THE WHEEL
A Symbolic Image of the Cosmos

This group of persons (who meddle in the private life of simple folk who have recourse to them in order to be oriented by way of a horoscope -or some other piece of charlatanry-or who seize upon some opportunity of escape, in the horrible situation posed by the sociocultural milieu in which they have had to live) have no level of knowledge of any type. This to the point of being totally ignorant of the existence of other planes than those of the minimal existential psychophysical, phenomenomaterial reality to which they ascribe themselves, and which they "spiritualize" by way of superstition, deceit, and fantasy, in the task of adding illusion to illusion, of presuming powers and cognitions, and of manipulating in their own interest determinate terminology purloined from, and forces born of, the grossest of suggestions. That illusion engenders illusion is something thatn neither should nor can surprise anyone. 

Astronomy, nevertheless, an official science, ceaselssly recognizes in its origins an astrological legacy more or less to be ashamed of, something now gotten beyond, but at the same time giving astronomy certain hierarchical "status." The same occurs with chemistry in relation to alchemy. The truth is that both chemistry and astronomy are degradations of alchemy and astrology. The ancient traditions included chemistry and astronomy in alchemy and astrology, as parts of these sciences, in the aspect bound up with quantitative experiment and empirical analysis. Only, this partial reading has subsisted in isolation from its principles and context, shaping the official sciences. And this same degeneration of thought -as to the level of current reading of the authentic traditional sciences-exists as well among the enthusiasts of "astrology," who use this term in denominating occultists, spiritist-spiritualists, theosophists, parapsychologists, hypnotists, naturists, and witches and "sorcerers" of varying coloration. 

Alchemy is the science of integral transmutation, symbolized by the properties of the minerals, and astrology is the knowledge of the true heavens, a knowledge ritualized by the stars and expressed by the code of the firmament. In the particular case of the zodiac, its division into twelve at its circumference, corresponding to the "stations" of the sun in an annual trajectory around the earth, and fragmented into portions of thirty degrees, is represented by a wheel of twelve radii, each of them being a month of the year, with thirty days or units composing it. This is the wheel of life, or the spatio-temporal boundary that gives cohesion, and makes the machine of the world "work." And the symbolization of this cyclic wheel, in the plane, is the circle, with the central point clearly marked or, at times, supposed. As we have already said, this symbol is valid for any cycle, whether the annual, or that of the days of a month, or that of a person's years of life, or that of the centuries in a civilization which come and go and return.¹ All peoples have known this supposition, this philosophical principle of cyclic time. Its going and coming, the death and rebirth of the year-to speak only of the annual cycle-is the becoming that the calendars signify. 

In the case of the Aztec and Mayan civilizations, the circumference is divided into eighteen parts of twenty degrees-and into thirteen of the same number of degrees for the esoteric-ritual calendar-but the meaning is the same: that of the perpetuity of the regeneration and the synchronization or rhythmic measure of movement, "of the god Time who panetrates all things." It is mind-boggling that the "scientists" of our day can continue to assert that the pre-Columbians were ignorant of the wheel. Not only the Aztec and Mayan calendars are wheels, but the wheel can be seen in its practical form applied to pre-Hispanic "toys" (or miniatures), including those exhibited in one of the principal anthropological museums. At the same time, innumerable are the designs of circular forms, spirals, and their interrelations created in all possible materials by the peoples of North, Central, and South America, developed as expressions of their metaphysical and cosmogonic knowledge and of that of the principle that the wheel represents. That the "technological" wheel was a taboo for these civilizations, and that its practical application was censured-for example, in transportation-is a fact based on a repugnance to using something sacred on profane levels. It is wheels and gears that have brought about the mechanization, dehumanization, and disintegration of the contemporary world. 

Now, if we transpose the macrocosmic to the microcosmic, and lend attention to that permanent return of the cycle upon "itself," bringing it from the cosmological plane to the psychological, we can clearly see the succession of episodes of our life, the play of shadows and lights of its history as if on a stage, the scenario in which its spectacle is presented, the personages who enter and leave, constantly changing names, disguises, masks, situations and roles, and the unbelievable illusion of the whole, inasmuch as anything is possible and insignificant in it, and, accordingly, a phantasm, a relative, amorphous phenomenon, subject to the wear of time and memory. The surface of the wheel of life turns again and again: and thus we see passing the steps of the day, the years, the persons we love and by whom we have been loved, and all of that which must die, subject to cause and effect, beginning and end. That is the law of life, and not that of eternal life, but that of perishable existence, reincarnating itself permanently in innumerable formations, to which astrologers and pseudo-spiritualists laboriously and actively devote themselves, taking them for metaphysics, when in reality they are but phenomena and situations by which we are conditioned: beginning with the sign of our birth, which we must transcend. 

To the mobile, substantial periphery, associated with time, is opposed the essential immutability of the center or axis of the wheel, both being situated at the extremes of a radius or spoke, which connects them, setting them in intercommunication. This changing, unstable, and sinuous surface is associated with the serpent and the serpentine form, as well as with its equivalent, the dragon of the Eastern and Western traditions. In the center of the wheel, a personage is found that the Hindu tradition denominates Çakra-Varti, servant of the wheel, identical with the Taranis of Druid myths, with the "perfect sage" of the Chinese, and with the Nahuatl Ometeotl (and other pairs of deities), who, lying motionless, give life through Tonatiuh, all always represented in the impassible attitude of the beginning, from which emanates all manifestation, and the changes and returns of the existential forms. 

We have already said that the wheel of which we are speaking is the figure of a circle in the plane. We have also seen the relation of this figure with the square, and have learned that, in space, the two are the sphere and the cube respectively. The same occurs with the plane spiral and the helix. In adding volume to the figure, new meaning possiblities are added, the figure being visualized on another level. The plane serves us as a support for vision in depth, for spatial comprehension.² 

The figure of the circle is more perfect than that of the square, since in the latter not all of the points of the sides are equidistant from the center. This "primacy" of the circle over the square is the same that exists between sky and earth, the point and the circumference, the thread and the weft, since without the former the latter would not be. The complementarity of these two "figurations," their value assignments and their joint utilization in manifold associations, is one of the keys of symbolic language. Interplays of symbols are needed, in conjunction, for the symbol to acquire its proper meaning. Some lead us to others, and these others to still others, and it is in mutual relations among these, and in the possibilities that they occasion, that the nature of symbolics and the mediating function of the symbol is understood. For, despite the fact that the knowledge made possible by means if it, and what we have thought of it before having obtained it, are different things, we can nevertheless observe that it has been through the actuation of the symbol, and of the whole of symbolics and its relations, that we have obtained it. On the other hand, we observe that these symbolics constitute the most faithful and clear, exact and stripped, manner of being able to synthesize a thought, a special state of awareness, or a view of the cosmos-at the extreme of which the unity between both appears evident. 

The cross of equal arms is the internal structure of the circle, the representation of the tensions that balance and shape it. It is also the internal structure of the square. Just so, the tridimensional cross fulfills this function with respect to the sphere and the cube. The plane cross symbolizes the number five. In this case, the central point is taken as an independent element. The ether of the ancients, in emanating its radiation, generates the quaternary of the cruciform arms, two opposite two, which, reaching their proper limit necessarily return to the original point, to their "quintessence." This is the heart of symbol, and the reflection of the potency that it manifests and tirelessly reabsorbs. It is the center of the horizontal plane, whence radiates the energy of the vertical plane, of the axis mundi, which it diffuses until it has marked out a space, like a dark vortex, that despite its immutability will generate all mutable acts and deeds, thus being simultaneously all things, the original point and any other point of the circumference, essence and substance, Purusha and Prakriti, and all of the possible degrees of the manifestation of the principles in creation, or universal being.³ 

The number five traditionally symbolizes the human being, and its geometrical representation is also a five-pointed star. This star has the particularity that it is a continuum, and can be sketched with a single line, without lifting the pencil from the paper, until it returns to the point that has generated it, completing the figure. At the same time, its design corresponds to the representation of a person with his arms and legs in a cross (in the form of an x), and his trunk and head as the vertical axis. The head symbolizes the pinnacle, the possibility of escaping one's own limits, or the possibility of knowing the unlimited by way of an emergence from the cosmos, and of reaching the total liberty of what is not conditioned by space and time-the possibility of reaching what is eternal in itself, because it has no birth or end, nor is it found to be dimensioned by any extension. The heart or navel of the world, as images of the center, reflect on the creational plane the possibility of what has no discourse because it is not successive, and the possibility of what cannot be comprehended without one's paying urgent, minute attention to the symbols that express it, or better, to what is hidden in its designs. 

On the other hand, the projection of a cube in the plane gives us a six-armed cross, or wheel of six spokes. Joining the north-south axis to it with a semicircumference at the extreme end of the north arm, to designate the pole, the pinnacle, and also the tridimensionality of up and down, expanded in the four cardinal directions, we obtain the symbol called the crismón, one very widespread in Christianity and assimilated to the "needle's eye." And it is very similar in its form, and identical in its meaning, to the cross called ansata, which can be seen abundantly represented in the Egyptian tradition. 

Just so, we have already seen that, in the symbolics of the temple with a square base and a hemispheric cupola, the numerical values assigned to these geometric forms were four and nine, respectively. In many cases, the dome, nine in value, as in the case of the circumference, is replaced by the triangle, which crowns the quadrangular structure of the base. Such is the case with many Greek and Roman buildings, and also that of the Egyptian and pre-Columbian pyramids. It is the same with the obelisks, very many gates not crowned with an arch, and Christian altars, which repeat the symbolical cosmogram of the temple in its vertical structure. 

Initiation into the Pythagorean tetrakys supposed the highest knowledge, while that of the "square of four" referred to knowledge of the earth, and constituted an antecedent step, both being symbolized by the triangle and the square. The number nine is implicit in the number three, being its squared power, and it signifies the expression of the trinity as universal principle, and its manifestation in a delimited, closed, cyclic plane that, together with the unit with which it is complemented, shapes the image of the whole. The same occurs with the triangle and its central point (3 + 1 = 4), which generate the quadrangular shape. The number four has always been taken as the number of the unfolding of the manifest, or the expression of the principles in the plane of creation.⁴ Regarding the relations between three and nine-or between the triangle and the circle-we shall recall that the sum of the angles of a triangle is always equal to two right angle-that is, one hundred eighty degrees, which is the value of a hemisphere, cupola, or dome, which on the other hand is a circular or cyclic number, since, as we know, this is the name for those numbers the sum of whose digits is nine. 

An association between the symbolism of the wheel and that of fire is very frequent in ancient traditions and among "primitive" peoples. To list a few biblical examples, we can cite Daniel 7:9, which tells us that "his throne was fiery flames, and its wheels were burning fire"; or Ezekiel 10:6, "Take fire from within the wheelwork, from among the cherubim"; or the Letter of James 3:6, "The tongue is a fire. The tongue . . . sets on fire the cycle of nature." This same relation is implicit in the so-called rota fire, indispensable for transmutation according to certain medieval alchemists. Referring to this mutual bond, we must say that, on occasion, fire is located in the center of the wheel, as it is in the case of the two magic circles. Likewise it may be the axis or center of the temple, stone or altar of sacrifice, sacrarium, ara, occult residence of Agni, fire, the radiant principle. Conversely, in some symbolics it is transferred from the middle to the periphery, and thus one sees wheels of numberless fires, as one can observe in different rites and dances, and in the pyrotechnics of the festivals of various traditions.⁵ Actually the symbolism is the same, although it is taken from two points of view. In one perspective, the fire has multiplied into innumerable fires; from the other, the central fire absorbs the division of the plurality of the fires, to signify an original, archetypal fire. On one hand, the unity of being in itself; on the other, its enduring presence in manifestation. 

An ancient dictum of Greek philosophy, later expressed by Nicholas of Cusa, and in general by all of the neo-Platonics and Hermetists, tell us: "God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere." Just so, the contraries of periphery and center become interchangeable. Every peripheral point is the center of a system. "God is in the world, and the world is in God." "The Face of faces is secluded in all faces." "God is in the circle of his dancers and at the same time is the center of the dance." It is a matter of the permanent paradox of an absence ever present, of a transcendent immanence. Any point on the circumference, in being transformed into a center, embraces the whole. And any point of this circle, or system, contains, in inherent, constitutive fashion, that same possibility. The union of contraries has occasioned the simultaneity of what is no longer differentiated: "Transcendence and immanence coincide in God, who is known as the invisible and indivisible One, and is recognized in the visible and divisible multiple."⁶ All is in all, and all are in one. 

It is by God, who has given us physical and spiritual birth, by whom we know God's self. Oneness cannot be known but by itself, since, if there were something outside it that could grasp it, it would then cease to be oneness. If we visualize this fact using the symbol of the wheel in the plane, and if we situate the principle of life in the extreme north of the circle, at zero hours of the day, and midday (or half of life) in the extreme south, the end will coincide with its beginning-at zero hours -conforming the alpha and the omega of every manifestation. The sense of creation is this perpetual recognition of oneself in all things. It is the invisible, becoming visible, that manifests itself to the world and the senses. 

This occurs every day everywhere, and the human beiing has symbolized it by bringing it always to bear on the multiple areas of her thinking and daily activity. In a traditional society, all of life is a collective rite, and work, pleasure, or any daily activity, is ritualization, or endowing with a rhythm, in accord with the cosmic-telluric energies, which are always present. In this sense, every construction, set of utensils, ceremony, language, gesture, or image of a traditional society is a symbol or sign of cognition (or recognition) of the cosmogony,⁷ imitated and repeated in accord with the creational model, which is decidedly alive at this moment. 

Thus, symbol constitutes, and forms part of, the normal life of a traditional people, and is found disseminated everywhere, in each one of the expressions of the everyday on the part of that community. The Latin word orbs (world) derives from orbis, the circle. By extension, the orb would be (etymologically) a circular plane or its squared equivalent. 

One often finds, in the center of quadrangular open courtyards, a (round) fountain, symbol of the axis and the original waters (also able to quell spiritual thirst or thirst for knowledge), fashioned at three levels from lesser to greater from the top down, with the water overflowing from each to the successive one. Games and amusements-as any cultural phenomenon-emphatically recognize a sacred origin, and have always constituted ritual forms of recreation and relaxation. Without going further afield, the Tarot is a card game, and the game of bridge itself reflects values of a cosmological order, just as does chess, however little their devotees may be aware of it. The middle Americans' game of handball is a cosmogram in movement, on which the participants unconsciously stake their lives, as in other play and military expressions like the guerra florida, literally, war of the flowers, or the European medieval tourneys, and all martial contests of the numberless peoples, including their "Olympic" celebrations. The object of these cultural manifestations was to re-create the cosmogony, as we have said, and at the same time to reveal it. Thus they fulfilled a didactic function-even at the level of subliminal teaching-since it is good to recall here that human beings must learn all of it, and experience it in ongoing fashion: after all, without the idea of an order repeated invariably, albeit in a thousand different forms, persons run the sure risk of plunging into disintegration and the confusion of the amorphous. 

The transmission of knowledge acquires the most varied manners of expression, as a given culture may have developed them in any direction, all being referred to a common archetypal plane. And even today, in Western society, very numerous are the fragments we find present in the average culture (and which are what justify that culture), which at bottom are but the ramshackle remains of our traditional heritage. 

The circus could be taken as an illustration of what we are presenting here. From the etymology of this word, circus, denoting a circle, and with its limit, the diversity of attractions and spectacles it offers, it is wholly and entirely a collection of samples and symbolical remains. The round tent is mounted on a central axis, creating a significative space, where the function is to be held. Four openings in the tent mark the cardinal orientation, and correspond to the places where the four main ropes are tied, to which are added four others, at the intermediate points. The play of tension of these lines, and their directional situation, balance and structure the circus tent. And now the function can begin. Clowns who strike themselves, and carry out impossible things, provoking laughter, applause, and even weeping. Dwarfs and giants, and every type of disproportion and phenomenon of nature, actors, magicians who pull from their hats worlds of fantasty, horses and trained animals, persons who fly through space, changing lights and sounds, shape a magical whole in which illusion is re-created, in order to emphasize it, and the spectacle of the world, with its limitless, secret, even monstruous possibilities, is imitated. 

For centuries, this art of ancestral fascination, with its extremely close bonds with the itinerant theater and the puppet show, and the medieval troubadours and jugglers, has awakened enthusiasm, and emotion (at times tinged with nostalgia or philosophy), and has taught numerous generations. As do today the carousel and the amusement park, as well, whose attactions, especially since the beginning of industrial and mechanized society, are entirely based on wheels, which generate movement and sensations. 

We must recall, furthermore, the errant character of the circus, its pilgrimage through countries, its nomadism. It this sense we should like to say a few words on the wheel as associated with the psychology of walking, of journey, quest, the idea of the overcoming of obstacles, challenge, progress, development, evolution. All of these concepts, laudable as they are from one point of view-taken as movements of the soul-nevertheless implicitly contain their own end, as they cannot be transferred from the horizontal plane, where they are commonly encountered, to the vertical-owing to psychological need, or to simple anxious concern to go further, out of curiosity, or wishing to experience something new, to discovery and spiritual realization. Or, as long as that aspiration encounters an ascending order, and does not plunge us into a descending disorder, originated by the very dynamics of desire, which can never be satisfied, since in obtaining what we have striven for, the latter continues to subsist, and originates anew its process of withdrawal, which by exhaustion begins to decrease-that is to say, each time it has been considered a means facilitating a higher, unknown end, and not as an end in itself, in which the unknown would be supplanted by the simple change of forms and their perpetual wisthdrawal. Or by the quantitative distances attributed to this "beyond," or by the sum of the possible sensible experiences. 

These horizontal aspirations, well understood, are the unconscious memory of the vertical-the attraction toward the center, the force that makes it possible to return to the origins. Human beings are privileged persons, since at any moment they can recover the memory of themselves, strive to reconstitute their glorious past, return to their lost fonts. The thread of time everlastingly weaves in its distaff this warp and woof, which is a support for knowing the atemporal, the eternal, presented obscurely within us, and being, ultimately, the secret mover that drives us to realize all acts, however little we know this fact or translate it in a thousand ways as superficial as they are anecdotic-minutiae of short scope that distract us, dazzle us, and subjugate us to them in subjecting us to their yoke. In this sense, symbol is a most precious aid, since it concentrates our attention and enables us to orientate and order ourselves with respect to our axis. Thus, it facilitates the realization of every type of correspondence and transposition, whether or the psychological, philosophical, or ontological level. 

As for certain forms like the spiral, which is a prolongation of the circle-and wheel-or rather, the emergence of both into other planes, now no longer horizontal but vertical (signifying true evolution or successive spiritual progress), these are a symbol encountered in all traditions and times, from the Far East to the American cultures, and even today continuing to be represented time and again as an integral part of the human store and legacy. Indeed, the evolutive and the involutive spiral are represented as double spirals, or serpents, in numerous traditions; and they are the symbols of the two principles or simultaneous currents of cosmic energy, found in all things. One rises up and the other descends, like the two halves of the day, permitting both, in their equilibrium, a stability and a harmony, as we see in Mercury's caduceus, or surrounding the Aztec calendar. Also, the sinuous forms of yin and yang, express this idea in the plane, forming a circle (or a sphere in the volumetric), a perfect figure with no beginning or end: the Tao. This spiral (which in three dimensions is a helix), functioning in conjunction and simultaneity with its opposite, configures the egg of the world, or the soul of a sphere, articulated between two invisible, opposed, and gravitational poles,⁸ since these two helixes are united at a static point of equilibrium, which generates a horizontal plane, the equatorial plane, the whole actually forming one figure. The latter could be set in relation with the three Hindu gunas: sattwa, ascending energy; rajas, expansive energy; and tamas, descending energy. 

This idea could also be represented, in the spatial, by two cones joined at their bases-the surface of the waters-or in the plane by two equilateral triangles inverted and united at a point, or, frequently, interlaced, showing quite clearly the union of contraries and their coexistence and interdependence, and we have the six-pointed star, or Solomon's Seal, a true symbol of analogy in its reflection and correspondence of one higher plane to another, lower one, which is its complement. It also signs high and low, and the four limits of the horizontal world, which its energies generate, as it strikes a relation--the operation usually symbolized by a circumference that surrounds and touches the star at six points, completing the image. 

The spiral, as well, and the double spiral, are frequently shaped in quadriform manner, which has occasioned the fixing of many symbolical "guards"-frames of a continuous whole-today ordinarily perceived as simply decorative. The svástica cross itself, a symbol as widespread and frequently used as that of the spiral-to which it is extremely akin-is a helix represented with two inverse rotational directionalities. And we know that in many traditions it is found represented by the intersection of two helicoid forms.⁹ 

But none of this could be perceived, were it not for that interior cube that all human beings have within themselves, their own space, which permits them to orientate themselves in the plane, and indicates to them what is before and what behind, what to the right and what to the left, and especially, tells them what is above and what below, thanks to which they enjoy their verticality and their equilibrium, without which nothing would make any sense. This invisible structure is intimately related with the human being's center, since it is also the structure of the cosmos, to which the human being belongs. And it constitutes the language permitting communication between the human being and the world. After all, the participation of both in one and the same model occasions the cohesion of the system--the coherence of discourse in the six directions of space, that is, in all of the possibilities of creation. The space is composed by coordinates and tensions, which embrace all of the points of the compass, in whose center there is a point of repose and rest-the "eye" of the hurricane-which in other analytical transpositions as well is the end and the beginning of the week in time: the sabath; the six remaining days being the days of creation or of the sephirotic manifestation or construction of the world; as well as the faces of a cube. 

Up to this point, we have seen wheels of four and six spokes, and their bonds with other symbols. We could mention the one of eight spokes, and illustrate it by the compass card or the ship's rudder; or the one with twelve, and repeat that it corresponds to the zodiac and the horoscope.¹⁰ After all, both the zodiacal plane, the model on which were built the cities of antiquity (the city of earth was a reflection of the heavenly city) and the horoscope can be very different things from those that modern astrologers suspect. The latter do not stop to think that astrology is nothing less than the science of heaven, and that this latter science, in conjunction with alchemy-the science of the earth-constitute knowledge of a cosmogony, and shape the science of the rhythms and the cycles. 

We believe, nevertheless, that the effort of these investigators could see itself recompensed (and would validate the teaching of astrology as it is expounded today) by the fact that its labors could require them to exercise themselves in analogical language, and would offer the possibility of conceiving in spatial, three-dimensional form-especially if they enabled them to grasp the idea of the cycle, repetition, and circularity of time. But this will never be, if astrologers were to occupy themselves, to the point of obsession, with personal problems, material or psychological, which can seem to them great magical or universal events only by reason of their myopia and lack of comprehension of symbol. The comprehension of symbol, such as we conceive it and here express it, is the condition sine qua non of the knowledge of astrology, which is surely a symbolics.