What does astrotheology claim about the Bible and the zodiac?
What it is
Astrotheology holds that the stories of scripture and myth were first told about the sky. The Sun's yearly path through the twelve signs is read as the life of a saviour: born at the winter solstice when the days begin to lengthen, crossing at the spring equinox, strongest at midsummer, dying as the year fails. The twelve signs become twelve apostles or twelve tribes, and the seven planets become the days of the week. Its authors call this the solar myth and hold it to be the hidden key to every religion.
The teaching
As Charles Dupuis's school of the solar myth teaches it.
One key to every faith
Astrotheology begins from one claim: that the first worship of humankind was the worship of the Sun, the Moon and the stars, and that the gods and heroes of every religion are the lights of the sky and the seasons of the year made into persons. The Sun above all is the hero, because on his yearly course hang light and dark, warmth and cold, harvest and hunger. Read with this key, Dupuis teaches, a sacred story is an almanac: its births, deaths and victories are dates in the Sun's year, and its companions are the signs he passes through.
The Sun is born
The story begins at the winter solstice. Through the autumn the Sun's noon height falls day by day, and around 21 or 22 December it reaches its lowest point and seems to stand still for several days, for the place where it rises on the horizon hardly moves. Then the days begin to lengthen. Astrotheology reads this as the Sun's death and birth: after three days at the bottom of the year the young Sun is born on 25 December, the date the Romans kept as the birthday of the Unconquered Sun.
Dupuis adds a detail from the sky of antiquity. At midnight on that night, he says, the constellation of the Virgin stood rising in the east, and so the Sun is born of a virgin.
The crossing at the equinox
In spring the Sun crosses the celestial equator, and from that day the light is longer than the dark. Astrotheology reads the crossing as a crucifixion and a resurrection: the Sun, set on the cross that the equator makes with its own path, overcomes the darkness and rises to rule the summer half of the year. In the centuries before the Christian era the spring Sun stood in the constellation of the Ram, and Dupuis reads the Lamb of the Christian Easter as that sign.
The feast itself, its authors point out, is fixed by the sky: Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring.
Summer, autumn and the serpent
At midsummer the Sun is at its height and strength, and then it declines. In autumn it passes into the Scorpion and the long nights, which Dupuis reads as the season of the serpent and of the powers of darkness, the dragon or the adversary who wounds the hero. Winter is the hero's descent into the underworld, and the year turns to the solstice again.
Every hero who labours, suffers, dies and returns is, in this reading, the same Sun. Dupuis finds him in Osiris, Adonis, Mithras and Bacchus, and in the twelve labours of Hercules, one for each sign of the zodiac.
Twelve and seven
The numbers of scripture are read the same way. The twelve signs become the twelve tribes of Israel and the twelve apostles; in Jacob's blessing Judah is a lion, like the sign of Leo, and Dan a serpent, like the Scorpion. The seven planets become the seven days of the week, the seven lamps of the temple's candlestick, a reading Josephus already gives, and the seven stars and seven churches of the book of Revelation.
The ages of the sky
Later writers add the slow turning of the sky called precession. The point where the Sun stands at the spring equinox moves backward through the zodiac, about one sign in some two thousand years, and astrotheology teaches that each age takes its emblem from that sign. The Bull is the age of Apis and of the golden calf; the Ram is the age of Moses, who breaks the calf of the old age, and of the ram caught in the thicket and the ram's horn trumpet; and the Fishes are the age of the Christian fish and of the fishermen called to be fishers of men.
The age to come is the Water Bearer's. Its authors find it in the Gospel's man bearing a pitcher of water, whom the disciples are told to follow into the house where he enters.
The Sun's names in scripture
Astrotheology gathers the verses in which scripture itself speaks of the Sun. Malachi promises: “But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings.” The psalm says of the Sun: “Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race.” Jesus is called the light of the world, and the first day of the week, the day of the resurrection, is in many languages the Sun's day. For its authors these are not figures of speech but traces of the first meaning.
Where the claims meet the record
Its students are asked to check the sky for themselves: to watch the Sun's rising point through December, to find the Virgin, the Ram and the Fishes among the stars, and to read the verses in their places. The texts answer some of the claims directly. The Gospels give no date for the birth at all. The Gospel explains the twelve apostles itself, by the twelve tribes they are to judge. And the early Christians explained their fish as a word: the Greek for fish spells the first letters of Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour.
The sky has its own answer on the ages. Counted by the modern boundaries of the constellations, the equinox point passed from the Ram into the Fishes only in the first century before Christ, and it will not reach the Water Bearer for several centuries yet; counted by equal signs from other starting points, the dates move by hundreds of years. A reader holds the readings of this branch as readings, and keeps what the sky does apart from what the texts say.
How it is practised
A reader can test the picture and not only receive it. Take one claim, such as the birth at the winter solstice, and rule two columns on a page: what the sky does on that date, which anyone can check, and what the text itself says, with chapter and verse. Where the text is silent, as the Gospels are on the date of the birth, write that down too. The page then shows which part is astronomy, which is scripture and which is the author's bridge between the two.
Where it comes from
The claim took its modern form in France. In 1795 Charles Dupuis argued that all worship began with the Sun and stars and that the Gospel story was the Sun's year retold. Later writers added the slow drift called the precession of the equinoxes: as the spring equinox point moves backward through the zodiac, they say, religion changes its emblem, a bull, then the ram of the Age of Aries, then the fish of the Age of Pisces, with an Age of Aquarius to come. The Roman feast of the Unconquered Sun on 25 December is their chief exhibit, and the Saturnalia, a feast of Saturn that was over by 23 December, is often named beside it.
What is known, and what is not
The astronomy is sound: the solstices, the equinoxes and the precession are measured facts. That biblical writers used the imagery of the sky is also accepted. What is not supported is the central claim, that the Gospels were composed as an allegory of the Sun. Most historians place them in first-century Jewish life, and the churches reject the reading. No ancient text states the scheme of ages on which the theory leans. The wider claim that myths encode precession rests largely on Hamlet's Mill, a book of 1969 that specialists judged unproven.
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.
- Precession of the Equinoxes
- The slow backward drift of the equinox points through the zodiac, about one degree in seventy-two years, first noticed by Hipparchus.
- Age of Aries
- The age before that of Pisces, when the spring equinox point lay among the stars of the Ram. Its ram and lamb emblems are a modern reading of old records.
- Age of Pisces
- The astrological age in which the spring equinox point is counted in Pisces. Astrotheology ties it to the fish emblem of the early church.
- Age of Aquarius
- The age said to follow that of Pisces as the equinox point moves on. Proposed dates for its start differ by many centuries.
- Saturnalia
- The Roman midwinter feast of Saturn, kept from 17 December with banquets, gifts and a holiday from rank. It was over before 25 December.
- Hamlet's Mill
- A book of 1969 by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend that reads world myth as a record of precession. Widely read, and not accepted by specialists.
Ask the Oracle further
What does astrotheology say the Sun does at the winter solstice, and how can I check it myself?How does astrotheology read the twelve apostles as the twelve signs of the year?
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
Its authorsThe zodiac on the bodyWhat scholars sayThe sky scripture namesThe whole artSearch the tree
