Sirius Rises -Update 7/23/12

Yes folks, it's that time of year again. Either the Dog Days of Summer are already upon, or they soon will be. In the ancient world the Dog Days constituted one of the most important time frames of the year for several of the great civilizations such as the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. The concept of the Dog Days derives from the heliacal rising of Sirius, the Dog Star. In the ancient world Sirius was of not little significance. 

"Sirius, or Serios, was the most important star in the ancient world. It was so important during one period of Egyptian history that some documents refer to Egypt itself as the Seriadic Land, after the Greek name for the star. Norman Lockyer, the 19th-century astronomer and specialist in temple orientation, surveyed no fewer than seven ancient Egyptian temples which were oriented to Sirius."
(The Secret Architecture of Our Nation's Capital, David Ovason, pg. 139)

The actual significance of Sirius is far beyond the scope of this article, but the curious reader is advised to explore several of my prior posts on Sirius, beginning here and here. For the time being, we shall roll with Crowley disciple Kenneth Grant's occult definition of Sirius:

"In the Arcane Tradition, the vast star, Sirius, symbolizes the sun behind the sun, i.e. the true father of our Universe. Sirius was the primordial star of all time, as the duplicator or renewer (of time cycles). He was known in Egypt as the Doubling One, therefore a Creator or reflector of the Image. Sirius, or Set, was the original 'headless one' --the light of the lower region (the South) who was known (in Egypt) as An (the dog), hence Set-an (Satan), Lord of the infernal regions, the place of heat, later interpreted in a moral sense as 'hell.'"
(The Magical Revival, pg. 226-227)

Sirius seemingly acquired its association with time keeping due to its heliacal rising coinciding with the flooding of the Nile. This day marked the beginning of the Egyptian calendar and the Dog Days of Summer. The Greeks and especially the Romans would embrace this time frame.

"Throughout Latin literature there are many references to 'the Dog Days' which followed the heliacal rising of Sirius in the summer. These hot, parched days were thought by that time to derive some of their ferocity and dryness from the 'searing' of Sirius. Traditions arose of Sirius being 'red' because it was in fact red at its heliacal rising, just as any other body at the horizon is red. When making rhetorical allusions to the Dog Days, the Latins would often speak of Sirius being red at the time, which it was."
(The Sirius Mystery, Robert Temple, pg. 86)

As can be imagined, the Dog Days were considered to be an evil time, marked by strife, chaos and madness. Despite the reverence and fear the ancients showed the Dog Days remarkably little about them has passed down to us. Even the actual dating of the Dog Days is highly debated. Robert Anton Wilson placed the time of the Dog Days as running from July 23rd till September 8th. Others have the Dog Days only lasting a month, and thus ending on August 23rd. Others still, such as David Ovason, have the Dog Days starting much sooner, on July 3rd, and stretching into early September. Given the significance the ancients attached to the Dog Days it is rather peculiar that there is so little consensus as to what the actual dates were.

What's more, there apparently were some kind of bizarre rituals associated with the Dog Days which numerous modern scholars hold to have been sexual in nature. The classical mythologists Carl Ruck and Danny Staples, while discussing the mythological hound Maira, write:

"At Athens, Maira was transmuted to the heavens as Canis Minor, the constellation of the Lesser Dog. With Sirius, the Canis Major, she ushers in the dog days of summer with her morning rising, the days whose unbearable heat makes women's uncontrollable sexuality still dangerous, as in the old days: for men, the month for a safe marriage was January; but transported to the skies, these dog days produce the heat necessary for the ripening of the grapes, as well as the dryness that drives off the damaging blight or black rot that would destroy the crop with the kind of fungal mold that is the antithesis of the beneficial yeast --and which is the curse these chthonic hounds would place on cities who do not know how to appease them, as they are at Athens."
(The World of Classical Myth, pg. 85)

In other words, it was feared that the Dog Days produced an uncontrollable sexuality in women, which implies that they were originally celebrated with orgiastic rites (presumably dominated by women) during Greece's matriarchal period. This is in stark contrast to the theory of famed poet and author Robert Graves:

"The Dog with which Aesculapius is pictured, like the dog Anubis, the companion of Egyptian Thoth, and the dog which always attended Melkarth the Phoenician Hercules, is a symbol of the Underworld; also of the dog-priests, called Enariae, who attended the Great Goddess of the Eastern Mediterranean and indulged in sodomitic frenzies in the Dog days at the rising of the Dog-star, Sirius."
(The White Goddess, pg. 53)

Perhaps the men of Athens simply didn't want to include women in their orgiastic rites so as to maintain the purity of the rituals? Or perhaps another partner that could also be refereed to as 'bitch' had long since been used by men in these rites.

"Crowley identified the heart of the Thelemic current with one particular Star. In Occult Tradition, this is 'the Sun behind the Sun,' the Hidden God, the vast star Sirius, or Sothis, which opened the zodiacal year of 365 days as well as the Great Year of approximately 26,000 years. 

"According to Herodotus..., the Egyptians celebrated the annual return of this Star, or God, with obscene rites characterized by bestial copulation. Thus, the Dog-Star. Crowley knew that no rite of antiquity was without magical purpose. He performed exhaustive experiments with this formula... and found it more effective, in many ways, than the formula of normal sexual magick which Theodor Reuss, following Kellner, had incorporated in the O.T.O."
(The Magical Revival, Kenneth Grant, pg. 50-51) 

Thus, the Dog Days potentially featured 'traditional' orgies, 'sodomitic frenzies,' and/or bestiality as part of the rituals of this glorious time. It also featured sacrifice, naturally. In some accounts the Romans were said to have sacrificed a brown dog at the onset of the Dog Days. However, there may have been even more sinister practices in an earlier period.

"The story about the puppies recalls the Roman habit of sacrificing red puppies in the Spring to avert the baleful influence of the Dog-star on their grain; the sacrifice was really to the Barley-mother who had the Dog-star as her attendant. Rhiannon, in fact, is the Mare-Demeter, a successor of the Sow-Demeter Cerridwen. That the Mare-Demeter devoured her children, like the Sow-Demeter, is proved by the myth of Leucippe ('White Mare') the Orchomenan, who with her two sisters ran wild and devoured her son Hippasus ('foal'); and by the myth recorded by Pausanias, that when Rhea gave birth to Poseidon she offered her lover Cronos a foal to eat instead of the child, whom she gave secretly into the charge of the shepherds of the Arcadian Arne."
(The White Goddess, Robert Graves, pg. 385)

Is it possible then that the sacrifice of a brown dog or red puppies that the Romans traditionally offered to Sirius was originally a human being, possibly even a baby? Ponder this for a moment as we turn to the present.

As noted above, the Dog Days were seen as a time of strife, chaos, and madness. This is a fitting description of the current state of affairs in the United States. We are in the midst of the worst drought in over 50 years, a situation that has already produced numerous wildfires and could potentially lead to global food shortages. As reports of a 20% increase in armed conflicts are coming in we are mauling further costly military adventures in Iran and Syria (in addition to the widespread use of drone warfare being employed by the current regime) all the while the US economy continues to stagnate. The US Presidential is heating up, but does anyone really give a damn anymore? Liberals are having a harder and harder time everyday telling the difference between Barack Obama and his predecessor. Conservatives are horrified by the creeping 'socialism' of Obama's regime, yet aren't convinced that they will fair any better under the corporatism of Mitty Romney. And then there's the every growing body of peoples that can't tell the difference between the two parties anymore and will thus be abstaining.

Unfortunately, politics will be out in force anyway. The 2012 elections will inevitably spark a steep rise in arrests and police actions in the coming months as politicians attempt to justify their re-election and the effectiveness of current policies. Meanwhile, the press is hard at work creating a 'zombie epidemic' by ensuring incidents like this continue to grab headlines. Then on Friday, July 20th, we had quite a dozy: a shooting spree that claimed the lives of 12 and injured dozens more occurred in a Colorado movie theater during the premier of the highly anticipated The Dark Knight Rises, the latest installment in Christopher Nolan's hugely popular Batman series. 

James Eagan Holmes (right), the obligatory lone-nut, three-named shooter authorities are insisting committed the shootings by his lonesome

Many conspiracy theorists and synchro-watchers have been closely following this film for months. As a major summer tent-pole release it will inevitably be filled with symbolism and predictive programming. Long before it was released it was already tapping into the current zeitgeist. Loren Coleman has already written a series of outstanding blogs, which can be found here, here and here, about the synchronistic link between Bane, the chief villain in the latest Batman film, and Bain Capital, the financial institution that threatens to derail the presidential bid of Mitt Romney.

Personally, Recluse has had little interest in the latest Batman film. Like Christopher Knowles, I was deeply disturbed by the blatant fascism of The Dark Knight, the second of Nolan's Batman films. Beyond that, there's just something about Nolan's Batman movies that I find unsettling. I think it has to do with the stark 'realism' of his take on Batman --its like all the 'magic' has been stripped out of the character in Nolan's quest to bring Batman out the comic world from which he hails. While Tim Burton's earlier Batman films were not without their faults, they at least managed to take the darkness Frank Miller brought to the character in the 1980s and combine it with a fairy tale-like world fitting of such an adaption. Nolan, by contrast, has reduced Batman to a neo-con symbol of the War on Terror --the just dictator that must protect the public at all costs.

Christopher Nolan (top), the director of the current Batman trilogy, and the right-wing Frank Miller (bottom), the creator of Sin City who brought his own dark style to the Batman comics in he 1980s

With Friday's shootings, the fascist dreams of Nolan's Batman films are fast becoming a reality. Already movie theaters across the country are displaying an increased police presence. In modern America even attending a movie requires the protection of the police state according to the powers that be. Strangely, a preview of Friday's shooting spree was already present in one of Miller's most celebrated 1980s Batman works, The Dark Knight Returns, as this Washington Times article notes. The comic was set in the future where Gotham City (as well as much of modern America) was overrun by crime while America has fallen into a dictatorship. And now life is imitating art, again.

the notorious sequence from Miller's The Dark Knight Returns that preceded the Aurora shootings

Ah, but there's more synchronicity. The shooting took place in Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. Much has already been made of the closeness of Aurora to Littleton, Colorado, site of the notorious Columbine High School massacre in 1999. Curiously few have mentioned that Aurora is less than 20 miles from the notorious Denver International Airport. From its swastika shaped runways, Masonic dedications, and apocalyptic murals, the DIA has long been a favorite of conspiracy researchers. I've already written extensively on the DIA before here for those wishing for more details.

the Swastika-like runways of the Denver International Airport (DIA)

For our purposes here the most striking connection the DIA has to the Aurora shootings is the statue of Anubis the former now features. Anubis is commonly known as the Egyptian god of the dead, but he also has a strong association with Sirius. He is commonly depicted with the head of a jackal, but in earlier incarnations he was dog-headed. He was the companion of Isis, whom some have argued was the embodiment of Sirius. In other cases Sirius was the star of Isis, with Anubis standing in for Sirius when Isis was depicted with him.

 "In the Egyptian mythology, the connection between the stellar goddess Isis and Sirius was expressed by the notion that Anubis (to use the Greek name for the star god) was her guardian dog. The image of a celestial woman with a dog is not without hidden significance, for the dog exists on a lower plane of being than both human and gods. It is thus intermediary between the goddess and 'those below her' --that is, the mass of humanity. In arcane art --as, for example, in the tarot pack --the presence of a do is usually intended to point to the lower self. It represents that inner darkness which has not yet been sloughed off, to allow the inner light to intensify."
(The Secret Architecture of Our Nation's Capital, David Ovason, pg. 140)

An earlier Robert Graves quote also mentioned the celestial-woman-and-dog image that symbolized Sirius in antiquity. Anubis and Isis are but one manifestation of this image. Thus, Anubis is yet another aspect of the Dog Dogs as are the bizarre sex rites and sacrifices mentioned above that thrived in antiquity. 


And now, in twenty-first century America, we have just witnessed a large scale shooting days before the onset of the Dog Days (or possibly in the midst of them), mere miles away from the most prominent modern statue of Anubis in the world.

Coincidence?

UPDATE 7/23/12 --Happy Dog Days!


A few other curious connections that link the Aurora shootings with Sirius have occurred to me. The first concerns the total number of victims: 12 people were murdered while 58 were injured. This makes a grand total of 70 victims in all. The number 70 is closely linked with both Sirius and the Dog Days.

"Sirius was, astronomically, the foundation of the entire Egyptian religious system. Its celestial movements determined the Egyptian calender, which is even known as the Sothic Calender. Its heliacal rising marked the beginning of the Egyptian year and roughly coincided with the flooding of the Nile.. The heliacal rising was the occasion of an important feast. One can imagine a kind of New Year-cum-Easter. The heliacal rising was the occasion when Sirius again rose into visibility in the sky after a period of seventy days of being out of sight, during which time it was conceived as being in the Duat, or underworld. A further connection with Anubis comes in here, as Anubis was conceived of as embalming Sothis for these seventy days in the Duat. An embalmed mummy is supposed to come alive again. And this is what happened to the mummy of Sothis. Sothis is reborn on the occasion of her heliacal rising."
(The Sirius Mystery, Robert Temple, pg. 129) 

Here we find yet another connection between the Aurora shootings and Sirius, but also between Sirius and Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead. As mentioned previously (and displayed across this blog), there is a large statue of Anubis at the Denver International Airport, located roughly 20 miles from Aurora.

The name Aurora itself means 'dawn', while Colorado means 'red.' This has led several synch-watchers, most notably Loren Coleman, to revisit the notorious 1984 action film Red Dawn, which I've written briefly on before here. However the combination that Colorado and Aurora produces, red dawn, could just as easily be an allusion to the heliacal rising of Sirius as it is to the Milius film. When Sirius returned to visibility after a 70 day absence it appeared as red in the sky during the heliacal rising, thus producing a red dawn at the onset of the Dog Days.

Finally, there's a vague connection to Aurora and Royal Astronomical Society fellow Robert Temple's 'oracle octave'/Sirius lines theory that I'll briefly address. Here's a quick rundown of Temple's speculations:

"The Sirius Mystery, an important new book by Robert K.G. Temple, explores the role of the star Sirius in the mystical and religious affairs of the earliest civilizations of the Mideast and Mediterranean. In his fifth chapter, on the geodetic locations of the various oracle shrines of the ancient world, Temple points out that these places were arranged along nine bands of latitude, from 31º30' N through 39º30' N."
(Weird America, William Grimstad, pg. 48)

Temple essentially argues that most of the major oracle centers of antiquity in the Mediterranean, such as the ones at Delphi and Delos, were originally oriented toward Sirius and were separated from each other by one degree of latitude. I've written much more on this theory before here, so I do not wish to delve into it here. I will point out, however, that the oracle of Dodona (one of Temple's main Sirius oracles) is located on almost the same latitude line as Aurora. Specifically, Dodona is at roughly 39º32' N while the Aurora theater were the shooting occurred is located at 39º70' N.

The Century Theater in Aurora, Colorado where the shooting occurred (top) and the Oracle at Dodona (bottom)

And it is here that I shall leave things for now. The Aurora shootings are truly shocking and pivotal events, but whether they represent an actual plot by the Cryptocracy, or the sheer power of memes, archetypes and synchronicity remains to be seen. Certainly the timing of the event is beneficial to certain factions in the United States, while the location is riddled with defense contractors and other military/intelligence personnel (Denver is just a little over an hour away from Colorado Springs, one of the major meccas of the Military-industrial complex). But nothing close to a smoke gun has been reported as yet.

All we can be certain of is that something sinister as afoot. So while we can, let's dig some Super Fury Animals.