The Ancient World

For a person in the ancient world the wood around him and everything in it was alive. Such person felt one with the cosmos. Everything that happened to him was meant to happen. Everything spoke to him. Everthing was a punishment, a reward, a warning or a premonition (=Vorahnung).

The ancients believed in a quite literal way, that nothing inside us is without correspondence in nature. If you looked down on to the internal organs of a human body, their disposition reflected the solar system. In the view of the ancients, all biology is astrobiology.

Science has coined the word "biorhythms" to describe the way the relationships of the earth with the moon and the sun, marked by the sequence of seasons and day following night, is built biochemically deep into the function of every living being.

This sense of interconnectedness was not just a bodily interconnectedness. It extended to consciousness too. The ancient man commonly experienced great spirits thinking through himself and through other people at the same time.

Today we tend to be very proprietorial about our thoughts. We want to take credit for originating them, and we like to think that our private mental space is inviolate, that no other consciousness can intrude into it.

Anyhow, the reality of our everyday experience is that thoughts are quite routinely introduced into what we like to think of as our private mental space from somewhere else: "Thoughts just come to us". The ancients understood this "somewhere else" as being some-one else, the someone being a god, an angel or a spirit.

While today we like to think of ourselves as each having one individual centre of consciousness located inside the head, in the ancient world each person experienced him or herself as having several different centres of consciousness originating outside the head.

The ancients did not worship the sun because they believed the physical object would be a sentient (=fühlendes) being, but because they saw the sun as a sort of lens through which the spiritual influence of a god rayed from the spiritual realm into the earthly realm. Other gods rayed their influences through the other planets and constellations. As the positions of the heavenly bodies changed, so the various patterns of influence give history direction and shape.

The ancient mystery schools also taught, that we not only have a head-consciousness, but also, for example, a heart-consciousness, meaning the heart is the portal through which Sun God enters our life. Likewise a kind of kidney-consciousness beams into us from Venus, spreading out into our mind and body via the portal of our own kidneys. Similar relationships exist for Mercury/Lungs, Jupiter/Liver, Mars/Gall and Saturn/Spleen(=Milz).

The working together of these different centres of consciousness makes us variously loving, angry, melancholy, restless, brave, thoughtful and so on, forming the unique thing that is human experience.

Working through the different centres of consciousness in this way, the gods of the planets and constellations prepare us for the great experiences, the great tests that the cosmos means us to have.

(from Jonathan Black: The secret history of the world, Chapter 2)