knowledge of this matter above and beyond the purely physical
symbolism above mentioned. And perhaps it is as well that such a
benighted condition prevails, and that the Divine, heavenly
goddess is unsought and comparatively unknown. The celestial
Urania, at least, in such isolation remains pure and undefiled.
She is free from the desecrating influence of polluted minds.

Such, in brief outline, is the general conception of mankind
regarding the shining constellations that bedeck, like fiery
jewels, their Maker's crown, and illumine with their celestial
splendor the wondrous canopy of our midnight skies. Is there no
more than a symbol of rural work in the bright radiance of the
starry Andromeda, the harbinger of gentle spring? Nothing, think
you, but the fruit harvest and the vintage is in the fiery,
flushing luster of Antares and the ominous Scorpion? Are men so
spiritually blind that they can perceive nothing but the symbol
of maturing vegetation and the long summer's day in the glorious
splendor of Castor and his starry mate and brother, Pollux? It
would, indeed, seem so, so dead is the heart and callous the
spiritual understanding of our own benighted day. To the initiate
of Urania's mysteries, however, these dead, symbolic pictures
become endowed with life; these emblems of rural labor or rustic
art transform themselves from the hard, chrysolitic shell and
expand into the fully developed spiritual flowers of spiritual
entities, revealing in their bright, radiating lines the awful
mystery of the soul's genesis, its evolution and eternal
progressive destiny amid the mighty, inconceivable creations yet
to come; pointing out each step and cycle in the soul's
involution from its differentiation as a pure spiritual entity, a
ray of Divine intelligence, to the crystallization of its