round shapes whole ages of humanity, and the pictures on the old star maps are the record of both.

Precession is real astronomy: the point where the Sun crosses the equator in spring creeps backward through the constellations, roughly one sign every two thousand years, a full circle in nearly twenty-six thousand.

What the Heindels do with it is not astronomy. They claim this slow measure "marks the birth and death of races, nations and their religions", and they say the material came to them through what they call the memory of nature.

You do not have to accept that as history to use the map. The authors themselves call the pictorial zodiac a symbolical presentation of our development, past, present and future. Read it the way they wrote it: as a story told in twelve pictures, where each sign the equinox passes through names the lesson humanity was learning at the time.

In the Heindels' opening chapter, what does each of the Sun's two movements through the zodiac produce?

• The yearly round marks the great ages; the precession makes the seasons of the year
• Both movements produce the seasons, one in the north and one in the south
• The yearly round shapes personal character; the precession shapes the weather
• The yearly round makes the seasons; the precession marks the great ages of evolution✓Correct answer

The fast yearly circle gives summer growth and winter rest; the slow backward drift of the equinox is the one the authors tie to evolution, nations and religions. Swapping them is the easy slip, because both move through the same twelve signs.

On the famous zodiac from the temple at Denderah, Cancer is not a crab. It is a scarab, the Egyptian emblem of the soul, and the Heindels take that seriously.

For them Cancer is "the gate of Life in the Zodiac", the place through which spirits coming back to rebirth enter earthly conditions. That is why it is ruled by the Moon, which the book calls the planet of fecundation: whatever is to be born passes the Moon's door first.

They add a picture of the distant past, when humanity was "much less body than soul" and first stepped into physical life through this gate. Cancer is also where the Sun climbs highest into the northern sky, so in the book the soul's entrance and summer's peak share one sign.

Opposite Cancer stands Capricorn, ruled by Saturn, whom the book pictures as "the reaper with his scythe and hour glass in hand." This is the Gate of Death, and it sits where the Sun sinks lowest, in the dead of winter.

Here is the turn a first-time reader misses. In the Heindels' telling, Saturn waits opposite the newly arrived souls not to punish them but to "usher them through the Gate of Death back into the spiritual realms where they are at home."

Death, in this map, is a return, not an exile. The two solstice signs are the hinges of the soul's whole career: in through Cancer, out through Capricorn, and back again. Winter's work fits the picture too, since it is the season when the summer's fruit is consumed and assimilated.

For the Heindels, Saturn's Gate of Death in Capricorn leads the spirit back to the realms where it is at home.

True✓Correct answer

True. Saturn is the reaper, but the book says he ushers souls "back into the spiritual realms where they are at home." The gate is fearsome only if you think of the body as home.