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A Compass Upon the Deep

 

 

 If the uncreated universe is viewed as a trackless waste then the act of creation must involve the making of a pathway across it. Thus, in the Book of Job, god challenges Job to explain the work of creation by asking "Who decided the dimensions of it, or who stretched the measuring line across it?". In Orpheus's song of creation it is the rising of the stars from the primordial chaos that mark out the pathways, 'by which the whole course of becoming is regulated'; in the Rig Veda it is Varuna who 'measured apart the earth using the sun as a measruign stick'. What these descriptions are teling us is that it was by means of mapping the paths of the stars across the sky that Plato's 'unwrought matter of Time' might be organized into an ordered cosmos. Aristotle stated it as knwn the the gods were originally stars, even if popular fantasy had later hidden this truth. The sun's path through the complete circle of the stars becomes a measuring rod on which the course of Time will be plotted.


The Unfettered Opposties in Chaos

A universal symbol of this cosmos is the 'Worm Orouboros', the serpent biting its tail, 'the serpent in matter, a symbol of the all-encompassing unity of the cosmos'. Stories from around the world tell that it is the embrace of this serpent thatensures the stability of the earth. This is the role of the Hindu serpent Sesha, whose coils are 'the endless revolutions of Time;
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The Persian deity Zurvan, who appears encircled by the starry serpent, is both 'intangible primal matter' and the 'wheel of heaven' in whose revolution 'all creation has its being and sees its end'. This 'revolving wheel of the gods ... contains everything including immortality'.

However, the Rig Veda hymns tell us that the priests know of three 'mystic wheels'. The sun's daily path is the first, its yearly path is the second, but the third wheel is known only to 'those skilled in the hghest truths'. For this 'wheel of the gods' contained a secret one which might at first have seemed disastrous to those whose diligent observation slowly discerned it. In fact, out of this secret they began to tell the story of how the body of god was separated from eternity and divided into the variuos forms of creation concealed within this invisible wheel. To learn the secret of this mystic wheel it is indeed necessary to become skilled in the highest truths.