Sol Invictus

I would like to know the stars again as the Chaldeans knew them, two thousand years before Christ… But our experience of the sun is dead, we are cut off. All we have now is the thought-form of the sun. He is a blazing ball of gas, he has spots occasionally, from some sort of indigestion, and he makes you brown and healthy if you let him… And that is all we have, poor things, of the sun… Where, for us, is the great and royal sun of the Chaldeans? Where even, for us, is he sun of the Old Testament, coming forth like a strong man to run a race? We have lost the sun. We have lost the sun, and we have found a few miserable thought-forms…

Do you think you can put the universe apart, a dead lump here, a ball of gas there, a bit of fume somewhere else? How puerile it is, as if the universe were the back yard of some human chemical works!… The Chaldeans described the cosmos as they found it: magnificent. We describe the universe as we find it: mostly void, littered with a certain number of dead moons and unborn stars, like the back yard of a chemical works.

Is our description true? Not for a single moment, once you change your state of mind… Our state of mind is becoming unbearable. We shall have to change it. And when we have changed it, we shall change our description of the universe entirely… We shall not get back the Chaldean vision of the living heavens. But the heavens will come t life again for us, and the vision will express also the new men that we are.

- D. H. Lawrence, ur Apocalypse