There is no dry diagram here. The rite begins with breath and sound.
“Each of the seven spheres [is] said to give forth a different vowel or nature tone.”
The words are meant to be spoken. The heavens answer. The candidate hears thunder in the surround, feels each crash, and is told to keep going until he has completed “all the seven immortal gods of the cosmos.” Then the doors open.
“Thereon open thine eyes, and thou shalt see the doors thrown open, and the cosmos of the gods that is within the doors.”
The line that stays with me is simpler:
“O silence, silence, I am a star whose course is as your course, shining anew from out the depth.”
That is the shape of the whole thing. The person is not standing outside the heavens and studying them. He is caught up in their motion.
There is a pole, but it is not a distant marker. It is the point on which the whole order turns.
“The seven pole lords, the servants of the pivot on which all things turn.” “It is he who makes the spheres revolve and turns all things upon the cosmic lathe or potter’s wheel.”
The spheres are not just objects overhead. They are also fate, pressure, necessity, the things that keep a person moving in the same old circle.
“The man is no longer to be a procession of fate, but is to set his foot upon the spheres of fate and make them the wheels of his chariot free in the air.”
Later, the great sphere stops being something seen at a distance.
“He thus finds himself in his own great sphere, which he no longer sees as an objective disc, but which has now become himself or the field of his consciousness.”
The old language gets stranger from there. A sphere of light holds everything, moving and still. Then even mass and space are taken away.
“Let there then be in the soul some semblance of a sphere of light transparent, having all things in it, whether moving or still.” “Conceive in thyself another sphere, removing from it all idea of mass. Take from it also the idea of space and the phantom of matter in thy mind.”
At the end, the pole comes back. The fixed point stands. The starry body turns around it.
“The god does not really move round on a path. It is he who is the true one who stands.” “It is the aeonic or the starry body of the man ... that turns on this pivot as on an axis.”
And then comes the plainest sentence in the whole passage:
“Hold thyself steady, and gazing steadily into thyself, draw breath from the divine.”
