‘Think of the grand teaching of Aknahton, that young Pharaoh who regenerated the entire land and brought it to its immense prosperity. He taught the worship of the sun, but not of the visible sun. The deity had neither form nor shape. The great disk of glory was but the manifestation, each beneficent ray ending in a hand that blessed the world. It was a god of everlasting energy, love and power, yet men could know it at first hand in their daily lives, worshipping it at dawn and sunset with passionate devotion. No anthropomorphic idol masqueraded in _that_!’
An extraordinary glow was about him as he said it. The same minute he lowered his voice, shifting the key perceptibly. He kept looking up at me through half-closed eyelids.
‘And another thing they wonderfully knew,’ he almost whispered, ‘was that, with the precession of their deity across the equinoctial changes, there came new powers down into the world of men. Each cycle--each zodiacal sign--brought its special powers which they quickly typified in the monstrous effigies we label to-day in our dull museums. Each sign took some two thousand years to traverse. Each sign, moreover, involved a change in human consciousness. There was this relation between the heavens and the human heart. All that they knew. While the sun crawled through the sign of Taurus, it was the Bull they worshipped; with Aries, it was the ram that coifed their granite symbols. Then came, as you remember, with Pisces the great New Arrival, when already they sank from their grand zenith, and the Fish was taken as the emblem of the changing powers which the Christ embodied. For the human soul, they held, echoed the changes in the immense journey of the original deity, who is its source, across the Zodiac, and the truth of “As above, so Below” remains the key to all manifested life. And to-day the sun, just entering Aquarius, new powers are close upon the world. The old--that which has been for two thousand years--again is crumbling, passing, dying. New powers and a new consciousness are knocking at our doors. It is a time of change. It is also’--he leaned forward so that his eyes came close before me--‘the time to make the change. The soul can choose its own conditions. It can----’