I shall try to show at a later stage what I hold to be, in the light of the psychological experience of Yoga, the exact processes involved in these ancient terms and their practical and philosophical justification. But whatever the validity attached to them or the lack of validity, it is only by reproducing the Vedic processes and recovering the original starting-point that we can recover also whatever is, to the intellect, hopelessly obscure in the Veda and Vedanta.  If we know of the existence of a buried treasure,  but have no proper clue to its exact whereabouts, there are small chances of our enjoying those ancient riches; but if we have a clue, however cryptic, left behind them by the original possessors,  the whole problem is then to recover the process of the cryptogram, set ourselves at the proper spot and arrive at their secret cache by repeating the very paces trod out by them in their lost centuries.

Conscious awareness results in a perception and lived experience of this harmony; sleep, uncon-sciousness with its accompanying compulsive behaviour patterns causes the world to appear as cacophonous. The time has come to move up the evolutionary ladder and live the experience that Leonardo foretold. We will discover in what way the Master disclosed this secret. And it may well cause us to reflect on another area of the debate regarding this mysterious genius: his own sexuality, or ‘sexual preference’, as we prefer to label it in the public discourse.

In The Last Supper we see the reality of 15^th Century society, dominated as it was by fear from all sides. Leonardo was a notorious free thinker and non-conformist; but his non-conformity was intriguingly consistent in its apparent eclecticism. For if we use the keys presented here, we find an unbroken thread weaving its way through all of his seemingly disparate pursuits. For example, why was he fascinated with flight to the point of obsession? Was he just, as most believe, foretelling things to come like aviation; or was this a means of experiencing release from Inertia that the 8^th sign held before him, the ‘knot’ that had to be undone in order to fly, to soar as a bird, as an eagle liberated from the gravitational pull of the Earth, that square of the crucified man?

This is not the only place we find the zodiac prominent in Christian tenants. It is explicit in The Revelation, which tradition holds to have been written by John the Beloved. In Chapter IV, 7, John describes the ‘four beasts’ as 1) Lion, 2) Calf, 3) Man, 4) Eagle. These are the four signs of the zodiac, Leo, Taurus, Aquarius and Scorpio (Eagle). They are the four of Fixed Quality, as it is termed in astrological lore, and they appear in John’s text in their correct order. Thus there can be no doubt where these ‘beasts’ come from. Based on this description, the early Church Fathers ‘decided’ on four gospels, being the ‘four pillars’ of the Church, and only four; and these would be equated ever after with the ‘four beasts’ of the famed Apocalypse of St John. Indeed, The Revelation makes no sense without the keys the zodiac provides to decipher the text.

There are two ‘flows’ in his painting, indicated by the hand gestures of the disciples. One flow starts on the right side (to the viewer) and takes us through the annual progression of the Earth around the Sun – from Aires through the twelve signs to Pisces, or the March equinox to the end of Pisces, and back to the Equinox again. But from the left side we find the hands indicating a reverse order which would mean a backward motion from Pisces to Aquarius, and so on. Leonardo displays for us these two important movements: the yearly progression through the ‘Sun signs’, and the astronomical Precession of the Equinoxes that causes a long passage of time backward through those same signs. From that backward movement of the Precessional Clock we can discover the astrological age of any given period. Presently we are in the Age of Aquarius. Leonardo lived during the Age of Pisces. Given the prevalence of zodiacal lore then, that the Fish (Pisces) symbol should have been prominent in early Christianity is not surprising, since the faith arose during that astrological segment of the wheel. However, what we are interested in discovering is why this early Fish Symbol was displaced by the Cross a number of centuries further into the Age.

The essence of the Goddess is movement, as Eastern traditions have known from the time the first sages began to ponder the mysteries of creation. But when knowledge falls into the hands of the profane and fragmentation is the result – that is, when oneness is lost which is expressed by the Master as seeing the whole universe in a point – then secrets and codes can easily be lodged in works of art as Leonardo did in The Last Supper. Actually, there is no secret, as this discussion reveals. There is only fragmentation which results in an arresting of the Becoming – to our awareness alone, that is. And since this same motion is the essence of the Goddess, in reinstating that connectedness, that eternal movement as witnessed in the heavenly harmonies, Leonardo is of course eulogising the Goddess throughout. Of course she is everywhere in his opus, not just in The Last Supper. She is explicit, however, in one of his cherished creations, St Anne and the Virgin. But my preference is for the cartoon rather than the oil, though he kept the painting with him until his death, because in the cartoon we find ‘the gesture’, the upheld index finger, not by the infant John but by the Mother of Mary.

The third creation Leonardo kept with him to the end of his life was La Gioconda (Mona Lisa). In this most famous of all the world’s art treasures, the Master has captured the very essence of the sacred Feminine. Through his incomparable hand she appears to convey that imperturbable and abiding confidence in an unassailable supremacy, in an enduring essentiality. Here is the mystery;