proudfootz

I sort of lean towards the astro-theological origins of the numerology of the bible (why 12 tribes of Israel then twelve disciples), but am rather less than overwhelmed by the notion that 'Jesus is the Sun' sort of stuff.

Horatio Parker

Interesting bit from The Shape of Ancient Thought (or via: amazon.co.uk):
De Santillana and von Dechend wrote a book called Hamlet's Mill. Looks interesting...

Horatio Parker

BTW, Hamlet's Inn appears to be available online.

stephan huller

Why are eggs sold by the dozen? The twelve tribes of Israel yes. The apostles no or at least no evidence. There are some heretical groups which argued that the twelve were multiplied by thirty (something? years of Jesus?) to arrive at the 360 say solar calendar. But here the twelve principally represent the twelve months where Judas was crucified in the twelfth month when the Passion occurred (?). If someone can explain how the Passion was thought to occur in the twelfth month when Passover can only take place in the first be my guest. Never could figure that one out.

stephan huller

The point again is that certain numbers had obvious significance.

4 elements
7 heavens

But the reason there are twelve months in the Bible have to do with the division of the year. The lunar cycle divides the year (approximately) twelve times. The original Hebrew months had no names (so the Pentateuch). The Samaritans to this day refer to each as 'the first month,' 'second' etc.) just like the days of the week. The Roman calendar too September, October, November, December etc. They added to months later at the time of Caesar.

stephan huller

The Hebrews were certainly aware of the parallel between the zodiac and the twelve months. But this has nothing to do with alleged astrotheology and the zodiac. If there was such a thing, it would have to explain why Judas (the 12th) fell away. If someone could figure this out satisfactorily I'd buy in. But I haven't seen it yet. Only if it can explain Judas (and no Acts please). Just the gospel narrative.

Robert Tulip

Hello Toto, thank you for these excellent questions. I hope you don’t mind if I respond at some length as they are quite complex and difficult, but are central to a scientific understanding of Christianity.

The metaphorical use of the zodiac is a topic that touches on magical imagination of a form that stands in poor repute. Already in this page, Horatio Parker has cited links between precession and "imbalance in the mechanisms of the universe" and "a kind of cosmogonic 'original sin'." Such language is typical of the speculative astrological material that infests this topic. While attractive in a poetic way, this sort of commentary typically appears on examination to lack scientific rigour.

Discussion of the zodiac is beset by cultural assumptions. The zodiac is quite simply the annual path of the sun. The zodiac stars mark the course of the year, as basic indicators of the observed structure of time. In agrarian societies, the position of the stars marks the seasons. This means there is a simple link between the seasons and the signs, and that any sidereal claim of astrological signs as an emanation of distant stars fails to understand the seasonal basis of the tropical signs.

I have studied the scientific basis of astrology, notably Gauquelin’s work, and there is no persuasive evidence for any astrological claims. Even if there may be some sub-statistical influence, it is so weak that it has escaped definite detection by science. So I am not approaching this material to defend magical claims in astrology, but rather to attempt a rigorous focus on evidence, in a topic generally assumed to be irrational. It is more about what the ancients thought than whether there is a real dynamic physical basis for astrology.

In Works and Days by Hesiod, the Pleiades, an asterism in Taurus, is used to mark the dates for planting and harvest in the eighth century BC. Hesiod wrote down material that may already have been ancient in oral tradition. Due to precession, caused by the wobble of earth's axis, the Pleiades first rise before dawn one day later every seventy one years. So, by the time of Christ the heliacal rising was about ten days later than when it was documented by Hesiod.

Sir Norman Lockyer, discoverer of helium and founder of the journal Nature, argued in his book The Dawn of Astronomy that ancient Egyptians could have been aware of precession, because they rebuilt their temples on a new axis every few centuries to adjust to changing stellar alignments. Joseph Campbell argues that the Vedic day of Brahma is precessional, because their number 4320 matches to the traditional period of one sixth of a Great Year. Campbell also claims there are precessional motifs encoded in Genesis.

Definite knowledge of precession dates to 130 BC, when the Greek astronomer Hipparchus of Rhodes calculated the speed of precession by comparing old star maps to his own observation. Interestingly, Hipparchus saw a lunar eclipse on 21 March 134 BC with the moon ‘at the feet of the woman’ (Virgo). I suspect this event helped him to see how the stars had shifted.

My own view is that precession was known in its effects much earlier, but was kept as a secret in the oral tradition of the mystery religions. For example Ezekiel’s discussion of ‘wheels within wheels’ and the ‘four living creatures’ have obvious simple cosmic correlates, but would not have been openly discussed within Judaism because of the conflict with the Deuteronomic injunction (Deut 4:17) against star worship.

By the time of Christ, the key point to consider is that cosmic seers were well aware that the position of the sun at the spring equinox was precessing from its traditional location in Aries into the constellation of Pisces. One possibly decisive event, repeating the Hipparchus lunar equinox eclipse, was a Passover ‘blood moon’ on 23 March 4BC, a lunar eclipse, with the moon at the feet of the woman in the sky (Virgo), possibly cited as a wonder in Revelation 12. This eclipse provided a publically visible shift from the religious tradition that Passover occurred when the full moon was in Libra, based on Philo’s statement that Passover, the main festival of the Jewish year, happens when the sun is in Aries. This precession of the Easter/Passover moon observable by the whole ancient world correlates to Paul and John’s idea of the shift of ages from law (Libra) to grace (Virgo) as the basis of the covenant of Christ.

It is hard for moderns to imagine the ancient relation to the sky. With no electricity or television, the stories in the stars had a vivid immediacy. So the observed slow shift of ages, with the equinox moving across the first fish of Pisces in 21 AD, provides an obvious template (in heaven) for the construction of a mythological theory of time (on earth).

Orthodox Christology proposes that Jesus Christ incarnated a hypostatic union between time (the Jesus of history) and eternity (the Christ of faith). Considered against a precessional cosmology, intimated also in Plato’s Timaeus, the stars symbolise the eternal same, while earth and the moving planets symbolise the changing realm of the different.

Plato says the Chi Rho cross (ie the intersection of the circles of the galaxy and the zodiac) is the connection between time and eternity. As philosophy pondered this empirical material, the myth of Christ as the incarnation of the connection between the same and the different provided a coherent narrative. Only at the time of Christ, during the time of Pilate, were the signs and seasons exactly aligned, providing an imagined pure cosmic harmony.

This astronomical material makes sense if you understand it, but as we all know, precession is a very obscure topic, known only to a tiny minority, and understood by even fewer. To make this Archimedian ‘lever of the world’ the basis for an explanation of history is a tall order. That is exactly what I contend happened with the construction of the Jesus Myth. From the astronomical observation that the sun precessed at the spring point from the first sign Aries to the last sign Pisces, we have the basis to elaborate a unifying myth, putting human flesh on the dry bones of observation of heaven.

Perhaps the most vivid precessional story in the Gospels is the miracle of the loaves and fishes. Loaves represent Virgo, whose main star Spica means ‘ear of wheat’. Fishes represent Pisces, the fishes. At the time of Christ, the equinoctial axis precessed from Aries-Libra to Pisces-Virgo. Hence the new cosmic axis was imagined as providing miraculous abundance. Mark 8 is particularly worth reading, with its abundant cosmic numbers –five loaves and two fish are the five planets plus the sun and moon, twelve baskets are the twelve signs or months of the year, 4000 or 5000 men represent the visible stars. And one of my favourite lines – Jesus castigates the disciples at 8:17ff for their failure to understand the real meaning of this miracle, which he bizarrely asserts (8:12) is not a sign from heaven.

Fleshing out the connection between the prominence of the Zodiac as an image or metaphor, the complete absence of any evidence for Jesus in non-gospel sources, and the conclusion that the gospels originated as cosmic drama, an astrotheological reading of the Gospels can make the following claims.
1. The precession of the equinox sun from Aries to Pisces at the time of Christ provides an elegant and parsimonious scientific explanation for the emergence of the Christ Myth, with the Gospels using imagery congruent with Christ as Avatar of the age of Pisces, especially the fish imagery, but also the astrological themes of Pisces as ‘compassionate mystical belief’.
2. This explanation of Christian origins is scientific and logical in nature, helping to explain the available evidence, but requiring relatively advanced knowledge of astronomy and theology.
3. The need for learning makes this material unsuitable in raw form for a mass cult which requires simple emotional messages. This helps explain why Jesus says at Mark 4:11 that everything told to the public is in parable form.
4. Transforming this cosmic vision into the Christian dogma required metaphorical elaboration, with imaginative fictional stories portraying the sun as a man. So, the ‘death’ of the sun at the winter solstice and rebirth at Christmas, and the shift from winter to spring at Easter as the basis for the passion story of death and resurrection, were incorporated into the new syncretic myth of Jesus Christ the Anointed Saviour, the alpha and omega.
5. All of the New Testament can usefully be examined against this cosmic heuristic of precession. The sense that the gospels actually tell an accurate story about the slow passage of time helps to explain the extraordinary emotional and political success of Christianity.

Iskander

12 x 9 + 3 = 111
123 x 9 + 4 = 1111
1234 x 9 + 5 = 11111
12345 x 9 + 6 = 111111
.......................................

12345678 x 9 + 9 = 111111111
123456789 x 9 +10 = 1111111111

The number 12 allows growth while preserving the form

Chili

So what do you do with the scraps Robert? that were greater than the food received by them all!

I think you should scrap the whole zodiac idea and consider that 'insight' is what the feeding of 5000 was about, as if a 'winnowing fan' went trough the mind that separated the wheat from the chaff that would obviously be greater than the seed it contained.

And the sun is not man but is human instead, who must go by the light of common day while in the absense of the celestial light that must be prior to him to enable the transformation of airwaves into the light of common day, which so is an illusion wherein also death is part of the illusion they see.

And so no, there is no "death of the sun," as inside the sanctuary of man a glimmer of hope will remain that holds the promise of better days ahead when the other side of the sun will illuminate the mind of 'the man,' . . . and then the night shall be no more [for him] as the 'woman' will be his light by night and by day.

Be sure to understand that the star of Bethlehem is real, but to be seen only when the light of common day has lost its charm, which then is when dreams no longer excite the human condition and that is the moment in time when the true light that always was prior to him shall be seen.

Zwaarddijk

So, Robert Tulip. When Acharya S says Bengali for Krishna is Christos - which it isn't, how is this not shoddy scholarship? Especially when that kind of crap regularly appears in her books.

(Of course, she says "Also, in Bengali, Krishna is reputedly "Christos," which is the same as the Greek for "Christ" and ...", and I bet the actual claim she makes is true! It is indeed true that Krishan reputedly is "Christos" in Bengali in the theosophist sources she's taking these claims from; but having asked several people who speak Bengali, everyone has agreed this far that Krishna is not Christos in Bengali. Of course, it's goddamn helpful that she doesn't use any standard transliteration scheme either, so even learning the script doesn't give one a direct idea of what Ch should correspond to - is it k /k/? is it kh /kʰ/? is it ch (/tʃʰ/? Is the r /ɽ/ or /r/? Is the o /ô/ or /o/? There's already 12 options there - considering that this happens with nearly every word she claims to exist in a language with a non-Latin script, there is a damn load of work debunking it - and every time this far I've gone to the effort of checking whether a claimed word exists, having checked about twenty candidate renditions, the result has been "no, such a word is not attested". 12 candidate options may not sound much, but multiplied by the amount of such claims she makes - even claims where the language is not identified beyond "a native american language of British Columbia" - there's about two dozen native american languages in that area, ... it is damn frustrating seeing this kind of cheap linguistic claim, which I bet whoever made them up in the first place could be fairly certain that no one would ever care to check whether the claim was accurate. Turns out they were wrong, someone is doing exactly that, and their deception has been exposed!

Just think about it - what's an easier lie to make people in general in the anglophone world believe in? English people are damn credulous when it comes to any linguistic claims, it's like looking things up in dictionaries even is a challenge for the general public. Given the pervasiveness of people taking at face value any claim about languages, Acharya's really struck a gold mine - no one's going to learn Devanagari just to check whether Krishna is Christos in Bengali, no one's going to open an Old Irish dictionary to check whether Budh and Krishna mean things in that language (and "krishna" can't even be a word in Old Irish, as it would have been written crisno - and with the phonotax of Old Irish, sh could not occur before that n unless the word was something like crisneo in the first place. (Proto-Celtic sn -> n, btw, so the word would have been something along the lines of crino anyway). No one's going to look through the dictionaries of twenty British Columbian languages to check whether "sin" is "sun" in that language.

Think about it - is this kind of bullshit claim she repeatedly makes scholarly? Credible? It is not in the least so. It's shoddy scholarship and misleading claims combined with misleading reasoning.