Christmas And Soul - Centered Gifts For The Signs

- Alan Oken

The symbolism of Christmas relative to astrology and the tradition of the Ancient Wisdom Teachings is both profound and beautiful. The birth in a manger is in astrological language “0° Cancer.” It stands for the foundation, cornerstone, and anchor of your personality, which, in time and through the process of the continued expansion of your consciousness via your spiritual Journey through life, will come to realize itself as the Christ/Initiate at 0° Capricorn. We all begin this journey in exactly the same way—we are all born! But relatively very few of us in any one generation are able “to take the initiation” (make the spiritual progress) that leads us to understand and recognize that the Christ (Krishna to our billion Hindu brothers and sisters) lives within us, no matter what our religion or ethnicity, for the Christ as a Principle of Consciousness belongs not to one faith, but to all faiths.

As many of my readers know, I am especially interested in languages and the origins of words, especially in relationship to the spiritual life, as these verbal links show how much we are all part of the One Human Family. Let us look therefore at the word manger in this respect. In English, manger means “a structure used to store feed for animals.” It is actually the same word as in the French manger, which means simply “to eat.” The origin of this same French-to-English verb to eat is found in Latin as “manducare” (English mandible, the jaw allowing us to chew), but we can go back in time even further to the Biblical Hebrew word mon, which means “a portion of food.” In Hindi and in the Hindu religion, the word