Sabıan Symbols

A group of highly evolved people called the Sabians washed up on the shores of the eastern reaches of the Mediterranean Sea thousands of years before history was written. Perhaps they came as refugees from the supposedly-fictional lost continent of Atlantis that Plato spoke of, perhaps they were from another planet, who knows? What we do know is that, some 7000 years before Stonehenge, when all the indigenous people around them were hunter-gatherers, they had the knowledge to move inland to where wheat would grow well, and to construct an impressive temple, at Gobeklitepe in Turkey, which demonstrated advanced astronomical awareness.

The Sabian people anticipated this. They understood that with great power comes great responsibility, so they delivered not only the one, but two teachings. The one was how to master, through agriculture and technology, the survival requirements of the physical world; the other was how to develop the wisdom to be responsible for such power. This wisdom could not have been formulated into any written text, even if there had been writing. Any ‘system’ of wisdom will fail and create more harm than good – think of religious wars and the prejudice in the world today born of the animus that arises when people think in terms of right and wrong. Wisdom, like morality, is time-and-place dependent, so any attempt to fix it into laws and explanations is falsely guided.

Instead they encouraged people to gaze at the stars – perhaps mainly in order to teach the importance of the number 7. Only star-gazers will see that the lights that travel across the heavens are 7 in number. To the naked eye the only travellers are the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Those who gazed became noticeably different from those who did not – they were a little spaced-out, mystical, highly intuitive, spontaneous and largely disinterested in the things that others pursued. For most of our history, these types were profoundly respected for that very quality that intuitively we associate with the number 7. Their word was often held to be sacred, and could frequently curb the power of chiefs and those bent on war and such practices offensive to peaceful co-existence with other living things and Nature itself.

Relatively recently, in the era of Scientific Materialism, materialists have gained supremacy and, through ridicule and even torture, have cast witches and mystics aside. Thus intuitive wisdom has recently been mostly ignored, and even intuition itself has been degraded and become confused. As ‘dog-eat-dog' became ‘corporate crocodiles eating all they can devour’, our species' memory of how to live well was all but lost. Blue skies became filthy; air, earth and water were all poisoned and very few people can remember how to live in joy.