The sky in the scriptures

Its authors

Dupuis, Massey, Kuhn, Hall, and lecturers today.

Hidden historyThe whole artThe whole tree

Who are the authors of astrotheology, from Dupuis to Santos Bonacci?

What it is

Astrotheology is a line of authors more than a school with a creed. They share one move, reading sacred story as astronomy, and differ in almost everything else. Dupuis was a French scholar of the Revolution. Gerald Massey was an English poet who looked to Egypt. Alvin Boyd Kuhn, an American lecturer, thought the allegory spiritual and not merely solar, and Manly P. Hall was a collector of symbols. Today it is carried mostly by lecturers and films, Santos Bonacci among them, who join it to the body and to the study of likenesses between religions.

The teaching

As each author of astrotheology teaches it.

Derham: the heavens declare

The word begins with the opposite argument. William Derham's Astro-Theology argues from the heavens to their maker: the size of the heavens, the number of the stars, the regular motions of the planets and the fitness of everything for life are, he teaches, a demonstration of the being and attributes of God. Derham holds that the fixed stars are suns, each perhaps with planets of its own, so that the creation is far larger than the ancients knew and its maker greater. His astro-theology reads the sky as a witness to scripture's God, not as the source of scripture's stories.

Volney: the ruins

Volney's The Ruins tells of a traveller sitting among the broken columns of Palmyra, to whom a spirit shows the history of the world's religions. The first worship, the spirit teaches, was of the elements and the stars, given names and stories; the gods multiplied as the stories were taken for history, and the peoples quarrelled over them. Volney's remedy is a religion of natural law, open to reason and common to all.

Dupuis: the origin of all worship

Dupuis is the founder of the system. All religion, he teaches, is the worship of nature, above all of the Sun, the soul of the visible world; the gods are its powers and the myths are a poetry of the calendar. He applies the key to the Gospels as to the myths of Greece and Egypt, and calls the Christian story a fable of the Sun. His aim is plain from his title: to show the one origin of every worship, and so to free his readers from the churches by showing them the sky behind the creed.

Taylor and Higgins

In England Robert Taylor, a former clergyman, preached the system in London, reading the Gospel scenes one by one as events of the astronomical year, and printed the sermons as The Devil's Pulpit. Godfrey Higgins, in his Anacalypsis, teaches that one first religion, of the Sun and of a universal reason, spread out from the East, and that every later faith is a dialect of it.

Massey: out of Egypt

Gerald Massey teaches that the Christian story came out of Egypt. In his books the Egyptian myths of Horus, Isis and Osiris are the original, read as astronomy and as the drama of the soul, and the Gospels are that myth turned into history by readers who no longer understood it. He sets out long lists of likenesses between Horus and Jesus, and those lists, copied from book to book, are the source of most of the parallels repeated today.

The Egyptian texts themselves tell the birth of Horus otherwise: Isis conceives him from Osiris after his death, when she has gathered and restored his body. That story is told in the branch on what scholars say, beside the other parallels.

Kuhn: the lost light

Alvin Boyd Kuhn turns the solar reading inward. The Sun's descent into winter and its return, he teaches, are a picture of the soul's descent into the body and its awakening there: the divine spark is buried in flesh, as the Sun is buried in the winter sky, and the resurrection is its rising within the person. Scripture, for Kuhn, is neither history nor a mere calendar but a drama of the soul told in the language of the sky, and he calls the meaning that the churches let fall when they read it as history the lost light.

Hall: the Sun in all the mysteries

Manly P. Hall's great album of symbols teaches that the Sun is the universal emblem of the divine in the ancient mysteries, and that the twelve signs, the planets and the human body are one book read at different scales. He sets the traditions of many peoples side by side on each page, and his readers take from him the habit of finding one symbol under many names.

Carey: the sky in the body

George W. Carey teaches that the story of the sky is told again in the body. With Inez Perry he matches the twelve signs to twelve salts of the blood, and he teaches that a seed or oil is born each month in the body and rises along the spine, and that this is the Christ of the Gospels. His teaching is given in the branch on the zodiac and the body, with the cautions it needs.

The lecturers and the film

In the later twentieth century the system passed to lecturers. Jordan Maxwell taught it largely through word-play on names, reading Israel, for example, as Isis, Ra and El joined; the Hebrew name is explained in Genesis itself as one who strives with God and prevails, and the house holds such word-plays to be games, not etymology. The writer known as Acharya S argued in The Christ Conspiracy that Christianity was assembled from older sun myths by its founders as a deliberate work, and the film Zeitgeist of 2007 carried her account to a very large audience.

Against that account stand the letters of Paul, written in the fifties of the first century to communities already worshipping Christ, and the Roman historian Tacitus, who records that Christ was executed under Pontius Pilate. Santos Bonacci teaches astrotheology today as part of a larger system joined to astrology, to the Hermetic saying on above and below and to Carey's teaching on the body.

Reading them as authors

Each of these writers wanted something of the theory. Dupuis and Taylor wanted to free people from the churches; Kuhn and Hall wanted to recover what they took to be a deeper faith; the lecturers want to wake their hearers. Knowing what an author wants is the first step to reading him well, and the second is to follow one of his footnotes back to its source and read what it says there.

How it is practised

Read the authors as authors. For each one a reader notes four things: when they wrote, what they were trained in, which sources they cite, and what they wanted the theory to do, whether to free people from the churches, as Dupuis and Taylor hoped, or to recover a deeper meaning for faith, as Kuhn believed. Then follow one footnote back to its source. Much of the later writing repeats the earlier, and a claim copied through five books is still one claim.

Where it comes from

The word is older than the theory. William Derham's Astro-Theology of 1715 argued from the heavens to a Creator, the reverse of its later use. Dupuis published in 1795, and Volney's Ruins had said much the same a few years before. In England Robert Taylor preached astronomical readings of the Gospels about 1830, and Godfrey Higgins left his Anacalypsis. Massey wrote between 1881 and 1907. About 1900 the German school called Panbabylonism traced every myth to Babylonian star lore, until the dated tablets refuted it. Hall wrote in 1928 and Kuhn in 1940. Jordan Maxwell's lectures and the film Zeitgeist of 2007, which drew on the writer known as Acharya S, brought it to its largest audience.

What is known, and what is not

The books and their dates are a matter of record. Their standing is another thing: almost none of these authors held a post in history, Egyptology or biblical studies, and specialists in those fields have not taken up their conclusions. Massey's Egyptian parallels in particular are not found in the Egyptian texts as Egyptologists read them. The authors remain worth reading as a chapter in the history of ideas, and the solar myth as a theory with a rise and a fall.

Its words

Astrotheology: The reading of scripture and myth as a story of the Sun, the stars and the body. The word first had another sense: arguing from the heavens to a Creator.
Solar Myth: The theory that a sacred story began as an account of the Sun's daily or yearly course. Dupuis applied it to the Gospels; scholars reject it as a general key.
Panbabylonism: A German school of about 1900 that derived every myth, the Bible's included, from Babylonian star lore. The dated tablets overturned it within a few years.
Christ Myth Theory: The claim that Jesus never lived and that the Gospel figure grew out of myth. Almost all historians, of any belief or none, reject it; the question is one of history and not of faith.

Ask the Oracle further

Which author of astrotheology should I read first, and what did each one hope to prove?Where does the word astrotheology come from, and what did it first mean?

Before you practise

Astrotheology is one way of reading scripture, held by some authors and rejected by most historians and by the churches. The correspondences of sign, planet and body are old tradition; the word-plays are not etymology. What you hold sacred is yours.

Its other branches

What it claims The zodiac on the body What scholars say The sky scripture names The whole art Search the tree