The Feast of the Transfiguration was yesterday (August 6), and while I was at Mass it gave me plenty of time to think about the Solar symbolism of the day.
I mentioned in my previous post, Astrology and the Catholic Church Calendar, that this Feast coincides with the Sun being at 15 degrees Leo, right in Midsummer at the center of the sign the Sun rules. The revealing of the shining glory of the Sun of God on a Solar holiday is too obvious a connection to ignore.
While I was reciting the Lord’s Prayer with that in mind, it occurred to me that I should just pay attention to what that prayer says in ordinary English.
The first phrase is, Our Father, who art in Heaven.
Put that in ordinary modern English and it’s something like this:
Our Father in the sky.
Our Father in the sky. The Sun. It’s obvious and it could not mean anything else – or rather, any other meaning builds on this one obvious identity.
With that basis, the meaning of the rest of the prayer falls into place as an alignment with the order of the heavens, the sky – in other words, the order of the planets and stars that we study today under the name astrology.
Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done
On Earth as it is in Heaven.
The order of life on earth as a mirror of the order of the Heavens – that correlation is practically a definition of astrology.
You have the regular, perfect and eternal order of the movement of planets and stars, and you have the realm or relative disorder here on Earth – what they referred to as the sub-Lunar world, the world inside the orbit of the Moon which is the rapidly changing world of the four elements. It is a prayer that the relative disorder of our world will align with the greater order of the stars. That’s known as, studying astrology.
Give us this day our daily bread.
The Sun is the source of energy and light, and thus of all life – we feed off the Sun. Along with any deeper spiritual dimension this points to the obvious physical truth that we rely on the Sun for life.
Trying to understand the prayer without the obvious Solar symbolism renders it vacuous; it would gut it of any real vitality or light.
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That brought to mind Psalm 19, and I want to look at some key verses in that psalm with this solar and astrological symbolism in mind as a context. The translation here is King James Version.
1 The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.
Heavens and firmament here are essentially synonyms, and this structure is the typical two parallel clauses that you find so often in the poetry of the psalms.
In plain English – the order of the planets and stars in the sky declares God’s law, being, pattern, handiwork. The order of astrology shows forth God’s order. Notice the emphasis on declaring and showing – this emphasizes that what we have here is a deliberate communication. Through astrology the Divine communicates with us.
2 Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.
3 There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.
4 Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.
Note the emphasis on speech, on communication, on knowledge. God speaks through the order of the heavens, and like a line drawn in a geometric construction it reaches to the ends of the world. That emphasis on speech, order and Law will be important a little later in tying in the second part of this psalm.
In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun,
5 Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race.
6 His going forth is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it: and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof.
In the Old Testament, the word Tabernacle or tent here is almost always used in reference to God’s house when God dwells among his people – during the sojourn in the wilderness the tabernacle held the Holy of Holies, the Throne of the Presence of God. In the Transfiguration incident in the New Testament, when the Glory of God is revealed, Peter talks of building three tabernacles, for Jesus, Moses and Elijah, and again you have the understood reference as a tabernacle built for God’s presence.
If there is a tabernacle for the Sun here it is because the Sun is the presence of God in our world.
The next few verses build the image of God/Sun as charioteer, riding across the circuit of the heavens and showing forth his glory, which sheds light on all things so that nothing is hid from its heat.
Again we have the obvious connection between the Sun, God’s presence and Glory among us, and the order of God shown forth in the heavens.
From here on the verses seem like a change of subject, but if you look carefully at what came before it is actually a continuation.
7 The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.
8 The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart: the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes.
The Old Testament continually refers to God’s Law as something living, active, light-giving, ordered, purifying, guiding. To understand this you have to set aside any notion of a Law as being some kind of arbitrary human declaration where it is binding because someone says so. That misses the point.
There is God’s Law as declared in the order of the heavens, and there is God’s Law as revealed in the commandments given to Moses. To the Israelites, they are one and the same Law, and studying the Law of the Stars and God’s law are one and the same. We need to recover that understanding today.
If you take the order of the heavens and God’s law as two distinct subjects then the psalm is incoherent. Assume that God’s law is written in the stars and it coheres.
(Please note that I am not arguing that the Jews or Christians have some kind of monopoly on God’s law and order, For me the law of God as written in the stars and in creation is primary, a given, and the laws of Moses are one interpretation. But, I am arguing that the laws we study in astrology are a given, and that for Jews or Christians to disown the order of the heavens in self-contradictory and incoherent.)
Here in the Western spiritual tradition, the Pythagorean/Platonic tradition puts a heavy emphasis on studying mathematics, geometry, and astronomy/astrology – which I think you can argue were the same thing then, as the stars and their meaning were interwoven – that these studies are an integral part of any spiritual education and discipline, and the study tends to purify and elevate. The verses of the psalm about the Law of the Lord as purifying the soul, enlightening the heart, making wise the simple and son, are exactly how the Pythagorean/Platonist tradition talks about the study of math, geometry and the other science, including astrology.
The Law of God, the Law of the human heart, the Law of the Stars, the Law of mathematics and geometry, and of philosophy – they are all expressions of one Law the binds us to the heart of the Cosmos.
So, for me as a practicing astrologer, not only is it okay to study astrology if I am Christian, but I would argue that, knowing what I do, I am obligated to study astrology as being part of the study of God’s Law.
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Image of the Chariot Wheel of the Sun from the temple at Konark, by Ananya Pal, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.