The Cross

The Rosary is a very important Catholic set of prayers, and a means of meditation, praised and commended by several saints.

It is traditionally grouped in three kinds of Mysteries: Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious (St. John Paul II, Pope, suggested a fourth one, the Luminous Mysteries).

I have been thinking about them and their relationship with natural symbols.

One of the associations that, I think, is hard to deny is this one (it´s taken from a post I did on Facebook, with very little modification):

In the first mystery, Catholics pray while meditating on The agony in the Garden.

Our Lord goes to a garden (related to Spring) on the Mount of Olives (from which olive oil, a hot and moist substance, comes) to pray intensely; his sweat turns into blood. He talks with the Father; and his disciples can't keep up praying, and fall asleep.

This is air.

The second mystery is the Scourging at the Pillar.

Pain. Bodily feeling. The senses are attacked. The emphasis, here, is on bodily sensation.

This is water.

The third mystery is the Crowning with Thorns.

Yes, this is also painful, and this is more or less the same set of events of the previous mystery, but the main theme here is the denial, or mockery, of Christ's rightful title of King of Kings. The attack is on his Honour, on his Crown, on his Lordship.

Fire.

The fourth mystery is the Carrying of the Cross. A hard journey on dry ground, towards a mount called "The Skull", carrying a huge chunk of wood intented to be the place of His death. The weight of matter, the limits and difficulties of concreteness.

Earth.

"But Marcos, there are five mysteries. What about the last one, The Crucifixion?"

As far as I can see, all the last mysteries (the Finding of Jesus in the Temple, the Crucifixion, and the Crowning of Our Lady Queen of Heaven) of the three “traditional” mysteries seem to be different from the others. They either sum up the others, or transition to the next mystery, or both.

Anyway, the Crucifixion involves a Cross, which has four arms. I’m sure you will have noticed that.

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On the Southern hemisphere, a very bright constellation is visible in the night sky.

The Southern Cross — which appears in the flag of several different countries (Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, and Samoa) — is composed of five stars, three of them very bright, Acrux (Alpha Crucis, on the basis of the Cross); Mimosa (Beta Crucis, on the right arm — don’t forget that it is facing us, so this star is to the left of someone facing the cross); and Gacrux (Gamma Crucis, at the top of the Cross).

The other stars are Imai (Delta Crucis, on the left arm), of second/third magnitude, and Ginan (Epsilon Crucis, on the “heart of the Cross”), of the fourth magnitude.

It is also known by the Latin word for Cross, “Crux”.

Their names, of course, tell us little to nothing about them, and there is no surviving astrological treatise on their symbolism.

There might have been something, by the astronomer/astrologer/naturalist/cartographer Georg Marcgraf. He lived in Maurice of Nassau’s Dutch Brazil for a decade, and had an observational tower for him. He wrote a treatise on the South Hemisphere stars. But this work is lost.

This constellation is mentioned in Camoens’s epic poem “The Lusiads”, and, oddly enough, in Dante’s Purgatory (as something that was visible from the North, then became invisible — due to the precession of the equinoxes).

Being bright, easy recognizable, and useful — it points toward the South Pole — it´s a pity the Southern Cross does not have a well-established astrological symbolism.

However, this is also the only Southern constellation for which this work is not, in practice, impossible.

First, we are talking about few stars. Secondly, there is a clear symbol attached to it — the Cross in which Our Lord was Crucified — and there is a clear correspondence between the stars and points in the Cross.

For example, Acrux is on the basis, the point at which the Cross connects with the earth — and the place where, Tradition says, the Skull of Adam is buried.

Gacrux is on the Head of Our Lord; Ginan, on His Sacred Heart.

Mimosa (on the right side, of the Good Thief) and Imai (on the left side, of the other thief) are also easily related to important events of the Crucifixion.

This is a shameless call for people to think on that and come up with symbolic ideas.

I am aware that this has to include observation of the stars themselves in the sky — to get their colour, their appearance, etc — but I’m not excluding astrologers from the other part of the world — please feel free to contribute.

That’s it for now. God bless you all.