The other day, I caught Robert Temple, author of The Sirius Mystery, in an interview about his latest book: Temple maintained that the stars are alive, and then he gave a few reasons why this might be so based on the latest scientific discoveries about plasma—and how plasma might be intentangled with consciousness. Temple is right, the stars are alive. However, the idea that this can be reconciled with science is not so and, just as Jordan Peterson once said to Richard Dawkins that it is suggestive that the Hermetic caduceus is shaped like the DNA double helix (Dawkins naturally pooh-poohed the idea), it is a dead end to pursue this path.
Science is not reality, since it relies for its power on the exclusion of the qualitative aspect of reality—just as a blind man finds his senses of smell and his aural faculty heightened, so the scientist wraps a wet towel round his head and finds his senses heightened in another dimension; often his other senses are so heightened that he forgets he is blind. Hence, sometime ago, I observed that Elon Musk follows the Indo-Aryan path—the migration to the stars. Yet I made a slight mistake; he represents the materialist inversion of this tradition, exoterically represented by the fact he extols “the doge”: “doge” backwards is “egod”—the electronic god, the AI Musk so admires; a goal that is also the anti-Messiah. The other option is to follow dog—the cryptogram you can easily decipher. The Indo-Aryan destiny is in the stars, but this is a spiritual destiny—it only finds a material analogue in rocket ships.
The view that the stars are alive is not novel—it is precisely what the ancient Greeks thought; and Nietzsche and Aleister Crowley, in their own ways, both echoed this sentiment: Crowley held “every man and woman a star” and Nietzsche lionised the cosmic dance, the Milky Way that lies within each person—albeit to different degrees. Nietzsche—the Greeks—would disagree with Crowley’s uncharacteristically democratic sentiment: not “every man and woman a star” but “the immortal heroes are stars”. Unlike in Christianity, not everyone merits post-mortem survival; some people are not even worth judgement—you have to be exceptional even to make it to hell.
The other day, I posted on Twitter the observation “The stars are alive” complete with the famous van Gogh painting above that depicts the stars—criticised at the time for being “inaccurate” in its representation. The painting was much admired by Colin Wilson, the popular writer on occult topics who often wrote about van Gogh as an “outsider.” After I made this post on Twitter, the site, in an uncharacteristic move, logged me off. I picked up my phone and found “van Gogh” was trending right next to an announcement that NASA was about to release its deepest-ever picture of star clusters—and next to these was an advert for “Valkyries”, the Valkyries commonly being held to be star creatures in ancient lore. A sign from the stars that I am on the right track.
You see, we do come from the stars; and in modern times people like Ridley Scott and his Prometheus series put this forward as a case of “ancient aliens” who made us through genetic engineering—and Neil deGrasse Tyson notoriously observes we are made from “star dust”. Inversion. We are from the stars, but rather we are from the spiritual stars—some of which are the heroes of old. This is not a conclusion I really want: I would prefer aliens—however, I know this is the right answer.
I said to my mother, “The stars are alive.” She immediately replied, instinctively: “That’s right, they are.” If you catch women very suddenly sometimes you hear the intuitive truth; just as when I said to her, many years ago, “I think Hinduism is the truest religion,” and she instantly replied, “Yes, it is,” even though she has no interest in or knowledge of it.