COSMIC ORDER

This notion that out of death
Comes life
Becomes a very important theme
In the later
Religions of the world
“He who loses his life”
“Shall find it”
Is a spiritualization
Of this idea
Then
When the
First cities appear
In Mesopotamia
About 3000 B.C
Large communities grow up
Based on agriculture
Planting has to take place at a certain time
Reaping, a certain time
And there are professional priests watching the heavens
To know when those times were
When those times came
And those men became aware
Of the movement of the planets
Through the fixed stars
And they calculated and recognized that these planets were moving in mathematically inevitable courses
And the idea came into being

[Chorus]
Men became aware
Of the movement of the planets
Through the fixed stars
Of a cosmic order
Of mathematical
Precision
Men became aware
Of the movement of the planets
Through the fixed stars
The neighbors now
Were the stars
And the planets

On and on
As the day comes and goes
The year comes and goes
The eons come and go
And the whole society must go into accord
With that
This idea that the human society should reproduce the heavenly order comes in
The neighbors now
Were the stars
And this
Still lives with us
In our religions
All of our religions have inherited
This motive
From the old Babylonian world
It went out with the higher civilizations
To India
To China
Even across the Pacific
To Mexico and Peru
And you see these great towers, these great temple towers
That represent
The mountain of the world
It’s the axis of the world around which the world turns
As it does around the pole star
The whole world
And society
And the individual in it
Are like the planets
Moving
In a great course
And society
And the individual in it
Are like the planets
Moving
In a great course

[Chorus]
Men became aware
Of the movement of the planets
Through the fixed stars
Of a cosmic order
Of mathematical
Precision
Men became aware
Of the movement of the planets
Through the fixed stars
The neighbors now
Were the stars
And the planets

Now in the 1920s
Sir Leonard Woolley, excavating in the graveyards of Ur
Found graves
In which there were thirty
And forty people buried
All of them in court
Attire
Who had been buried
Alive
When the King
Died
Or was killed
At a certain time
In the movement of the planets
When the Moon goes down
And the planet Venus along with the Moon
That was the end of an eon
The King and his entire court
Walked
Into
The grave
They were playing
A game

Just as the hunters
Were imitating animals
Just as the planting people were imitating plants
So the high civilizations began
With princely
Aristocratic
Little groups
Imitating the stars
To the death
Going all the way
The whole court, at the end of an eon
Went in the grave
So that another court
Could come

[Chorus]
Men became aware
Of the movement of the planets
Through the fixed stars
Of a cosmic order
Of mathematical
Precision
Men became aware
Of the movement of the planets
Through the fixed stars
The neighbors now
Were the stars

And it’s a very poetic thing really
The little girls who played the harps
We have these harps
They have been excavated and restored
These little skeleton hands
The girls’ hands, were still on the harp strings
The women
In one of the graves had
Golden hair ribbons
One girl didn’t have
Her golden hair ribbon on
It was found
In her pocket
She had been late for the party
And hadn’t had time to put her ribbon on
Well now, we don’t do that anymore
That kind of action
Has fallen
Into desuetude
Nevertheless
The king still wears the golden crown of the sun

The sense has gone yet the poetry somehow
Echoes