Sabian Origins

Origins of Sabian Symbols

This is a story that connects Sabian Symbols with the number 7. It is a feasible explanation for what might never be proved or even fully understood about how and why Sabian Symbols came into being.

Gobeklitepe

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 very first makers of bread may well have been others on the planet - the Aboriginals in Australia) LINK.

Sabian People as Teachers

The locals, though primitive, nonetheless had the sense to see the great advantage in learning from the Sabians, primarily how to grow food. Thus the seed of civilisation was germinated. Yet this was also the first steps of a long march, over millennia, towards an almost inevitable existential crisis of the species homo sapiens. Why inevitable? Because without wisdom there is a predictable formula: from agriculture, and the resultant technology, comes wealth, then extreme power and the lust for dominion over others and over Nature. The corruption of truth and beauty soon follows and madness comes to be seen as normal. We can surely see today what that has led us to – we are on the brink of a cataclysm that we may not survive.

Power and Responsibility

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.

Star Gazers and the Number 7

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.

Sabians and Sufis

The essence of this approach to knowledge lies not in the use of words to offer explanation, but in their use onomatopoeically as sounds that bring about states of higher consciousness; or as an awareness of breath as having a spiritual aspect that connects us to the life force; or as tuning in to music as a way to remember the soul. The natural successors to this attitude of spiritual expression are the Sufis, and there may well have been a direct transmission of knowledge from the Sabians through the ages to the Sufis. Apart from the strong likelihood due to geographical proximity, the study of the various musical forms certainly suggests this.

Corporate Crocodiles

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. ​

Elsie Wheeler

Yet in 1925 an extraordinary woman, with the exceptional ability to employ her right-brain to an impressive degree, reached out across time and space and intuitively discovered the resonance of universal wisdom that vibrates eternally across all the universes, the same star-wisdom that was taught by the Sabian people 12000 years earlier. When tasked by an astrologer, she found her own way of capturing what she could of the eternal message, and delivered this in the form of 360 images, linked to the Zodiac, the circle of the stars. Each is a rather obscure and mysterious symbol that triggers the intuitive side of any student. She was of course aware that they came to her from a particular source, the Sabian people, so appropriately and respectfully she called them Sabian Symbols.

Elven Star

Almost a century later a method has been developed, Elven Star, to link the Sabian Symbols with Sufism’s 7 Planes of Consciousness. The subtle, intuitive wisdom of 7-ness lies dormant within each one of us, and can be awakened by those who train themselves to know what 7 feels like, what it means and how it can be used. It is the study of the 7th harmonic frequency of vibration and connects our consciousness to the realms which, in our mythology, we associate with faeries and elves. By using the Elven Star, we are remembering the 7-ness within us and helping to restore the balance in the world at this time of great distress and potential turbulence.

Creativity Music and Dance

It is certain that balance will one day be restored – this is a cosmic law without which existence itself would collapse, being dual in its very essence. Yet it is also certain that each individual must affirm a path of light and behave accordingly, or else be drawn towards a darker experience wherein, though veiled by the many glamours of materialism, fear is dominant. Then real joy is forfeited. By tuning in to our ‘7-ness’, we make that affirmation, and we learn to raise creativity, music, dance and spontaneity above the burdensome heaviness and reluctant duties of an obedient life lived solely to avoid discomfort.