The Filianic Star-Myth

Lately I've been reading a pretty excellent book: Earth & Sky, Visions of the Cosmos in Native American Folklore. It has been fascinating to find common threads throughout the world in our interpretations of the stars above us, but even more fascinating to read more in depth about the things that are so different from what a Eurocentric model usually presents.

And it is very in depth. Some of the articles contained in the book are highly detailed scientific pieces: one discusses the 'desert varnish' that helps date locations in the American Southwest and plots out where the sun would have risen thousands of years ago relative to sacred mountains. Since the book's theme is the stars, there's rather a lot about the angles and degrees, heliacal risings and settings, and calculations to compare the sidereal years of various planets to the solar year. Decades of people's life works are presented here, and the amount of effort that went into producing each piece is staggering.

One of my favourite aspects of the work as a whole, though, is in the peeling back of layers of myth and folklore to reveal the movements of the stars encoded within. Stories that seem the farthest from anything celestial turn out to be such perfectly detailed accounts of the stars' movement that we can date not only how long ago the story must have originated (thousands of years ago), but also date when in the year, what part of the season, this story takes place.

I'm nearly finished with the anthology; just a few chapters left to go, but it hit me suddenly. We have a star story encoded in our origin myth.

It may be very obvious to anyone who takes a moment to think about it, but it took me quite a while to realize it. I wonder if it is that we have 'accidentally' encoded this myth, or if the myth of divine child itself was originally somehow tied back to a star mythos that gradually became more and more obscured.

There are several pieces to this and I'm not sure what order to place them in. It's something like this:

• Our Mother is represented by the Sun, being 'too bright for us to look upon'
• The Daughter is represented by the Moon, mediating and reflecting the Mother's light to us
• Maid "at the dawn of time...did turn from the Perfection of Existence in the infirmity of her sovereign will" (the Creed)

It's nothing so spectacular as being able to walk backward through time and pinpoint exact dates in eras long gone, but the whole of it all put together is something like this:

We, as a planet, regularly and daily 'turn from' the Sun into night. We can no longer look at the Sun's brightness, and so the Moon is given us that we may see by night.

The first chapters of the Holy Mythos tell us that at the beginning there was no way to tell time - but once we 'turn away' we are 'in darkness' and we cannot look at the Mother (the Sun) as before. Time has begun because now there is a round planet we are on that is revolving and we cannot always be in the presence of the Divine; the divide that cannot be bridged is only solved by placing a celestial mirror to reflect light onto the side of the planet that would otherwise be unreachable. Yet another harmony is discovered in the idea of the micro reflecting the macro: the house is a microcosm of the world, one maid's life is considered "a microcosm of the Great World Cycle", so too would the microcosm of a single moon cycle reflect the larger year-cycle, with the new moon (the 'death' of the moon) reflecting the season of Moura.

All of this, of course, is entirely dependent on a modern understanding of a globe planet, that we spin on our axis, and that we revolve around the sun. I'm not suggesting that some ancient society encoded the reality of our planet into a myth that we have somehow preserved; nor am I suggesting the Mother is literally the physical sun. But it does not seem possible that someone - even a team of people! - could deliberately include so much richness in our Mythos that every time I think about them, there is another layer of meaning waiting to be mined. There is always so much in our Scriptures to discover that I am constantly astounded by their depth and beauty!