With the progress of humanity along the spiral of our evolution, scientific minds are hard at work to uncover the secrets of the universe. Revealed with every new discovery and apparent advancement in our knowledge of our selves, is a myriad of additional questions and new theories for our minds to analyze. In a general sense, life can be defined as cellular organisms (single or multi-celled); cells bound by an outer membrane, containing within its walls a set of instructions for its inherent purpose. These instructions are DNA, RNA and the resulting proteins. All living things reproduce and are the result of reproduction; some organisms requiring another of similar genetic makeup, others containing within themselves all that is necessary for that reproduction. Another trait of living organisms is their necessity to convert matter into energy. When the process of this conversion ultimately ceases, the organism has technically died’. The final requisite for Life is the process of its evolution, a process in great debate even to this day. Aside from the Creationists, Neo-Darwinists are themselves not in complete agreement on the subject.
But so far all of our interest has been in physical biology. The consciousness of our species has just recently been looked at by the scientific community. It is the aim and function of Scientific Illuminism to reestablish the link between Science and Religion. Science is interested in how the physical universe works, Religion is interested in how the spiritual universe works. In truth, these two ideas are intimately related, though their individual study has not been until this current era. The intimate relationship between the physical and spiritual (both cosmically and within each living being) is demonstrated by the discovery of the unicursal hexagram by Sir Aleister Crowley in the last one hundred years.
It is hypothesized that the genome can evolve randomly, but, in the eyes of Scientific Illuminism, the conscious will can influence the mutation of the human genome. In other words, there is a key that once discovered can open up the human being to the influence from the stars, whereby our complete evolution will unfold. The Alchemists and Christian Gnostics have held this idea for ages, and it is believed that the work of adepts from these schools are responsible for the evolution of the human being. The work is not complete by any means; more work is needed to continue the work of our initiated ancestors.
The definition of life given earlier seems to exclude ideas of discarnate intelligences and non-carbon-based consciousness. Does Life have to be cellular? Is it inconceivable to think of life that is not housed in a material frame, dependent upon DNA imbedded within its most microscopic component? In this author’s opinion, discarnate intelligences exist until it can be proven otherwise; however, the scientific community is currently only concerned with the life that is readily experienced on our planet Earth. The objective of this brief article (ideally) is to open up the possibility of directly experiencing those forms of life that are not bound to the Cell, and whereby our own cellular structure can receive the influx of the consciousness of that life, allowing the evolution of the Earth to receive consciously that influx. There is an underlying consciousness to the universe, and this consciousness has been drowned out of our human minds by the drum of our developing intellect. Perhaps the expansion of consciousness in certain individuals can create the necessary genetic mutations that will become nature’s preference.
Another idea is that just as the physical world relies on evolution for survival, perhaps the spiritual world relies on (new) theories of evolution for its survival? This would correlate with the Hermetic Ideas that the world above is like unto that world which is below. It is our work to reveal that relationship and develop a theory that will accommodate the entire universe, both physical and spiritual.
A theory that has begun to accumulate data (and followers) is called Cosmic Ancestry, which asserts that life on Earth was seeded from extra-terrestrial cellular organisms, and that evolution to higher states of being depends upon new genetic material arriving from similar outer space cellular organisms. One point to keep in mind, as we will begin to look into Neo-Darwinism, is that the Cosmic Ancestry theory acknowledges terrestrial evolution provided that it does not depend upon new “genetic programs”, which, according to Cosmic Ancestry theory, can only be implanted by extra-terrestrial sources.
The first principal of this new theory is termed Panspermia. The two root terms that compose this principal, Pan and Sperm, have obvious implications for the Thelemic Paradigm, and much could be said about these implications. Pan translates as All or Everywhere, (Pan in Thelemic doctrine suggests the threshold of the Abyss separating Life from its primary source, and without theorizing about the nature of that source, it can be said that the seed, or Sperm, is ever-present on our planet and combined with the fertility of our surroundings, creates the process of life.) The Sperm suggests the Hebrew letter Yod, which is related to the Hermit Atu in the Tarot of Thoth.
Aristotle was first to expound the theory of Panspermia (in its primitive form) concluding that the spontaneous generation of life was an event that occurred on Earth, explaining the origins of cellular life. It was the preferred theory for more than two thousand years, but was disproved in 1864 by the French chemist Louis Pasteur. It was in the 1870’s when British physicist Lord Kelvin and German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz reinforced Pasteur’s work arguing that life could have come from outer space. Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet, in her work The Gnostic Circle: A Synthesis in the Harmonies of the Cosmos (Aeon Books, 1975) explains that the planet Pluto is the “fecundator of life” and that its seed propels new creation into the earth. Granted, these ideas (seemingly) step beyond the boundary of this article, it nevertheless demonstrates the lofty idea of life on earth being directly affected by the state of the cosmos as a whole. In modern Qabalistic theory, Pluto is associated with Kether, the number one, the seed that becomes planted in Malkuth, the number ten. (1 and 10) In the first decade of the 1900s, Swedish chemist and Nobel laureate Svante Arrhenius theorized that bacterial spores propelled through space by light pressure were the seeds of life on Earth. This Light seems to be the medium through which the essence of Life is transmitted.
In the 1970’s, interest in Panspermia was revived. Careful spectroscopic observation and analysis of light from distant stars uncovered traces of life in the intervening dust. British astronomers Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe proposed that comets carry bacterial life across galaxies. It is generally accepted in the modern scientific community that outer space contains the ingredients’ of life. Ancient initiates had this knowledge even before the invention of astronomical observation techniques, viewing the greater cosmos as a type of macrocosmic ovum. Mainstream science, however, has not accepted the theory that complete single-cell organisms seeded life on this planet.
Evolution can be defined as the change in the gene pool of a population over a given period of time. This was demonstrated by Darwin in his study of the black and white colored moths. Nature Herself selects those variations within the gene pool as most able to survive under the current circumstances of the environment. However, only genetic variations existent within the gene pool can be part of the evolution of a species. In other words, if the variation of a darker color was not already present in the gene pool of Darwin’s moths [insert correct terminology], there would have been no black moths, magically created in order to survive. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe restructured panspermia to include this new understanding of evolution. Their theory accepted the fact that life on Earth evolved over the course of a few billion years. The key here is that they concluded that higher evolution’ could not be explained by random mutation among genes for single-celled organisms. These new’ genes must come from outer space, so says the new theory of panspermia. This idea is called strong-panspermia’. The suggestion again is that life-forms that were more evolved than the current single-celled organisms in the early stages of the Earth’s development succeeded in reaching the earth and inputted a new genetic variation in the gene pool.
