Around 276 B.C. a poet from Cilicia had the great honor of coming into the favor of Macedonia’s King Antigonus II Gonatas, who firmly wanted him at his court. His name was Aratus (Ἄρατος), and he is also known as Aratus of Soli. Described as a «cosmic philosopher and Homeric poet», Aratus was born in Tarsos around 315 B.C. and completed his studies in Athens, where he was initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries and was a student of the Stoic philosopher Perseus of Cytium. He is mostly remembered today for a didactic poem entitled Phainòmena, made of a total of 1154 verses and divided into two parts: the first one, the actual Phainòmena, made of 732 verses, and the second one entitled Diosemeîa (whose meaning is “Predictions” or, better, “Signs from Heaven”). But Aratus’ Phainòmena was nothing more than the transposition into poetic verses of an astronomical treatise, now lost, by the great astronomer Eudoxus of Cnidus, who lived almost two centuries before Aratus. A treatise that hid ancestral knowledges transmitted by secret initiatory schools, knowledges dating back to the ancient Minoan civilization.
This new essay by the historian Nicola Bizzi is a journey into the secrets and mysteries of an ancient forgotten science, which over the centuries has become the exclusive heritage of secret initiatory orders.
