CELESTIAL PHENOMENA

...their carnival until Science signaled the time to remove the masks. For us, these costumes and masks have become tools for studying the history of the human mind. However, to truly understand them, we must transport our senses back into that early phase of our own existence—as much as possible while still carrying our modern culture with us.

Without giving too much credit to Solar mythology A 19th-century school of thought, led by figures like Max Müller, which argued that most ancient myths were originally metaphors for the sun and its movements., it seems quite clear that the earliest feeling of worship was born from the wonder man felt when looking up at the heavens. The splendors of the morning and evening; the blue sky, painted with frescoes of cloud or darkened by the storm; the night, crowned with constellations—these awakened the imagination. They inspired awe, kindled admiration, and eventually led to adoration in the being who had reached a point where his eyes were lifted above the earth. Amid the rapture of Vedic hymns The Vedas are the oldest scriptures of Hinduism, composed in ancient Sanskrit. addressed to these majestic sights, we encounter sharp questions about whether the gods described by the priests actually exist, and suspicion is sometimes cast on the practice of sacrifice. The forms that peopled the celestial spaces may have been those of ancestors, kings, and great men. However, before any of those forms existed, there was a poetic enthusiasm that built heavenly mansions for them. The crude cosmogonies Theories or stories regarding the origin of the universe. of primitive science were likely embraced by this spirit and were consecrated as slowly as scientific generalizations are today.

Our modern ideas of evolution might suggest the reverse of this—that human worship began with lowly things and gradually ascended to high objects. This view assumes that in primitive ages, adoration was directed to logs and stones, trees and reptiles, and that the human mind climbed by degrees toward the contemplation and reverence of celestial majesty. But the agreement of this view with our ideas of evolution is only superficial. The real progress here seems to have been from the distant to the nearby, from the great to the small. It