The sky in the scriptures

The teaching

As the school of the solar myth from Dupuis to Kuhn teaches it.

The sky as the first book

Astrotheology starts from the night sky and the turning year. Before there were scriptures, its authors teach, there was the sky: the Sun that brings the day and the seasons, the Moon that measures the months, and the stars that rise and set in their order, marking the times to plough, to sow and to reap. People who lived by that calendar told its events as stories, and in time, the school holds, the stories were taken for history. Its key, the solar myth, reads a sacred story back into the sky it is said to have come from.

A student of the school learns the sky before its readings, and that order is kept here. Three things are kept apart from the first page: what the sky does, which anyone can watch and check; what a text says, in its own words and in its own place; and what an author reads into the meeting of the two, which is a reading and is held as one.

The Sun's road through the twelve

Over a year the Sun travels once round the sky against the background of the stars, along a path called the ecliptic. The band of stars along that path is the zodiac, divided into twelve signs, and the Sun spends about a month in each: the Ram, the Bull, the Twins, the Crab, the Lion, the Virgin, the Scales, the Scorpion, the Archer, the Goat, the Water Bearer and the Fishes. The stars behind the Sun cannot be seen by day, so the old watchers found its place in other ways: by the sign standing high at midnight, opposite the Sun, and by the heliacal rising of a star, the first morning it shows again just before dawn after weeks lost in the Sun's glare.

Dupuis reads the stars as the cast of the story. With each sign other constellations rise and set, and the figures the Sun passes, with those that rise or set beside them, become in his reading the hero's companions, helpers and enemies. So he reads the twelve labours of Hercules as the Sun's road through the twelve signs, each labour told from the stars of its month.

The four turning points

The year turns on four points. At the winter solstice, around 21 or 22 December north of the equator, the Sun stands lowest at noon and the day is shortest; its rising point on the horizon, which has crept south all autumn, seems to halt for some days before it turns back, and solstice means the Sun standing still. At the spring equinox the Sun crosses the celestial equator, rises due east, and day and night are equal; at the summer solstice it stands highest and the day is longest; and at the autumn equinox day and night are equal again as the dark begins to win. South of the equator the seasons fall the other way round, and the school's readings were made in the north.

Astrotheology reads the four as the hero's life. At the winter solstice the Sun is born, the days lengthening from the darkest point; at the spring equinox it crosses over and triumphs, the light outlasting the dark, and the crossing of its path with the equator is read as a cross; at midsummer it reigns in its strength; in autumn it weakens and passes into the long nights, the season the school gives to the serpent and the powers of darkness. The two halves of the year are read as the reign of light and the reign of darkness. How each turning is read is taught on the page of what it claims.

The Moon, the seven and the twelve

The Moon keeps a second clock. From new to full and back takes about twenty-nine and a half days, so twelve of its months fall some eleven days short of the Sun's year, and a calendar that keeps both must add a month now and then. The school points to the feasts that still keep the Moon's time, Passover at the full moon of spring and Easter on the Sunday after the first full moon of spring, as signs that worship once followed the sky.

Beside the Sun and the Moon, five more lights wander against the stars: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The seven together give their names to the seven days of the week, and the school reads the sevens of scripture by them: the seven lamps of the temple's candlestick, the seven stars and the seven churches of the book of Revelation. The twelves it reads by the signs, the twelve tribes and the twelve apostles among them. The morning star, the planet Venus rising before the Sun, has a place of its own in the texts, read on the page of the sky scripture names.

The ages of the sky

The slowest clock is precession. The point among the stars where the Sun stands at the spring equinox does not stay put: it drifts backward through the signs, about one degree in seventy-two years, a whole sign in some two thousand one hundred and sixty years, and the full circle in nearly twenty-six thousand. Each stretch of time is named for the sign the equinox point stands in, and the school teaches that every age takes its emblem from its sign: the Bull for the age of Apis and the golden calf, the Ram for the age of Moses and the ram's horn, the Fishes for the age of the Christian fish, and the Water Bearer for the age to come.

When the Water Bearer's age begins is not agreed. Counted by the constellations as they are drawn now, the equinox point will not reach it for several centuries; counted by equal signs from other starting points, its authors date the change hundreds of years apart. A student learns the motion, which is measured, and holds the emblems as the school's reading.

The four that held the corners of the year

The school reads scripture's four living creatures by the same sky. Some four to six thousand years ago, in the age of the Bull, the Sun stood at the four turning points of the year in the Bull, the Lion, the Scorpion and the Water Bearer. Its authors find those four signs in the creatures of Ezekiel and of Revelation, where “the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle”, and they set the eagle beside the Scorpion: four signs that once held up the corners of the year, read as the four beasts around the throne.

The small world and the inner sky

The last key is the human being. In the old teaching the school inherits, the body is a small world made on the pattern of the great one, and the twelve signs are laid on it from the Ram at the head to the Fishes at the feet, so that the year runs down the body as the Sun runs round the sky. That scheme, and what the school adds to it, is taught on the page of the zodiac on the body.

Alvin Boyd Kuhn turns the whole reading inward. The Sun's descent into winter and its return are for him a picture of the soul's descent into the body and its waking there: the divine spark buried in flesh as the Sun is buried in the winter sky, and rising again within the person. Read this way, scripture is neither history nor a calendar but a drama of the soul told in the language of the sky, and Kuhn calls the meaning lost when it is read only as history the lost light.

Where a student begins

The first practice is to watch. From one fixed spot, mark where the Sun rises on the horizon once a week through a season, glancing at the place and never looking straight at the Sun, and the solstice's halt and turn can be seen without a book. Note the Moon's shape each evening for a month. Learn the constellations of the zodiac that stand in the night sky this season, and find Orion and the Pleiades, the stars the book of Job names. This is the ground every reading stands on, and anyone with a clear horizon can check it.

Then read, with the book open. Take one claim of the school and rule three columns: what the sky does on the day in question; what the text itself says, in its chapter and verse; and what the author sets between them. Ask of any likeness where it is written, whether its source is older than the story it is said to explain, and whether it survives in the original language. A pun on sun and son works only in English, and the house holds such word-play to be a game, not the history of words.

The branches lead on from there. What it claims gives the school's reading of the Sun's year in full; its authors gives each writer in his own terms; the zodiac on the body gives the oldest part of the picture; what scholars say gives the test of a likeness and what it leaves standing; and the sky scripture names gives the passages themselves, read in their places. None of it asks anything of a reader's faith, and what a reader holds sacred stays their own.