FOREWORD

Since the earliest times, Earthlings have lifted their eyes unto the heavens. Awed as well as fascinated, Earthlings learned the Ways of Heaven: the positions of the stars, the cycles of Moon and Sun, the turning of an inclined Earth. How did it all begin, how will it end - and what will happen in between? Heaven and Earth meet on the horizon.

For millennia Earthlings have watched the stars of the night give way to the rays of the Sun at that meeting place, and chose as a point of reference the moment when daytime and nighttime are equal, the day of the Equinox. Man, aided by the calendar, has counted Earthly Time from that point on. To identify the starry heavens, the skies were divided into twelve parts, the twelve houses of the zodiac.

But as the millennia rolled on, the "fixed stars" seemed not to be fixed at all, and the Day of the Equinox, the day of the New Year, appeared to shift from one zodiacal house to another; and to Earthly Time was added Celestial Time - the start of a new era, a New Age. As we stand at the threshold of a New Age, when sunrise on the day of the spring equinox will occur in the zodiacal house of Aquarius rather than, as in the past 2,000 years, in the zodiacal house of Pisces, many wonder what the change might portend: good or evil, a new beginning or an end - or no change at all?

To understand the future we should examine the past; because since Mankind began to count Earthly Time, it has already experienced the measure of Celestial Time - the arrival of New Ages. What preceded and followed one such New Age holds great lessons for our own present station in the course of Time. 1

It is said that Augustine of Hippo, the bishop in Roman Carthage (A.D. 354-430), the greatest thinker of the Christian Church in its early centuries, who fused the religion of the New Testament with the Platonistic tradition of Greek philosophy, was asked, "What is time?" His answer was, "If no one asks me, I know what it is; if I wish to explain what it is to him who asks me, I do not know."

Time is essential to Earth and all that is upon it, and to each one of us as individuals; for, as we know from our own experience and observations, what separates us from the moment we are born and the moment when we cease to live is TIME.

Though we know not what Time is, we have found ways to measure it. We count our lifetimes in years, which - come to think of it - is another way of saying "orbits," for that is what a "year" on Earth is: the time it takes Earth, our planet, to complete one orbit around our star, the Sun.

We do not know what time is, but the way we measure it makes us wonder: would we live longer, would our life cycle be different, were we to live on another planet whose "year" is longer? Would we be "immortal" if we were to be upon a "Planet of millions of years" - as, in fact, the Egyptian pharaohs believed that they would be, in an eternal Afterlife, once they joined the gods on that "Planet of millions of years"?

Indeed, are there other planets "out there," and, even more so, planets on which life as we know it could have evolved - or is our planetary system unique, and life on Earth unique, and we, humankind, are all alone - or did the pharaohs know what they were speaking of in their Pyramid Texts?

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