Re: Sky & Telescope article

[Dan Moonhawk Alford <dalford@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 5 Oct 2000, Dennis wrote:

> Dan Moonhawk Alford wrote:
> > On Thu, 5 Oct 2000, Dennis wrote:
> > > Dan Moonhawk Alford wrote:
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > In the last part of the last degree? People must've already been singing
> > > > "This is the dawning of the Age o-of Pi-isces" in the streets! ;-)
> > >
> > >       Or,
> > >
> > >       "What rough beast, his hour come round at last,
> > >       "Slouches towards Eridu to be born?"
> > >
> > > Incidentally.  Scholars, over the last ten years, have
> > > discovered that the Mithraic cult of the middle to late
> > > Roman empire originated from the discovery that the sky
> > > was going from the Age of Taurus to the Age of Pisces.
> > 
> > Slight problem with that.
> > 
> > Astrologically, there was the Age of Taurus (~4-2000 BCE), then Aries
> > (~2000-1 BCE), then Pisces (~1-2000 CE), and we're now on the cusp of
> > Aquarius ~2-4000 CE).
> 
> But I'm sure I've got the Mithraic cult placed properly in time.  
> From "H.G. Wells' Pocket History of the World", pp. 174-5: "The rise
> of the Roman Empire opened the western European world to this growing
> cult [Serapis-Isis cult]...  But there were many rivals to the
> Serapis-Isis religion.  Prominent among these was Mithraism. This was
> a religion of Persian origin, and it centered upon some now forgotten
> mysteries about Mithras' sacrificing a sacred and benevolent bull...
> The bull upon the Mithraic monuments always bleeds copiously from a
> wound in its side, and from this blood springs new life."  That was
> written in 1941, long before the new theory.

I wasn't questioning your positioning of it at all, Dennis, but providing
hopefully a more stable backdrop. Like the Serapis-Isis cult, then, this
was dredged up from the Age of Taurus during the period of the Great New
Year by the Romans on the cusp of Pisces. Now what you said makes more
sense, given Roman acquisitiveness of all things ancient and religious.
  
> > That would be Age of Taurus, then, when Egyptians, Minoans and others
> > following astrology revered the bull; the Hebrew people moved away from
> > (Taurus) bull worship to (Aries) ram/lamb slaughter at the cusp of
> > Taurus/Aries. 
> 
> My references definitely place Mithraism during the Roman Empire

Got it, now.

> > All ancient civilizations following
> > astrology, which Jung called "the psychology of the ancients," brought
> > their religious practices into conformance with the current Age.
> 
> But there are two very important exceptions - Judaism and
> Christianity.

Both of them officially repudiate astrology, I believe. Judaism moved from
bull-worship to ram/lamb-slaughter and then stopped. A small group of
Christian Jews got hijacked by Paul to move from ram/lamb-slaughter to
fishing and then stopped.

> The Jews had to do some contortions to adapt their one invisible God
> to traditional cosmology.

We could just as well say this was the continuation, a la Moses, of the
one-invisible-god competing religious sect of Egyptian Amun (whence still
"Amen"), brought into the Aries Age.

> Seven was a sacred number to ancient cultures because the Babylonians
> had discovered that one could predict the motions of the sun, the
> moon, and the five visible planets by assuming that they were mounted
> on crystal celestial spheres with differing rate of rotation.  The
> Jews brought this to their way of thinking by saying that God created
> the world in seven days; the stars were merely lights in the sky,
> instead of gods.  Twelve was sacred because of the twelve tribes of
> Israel, not because there are about twelve lunar cycles per solar
> cycle.

I'd have to question the last chicken-and-egg statement, since the fairly
newfangled solar (male) cycles being MORE important than the lunar cycles
(female -- 'unlucky' 13) theoretically would date from the beginning of
male Aries.

As to the rest, we'll have to put those to the side to figure, then, why
seven is also highly important in Native North America as well. Prayers
greet the Four Directions, Above, Below, and Inner. There were seven
primary "movers" in the sky: Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and
Saturn. Twelve solar vs 13 lunar cycles. All the ancients, everywhere,
studied the stars for hints to prepare for catastrophe or timing for
ceremonies. It's so funny how our current global culture has divorced
itself from this ancient knowledge and knowledge of ancients.
 
> Were it not for all that, I'm not sure what would be common belief
> now.  Westerners don't believe in the four classical elements - earth,
> water, fire, and air - but I've heard an Indian yoga teacher mention
> earth, water, air, fire -- and ether!  (The Easterners don't think
> that "nature abhors a vacuum".)  Astrology probably would have been
> destroyed not by religion but by science.

Only by scientism, the totalizing belief in science as the only true
repository of knowledge. The left-brain half of astrology got a great
boost from the better tools which emerged from science, but its principles
of "observation, correlation, prediction" adopted by science remained the
same.

warm regards, moonhawk

dalford@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
<http://www.sunflower.com/~dewatson/alford.htm>

"I don't need a compass to tell me which way the wind shines!" 
                                                   -- Roy, Mystery Men