The Presence of iva

Astronomical Notes in The Presence of iva by Stella Kramrisch

(with Material from Gnostic Christianity and Revelations)
2002. John Major Jenkins

tella Kramrisch, whose seminal book THE HINDU TEMPLE is still a

primary source on sacred architecture, published a huge study in 1981
called THE PRESENCE OF IVA. It delved deeply into mythology and

explores the many variants of the Vedic-Hindu Creation myth. She provides an
unflinching revelation of the precessional underpinnings of the Vedic Creation
myth, with a clear indictment of the galactic alignment's involvement in Vedic
metaphysics, religion, and mythology. My summation will be as brief as
possible.
Kramrisch writes that the g Veda, which she calls the oldest and most sacred
work of Indian religious tradition, contains a hymn that identifies itself as A
POEM ABOUT THE WILD GOD (RV 10.61). This WILD GOD is none other than Raudra

Brahman, a primary Creation Deity who manifests in later deities such as

Prajpati. The Creation myth that unfolds involves Raudra Brahman engaging
in coitus with his own daughter; however, the Archer deity (in this early hymn,
it is Agni) shoots him and he pulls out at the moment of ejaculation and spills
his seed. This leads to the manifest world arising from the spilled seed, the
emergence of the manifest realm of multiplicity and form from the unmanifest

essential unity. This is the beginning of time and the world of human beings
who are separated from the unmanifested ground of being from which their
souls came. This myth is the core of the Vedic Creation cosmology and is related
to other redactions such as found in the Theft of Soma, the Churning of the
Milky Ocean, and the union of Prajpati and Rohi. Prajpati's desire to move
towards and unite with his daughter Rohi, an unparadonable movement that
led to the generation of the limited realm of manifest existence, is a replication
of Raudra Brahman's creation act.
After sketching the astronomical identities of these mythological deities,
Kramrisch writes:

Rudra, who became Kla, Time, was the main actor in this primordial myth
when Prajpati moved toward Rohi and made love to her. Prajpati the year
had transferred its beginning from its accustomed place in Orion toward
Aldebaran (416).

Thus, precession is unveiled as the root of this process:

[Precessional shifting] had its mythical image in Prajpati's

unpardonable movement toward Rohi (Aldebaran). The precession of
the equinoxes . . . became the cosmic, astronomically defined moment,
synchronized with the Father's approach to the Daughter (416).

Of course, it should be emphasized that precession itself can't be an

astronomically defined moment ; it is the movement of the vernal point away
from a previous position toward Aldebaran that defines a specific moment
within precession that is associated with Creation in Vedic cosmology.
Kramrisch clarifies this in the following passage:

The time when the sun at the vernal equinox no longer rose in Orion but
moved toward Aldebaran was after 4500 B.C. (417).

(For this and other calculations she draws from the work of M. Raja Rao, THE

ASTRONOMICAL BACKGROUND OF VEDIC RUDRA AND PURANIC IVA in BHARATIYA VIDY 13,
1952.) See Notei 1 below for Sidharths revision of this timing.
The unpardonable fall into creation/manifestation is expressed in the myth of
Prajpati's aborted coitus with his daughter, Rohi. Astronomically, this fall
occurred right after 4500 B.C., ostensibly because the vernal point had moved
out of Orion and was shifting toward Rohi (Aldebaran). But this situation is
equivalent to when the equinox-galaxy alignment occurred, circa 6,450 years
ago. This was the era of the previous galactic alignment, an equinox-galaxy
alignment after which the sky was observed to become untuned or
disharmonious. I direct readers to my commentary on Hamlet's Mill. Thus, the
Vedic Creation myth under discussion symbolizes the same fall and untuning
of the sky that is the subject of Hamlet's Mill. That book mentions Rohi on
page 398 and Rudra on page 365. The PRESENCE OF IVA, published by Princeton
University Press, cites Hamlet's Mill in the bibliography.
So, with this brief summary we see that the Vedic Creation myth is rooted in a
knowledge of galactic alignments. The epoch following such an alignment era,
especially the historically accessible one of era-4400BC, apparently led to ideas
of a fall and this reading, so clearly and brilliantly deduced in Kramrisch's

book, supports the primary thesis of Hamlet's Mill. The conclusion to be made
here is pretty straightforward. Precession and galactic alignments within
precession are intimately involved in ancient traditions that encode ideas about
Creation and the fall of humanity into materialism and ignorance. Conversely,
the same astronomical players must be involved in eschatology (end of epoch
events) and the ascension of humanity back to spiritual unity with the
unmanifest ground of all manifest existence.
Copyright. October 7, 2002.

Comments on Max Pulver article, Jesus's Round Dance and

Crucifixion According to the Acts of St John in The Mysteries
The Vedic concept of the descent of souls into creation that occurs upon the
spilling of Prajpati's seed finds a counterpart in Gnostic-Christian tradition.
However, the counterpart describes not the dispersion of soul-force (spermata)
into manifestation (the hyle of matter), but the role of the Gnostic Redeemer
(Christ) in gathering up the dispersed spermata and ascending back into the
unmanifest Godhead. While Prajpati's sin was apparently timed with the
equinox-galaxy alignment of era-4400 BC (see above), the re-ascent of the
Gnostic Redeemer is apparently timed with the solstice-galaxy alignment, in the
following way. I will adhere to the evidence given in Max Pulver's article Jesus's
Round Dance and Crucifixion According to the Acts of St John in The Mysteries (in

Papers FROM THE ERANOS YEARBOOK, ed. Joseph Campbell) and then, since Christ's
return relates to Judgment Day and Revelation, I will draw from the biblical
Revelation of St John, a late Gnostic text.
The evidence relates to the apocryphal Acts of John, specifically the episode in
which John flees the crucifixion only to have a vision of Jesus in a cave with the
cross. Rather than being the cross of wood upon which Christ was hung, this is
a cross of light inside a cave that represents, like Platos cave, the cosmos. It also
relates to the Round Dance of Jesus, described by the same John who
wrote Revelations and who visited the kingdom of Prester John. Finally, it
relates to the gnostic meaning of the Eight, the Ogdoad, the PRIMORDIAL GOD
who like Prajpati injected spermata into the manifest creation, and through
whom the redeemed spermata (souls) must ascend back into the unmanifest.
The Gnostic Poimandres prophesies the ascent of the soul in the Corpus
Hermeticum (Scott, p. 249).
According to Pulver, For the Egyptians the Eightness represented the body of the
primordial god; it provided the instrumentality for Creation by the Word, or
archaicallyby the emission of the sperm (Pulver, 187). The Eight is the 8th
Gate or Sphere. Similarly, Basilides knows two Christs, one in the Ogdoad, and a
lower, solar Christ (187). The sideways eight is the infinity symbol. The Eighth
Gate is the entrance out of the cave of manifest existence, beyond the seven
planetary spheres of the sensible world. Jesus says I am the door. In the vision

of Jesus in the cave, John witnesses the inner meaning of the cross, an
illuminated cross inside the cave, spinning around the head of Jesus. Like the
Medieval fresco paintings of Jesus Pantocrater, the center of the cross is the
head of Jesus, or his third eye, where sensory time and space are transcended.
I propose that the bright cross symbolizes the equinox and solstice axes. In the
later revelation of John, we find the four evangelists and horsemen who
symbolize the four cardinal constellations. When the equinox-solstice axes align
with these constellations, eras of Galactic Alignment occur.
According to Pulver, Christs role is to issue forth from the pleroma (the
unmanifest) and descend into manifestation to fulfill his mission of collecting the
divine spermata which are dispersed through matter (186). This idea relates not to
the

crucifixion

but

to

Judgment

Day

and

Revelations.

Revelations provides the astronomical alignment with the use of the cardinal
constellations of alignment eras and the fact that Jesus was born of the winter
solstice. This all seems to be a metaphor for the ascending process by which the
seeds (fallen souls) return to God (the paradise of the unmanifest). This
situation is the opposite of the Prajpati-Rohi episode that is associated with
souls' descent into manifestation and the equinox-galaxy alignment of era4400 BC.
10-12-02.

Notes:
In THE CELESTIAL KEY TO THE VEDAS (ITI, 1999), Sidharth suggests that the Prajpati
episode refers not to 4400 BC but, because the "beginning of the year" was
originally associated with the solstice point, to the era a quarter-precession
cycle prior to that. This would place the DESCENT INTO MATTER on the
previous solstice-galaxy alignment of era-10,800 BC, and the ascent out of
matter with Christs Return and Judgment Day, 2000 AD, the era of the current
solstice-galaxy alignment. This descending-ascending process is precisely the
message of the Vedic yuga doctrine that I reconstructed, in my 2002
book Galactic Alignment, following the clues of r Yuktevara, Patrizia NorelliBachelet, and David Frawley.
i