In the Greek alphabet the fourth letter, delta, is the symbol of the Holy Door, and among the Egyptians the triangle was the symbol of Men-Nefer, the very ancient goddess of the mother city Memphis, as identified in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The object of the worship of the Yantra is to attain unity with the Mother of the Universe in Her forms as Mind, Life, and Matter … preparator to Yoga union with Her as She is in herself as Pure Consciousness.

To the Gnostics of the later Roman Empire, the triangle signified creative intellect, the balancing coolness of mind, the persistent reconciliation that proceeds in the souls of the ones who seek Christ within.

Among the ancient Sumerians Ishtar was the Triune Goddess, as among modern Christians the Trinity is the central figure of the creative force, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

The Way to Christ is lit by the Star of Bethlehem, as also the word Ishtar means "Star."

Babylonian scriptures call Ishtar the Light of the World, Opener of the Womb, Leader of Armies, Lawgiver, Forgiver of Sins. It is from the legend of Ishtar that the story of the descent into the underworld enters so many of man's traditions: The giver of life overcomes the taker of life, and rebirth emerges.

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednigo traveled the bath of transformation, and were not consumed in its fires. They symbolically sat astride the shoulders of the eagle, as did the medicine men of Native America, the shamans of the Siberian plains, the witches of old Europe when the ice king strode half the continent.

Transformation: Among the Apache, when someone was called in his heart to be a shaman, it meant that he had to go into the world of the dead, he had to dare the fire. The Apache would find a cliff and jump off. If he lived, he became a man of medicine. If he died, he died.

Length and breadth, when they merge, make the solid, which the Pythagoreans thought of as mind emerging into reality. "Know thyself," was ever the refrain of the old Greek mystical philosophers, the admonition of Apollo and of the visitors who took Betty Andreasson.

Could it be that we are about to rediscover the actual, physical truth of the ancient idea that to know the mind is to know the universe? A child reported: "The unconscious mind is like the universe beyond the quasars. It's a place we want to go to find out what's there."

What is there? Could there be in the tinkling caves of the soul a door that leads beyond the edge of reality? Is that where the eagle will go when it takes flight? Is that where the visitors came from?