The 2012 Story

COPERNICUS AND THE SPIRITUAL ILLUMINATION OF THE CENTRAL SUN

Jeremi Wasiutynski offered, in his magisterial book The Solar Mystery, an in-depth reevaluation of the influences that drove Nicholas Copernicus to formulate his heliocentric model. He noted that, within the history of science, the current understanding is “hampered by false preconceptions” and “the prevailing ideas concerning the motives of Copernicus’s creative work are inadequate.”¹⁷ The symbol of the sun fascinated the great minds of the Renaissance, including Copernicus, Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Thomas More, Campanella, and Giordano Bruno. They were all inspired by the new translations of ancient Greek philosophy that contained profound ideas that challenged Christian doctrine. As hermetic philosophers entertaining ancient “pagan” notions, they danced on the fringes of heresy and their true agenda had to be cloaked in secrecy. For them, the sun had to be returned to the center of a spiritual metaphysic, reviving a superior esoteric cosmology they believed was taught in the ancient Greco-Hellenist Mystery Schools as well as Plato’s Academy.¹⁸

A group of initiates in Italy strove to realize the paradigm of the ancient solar religion. Copernicus was one of them. He sojourned to Italy in the 1490s and joined a milieu of thinkers and artists who were being transformed by the philosophical works of the late-Byzantine Neoplatonist philosopher Gemistos Plethon.¹⁹ The connections between Copernicus and key players in this movement, which was in fact destined to trigger the sixteenth-century renaissance of ancient Greek science and ideals, are quite compelling. The period was awash in political and cultural tumult. Byzantium had just fallen to the invading Turks, and intellectuals and other refugees were fleeing to Italy. There, the painter Giorgione and others were all ears and were greatly influenced by Neoplatonic and hermetic principles, one central idea being that the outer sun was a symbol of an inner sun, which as the central conduit of spiritual illumination offered salvation as well as intellectual wisdom. The ancient mystery cults of Greece placed this sun at the center of their divine cosmos; why, then, was the external sun relegated to the outskirts? This line of thought led its investigators in two directions. For Giordano Bruno, it led to being burned at the stake. For Copernicus, it led to being hailed as the godfather of modern science.

In his book The Solar Mystery, published two years before his death at the age of ninety-eight, Wasiutynski wrote that his primary task was “to reconstruct and interpret a complex of historical facts related to the working of the solar mystery in the minds and lives of some of the leading creative representatives of the Renaissance, united by unknown secret bonds.”²⁰ Copernicus emerges as a misunderstood figure whose real intention, in its original essentially mystical formulation, was diametrically opposite to what eventually happened with his work. Copernicus “was highly conscious of the crucial significance for human life of his transformation of the image of the world… [but] the way in which he was called to usher in the modern history of mankind has certain paradoxical and tragic features which have become fully apparent only now.”²¹

Copernicus was devoted to a romanticized past in which spiritual mysteries had been realized by great sages and philosophers. In his effort to revive and “prove” the principles at work in this metaphysic of solar illumination, he unintentionally undermined the very foundations on which he was building. Wasiutynski explains that this dislocation occurred because he attempted to represent the modus operandi of a high order spiritual revelation in a lower order of consciousness—namely, that of a nascent materialist science. This is, of course, the same problem we have in much of the modern scientific-academic treatment of ancient Maya teachings: force-fitting a multidimensional nondual cosmology into the confines of a shortsighted linear flatland.

Copernicus had been an initiate in a solar brotherhood that erupted in Italy in the 1490s. His own vision of the world was recentered upon the transcendent spiritual sun of direct gnosis, but when he tried to turn it into a tangible model and present it to a profane world, trouble ensued. “By disclosing to the profane world the ruling power of the Sun in the universe [in a way that was] accessible to the science of his time, Copernicus definitively diverted the profane mind from that transcendent principle—the Solar Logos—which he himself had directly experienced as mystically present in the Sun.”²² That this would occur, inadvertently against his own intentions, must have quickly become apparent to him, for although his great work was mapped out by the year 1520, he resisted releasing it and delayed its publication until a fan, Rheticus, facilitated its publication shortly before his death in 1542. The Copernican Revolution, as a new way of mapping the universe, was what the swine did with the pearls thrown before them. Cosmology (cosmos-logos = knowing the cosmos) was trumped by cosmography (cosmos-graphing = mapping the cosmos).

And here we are at a new juncture, in which a galactic cosmovision devised by ancient pagans (the Maya) threatens the superiority complex of modern science. At the same time, if properly understood as an expression of perennial wisdom, 2012 offers to inspire and possibly awaken spiritually sensitive seekers. It offers something that has been winnowed out of modern civilization, something that just might be more sophisticated than anything achieved by the modern world. How will Western civilization respond to this breach in its self-image? Not surprisingly, it will call it doomsday and try to make you fear it, judge it, or dismiss it. It will try to render it impotent by distorting all the facts, or turn it into a Saturday-afternoon distraction with a variety-pack of entertaining movies. In this, which is already happening, it enslaves 2012 to the small-minded agenda of empiricism and materialism.

The problem, as usual, is looking in the outer world for that which can only be found within. Wasiutynski, who in his thinking combined analytic exactitude with intuition, wrote:

As long as men will seek spiritual inspiration in some artificial temple rather than in the archetypal temple whose dim mirror-image is Nature, the products of their creative work are not likely to be immortal. But the desire of Life was bound to raise mighty waves in the mythical substratum of European civilization to break the crust by which the preservers of external traditions protected themselves against the Eternal Revelation.²³

Let’s hope that the galactic cosmology of the Maya doesn’t get treated like Copernicus’s heliocentric cosmology did. How many different ways must the stubborn ignorance of the Western world be handed the perennial wisdom on a silver plate before it stops, lets go, and simply opens up? I hope that future historians will read this and chuckle to themselves, for the right reason. Time will tell.

THERE IS NO ABSOLUTE TRUTH: EVERYTHING IS RELATIVE

Read that heading again. If you buy that, you missed a great joke. Also, the White House is red and I am not my not-self. All funny, but this isn’t about semantic games. Our culture is rooted in an absurdity which can be summarized as the belief that “there are no absolutes.” The doctrine of relativism is the primary critique against the Perennial Philosophy, which is predicated upon an absolute source and center of all manifestation. Source and Center are the absolute first principles of the Perennial Philosophy, the necessary consequence when you start your philosophy with nothing. The commandment that there are no absolutes is the talisman thrust at the Perennial Philosophy, but it’s a logical conundrum. Philosophically and conceptually, it just doesn’t work. You can’t have relativism without an absolute reference point. “No, no,” says the convert to relativism, “it’s all relative.” Absolutely.

By the way, it’s funny that our mainstream culture uses the word “absolutely” as a catchphrase or space filler that is synonymous with saying “I agree with the opinion you just expressed as if it were a profound universal truth.” An interviewer asks, “Do you think that Big Foot has anything to do with crop circles?” The interviewee obligingly responds, “Absolutely…” and proceeds to unwind a series of wild assertions. We can add “absolutely” to the list of our culture’s inverted malapropisms along with “myth” and “symbol.”

Rather than being an abstract point of questionable worth, a whole range of related confusions, some having very practical implications, falls under the dominion of this issue. Time and eternity, life and death, limitation and limitlessness, free will and determinism—if these ideas are correctly understood, a sustainable worldview and