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Daniel Pinchbeck
the Moon. As Robert Bauval discovered in The Orion Mystery, vertical tubes in the Egyptian pyramids were designed to align with particular stars at certain times, revealing the movement of precession. According to the Precession of the Equinoxes, we are currently at the end of the Age of Pisces, transi tioning into the Age of Aquarius. Hindu or Vedic cosmology conceived of the Yugas, four periods, each shorter than the last, representing accelerat ing decline from the Satya Yuga, the Golden Age, when humanity was selfgoverned by knowledge of divine law. This is the Kali Yuga, the final epoch, which corresponds, in Greek myth, to the last of four ages—Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron. As discussed, Mesoamerican myth conceives of cycles within cycles, like wheels within wheels, continuing over vast periods. Ac cording to the Classic Maya, we are approaching the end of the “thirteenth baktun,” completing a Long Count of 5,125 years. “Anxiety is the great birth-giver,” Gebser writes. A new form of con sciousness emerges and realizes itself during a fatal crisis, when the prevail ing structure has reached “the end of its expressive and effective possibilities, causing new powers to accumulate which, because they are thwarted, cre ate a ‘narrows’ or constriction. At the culmination point of anxiety these powers liberate themselves, and this liberation is always synonymous with a new mutation.” After mythic civilizations had elaborated their dream-like consciousness and inner awareness of the soul within temple cities and pantheistic cults, their cultures could only repeat themselves, becoming increasingly routinized and mechanical. “The exhaustion of a consciousness structure has always manifested it self in an emptying of all values, with a consistent change of efficient qual itative to deficient quantitative values. It is as if life and spirit withdrew from those who are not coparticipants in the particular new mutation,” Gebser writes. As mythic cultures declined, religious doctrine turned rigid and stagnant, locked into tradition rather than renewed through inner ex perience. The “deficient quantitative” mania that gripped the Aztecs dur ing the last years of their empire led them to sacrifice increasing numbers, as many as 250,000 victims annually, according to some scholars, before the conquistadors crushed them. The drastic shift—mutation or leap of quantum creativity—into the mental-rational structure was foretold by a myth: the birth of the goddess