The Spiritual Science of the Stars: A Guide to the Architecture of the Spirit

Excerpts & Samples

By Pete Stewart

Publisher : Inner Traditions/Bear & Company

ABOUT Pete Stewart

Pete Stewart
Pete Stewart is an architect and software designer and is the author of two published works on the history of the bagpipe and its music. He has studied myth and its relationship to astronomy since the mid-1970s. He lives in the Scottish lowlands.

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Description

The profound influence of ancient cosmologies on our ideas about the human spirit

• Shows how ancient myths contain a sophisticated understanding of our relationship to the cosmos, derived from thousands of years of observation of the night sky

• Explains how ideas of the mind and spirit are still entwined with these ancient cosmologies despite the disruptive effects of modern astronomy

• Reveals how ancient ideas and contemporary cosmology might be combined into a new model for spiritual meaning

Thousands of years before the first written records, humans were turning to the night sky as a source of meaning for existence and their place within it. The conclusions drawn from these observations are embodied in stories from across the world known as Creation Myths. Contrary to the popular belief that these myths were meant to explain the origins of the universe, Pete Stewart shows that they were actually designed to create a harmony and order in the lives of humans that reflected, in their society and architecture, the ordered patterns they saw evidenced in the sky.

These ancient myths also record, in the story of “the separation of Heaven and Earth,” the discovery of a disastrous discord in this ancient harmony, which the mythmakers overcame by imagining a vastly expanded architecture, one in which the individual soul had a role to play in the evolution of the cosmos.

Today science presents a similar challenge to our sense of meaning. Stewart explores how, by reexamining the myths of creation in this light, we can learn how contemporary cosmology might yield a new architecture for the spirit and how the ancient sense of being in the cosmos might be reconstructed for our age.
“Pete Stewart has taken the time to properly map out the mythic frame of precession identified in the classic work Hamlet’s Mill. His writing is full of insights into the mind of the mythmakers and unifies disparate global traditions into a single original concept.”
Richard Heath, author of Matrix of Creation and Sacred Number and the Origins of Civilization

“This book is a stunningly coherent story of ancient myths expressed in terms of the measuring of time, or cosmos. Stewart’s view is that myth was an attempt to make sense of our human situation rather than to provide an explanation for the existence of the universe. It explains spirituality in a totally original way as a deeprooted enterprise to make sense of time.”
Anthony Blake, author of A Seminar on Time, The Intelligent Enneagram, and the forthcoming Ways of Higher Intelligence

" . . . this reexamination of creation myths in this new light today offers insights on how new ideas of the cosmos can be gained from modern astronomy, and deserves a place in any New Age lending library."
The Midwest Book Review, Feb 2008

"This is a stunning account of the origin of creation myth and how it underpins the development of cultural and religious mores across societies globally, many strands of which are recognizable to the present day."
Pat Alvis, reviewer, Mar 2008