The Most Important Constellation to Castaneda’s Lineage
Table of contents
Background
At our 20th Sunday Session with Castaneda, on April 14, 1996, he explained he needed our birthdays and the times we were born to figure out when the constellation Corona Borealis was at its zenith on the day we were born. He claimed the old sorcerers had always been guided by that particular constellation. When it was immediately above, they would take action. If they were born a few hours before Corona Borealis was at its zenith, when they had an impulse to do something, they would wait a few hours before taking action.
He described the constellation as a horseshoe shape, visible from the Northern Hemisphere, and said he would show us a diagram. Castaneda told us that his birth time was almost a day before Corona Borealis was at the zenith, so he hads to wait almost a day, or eight hours, when he had an impulse, and then “I either do it or I don’t.” But this practice gave him the space to act at the proper time.
He told us that Corona Borealis had one dim star that made a triangle with two others. He said it was hard to see in a clear sky in the countryside in Mexico, but that “in our polluted atmosphere here it is easier to make out.” [The star he referred to is R Coronae Borealis, which does make a small triangle with two of the stars that make up the base of the horseshoe shape.)
Very Unusual Star
According to the Peterson Stars and Planets Field Guide, this star “is one of the most unusual stars in the sky. It stays at 6th magnitude for a period ranging from months to years and then precipitously drops to 11th magnitude or even fainter for a period that lasts only weeks. At the same time, its spectrum of absorption lines is obscured and a spectrum of emission lines appears. R CrB is a carbon-rich star, and apparently it sometimes throws off clouds of carbon soot that obscure its photosphere, making spectral lines from its higher and relatively hotter chromosphere appear as emission lines. The clouds of soot have been detected in the infrared.”
Important for Two Reasons
During the course of subsequent Sunday sessions and private telephone conversations, Castaneda explained that Corona Borealis was the most important of three constellations that were of interest to sorcerers of their lineage. Corona Borealis’s importance, he explained, was at least twofold:
(1) the time of day you were born relative to when Corona Borealis reached its zenith in the sky that day indicates whether you should take action immediately on an impulse to do something, or whether you need to first wait a certain period of time (determined by the length of time between when you were born and when the constellation reached its zenith on the day of your birth); and
(2) “dreaming” at times when Corona Borealis is at its zenith in the sky can enable you to “enter other worlds.”
How It Came Up
What prompted Castaneda to share this information with us in the first place is, I think, worthy of mention. Before the point at which it is mentioned in my notes, we had taken a short break. During this break, I had noticed Castaneda engaged in conversation with a female member of our group whose name was V. After the break, he told us about Corona Borealis. Following the session, I asked V about her conversation with Castaneda, and she said that something she had told him had prompted him to ask her for the time she was born. A couple of weeks later, after I had compiled all of the birth times for the entire group and, with Greg’s help, had calculated when the constellation was at the zenith on the day each person was born, I discovered that the person in our Sunday class whose birth time most exactly coincided with Corona Borealis being at the zenith at the time they were born was V. [It takes C.B. about forty-five to fifty minutes to cross the zenith, and V’s birth time was smack dab in the middle of that period, within six minutes of exact zenith. W and I turned out to be the second closest in the group to having C.B. at its highest point at the time of our birth (within 20 minutes of the exact zenith).]
After I passed on my initial findings to Castaneda, I received an excited call from him at my office. He was thoroughly delighted to have the material, and had apparently never seen it so exactly calculated. (I used to dabble in astrology and chart making, so I had all the almanacs and ephemerises handy; my friend and Sunday group colleague Greg tracked down the best programs available for determining the positions of constellations on particular dates, and together we had checked and rechecked our calculations.) Greg and I had also constructed a chart of the current position of Corona Borealis over Los Angeles for every day of the year, which was accurate within 10 minutes for every year.
Two Other Constellations of Interest
During this conversation, Castaneda also mentioned that the other two constellations sorcerers are interested in are Camelopardalis, a very long camel-shaped constellation, and Coma Berenices. I gathered that the latter two had more to do with “dreaming.” As a result of this conversation, Greg and I added Camelopardalis and Coma Berenices zenith times to our chart, with comparisons to each Sunday person’s birth time.
Castaneda told us at a subsequent Sunday session that he was going to assign each of us a “unique code” based on our birth time’s relationship to Corona Borealis’s zenith on our birthday. That day he told the group that, “Corona Borealis has a pull for sorcerers. It’s about action. If you wait and do something at the point of Corona Borealis at the zenith, it may not be successful, but it will be a brilliant failure. Whatever you do, Corona Borealis has a pull.”
How I’ve Used This Knowledge
An upshot for me of learning that I had a birth time close to C.B.’s zenith was to make me more willing to act on impulses, especially those that seem to arise “from nowhere” and that are not about “me.” Up until that time, I lived more as you might expect from a “recovering lawyer”–i.e., super cautious, constantly collecting information, not making an important move until all the relevant data was in. Learning to “trust my impulses” was a major not-doing for me, but it helped me tremendously in learning to “navigate.” Now when I get sudden strange impulses (like a full-blown idea to start a new mailing list for a small group of “warriors” at the first of the year), I take them seriously and tend to act. The results continually astonish me, since I find my action very often results in tapping into something others were thinking which I otherwise would never have learned if I had not acted at the time the impulse occurred to me. I gather that, for others whose birth time preceded C.B. at its zenith by several hours, the additional time that they have learned to wait before acting on an impulse has likewise proved beneficial.
In a conversation with Florinda Donner about astrology a year or so later, she confirmed that these three constellations had been “a very serious topic for don Juan,” and that he had made sure that each of his disciples kept track of where they were in the night sky.
Corona Borealis and You
To find out where Corona Borealis was at the time you were born, you can use the following constellation-mapping website:
http://www.fourmilab.to/yoursky/
In order to create a sky map for the constellations overhead at the time you were born, you will need to know the latitude and longitude of your birthplace and the Universal Time (i.e., Greenwich Mean Time) for the moment you were born. (If you’ve ever had your astrological chart prepared, this information can usually be found there.)
Enter this info in the appropriate places on this website and then hit the “Update” button. The sky chart includes a grid marked off in hours. (Note: If Corona Borealis was below the horizon at the time you were born, you can enter another time period on the same day to generate another chart that should show it.)
©️ 2024 by Richard Jennings, all rights reserved
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