In Thea’s autobiography, The Tenth Day of Victory, she describes the process by which [the] extraordinary book [The Magical Carousel] came into being, long before she became aware of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.
‘I was suddenly flooded with inspiration for a book on astrology of a totally new order, like nothing that had ever been written on the subject. Images began to take shape before my mind’s eye of a fantastic journey through the zodiac. The vision I had developed of the zodiac in my first book was now to be presented to children in allegorical form, where all the significances of the signs would be personified in figures in a land of fable in the manner of a fairy tale. I was overtaken by this flood of inspiration which took hold of me and kept me in a state of rapture for the entire month it took to write the book. The story was as if projected on a screen in my forehead, between my eyebrows. All I had to do was to follow this projection and record what I ‘saw’. The stream of images was so powerful and consistent that for the period the influx was on I could do nothing but give in to this force and allow myself to be transported into the magic world of fantasy, an experience unknown to me until then.’ – The Tenth Day of Victory, 1994, Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet
The influx of inspiration that she experienced took the form of a journey through the zodiac which she entitled, The Magical Carousel, perhaps the only contemporary ‘Cosmic Myth’ of our time. It is written in the classic zodiacal language proper to all mythology which describes the primordial form of circular or sacred time.
Like all myths, its value lies in the ability of the individual to identify the archetypal structure expressed in the story with the deepest existential dimensions of himself. When this is done, an unveiling begins, allowing him or her to see that order which is always present though hidden from view. It is precisely this ‘seeing’ which makes possible the transformation of an individual from one mode of being to another. As one is able to follow the passage of his own life through the cosmic process described in the myth, he gains a new orientation in life. He discovers within himself a ‘center’ which has a cosmological value equivalent to a sun. When this psychic dimension is realized, the individual becomes fully aware of his connection with the cosmos and sees the Divine evolution reflected in his own passage through the cycles of archetypal time. From this perspective the world becomes intelligible as order, making it possible for the individual to rise above the profane world and experience the real truths which stand behind the play of forces and drive the evolutionary process.