The Star People

You may be interested in The Star People by Gaylord Johnson, recently released over at Project Gutenberg. It’s a story about an uncle teaching some kids, who form “the society of star gazers”, about the star constellations.

“Why did not somebody teach me the constellations, and make me at home in the starry heavens, which are always overhead and which I don’t half know to this day?”

—Thomas Carlyle.

Consider also:

  1. “I was with a number of Hermetists, and one of them said to another, ‘Do you see something in the curtain?’ The other gazed at the curtain for a while and saw presently a man led through a wood by a black hound, and then the hound lay dead at a place the seer knew was called, without knowing why, ‘the Meeting of the Suns,’ and the man followed a red hound, and then the red hound was pierced by a spear. A white fawn watched the man out of the wood, but he did not look at it, for a white hound came and he followed it trembling, but the seer knew that he would follow the fawn at last, and that it would lead him among the gods. The most learned of the Hermetists said, ‘I cannot tell the meaning of the hounds or where the Meeting of the Suns is, but I think the fawn is the Morning and Evening Star.’ I have little doubt that when the man saw the white fawn he was coming out of the darkness and passion of the world into some day of partial regeneration, and that it was the Morning Star and would be the Evening Star at its second coming.”
  2. Every Man And Every Woman Is A Chocolate Star
  3. New Head for the Red post about Goetia is a Q&A about an ebook that uses Lord of the Rings and Star Wars metaphors
  4. “In his time educated people believed that they amused themselves with books of imagination but that they ‘made their souls’ by listening to sermons and by doing or by not doing certain things. When they had to explain why serious people like themselves honoured the great poets greatly they were hard put to it for lack of good reasons.”
  5. “Every people has the prophets it deserves; the credulous cowardly ice-cream-soda idealist is best left with the illiterate illuminati, rascally Rosicrucians, magpie mediums, parrot psychics, and cockroach clairvoyants with whom they feel at home. One cannot initiate imbeciles.”