There is a phrase in the New Testament, "The end of the world". It is just beginning to dawn upon many of us that what was really meant was that the sign Pisces, in which Christ, the Great World Savior, came, would end at a particular date, and we are right in that time now. We are not facing a judgment day in which the sheep and goats will be divided and some go to heaven and others go to hell. Many ridiculous interpretations have been put upon the symbolism of the Bible.
It has been thought that the sheep went to heaven and the goats went to hell. It is the other way round. The goat in Capricorn is the initiate and from a certain esoteric angle the goats do go to heaven because they function in the spiritual kingdom which is heaven; the sheep remain on earth (which after all is the only hell one can possibly predicate) until they are no longer sheep, until they learn to have individual thought, become goats, climb the mountain and exchange the position of follower to that of independent seekers.

Entrance into heaven is entrance into the Aquarian age, begun during the last two hundred years. We are told that about the year two thousand our pole star and another star (Vega) in the heavens will be in conjunction with each other [183] and the Aquarian age will be fully with us, but only fully with us in the sense that we shall be entering it and Piscean forces will be receding rapidly. All that transpires in physical plane expression is due to subjective forces.

A school of thought exists which traces all the mysteries, all the teachings that we are now calling the Ageless Wisdom, to a form of animal worship and temple mysteries of a sordid and sexual kind. I shall not go into details, but I want to tell you what I think is of vital interest for us to grasp, because it is something in the Aquarian age which will be emerging in greater fullness right along. It is one thing to be subjected to blind force, it is another to have an intelligent outlook upon what is happening and to understand and look for certain occurrences. Perhaps for the first time in the history of our race there is a sufficient number of intelligent men and women to anticipate happenings with an understanding based on what has transpired in the past, so enabling them to predicate what will happen in the future.

What caused the worship of the bull in Taurus? Not the bestial nature of humanity that took the bull as a symbol of the animal nature and deified it, which is what the average human being who investigates the mysteries says. It is because there were subjective forces playing upon our planet as our sun passed through the sign Taurus. The lesson for man is that under the symbol of the bull he had to wrestle with the animal in himself.

Then our sun passed into Aries, the Ram, and we had the sacrifice of the lamb, showing that the sacrifice of the animal nature was beginning to succeed the concept of wrestling with the animal nature.

Then the sun passed into Pisces, the fishes. The forces that played upon our planet at that time brought into the consciousness of man his essential duality and the link between the two parts of himself, two fishes linked by a band. This consciousness, on a large scale, began to make its impact upon [184] the human being, i.e. that he is soul and body. Christ came in Pisces to demonstrate to us perfectly what would be our ultimate achievement when we had linked those two together, the fish, the symbol of the second person, the fish Avatar, and the fish swimming in matter, the symbol of the human being in incarnation. There you have the story.

Having traced that wonderful, idealistic, evolutionary teaching down the last five to six thousand years as the result of subjective forces playing upon humanity, we are now passing into the sign Aquarius where, through symbolism of water and purification, we shall learn how to be the soul and not the human being. That is what is going to happen in Aquarius.

At the end of the Aquarian age, approximately two thousand five hundred years hence, can you picture what humanity will be like? The animal nature, the emotional nature and the mentality will be secondary, and the soul, the consciousness aspect, that universal urge in each of us that puts us en rapport with God, will have surged to the front. Putting it another way, we shall have left behind the human kingdom and, though we may be inhabiting bodies, our consciousness will be focused in the fifth kingdom of nature, the spiritual kingdom. That is the prophecy, the thing that lies ahead for humanity in two thousand five hundred years' time.