ALIGNMENT OF THE HEAVENLY DOORS OF THE SOULS

Everything referring to the heavenly doors of the souls got started more than ten years ago, when I was trying to match somewhat atypical circles — for the most part tumular — apparently located where the ecliptic intersects the Milky Way. It is worth recalling that the key came from Norman Davidson in his book Astronomy and the Imagination (A new approach to man’s experience of the stars), published by Routledge & Kegan Paul Books Ltd., NY, page 161: «Both Greeks and Romans saw it as a pathway for departed souls who entered by the door where the Milky Way intersects the zodiac in the Twins and left it to return to the gods by the door in the Archer.» This brief and enigmatic quote served to gradually move closer to the origins, and, while I was at it, to presume that the atypical circles I found so frequently in the section of the ecliptic that crossed the Milky Way from Scorpion to Sagittarius represented planets, or ‘carriers of souls’ to the resting place of the gods. The fact is that this ‘invention’, which is really nothing of the kind as I shall point out later, always works by elegantly and accurately resolving complex stellar representations which would otherwise have no links to the stars. Davidson and the gates through which the souls entered and exited the heavens (I’ll explain this very briefly for the time being) were crucial, in the first place to properly matching stone circles and stars, and secondly, to understanding the reason behind such representations. The matter started becoming clearer around 1997, reflected in part in the Agiña groups —not yet published— remembering the mentions in The Mayan Prophecies and in The Magi by Adrian Gilbert, and his references to Corpus Hermeticum and to the chapter XVIII —The Galaxy— of Hamlet’s Mill by Giorgio de Santillana & Hertha von Dechend which locates the southern gate near the tail of Sagittarius and the northern gate at Gemini, an idea the best-known advocate of which was Macrobium. And let’s not leave out Porphyry in his interpretation of The Cave of the Nymphs in The Odyssey, and other Oriental and Babylonian precedents to the gates. Details on these precedents, as well as a bibliography, were provided in the Spanish version of the November 2002 update in the article Retazos de religión. For the purpose of studying the stone circle groups as a whole, everything that one way or another might be common to the Psc, regardless of how the groups are interpreted individually, has been moved to the appendixes.



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