Capital Punishment ()

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Capricorn (from Latin capr goat + cornus horn)

The goat, often mystically connected with the sea; the tenth sign of the zodiac. In astrology, an earthy, cardinal sign, one of the two houses of Saturn, and the exaltation of Mars; its bodily correspondence is the knees. The symbol is a hybrid monster, often with the fore part of a goat or antelope and the hind part of a fish or dolphin. In some systems it is a crocodile. This sign marks the extreme southern limit of the sun.

In the Hindu zodiac it is Makara. Subba Row (The Twelve Signs of the Zodiac) says that ma is equivalent to the number 5, and kara means hand; thus the word signifies a pentagram. It may be taken to represent objectively both the microcosm and the macrocosm. Makara is the most mysterious of the signs, connected with the fifth group of the hierarchy of creative powers, and with the microcosmic pentagram -- the five-pointed star representing man (SD 1:219). In Egypt this sign was called the crocodile; with the Peratae Gnostics, it was represented as a dolphin and identified with Chozzar, god of the waters; it is associated with the Leviathan of Job, and with a group of five kumaras in India (SD 2:577).

"Makara is connected with the birth of the spiritual 'microcosm,' and the death or dissolution of the physical Universe (its passage into the realm of the Spiritual) . . . 'When the Sun passes away behind the 30th degree of Makara and will reach no more the sign of the Meenam (pisces) then the night of Brahma has come' " (SD 2:579 & n).

Equating the 12 sons of Jacob in the Hebrew system to the signs of the zodiac, Naphthali is assigned to Capricornus: he is called a "hind let loose."

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Captures Astronomical bodies not belonging by origin to a particular system. The planet Neptune is spoken of as a capture not belonging to our solar system, meaning that it is a body which has been attracted into an orbit on our plane around the sun. The word is used similarly for the extra moons of those planets having more satellites than one true moon, which is the parent of the visible globe. These captured moons are satellites from the astronomical standpoint, but are not true parental moons.

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Caracara. See CHARACHARA

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Caraka. See CHARAKA

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Carbonari (BCW 1:107n; 6:19-20)

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Carboniferous Age. See GEOLOGICAL ERAS

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Caresma. See BARESMA

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Cancer The Crab. Fourth zodiacal sign, being watery, cardinal, feminine, and the only house of the moon; in astrology it corresponds to the stomach and breast. Its symbol is a crab; in Sanskrit it is called Karkataka, and is dedicated to Surya, the god of the sun.

In the Hebrew allocation of the signs to the 12 sons of Jacob, it is give to Benjamin, who is said to ravin as a wolf. This sign is that of the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere and is associated with heat, but in the southern hemisphere it is at the winter solstice, and we are told of times when the earth's poles were inverted so that the south pole was in Cancer.

According to Subba Row (Theos 3:42), Cancer represents the sacred Tetragram; the Parabrahmatharaca; the Pranava resolved into four separate entities corresponding to its four matras; the four avastas or four states of consciousness; the four states of Brahman, etc.

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Cancer, Carcinoma A malignant opithelial tumor composed of a connective tissue-stroma surrounding groups or nests of multiplying epithelial cells. In general, carcinomas have capacity for unlimited growth, for invading adjacent tissues, and for producing similar typical growths in distant tissues in the same body or, as in experimental research, by grafts which take in another animal's body. These multiplying cells, drawing freely upon the nutritive materials of the living matter, pile up an unorganized, functionless, purposeless, uncontrolled local mass of its own cells running riot at the expense of the body.

The search for causes has held as suspect everything tangible in the human body and in the human milieu. Yet it is the different degree of development of the complex inner elements and urges of conscious quality which, giving personal play to the circulating life-forces, make the modern industrialized type just what it is as a human phenomenon of interacting spirit and matter. The searching analyses have yet to stress the reaction of modern people's combined mental, emotional, and ethical consciousness and vital forces upon the highly organized matter in their own bodies.

In each person the cosmic forces of vitality and intelligence manifest, perforce, according to individual karma. These combined factors are the noumena of all structural, chemical, functional, and biological phenomena. But these universal forces, in manifesting, are stepped down through the successive laya-centers of the inner person's spiritual, mental, emotional, and psychic nature. This series of conscious conditions provides and sets the stage, and directs the personal play of the manifesting impersonal forces. Every physical change as well as pathological phenomenon is "produced by certain conditions and changes in the tissues of the body which allow and force life to act in that body; . . . all this is due to those unseen creators and destroyers that are called in such a loose and general way, microbes" (SD 1:262).

During life the entire human constitution is suffused or permeated by the organic vital fluid of the reimbodying ego, which acts as a cohering factor for all the life-atoms of all the planes of the constitution to form an organic electrical field in which these life-atoms may inhere and work both collectively and individually, under the impulses and urges originating in the substance of the reimbodying ego. At times, the intense and unceasing vital activities of the life-atoms overcome the cohering, dominating influence of the organic psychoelectrical field. This is what brings about "many if perhaps not all of the various forms of disease of a lasting character. Cases of malignant disease are due to the same general cause but on account of specific and unusual circumstances are localized in some portion of the body where the power or control of the organic vitality becomes greatly weakened" (ET 813).

Lingering diseases are often preceded by a gradual withdrawal on inner lines of the higher parts of the human constitution which, being denied timely expression here, are drawn toward their native spiritual levels of existence. Thus the waning influence of the cohering, harmonizing, and balancing spiritual life-atoms and forces leaves the uncontrolled pranic forces to be expended upon the vital-astral-physical nature which manifests along the various materialistic mental, emotional, and sensuous levels and lines of life. An overdeveloped materialism is usurping the natural place and preventing the functional play of the duly awakening higher mind and spirit -- the essentials, at this stage, alike for our civilization's present safety and for its further progress.

This dangerous collective lack of balanced evolution is repeated in the play of the life-forces upon the cells of the cancerous individual. He is karmically responsible, as a self-conscious being with free will, for staging his own play of these impelling forces. His functionless cancer cell with its one primitive activity of self-division, localized out-of-time, is a biological throwback in type to the huge ethereal ovoid cell-forms of the first root-race. These primitive cells were then the normal encasement of the nascent, unself-conscious humans-to-be whose mode of reproduction was simple division. Now the normal body cell does not go off on its own, but adds its function to the complex organism in whose development it also has acquired its minor place to work and to evolve.

Nature, working always and everywhere to evolve suitable forms for the progressive imbodiments of the manifesting one life, leaves civilized man free to do his part by spiritually balancing his own human growth. Otherwise, he becomes an unnatural unit in the universal plan which makes ethics the natural cohering, harmonizing factor in the universe itself which actually is imbodied consciousness. Highly evolved culture without spiritual leaven is only sublimated selfishness.

Long-continued selfish emotions cause a distorted and inharmonious flow of the pranic currents of the body and they cause disease according to the type of the emotions. This concerns the majority today, for few have a working philosophy of life which can take things as they come. Aside from the frankly criminal and vicious types, the inner life of the many is self-centered and disturbed by the emotional play of worry, grief, disappointment, unhappiness, or a sense of futility or frustration -- for all of whom there seems to be no way of escape. Even the exceptional cases who have no articulate troubles, and who outwardly seem free from the prevailing restlessness, suffer from a muted unrest and an inward tension, a haunting feeling of self-reproach for somehow being unworthy of themselves, while a more satisfying reality of life is waiting to be attained. Evidently, the emotional effect of all these conditions -- to which the generally uncivilized are immune as yet -- react in disorder of the psychomagneto-electric forces flowing along the highly organized network of nerves. The retarded or short-circuited forces produce disease in one or another organ according to the type of the emotions. Back of all precancerous microscopical and chemical findings of changes in the blood, or in the polarity of the cells, or what not, are causative inharmonies or wrongs of the inner life.

No age or personal condition is wholly exempt from malignancy; and the karmic causes, in child or adult, may date back to a former life. Cancer, with its ability to grow in any living tissue, has been found in nearly all animals and in many plants, showing the closely knit natural relationships between all forms of life, each kingdom acting upon and reacting from harmonies or disturbances in other kingdoms. Experimental research has taken it over to the animal world countless times. Moreover, humanity's milieu is, in a real sense, an emanation of itself, because the vital human stream of incoming and outgoing material and of life-atoms on all planes is interchanged with and used by all other things and beings. Hence, humanity's unbalanced quality stamped upon this visible and invisible substance would predispose its impress to reappear, at times, in the physical forms of nature's less conscious entities.

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Candala. See CHANDALA

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Candra. See CHANDRA

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Candrabhaga. See CHANDRABHAGA

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Candragupta. See CHANDRAGUPTA

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Candrakanta. See CHANDRAKANTA

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Candramana. See CHANDRAMANA

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Candramasanjyotis. See CHANDRAMASANJYOTIS

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Candra-vansa. See CHANDRA-VANSA

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Cabiri, Cabeiri. See KABIRI

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Cable-tow In Freemasonry, the restraint placed upon and exercised by Masons. It is the cord enclosing the tracing beard of an Entered Apprentice, "having four tassels placed at the four angles, referring to the four cardinal virtues (prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice) and their illustrative points, while the cable-tow is emblematic of the cord or bond of affection which ought to unite the whole fraternity (See Hosea, xi, 4): . . . 'I have drawn them with the bands of humanity, the cords of love' " (The Royal Masonic Cyclopedia, Mackenzie).

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Cadmus, Cadmilus (Greek) Son of Agenor, king of Phoenicia, and brother of Europa, husband of Harmonia, and father of Semele; legendary founder of Thebes, who slew the dragon, planted its teeth, and built the city with the help of some of the soldiers that sprang from the teeth.

He and his wife were finally turned into serpents by the gods. Said to have introduced into Greece an alphabet, possibly based upon 16 characters derived from either Egypt or Phoenicia. He belongs to the class of heroes, who succeeded the reigns of the gods and demigods on earth and who were parents and instructors of mortals.

Hermes was worshiped at Samothrace as the ancestral god under the name of Cadmus or Kadmilos.

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Caduceus (Latin) A herald's staff; specially, the wand of Mercury or Hermes, god of wisdom, corresponding to Thoth. It consists of a rod or tree with two serpents wound in opposite directions round it, their tails meeting below, and their heads approaching each other above.

At the top of the rod in the Greek version is a knob, in the earlier Egyptian form a serpent's head, from which spring a pair of wings. From the central head between the wings grew the heads of the entwined serpents (spirit and matter), which descended along the tree of life, crossing the neutral laya-centers between the different planes of being, to manifest where the two tails joined on earth (SD 1:549-50).

The analogy is found in every known cosmogony, all of which begin with a circle, head, or egg surrounded by darkness. From this circle of infinity -- the unknown All -- comes forth the manifestations of spirit and matter. The emblem of the evolution of gods and atoms is shown by the two forces, positive and negative, ascending and descending and meeting. Its symbology is directly connected with the globes of the planetary chain and the circulations of the beings or life-waves on these globes, as well as with the human constitution and the afterdeath states.

Significantly, in ancient Greek mythology, Hermes is the psychopomp, psychagog, or conductor of souls after death to the various inner spheres of the universe, such as the Elysian Plains or the Meads of Asphodel. The Caduceus also signifies the dual aspect of wisdom by its twin serpents, Agathodaimon and Kakodaimon, good and evil in a relative sense.

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