Charles-François Dupuis

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all the Origine de tous les cultes (1795) and its abridgement of 1798.

The key, and where it is taught

Dupuis teaches that all religion is the worship of nature, above all of the Sun, and that its gods and heroes are the lights of the sky and the seasons of the year made into persons. The Sun is born at the winter solstice, triumphs at the spring equinox, weakens in autumn and dies into winter, and every hero who labours, suffers, dies and returns is the same Sun. That reading, from the virgin of the midnight sky to the Lamb of Easter, is taught in full in the branch on what astrotheology claims, among The sky in the scriptures, for it is his school. What follows is his own: how he came to the key, what he took the first god to be, and how he read the faiths of two principles, the mysteries and the last book of the Bible.

A farmer's calendar in the sky

His first discovery, as he saw it, came from the figures of the zodiac. They are not arbitrary, he argues, but pictures of what happens on earth while the Sun stands in each sign: a farmer's calendar drawn in the sky by the people who first named the stars. Read in that way they fit the year of the Nile on one condition only, that the Balance, the sign of equal day and night, stood at the spring equinox. Then the Water Bearer pours in the months of the flood, and the Virgin holds her ear of wheat at the harvest.

Since the slow turning of the sky carries the equinox back through one sign in about two thousand years, he concludes that the zodiac was invented in Egypt many thousands of years ago, and that its people were the first teachers of mankind. The plain fact is that the twelve signs as we know them took shape in Babylonia, in the centuries before Christ.

The world is God

Beneath the solar fables lies his real theology. The first god of mankind, he holds, was the universe itself, the great whole, living, eternal and moved by its own soul, and the Sun is that soul's most visible seat, the eye and heart of the world. The first peoples divided the whole into two causes: an active cause, the sky with its fire and light, which they made male and called father, and a passive cause, the earth and its waters, which they made female and called mother, from whose union every living thing is born. All later gods are those two causes and their parts, given names, faces and stories.

Light and darkness

From the same sky comes the war of good and evil. The equinoxes cut the year in two: a half of long days, when light rules and the earth bears fruit, and a half of long nights, when darkness rules and nature dies. The Persians made the two halves into two principles, Ormuzd, the god of light, and Ahriman, the god of darkness, and every faith that sets a good power against an evil one, a god against a devil or a saviour against a serpent, is telling, in Dupuis's reading, the contest of summer and winter, with the serpent and the Scorpion as the autumn signs of the dark.

The mysteries

The ancient mysteries were for him schools in which this astronomy was taught as a drama, and in which the fate of the soul was joined to the course of the stars. The soul, in the teaching he gathers from the Platonists, comes down from the sky through the spheres of the planets, taking something from each, and after death climbs back the same way to the fixed stars. The initiate who saw the god die and rise in the rites of Mithras, of Isis or of Eleusis saw at once the Sun's year and the soul's own journey, and was promised a happy return.

The book of Revelation

Dupuis gives the last book of the Christian Bible a long reading of its own. The Apocalypse, he argues, is a book of the mysteries of the Sun written in the language of the sky. Its Lamb is the Ram of the spring equinox; its four living creatures, the lion, the calf, the face of a man and the eagle, are the four signs that stood at the four corners of the year; its seven spirits and seven seals are the seven planets; its twelve gates and twelve foundations are the twelve signs; and its new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven foursquare and full of light, is the sky itself renewed at the end of a great cycle.

His aim

Dupuis wrote to free his readers, as he saw it, from the quarrels and fears of the churches, by showing them that every creed is the same first worship of nature in different dress. His own creed is the one he found at the root: the universe itself is the god, and the reverence owed to it is reverence for its order and its laws. The reader holds his key as his reading, not as the history of any faith.