in defence of astrotheology

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Stephan Huller
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Re: in defence of astrotheology

Post by Stephan Huller »

And surely the reader can see the implication of the growing influence of Imperial monarchia = the watchers doctrine was seen as an escape from authority, a war against the ruler of the world viz. Caesar. This undoubtedly is the logical basis behind whatever 'persecution' there was of Christians in the late second and third centuries. Perhaps the original 'astrotheology' was originally limited to an 'earthly escape' by means of the 'stepping stones' of the planets. Nevertheless as soon as Caesar took an interest in what the Christians believed and said and practiced, as soon as Christianity fell under the umbrella of 'contemporary religions' which had to demonstrate their loyalty and 'veneration of the monarchia' - it wasn't long before the religion was reshaped from within according to 'what was appropriate' for a respectable religion.
Robert Tulip
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Re: in defence of astrotheology

Post by Robert Tulip »

neilgodfrey wrote:In defence of D.M. Murdock's discussion in Christ in Egypt about crucified Egyptian gods I think she does an interesting job of detailing the evidence for the various deities, especially with respect to Osiris, including the function of the djed cross or pillar, and early Christian interpretations of these -- pages 336 to 352.
Yes, this is an excellent and informative chapter, and I am very pleased to see your positive comments Neil. But I should warn any cavalier readers that this chapter on Was Horus Crucified? does quote the Catholic Encyclopedia, which has been so vigorously mocked in this thread, despite its simple conservative citations of ancient sources, and it does explore the allegory of the cross, which may strain the brains of some of the more simple minded.
neilgodfrey wrote: I think this is interesting background information that should rightly be factored into any historical and literary analyses that considers the origins of the Gospel of John's miracle of the raising of Lazarus, Secret Mark and the stories of Alexandrian provenance. But then on pages 353 to 356 it seems Murdock crashes head on into a brick wall by trying to overstate her case. Or am I missing something that she has explained elsewhere to justify her argument? We come to the heading "Divine Man" Crucified in Space. Referring to Massey's discussion of the phrase "crucifixion in space" Murdock writes:
The crucifixion in space usually refers to that of Plato's "second God, who impressed himself on the universe in the form of the cross,"2 constituting the Greek philosopher's "world-soul" on an X, which, as we have seen, represents the sun crossing the ecliptic.. (p. 353)
I expected to see here the footnote directing me to Plato and his discussion of this "second God". But instead she takes us to Lundy, Bradshaw, Roberts, and Philo. That leaves me wondering where Plato speaks of "a second god" who made himself in the "form of a cross" at the ecliptic. My memory tells me that Plato did speak of the ecliptic being like a cross but no more. Have I forgotten crucial details? Murdock does not help me here.
Yes, you have forgotten crucial details regarding the Demiurge, which Plotinus called the Second God of Plato. And you are following Peter Kirby’s fine example of part-reading, like his omission of the sourcing word “CE” from the start of a part-sentence he quotes which he criticises for failing to cite its source, which funnily enough is a simple and sober citation of ancient authors from the dreaded Catholic Encyclopedia. Similarly, your omission here is a failure to note Murdock’s very next sentence, where she explains that the Second God is the Demiurge. And then she provides Pope Benedict’s implied comparison between Plato’s crucified ‘truly just man’ and Jesus Christ from Republic 362. But it is great to see you reading Christ in Egypt, which is a wonderfully informative book. Hopefully this will inspire others to also read it, as well as Did Moses Exist? I should add, Murdock's purpose includes a paradigmatic critique of conventional theology, which explains the polemical content that gets criticised by those who are committed to conventional readings.

I have the distinct impression that some readers here are too hasty in jumping to conclusions without careful reading. I have several times answered questions in this thread which have been the topic of subsequent blithe comments from the likes of Huller and Ulan. With forty pages that is fair enough I suppose, except that you would expect people would be slightly more circumspect before making wildly false insulting and misleading errors, notably Huller’s Howler about my supposed failure to cite Biblical evidence for a stellar framework for myth.

Earlier in this thread (page 13) I cited Plato’s Timaeus, saying the ecliptic “has been constant against the stars for all history, equating to what Plato in the Timaeus called “the same”." I went on to explore this 'cross in the sky' motif raised again here by Neil, saying: "The [other line in the heavens described by Plato] is the celestial equator, the line separating the north and south hemispheres, crossed by the sun at the spring and autumn equinoxes. This line moves at the rate discovered by Hipparchus of more than one degree per century, actually at one degree per 71.6 years. This line equates to what Plato in the Timaeus called “the different”, in his explanation that two great circles form an X in the heavens.”

This cross in the sky material from Plato is well worth expanding in view of Neil’s question about it, and in view of its absolute centrality to the Gnostic Hermetic origins of Christianity in Platonic astral philosophy. The source is Timaeus 36, as discussed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timaeus_(d ... World_Soul in which Plato provides his celebrated accurate theory of time as the moving image of eternity.

Although Plato’s descriptions are somewhat veiled, the most coherent explanation, as traditionally accepted, is that Plato defined time and eternity by the relation between the colures of the ecliptic and the equator which cross as great circles at the equinoxes to form opposite chis in the sky. These colures, to use Dante’s term in The Paradise, form the same Logos or cosmic order upon which Christ was imaginatively crucified in the Christian Gnostic Myth of the hypostasis of time and eternity, an objective idea that was anthropomorphised into the passion and creed.

Plato says in this sublime text that “the whole plan of the eternal God put the soul in the centre and made the universe a circle moving in a circle, one and solitary.” This is indeed what we can see if we look, applying Plato’s Parmenidian scientific logic of the one, seeing that the consistency of physics means space-time is unitary. Plato calls the Chi the ‘world soul’, a concept which Yeats in his famous poem The Second Coming was to liken to the sphinx slouching towards Bethlehem, where Yeats calls the man-lion a ‘vast image out of Spiritus Mundi’. Yeats here expands on the precessional cosmology he presented in A Vision, with the image of Aquarius the Man and Leo the Lion as the axis of the world which the equinoxes will reach to mark the Second Coming of Jesus Christ at the dawn of the Age of Aquarius.

Continuing with this material from Timaeus, Plato says God “divided the universe lengthways into two parts, which he joined to one another at the centre like the letter X, and bent them into a circular form, connecting them with themselves and each other at the point opposite to their original meeting-point, with a uniform revolution upon the same axis, he made the one the outer and the other the inner circle.” This is an obscure and difficult image, but it actually matches well to reality. The main theory (Bury, Cornford) of what Plato means is that the outer circle is the ecliptic while the inner circle is the celestial equator. Another theory (George Latura) is that the X in the sky is formed by the intersecting paths of the sun and the Milky Way Galaxy in Gemini and Sagittarius, and this is the celestial cross which Constantine made his conquering sign. While Latura’s theory is plausible, I support the traditional view, given its elegant match to how the ancients could see precession as marking the dawn of the new age of Pisces when the equator crossed the fish and formed the exact image in the sky of the Chi Rho Cross.

Plato says "God called the motion of the outer circle the same" (likely reflecting that the fixed stars always look the same), and "the motion of the inner circle the different." In terms of understanding of precession this means that Plato was aware that the equator moves against the background stars. This is completely plausible given how Timaeus recognises that Greek thought learned from the East, a humble learning that was somewhat lost sight of in later times when Greek superiority became the dominant cultural idea.

Plato then explains, in another profound but complex passage, that “The soul began a divine beginning of perpetual rational life. The body of heaven is visible, but the soul is invisible, and partakes of reason and harmony, and being made by the best of intellectual and everlasting natures, is the best of things created. And when reason, which works with equal truth, whether she be in the circle of the different or of the same--in voiceless silence holding her onward course in the sphere of the self-moved--when reason, I say, is hovering around the sensible world and when the circle of the different also moving truly imparts the intimations of sense to the whole soul, then arise opinions and beliefs sure and certain.”

This text contains a wonderful affirmation of the centrality of precession to understanding the nature of time. The movement of the equator, traditionally the sign of the different, is said here by Plato to “impart sense to the whole”, giving rise to “certain belief”. This movement is nothing else but precession of the equinox, as observable in the astronomy of Plato’s day in Babylon, marking the difference between the ages of time in human history.

Platonic philosophy recognised the great difficulty of understanding and explaining this material, and therefore placed objective astronomy as the real context of the “certain belief” in the ‘sense of the whole’, ie the zodiac ages. This "certain belief" in the sense of the whole as based on observation of the shift of the heavens became the Gnostic basis of the Apocalypse 15 description of Christ as King of Ages, in my view.

This sense of the whole helps to explain Plato's next comment: “But when reason is concerned with the rational, and the circle of the same moving smoothly declares it, then intelligence and knowledge are necessarily perfected.” The rational is here equated to the visible movement of the stars, with reason uncovering its hidden order. “And if any one affirms that in which these two are found to be other than the soul, he will say the very opposite of the truth.” The positive statement here from Plato is that intelligence and knowledge are primarily perfected in the observation of the unchanging regularity of nature. Astronomy is at the foundation of science, philosophy and theology.

Continuing with the Timaeus origin of Christian natural cosmology, Plato says “When the father and creator saw the creature which he had made moving and living, the created image of the eternal gods, he rejoiced, and in his joy determined to make the copy still more like the original; and as this was eternal, he sought to make the universe eternal, so far as might be. Now the nature of the ideal being was everlasting, but to bestow this attribute in its fulness upon a creature was impossible. Wherefore he resolved to have a moving image of eternity, and when he set in order the heaven, he made this image eternal but moving according to number, while eternity itself rests in unity; and this image we call time.”

The Gnostic God of Time was called Aion, and was depicted as a man-lion with eagle wings encircled by a snake, standing upon a globe marked by the X. This esoteric image of time, the moving image of eternity, provides the template we should focus on to explore the evolution of the Christ myth, including how the cross myth emerged from the snake on the pole of Moses according to John 3. Both Plato and the Gospels contain this basic scientific observation of the structure of time as the framework of myth. We see here the sublime depth of the Hermetic origins of Christianity in the as above so below hermeneutic of the Lord’s Prayer, with Plato imagining the copy (ie what later became the Gospel story of Jesus) as modeled on the original, ie the actual movement of the cross of heaven observed by astronomy in the precession of the equinoxes.

By the way, there is quite a bit of interesting speculation around the equinox eclipse today, followed by the Easter Blood Moon in two weeks time.
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Peter Kirby
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Re: in defence of astrotheology

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You clearly didn't understand my point, Robert Tulip, and you clearly have misrepresented it as a consequence, but I don't need you to understand it.

For the reader, though, and because Robert Tulip seems intent on making this a cause célèbre: I did not contend (in my short aside) that it was not clear that the quoted author refers to the Catholic Encyclopedia. What I did suggest is that research in a book should refer to quotations from ancient writers directly. This would not be very contentious, except because of which author and which book happened to be referenced (originally by MrMacSon, who further attenuated the citation by referring only to the quoted author--but, then, he wasn't writing a book, which is a different genre than a forum post), leading Robert Tulip to rush to the defense of its immaculate goodness.
Robert Tulip wrote:Peter Kirby really does need to invest in some asbestos underpants after asserting that claims about solar discussion in Tertullian and Augustine are unsourced when the very word before his extract is the cited source, which he then proceeds to link, the Catholic Encyclopedia article on Christmas. I fear that Peter’s objection is more an emotional incredulity about the extensive solar themes embedded in early Christianity.
Peter Kirby wrote:Peter's partial quote was rather like saying, 'hey Mattyboy, whydjya say "are the meek for they will inherit the earth"? Dja mean foolish, prosperous, criminal, or what?'

The excuse that Pete's Bible has a page turn after the word "blessed" (just as Murdock's book has a page turn after the word "CE" as a perfectly authoritative and proper source on Augustine and Tertullian on Christianity and sun worship) does not really provide a strong basis for his speculation, which does not end up looking entirely kindly and informed. The short chapter of Suns of God titled Krishna's Birthdate that Mr Kirby referenced as supposedly light on footnotes and ancient sources has 37 footnotes and by my count dozens of ancient references. This claim of weak sourcing is itself sloppy, although it must be recognised that the subject matter of this chapter means that some secondary sources will be open to challenge.
Robert Tulip wrote:And you are following Peter Kirby’s fine example of part-reading, like his omission of the sourcing word “CE” from the start of a part-sentence he quotes which he criticises for failing to cite its source, which funnily enough is a simple and sober citation of ancient authors from the dreaded Catholic Encyclopedia.
I'm Peter Kirby and I'm of sound mind. The author quoted is perfect in every way. You ask me, I'm answering. Yes, I agree in every possible respect.

Hare Krishna, holy Sun of Righteousness, and three hail Satans... and I've deleted that post. Is that enough to be taken off the list?
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neilgodfrey
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Re: in defence of astrotheology

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Robert, you have missed my point entirely. How much of my post did you actually read? Citing an encyclopedia is all very fine for a grade 9 history assignment but it does nothing to help us verify what Plato himself actually said. Nowhere does Murdock verify the key assertions that I was addressing and that are so central to her point with any primary evidence. A more cruel and perhaps honest response would be to say she is casually misleading her readers with fanciful fabrications she wants to be true.

You yourself continue to cite only works from late antiquity and I am always reminded of one of the first lessons I learned in my course on ancient history: our lecturer warned us that Carcopino's Daily Life in Ancient Rome was very popular but really in some places also a terrible work because it lumped all of Roman history together as if it was one lump so that readers got the wrong impression that certain customs were characteristic of the whole period. One must always be careful to identify the period in question that sources are coming from.

Recall my response to your similar error earlier when I pointed out that your misuse of evidence is as bad as claiming events today had relevance for events around the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

If you read my own comments so carelessly in ways that take from them points I nowhere make I guess I should somehow understand how it is you so badly misread other works, too. Your own ramblings about Plato contain wild speculations and extrapolations that have nothing to do with the point of the original author. But to address your comments would require us to go through each line at a time and I do not believe that would involve anything other than a game of free association on your part. I would wish you would study Plato seriously and learn what the major scholars themselves have written on Timaeus.
Last edited by neilgodfrey on Fri Mar 20, 2015 4:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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John T
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Re: in defence of astrotheology

Post by John T »

"[Plato believes] Astronomy is at the foundation of science, philosophy and theology."...Robert Tulip

*******************

Not the Plato I know.

Plato believed in four levels of reality.
1. images
2. objects
3. mathematical objects
4. forms

Plato believed that just five polyhedral solids made up all of the basic elements of the physical world.

earth = cube
air = octahedron
fire = pyramid
water = icosahedron
heaven = dodecahedron

Plato claimed '...the god used [the dodecahedron] for arranging the constellations on the whole heaven.'

Plato believed our pre-exsisting souls were acquainted with the forms before being united with our bodies.

Only through education, dialect and desire can our souls recollect the forms.

Astrology or astrotheology had very little to do with the metaphysics of Plato as well as Plato had very little to do with Christianity.

Sincerely,

John T
"It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into."...Jonathan Swift
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MrMacSon
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Re: in defence of astrotheology

Post by MrMacSon »

Peter Kirby wrote:You clearly didn't understand my point, Robert Tulip, and you clearly have misrepresented it as a consequence, but I don't need you to understand it.

For the reader, though, and because Robert Tulip seems intent on making this a cause célèbre: I did not contend (in my short aside) that it was not clear that the quoted author refers to the Catholic Encyclopedia. What I did suggest is that research in a book should refer to quotations from ancient writers directly. This would not be very contentious, except because of which author and which book happened to be referenced (originally by MrMacSon, who further attenuated the citation by referring only to the quoted author - but, then, he wasn't writing a book, which is a different genre than a forum post), leading Robert Tulip to rush to the defense of its immaculate goodness.
Thanks for elaborating on this Peter (in several ways, including beyond "you didn't understand my point")*, and finding the original citations.

Further to your point about referring to citations by writers directly: authors are, ethically, obliged to have read them themselves, too; or cit both the primary reference and the secondary reference and to say "[primary] cited by [secondary]".

* I think we should all aim to reiterate our point in subsequent posts - it makes it easier for us all reading these rambling threads.
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MrMacSon
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Re: in defence of astrotheology

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neilgodfrey wrote:Robert, you have missed my point entirely. How much of my post did you actually read?
It would be helpful to us others if you briefly reiterated your point in such a post.
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Re: in defence of astrotheology

Post by neilgodfrey »

MrMacSon wrote:
neilgodfrey wrote:Robert, you have missed my point entirely. How much of my post did you actually read?
It would be helpful to us others if you briefly reiterated your point in such a post.
The opening paragraph was in fact a repeating in summary the point of my earlier post:
Robert, you have missed my point entirely. ..... Citing an encyclopedia is all very fine for a grade 9 history assignment but it does nothing to help us verify what Plato himself actually said. Nowhere does Murdock verify the key assertions that I was addressing and that are so central to her point with any primary evidence.
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neilgodfrey
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Re: in defence of astrotheology

Post by neilgodfrey »

Robert Tulip wrote:Yes, you have forgotten crucial details regarding the Demiurge, which Plotinus called the Second God of Plato. And you are following Peter Kirby’s fine example of part-reading, like his omission of the sourcing word “CE” from the start of a part-sentence he quotes which he criticises for failing to cite its source, which funnily enough is a simple and sober citation of ancient authors from the dreaded Catholic Encyclopedia. Similarly, your omission here is a failure to note Murdock’s very next sentence, where she explains that the Second God is the Demiurge. And then she provides Pope Benedict’s implied comparison between Plato’s crucified ‘truly just man’ and Jesus Christ from Republic 362.
Robert, you still have not given us the supporting citation in Plato to verify Murdock's claim that Plato spoke of a crucified divine man in space. That's what I was asking for.
Robert Tulip wrote:I have the distinct impression that some readers here are too hasty in jumping to conclusions without careful reading. I have several times answered questions in this thread which have been the topic of subsequent blithe comments from the likes of Huller and Ulan. With forty pages that is fair enough I suppose, except that you would expect people would be slightly more circumspect before making wildly false insulting and misleading errors, notably Huller’s Howler about my supposed failure to cite Biblical evidence for a stellar framework for myth.
I get the distinct impression that you are too hasty in jumping to conclusions about what your dialogue partners are in fact saying and asking. You have missed the points of our questions so many times and rambled on at length at tangents -- all the while avoiding the core problems we are raising.
Robert Tulip wrote:Earlier in this thread (page 13) I cited Plato’s Timaeus, saying the ecliptic “has been constant against the stars for all history, equating to what Plato in the Timaeus called “the same”." I went on to explore this 'cross in the sky' motif raised again here by Neil, saying: "The [other line in the heavens described by Plato] is the celestial equator, the line separating the north and south hemispheres, crossed by the sun at the spring and autumn equinoxes. This line moves at the rate discovered by Hipparchus of more than one degree per century, actually at one degree per 71.6 years. This line equates to what Plato in the Timaeus called “the different”, in his explanation that two great circles form an X in the heavens.”
Yes, Robert. I read your tedious non-reply. What you are saying here is well known to any student of Plato. But it does not say what Murdock claims it says.
Robert Tulip wrote:This cross in the sky material from Plato is well worth expanding in view of Neil’s question about it, and in view of its absolute centrality to the Gnostic Hermetic origins of Christianity in Platonic astral philosophy. The source is Timaeus 36, as discussed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timaeus_(d ... World_Soul in which Plato provides his celebrated accurate theory of time as the moving image of eternity.
We don't want your expansions or extrapolations of it. We want to know just what Plato said and meant and how he was understood up to the time of the beginnings of Christianity. Yes, we all know about the neo-Platonists who went further with Plato's notions and how these appear in the evidence long AFTER Christianity put down roots.

Robert Tulip wrote:Although Plato’s descriptions are somewhat veiled, the most coherent explanation, as traditionally accepted, is that Plato defined time and eternity by the relation between the colures of the ecliptic and the equator which cross as great circles at the equinoxes to form opposite chis in the sky. These colures, to use Dante’s term in The Paradise, form the same Logos or cosmic order upon which Christ was imaginatively crucified in the Christian Gnostic Myth of the hypostasis of time and eternity, an objective idea that was anthropomorphised into the passion and creed.
Yes, we know how later groups built upon some of Plato's ideas. But that's not answering the questions of concern for Christian ORIGINS. "Origins" are not subsequent developments that are found in the later evidence and built upon the origins.
Robert Tulip wrote:Plato says in this sublime text that “the whole plan of the eternal God put the soul in the centre and made the universe a circle moving in a circle, one and solitary.” This is indeed what we can see if we look, applying Plato’s Parmenidian scientific logic of the one, seeing that the consistency of physics means space-time is unitary. Plato calls the Chi the ‘world soul’, a concept which Yeats in his famous poem The Second Coming was to liken to the sphinx slouching towards Bethlehem, where Yeats calls the man-lion a ‘vast image out of Spiritus Mundi’. Yeats here expands on the precessional cosmology he presented in A Vision, with the image of Aquarius the Man and Leo the Lion as the axis of the world which the equinoxes will reach to mark the Second Coming of Jesus Christ at the dawn of the Age of Aquarius.
Omg, you really don't want us to engage in a critical discussion, do you. You really want us to be swept up with all this poetry and float with astrotheology because of the imagery of Yeats? (Not that I've got anything against the poetry of Yeats. I still quote lines of his myself. But not in order to establish a crucial point in a critical argument.)

There is nothing in Plato that supports what Murdock asserts on his authority.
Robert Tulip wrote:Continuing with this material from Timaeus, Plato says God “divided the universe lengthways into two parts, which he joined to one another at the centre like the letter X, and bent them into a circular form, connecting them with themselves and each other at the point opposite to their original meeting-point, with a uniform revolution upon the same axis, he made the one the outer and the other the inner circle.” This is an obscure and difficult image, but it actually matches well to reality. The main theory (Bury, Cornford) of what Plato means is that the outer circle is the ecliptic while the inner circle is the celestial equator. Another theory (George Latura) is that the X in the sky is formed by the intersecting paths of the sun and the Milky Way Galaxy in Gemini and Sagittarius, and this is the celestial cross which Constantine made his conquering sign. While Latura’s theory is plausible, I support the traditional view, given its elegant match to how the ancients could see precession as marking the dawn of the new age of Pisces when the equator crossed the fish and formed the exact image in the sky of the Chi Rho Cross.

Plato says "God called the motion of the outer circle the same" (likely reflecting that the fixed stars always look the same), and "the motion of the inner circle the different." In terms of understanding of precession this means that Plato was aware that the equator moves against the background stars. This is completely plausible given how Timaeus recognises that Greek thought learned from the East, a humble learning that was somewhat lost sight of in later times when Greek superiority became the dominant cultural idea.

Plato then explains, in another profound but complex passage, that “The soul began a divine beginning of perpetual rational life. The body of heaven is visible, but the soul is invisible, and partakes of reason and harmony, and being made by the best of intellectual and everlasting natures, is the best of things created. And when reason, which works with equal truth, whether she be in the circle of the different or of the same--in voiceless silence holding her onward course in the sphere of the self-moved--when reason, I say, is hovering around the sensible world and when the circle of the different also moving truly imparts the intimations of sense to the whole soul, then arise opinions and beliefs sure and certain.”

This text contains a wonderful affirmation of the centrality of precession to understanding the nature of time. The movement of the equator, traditionally the sign of the different, is said here by Plato to “impart sense to the whole”, giving rise to “certain belief”. This movement is nothing else but precession of the equinox, as observable in the astronomy of Plato’s day in Babylon, marking the difference between the ages of time in human history.

Platonic philosophy recognised the great difficulty of understanding and explaining this material, and therefore placed objective astronomy as the real context of the “certain belief” in the ‘sense of the whole’, ie the zodiac ages. This "certain belief" in the sense of the whole as based on observation of the shift of the heavens became the Gnostic basis of the Apocalypse 15 description of Christ as King of Ages, in my view.

This sense of the whole helps to explain Plato's next comment: “But when reason is concerned with the rational, and the circle of the same moving smoothly declares it, then intelligence and knowledge are necessarily perfected.” The rational is here equated to the visible movement of the stars, with reason uncovering its hidden order. “And if any one affirms that in which these two are found to be other than the soul, he will say the very opposite of the truth.” The positive statement here from Plato is that intelligence and knowledge are primarily perfected in the observation of the unchanging regularity of nature. Astronomy is at the foundation of science, philosophy and theology.

Continuing with the Timaeus origin of Christian natural cosmology, Plato says “When the father and creator saw the creature which he had made moving and living, the created image of the eternal gods, he rejoiced, and in his joy determined to make the copy still more like the original; and as this was eternal, he sought to make the universe eternal, so far as might be. Now the nature of the ideal being was everlasting, but to bestow this attribute in its fulness upon a creature was impossible. Wherefore he resolved to have a moving image of eternity, and when he set in order the heaven, he made this image eternal but moving according to number, while eternity itself rests in unity; and this image we call time.”

The Gnostic God of Time was called Aion, and was depicted as a man-lion with eagle wings encircled by a snake, standing upon a globe marked by the X. This esoteric image of time, the moving image of eternity, provides the template we should focus on to explore the evolution of the Christ myth, including how the cross myth emerged from the snake on the pole of Moses according to John 3. Both Plato and the Gospels contain this basic scientific observation of the structure of time as the framework of myth. We see here the sublime depth of the Hermetic origins of Christianity in the as above so below hermeneutic of the Lord’s Prayer, with Plato imagining the copy (ie what later became the Gospel story of Jesus) as modeled on the original, ie the actual movement of the cross of heaven observed by astronomy in the precession of the equinoxes.

By the way, there is quite a bit of interesting speculation around the equinox eclipse today, followed by the Easter Blood Moon in two weeks time.
Image
Rambling preaching to the choir that substitutes for argument.
Last edited by neilgodfrey on Sat Mar 21, 2015 3:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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The Crow
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Re: in defence of astrotheology

Post by The Crow »

Ulan wrote:
The Crow wrote:Man! This thread still going? When is the trial? I think the inquest has lasted long enough.
As Robert failed to provide any evidence for any of his fanciful stories, aside from some possible allusion to the zodiac in Revelations, I guess we can put astrotheology to rest. He had a chance to get the ball rolling and dropped it. Maybe another time.

So it looks like astrotheology is some modern New Age movement without any relevance to the origins of Christianity.
Yep...makes me glad I gave up debating religion a long time ago its full of opinions and everybody thinks theirs is the right one. :confusedsmiley:
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