Stars and Mars
HOW far removed we are nowadays from the scientific scepticism of Huxley and Herbert Spencer ! They, or at least their less intelligent followers, sneered at religion, at mediaeval alchemy, at popular superstition. They stigmatized all these time-honoured influences by calling them old wives' tales.
But, to-day, old wives' tales are carefully garnered up by the harvesters of wisdom, and reverently brought into the laboratory. An allegory is believed to be as substantial as a chemical equation, and we find the Book of Genesis being restored to its old position as a history of the Cosmogony.
Now we have a further tribute to the ancients. Dr. Millikin, in America, and Dr. Kolhorster, in Germany, have discovered that certain X-rays reach us through space. For a time it was believed that they were radium rays emanating from the sun. It is now found that these rays never cease, day or night. Waking or sleeping, our bodies are penetrated by these subtle forces, which insinuate themselves into every atom of the earth's substance, driven on with resistless strength by the impetus gained through their vast traversings. They come from the remoter heavenly bodies, the stars.
Dr. Nordmann, the Chief Astronomer at the Paris Observatory, suggests that here we may discover the cause of cancer. He thinks that all cancers may be forms of radiodermatitis, the disease which attacks radiologists, who are the victims of the molecular anarchy set up by the action of Rontgen-rays on organic matter. A molecule is a moral entity, like a city-state ; but if it is split up into its component atoms, the result is incoherent and elemental individualism. It means a throwing over of all evolved organization, and harking back to primeval and experimental groupings. Such a grouping of atoms into-a tentative molecular corporation is cancer. All these speculations inevitably lead us back to the ancients ; to the Chaldeans and Sumerians, with whom, as far as we know, the science of astrology originated. It has always been an esoteric cult, and, of course, the materialistic Nineteenth Century threw it out as a very Ishmael. But, after all, the descendants of Ishmael gave a-valuable contribution to mathematical knowledge. It looks to-day as though we may have still to learn from this outcast. We may be forced to remember that only since the time of Galileo has astronomy Confined itself to centrifugal or cosmic speculation about the stars, and- neglected the obverse, the centripetal or human speculation.
That obverse activity is the motive of the astrologers and their modern exponents, the Rosicrucians. It is based in the doctrine that life originates in the force whose lowest and most sensual manifestation is light. Our animal senses can appreciate light. A step beyond light are activities which affect us—as we know—but which we can appreciate only with our supersensual selves, our minds. So we go on to activities even more rarefied, Which even our minds cannot apprehend. We are aware of them by means of some personal instrument even more sensitive, such as conscience, or intuition. But because of their rarity, these parts of ourselves are no less real than our minds, or our eyes and ears. Nor are the powers, to which they respond, less real than rays of light.
Light comes to us from the sun. It brings us our substantial vitality. It germinates the seed ; it grows the stem, the limb, the brain. It is only the saddle- horse, however. It bears on its back a rider—let us call him radio-activity--who comes with subtler nourish- meats. And he, too, carries within him a mind and consciousness, a still more remote influence and activity, with which we ultimately may be enriched. However we name that essence of an essence, that ray within a ray, the scientist hopes one day to measure its vibration, its wave-length. He will thereby revive the moribund science of theology.
Life, then, is light, and something more than light: That something more, according to the astrologers, is the moulding thumb which works on the raw material provided by light. Light create; our substance, but those finer rays shape us, and give us grace, personality-- even divinity. And they come persuasively toward us, not only from the sun, but from all heavenly bodies. In infinite combination or antagonism, these rays literally manipulate the substance of the spheres. We are of that substance, and are subject to the geometrical groupings of those immeasurable rays.
Such have been the first principles of astrology for six thousand years. It appears that they are now to be justified by experiment.
Living in this universe of interstellar communication, we must realize how relatively small a part mere space plays. What are a few billion miles, since they cannot interfere with these soul and body-building alliances ? Mars at this moment is eight million miles less than its average distance from us. Its contribution to terrestrial and human destiny is not likely to be affected by this accident, which as only a move- in. a gambit on the chess-board of space conceived by a player outside space. We may get some cold comfort from this when our multi-valve super-heterodyne sets remain unmoved by any message from Mars. If there be inhabitants in that icy-cold planet, their silence may be due to a sub-conscious feeling that they have already had -too much say in our affairs,- and we in theirs.
RICHARD CHURCH.
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