neilgodfrey wrote:Why in your English rendering [of Mark 1] do you use two different words [heaven and sky] for the one Greek word that is translated as "heavens"? This leads me to suspect you are attempting to subtly shift a meaning or association by illegitimate means. Let's be consistent with our treatment of the Greek.
It is entirely legitimate and consistent.
The Greek word in Mark 1:10 is Ouranous (heavens) and in 1:11 is Ouranon (heaven).
Heaven means sky.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranus_(mythology) states Uranus (Ancient Greek Οὐρανός, Ouranos meaning "sky" or "heaven") was the primal Greek god personifying the sky.
The astral link to Mark’s term for heaven or sky is shown in a mosaic at the wiki link showing Ouranos as Aion, the Gnostic/Mithraic God of Time, against the zodiac.
http://www.theoi.com/Protogenos/Ouranos.html states "OURANOS (or Uranus) was the primeval god of the sky. The Greeks imagined the sky as a solid dome of brass, decorated with stars, whose edges descended to rest upon the outermost limits of the flat earth."
In the Olympian creation myth, as Hesiod tells it in the Theogony, Uranus came every night to cover the earth and mate with Gaia. This sense of connection between earth and heaven is the essence of Christology, but unfortunately the real natural meaning was lost in the fallen alienated supernatural wrong theory of Christendom.
The manifest errors of doctrine within the corrupted world of Christendom illustrate why all the supernatural tares have to be burnt away so we can find and retain the natural wheat at the crux of the Christian paradigm. This natural wheat can be discerned through astral reading of parables such as the loaves and fishes.
neilgodfrey wrote:
Where is the "astral" association? There is none whatsoever. If you want to associate any particular reference in any literature of "heavens" with "stars" you need to demonstrate that link. You can't assume it as a universal.
Ouranous, the source of the voice of God in the first chapter of Mark, has the same name as the father of the Titans who was
reportedly depicted in ancient art as the star-spangled sky. Only as ignorant schemers took over the church was this basic meaning forgotten and suppressed. That leaves your “none whatsoever” assertion looking quite dubious.
neilgodfrey wrote:
The heavens are regularly in the literature, Hebrew and other, associated with the abode of God. When authors get a little more specific they may speak of thrones and transparent "sea" floors and precious stones and not necessarily stars or planets nor even sun and moon. Clouds are sometimes mentioned when transport and travel is depicted. Various mental and literary images people have are generally compartmentalized according to their purpose and function. Details are represented because they add to the meaning and ambience that the author wants to portray. There are no astral associations here in Mark 1 at all. Not that I can see.
Your denial here of an astral link to heaven illustrates how comprehensively the degraded supernatural dogma of Christianity has corrupted theology. I accept that this failure to read literally passages such as “Jesus looked up to heaven” is pervasive in the alienated dogma of Christendom, but my point is that the original text can more profitably be understood as allegory for natural wisdom. Removing the natural wisdom destroys the ethical meaning of the text.
neilgodfrey wrote:
It is mere baseless assertion to say that this verse contains an astral association, is it not?
Of course not. The verses in question use the term Ouranos for heaven, a term which ancient thought associated with Aion and the stars of the zodiac. The astral association is strong and central. Only the later corruption of Christian supernaturalism with its suppression of natural wisdom severed this connection.
neilgodfrey wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote:The vision by Christ of the heavens parting is presented as a physical sight, contrary to the imagined heaven as abode of God unconnected to what we can see.
Though many commentators say the scene in Mark 1 is a vision that is not in the text either. The text tells us that the heavens literally opened and the Spirit literally descended. Heavens opening accords with the ancient understanding of heavens.
I think you are imposing the dominant Christendom concept of a supernatural heaven onto the ancients. This is perhaps reasonable given that the Christian theory of heaven dominated the world for nearly 2000 years, but in this thread I am presenting an alternative hypothesis, that this Christian supernatural theory was a corruption of an original natural enlightened vision. Talk of the heavens opening could refer to rain (
Uranus links etymologically to rain). My view is that the only coherent heuristic is to treat miraculous supernatural claims as originating in allegorical intent with both cosmological and ethical messages.
neilgodfrey wrote:The verse tells us that the voice of God was heard from the heavens. I agree with you that all this is something Jesus literally saw (according to the narrative). It really happened (in the narrative) -- that is, the heavens literally opened and the spirit descended and a voice was heard from where the spirit commenced its descent. This is all quite compatible with first century understanding of the nature of heavens and how they could be parted etc. It also tells us God is located in or just behind those heavens.
Your phrase “first century understanding of the nature of heavens” is hardly unambiguous. What evidence do you have that a literal supernatural miraculous imagination was at the source of the Biblical imagery? My reading is that the sustained Orthodox assault on Gnostic wisdom suppressed the original coherent natural understandings of heaven, and this supposed supernatural 'first century understanding' was read back in to the texts as history was edited by the victors.
neilgodfrey wrote:
If you disagree with any of this you will have to explain to me why. I am taking a direct meaning of the text to the best of my understanding. There is no hint anywhere in the narrative that I should interpret any of this as a vision or metaphor. Do you disagree? (To the best of my knowledge it is modern interpreters who prefer to re-imagine the narrative as a vision in order to make it compatible with modern scientific understanding -- another misguided attempt to make an ancient text relevant to today.)
The entire Gospel is what you call "vision and metaphor". All four Gospels explain that “to those who are outside, all things are done in parables,” as Jesus says at Mark 4:11. The literal reading of the Baptism of Christ is obviously allegorical. The literal claim of a voice coming from the sky would today be considered delusional, so its real meaning should be understood as allegory. Your implication that the author believed the sky really opened, if that is what you are saying, seems to deliberately condemn the text to irrelevance and madness by presenting any sane reading as "misguided".
neilgodfrey wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote:Allegorically, the whole discussion of the baptism by John in the River Jordan and the theme of wilderness matches directly to an astral reading, with heaven as the sky, the wilderness as the fallen world of human life sundered from grace, and the River Jordan as the constellation Eridanus, the river in the sky, etymologically linked to Jordan. Jesus and John stand as motifs for the sun at the winter and summer solstices respectively, as marked by their feast days after the dates when the sun begins to ascend and descend in its annual path.
This is where you lose me and my eyes only glaze over the rest of your post. I cannot relate to anything you are saying here. You are just bringing all of this into the text without any warrant from the text itself to do so. Are all references in the ancient texts to the Jordan River symbols of a constellation? Your decision to introduce this interpretation strikes me as arbitrary. There is nothing I can see in Mark 1 to justify your association.
It does not surprise me Neil that you would find such interpretation unwelcome since you have repeatedly emphasised the strength of your prejudice. I am not saying all references to the Jordan River are to the constellation Eridanus. Now that I look again, the sources on this link are not as clear as I had thought. For example an astral essay on Cosmic Multiplication at
http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cgi/viewcon ... ontext=ocj states that Ezekiel 47, with its resonances to Revelation 21, refers to Eridanus as the Jordan, assimilating the Holy Land to the sky, but I cannot show that this is more than speculation. But that is just an aside, and not an essential point.
Nonetheless it remains fair to say that this passage in Mark can be read as matching an astral reading. This is an interpretation that we can follow links through Ezekiel 47 and Revelation 21, with allegorical Biblical rivers with strong astral association.
neilgodfrey wrote:
Firstly, the event appears to be happening in daylight hours. There are no stars to impinge on anyone's imagination. Sun and moon? Absolutely nothing in the text to lead to this association. You don't even attempt to make any. You just pull the sun and moon out of the sky and say they apply to John and Jesus.
Since I did not mention the moon, your glazed reading is not particularly worthwhile here. One reference supporting this link between John and Jesus and their feast days at the solstices is John 3:30 "He must increase, but I must decrease."
neilgodfrey wrote:
You could do that with any text that is speaking of a new and old, greater and lesser, of anything at all. You have no method, no rationale -- except your own personal spiritual preconceptions. You believe the text has astrotheological meaning so you inject your astrotheological interpretations into it. Someone else, by the same method, could begin by believing the text is about something else and bring their interpretations into it accordingly.
I have explained my views several times in this thread, and Neil’s comments are redolent of the resistance described in the passage in Mark on the disciples' incomprehension of the loaves and fishes allegory. I am starting from the one truth of astronomy. You may say that is arrogant, but the fact is science is consistent and unitary.
From the ancient Gnostic perspective, this one truth encompassing all observation was the movement of the eighth heaven, the shift of the fixed stars against the circles of the sun and planets. This movement is nothing else but precession. Copernicus correctly understood precession as the encompassing movement of naked eye astronomy. So the fact is I am not operating with “no method, no rationale -- except [my] own personal spiritual preconceptions” as Neil foolishly repeats again. I am starting from what the ancients could see as their understanding of heaven, and analysing systematically how this is incorporated in the Bible. Neil’s emotional repugnance and incomprehension regarding this scientific method is amusing and sad.
neilgodfrey wrote:
You say that your meaning then makes most sense of it all. But to others it makes no sense whatever -- it only makes sense to you because you have just explained it all according to your own belief-system. Others do the same with their own belief-systems.
I am not talking about a belief system. I am talking about coherent scientific understanding. It is a shame you do not understand this simple epistemic distinction. My "belief system" is modern science.
neilgodfrey wrote:
You say your belief system is true because it is scientifically verifiable. That makes no difference whatever to the fact that you have arbitrarily imposed it upon the text.
Again, I am not imposing anything arbitrary but exploring how the Gnostic authors used the myth of Christ to symbolise the connection between earth and the cosmos in a rational way. That is a perfectly valid and coherent scientific research program, even if it is repugnant to people who hold strong religious prejudices.
neilgodfrey wrote:
This is why I have said you have given us no textual analysis at all. You are not analysing the text. You are only interpreting the text through your own preconceptions and then declaring success and validation because your interpretation gives you the results you find satisfying.
Now you are just being emotional. Of course I analysed the text. I have gone through every verse on the loaves and fishes in Mark and explained how it fits with an astral reading against what the ancient Gnostics understood as the shift of the ages. My “preconception” again, is that the Bible offers a coherent story, based on such ideas as ‘thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’ to explore how our temporal world connects to the eternal cosmos.
I reject the preconception that the Bible is incoherent. Both conventional Christians and people who dislike Christianity can be expected to make an a priori rejection of my project of a scientific rehabilitation of the ancient texts.
neilgodfrey wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote:A further astral meaning of heaven in Mark is in Chapter 13:24-25: "in those days, after that oppression, the sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light, the stars will be falling from the sky, and the powers that are in the heavens will be shaken." As well as associating knowledge of the shift of ages with eclipses, following the astronomer Hipparchus, Mark here explicitly links the shaking of the heavenly powers with the falling of stars.
You are overlooking here all the literary precedents for this passage and their literary function as metaphors -- as demonstrated by comparative literary analysis, cultural tropes and historical contexts. Those explanations are based on dissections of the texts themselves, on analysis of the text -- you are not doing that. You are preconceiving the text to have one meaning and then finding the meaning you want in accord with your belief system.
I don’t think the astral meaning is exhaustive, but I do think that the centuries of stony sleep that have ignored the original natural intent have created massive barriers to reading what this text actually means. Again Neil alleges there are better readings but fails to explain them.
neilgodfrey wrote:Now, for the two hundred and fiftieth time, why don't you attempt to paraphrase in your own words what you believe my criticisms of your view to be -- just to see if you can assure me that you really do understand why I am disagreeing with your explanations?
No, I do not at all understand your criticisms. I just think you exhibit a massive failure of comprehension.