Freethought Nation

Hello Markoman, thank you for this very good question. Here is my opinion.

Astrotheology starts from the premise that mythical figures are primarily grounded in observation of the cycles of nature. The daily and annual cycles of the sun, moon and stars are the basic phenomena of time which religion seeks to explain through its theory of the cosmos, or cosmology.

The idea of the dying and rising savior, such as Jesus at Easter, matches precisely to the natural fertility cycle of the death of the old year in winter and the birth of the new year in spring. This regular cycle is at the foundation of the symbol.

So, when we look to the situation at the dawn of the Roman Empire, around the time of Christ, we see that various myths had to be combined to formulate a new common story. A fertility myth of a dying and rising savior was needed that would be acceptable to Jews, Greeks, Egyptians and various other cultures. The result was the story of Jesus Christ.

Astrotheology also presents an even bigger and slower story about natural cycles, the precession of the equinox. This is the slow wobble of the axis of the earth, whereby the stars rotate around the seasons every 26,000 years or so. The interesting thing with Jesus is that in precisely 26 AD, the spring equinox moved from the point traditionally touched by the foot of the lamb across into the sign of the fish. This is an objective piece of astronomy, readily visible to ancient astronomers. So, the equinox moved from the first sign, Aries, into the last sign, Pisces, at the time of Jesus Christ, marking the apparent beginning and ending of a Great Year cycle, at the alpha and omega point, the beginning and the end of time, marked by Christianity with the beginning of the calendar at the estimated birth date of Christ. We see here a precise match, echoed through numerous Biblical stories, between the myth of Christ and the observed motion of the cosmos.

A historical Jesus is completely superfluous to explaining this cosmic correlation. Traditionally, Christology tells us that Jesus of History is the same person as the Eternal Christ. Really this makes little sense. We are far more able to understand the theology of the Eternal Christ, the Logos, by reference to the movement of the stars than by claiming a magical union with a man born in Nazareth, a town which did not even exist until the Gospels made it necessary to found it well after the time of Christ.
The story of the historical Jesus is so laden with fictional folk myth that it does not help to understand a scientific account of the cosmic Christ. We have no way of assessing what bits of the story originate from where. It is likely there were many messianic pretenders who contributed in some way to the elaborate tales of the Gospels. And Paul's Epistles give no grounds for belief in Jesus, since nowhere does he make any compelling references to a historical individual, instead focussing on a spiritual idea transmitted by revelation and preaching.
It matters for me because the story of Jesus helps us to frame the structure of time against the precession of the equinox. I find this a valuable way to interpret history, through the hypothesis that the writers of the Gospels embedded an accurate long term cosmic vision. It is possible to interpret contemporary history in apocalyptic terms, with problems of climate, population, war and delusion creating scope for massive risks to humanity. If we want to say the Bible offers anything constructive to address these global problems, our first responsibility is to read the Bible honestly, and not to accept traditional magical delusion. That means exposing its claims to scientific historical evidentiary standards, against which the claim of the historical Jesus appears no more credible than any fictional legend.

It seems paradoxical to many people, but what this all means, in my opinion, is that taking the message of Jesus seriously requires us first to take seriously the probability that he was invented. The mind control exercised on the Christian world by the invention of the historical Jesus has actually deflected people from taking seriously the message of the Gospels, actively preventing Christians from seeing the natural meaning behind the supernatural imagery.

Thanks a lot for your answer Robert, its thought provoking as always! Couple of comments and extra questions arose:



Here is one confucing part. Sun is supposed to die on winter solstice for three days and new year/season/age starts on spring equinox. Now corresponding celebrations occurs opposite. New born child on Christmas and resurrection on passover. How do you explain that?



What kind of evidences we have for them trying to make new myth acceptable? I mean today we still have majority of mentioned sects (think egyptians as muslims) heavily disagreeing with the supposedly created new myth. Or was it that there were only gnostics, that accepted it after all?



Great analogy, from first sign A to last sign O in one jump/generation. But how do you count "precisely 26 AD"? I've seen a lot of variation on that calculation.



I've never double checked that one until now (http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/nazareth.html). What do you think Nazareth signifies then on astrotheology? Mystical interpretation would be to connect it with annointed holy men that didn't cut their hair or anthropological interpretation connects him to the religious sect of nazarenes, maybe sub sect of essenes: http://www.rtforum.org/study/lesson13.html which of cource would assume he was a real person.



This brings me one more question. What is the message of Christ according to astrotheology? Do you think its purely fiction based on otherwise real star constellations and thats all or is there something else that the myth and myth creators tried to tell?

The annual cycle has different starting points. The cycle of light is based on the solstices, when the points of greatest and least light occur. The cycle of life is based on the equinoxes, with the bursting forth of new life occurring at the end of winter and start of spring, and the point of greatest life at the harvest equinox. (There is also a third cycle,the cycle of heat, which is phased exactly one month after the cycle of light, so the coldest day on average in the northern hemisphere is 21 January and the hottest day is 21 July.)

Your statement 'celebrations occur opposite' is not quite right. Easter is a fertility ritual, celebrating the death of the old year (cross) and the birth of the new year (rising). Christmas is also a fertility ritual, celebrating the end of the shortening days and start of lengthening days, except that somehow the death part of Christmas has been forgotten. The two festivals are connected, in that the sun 'dies' for 40 hours when it 'stands still' on the horizon at the solstice before 'rising' at Christmas when it restarts the journey south, just as Jesus 'dies' for forty hours from 3pm on Good Friday to 7am on Easter Sunday.

The New Testament says 'these things are written that you may believe' (John 20:31). We have no external evidence that Jesus Christ was a real flesh and blood man. John presents many mythic stories about Jesus, as the word, the door, the vine, the way, the truth, the life, etc. Acharya has explained how many of these symbols are also found in older Egyptian mythology. The story of Lazarus in particular appears as a way to repackage the older Egyptian myth of Osiris in a way that would be acceptable and popular in the new context. Part of the new context was the response to the extreme barbarity of Rome in its destruction of Jerusalem, with the mass refugee exodus from Israel to Egypt in 70 AD leading to the addition of the Hebrew prophecy of the messiah to the invented Greco-Egyptian religion of Serapis.
My view is that Christ was invented by Gnostics, but the story they wrote was so wildly popular that like the sorceror's apprentice, where the broom comes to life and cannot be controlled, the myth came to life and overwhelmed its inventors, and the simple historical version obliterated the complex cosmic version.

Now you have caught me with a small mistake! In fact the 26 AD dating is not mine, but I got it from a book The Jews Against Rome, which claims Essenes predicted the messiah at that time. I checked this myself to see when precisely the equinox crossed into Pisces. Using SkyGazer 4.5 astronomy software, I zoomed in to find the exact year when the equinox point crossed the line of the first fish of Pisces, and it was 21 AD, as shown on the attached diagram Equinox September 21 AD.gif. The equinox was parallel to the knot star of Pisces much earlier, and crossed the drawing of the mythical figure later, but it crossed the actual line as visible in the sky in 21 AD. This date would have been calculable by ancient seers, and is reflected in the idea of Christ as having his passion during the time of Pilate, recognising that the movement is so slow, just one degree per lifetime.The archaeological work at Nazareth indicates no inhabitation at the time of Jesus. See the work of Rene Sahn at http://www.nazarethmyth.info/. I've read quite a bit of debate about this, including on how the idea of Jesus as an Essene or Nazarene was seen as politically unacceptable, and so Nazareth was invented. If the Nazarene sect, linked to the Therapeuts of Alexandria, was responsible for the invention of Jesus, then displacing this source onto an imaginary place name makes sense.
I think that we can still read the New Testament as a story of fall and redemption, in a way that is compatible with scientific observation, explained through astrotheology. The long time scale of precession produces a cycle of light and dark for our planet with period 21,600 years, seen in the glacial record. The high point of the cycle is when the northern summer solstice is closest to the sun, and the low point is when the northern winter solstice is closest to the sun. The high point was the dawn of the Holocene, 11000 years ago, and the low point was in 1296 AD. This is a scientific fact based on orbital analysis at the basis of climate science. I don't think the ancients were consciously aware of this slow change process, but it is completely plausible that they were unconsciously aware, given that this cycle has been stable since the dawn of life four billion years ago. Just as organisms are unconsciously aware of the change of the seasons each year, it is plausible that religious consciousness has an instinctive intuition of the slow cycles of our planet.

Mythically, the high point is seen as the Golden Age of knowledge of God, while the low point is seen as the Iron Age of ignorance of God. The myth of Jesus Christ can best be explained in my view as the fictional imagination of the presence of the Golden Age in the midst of the Iron Age, with Christ as the avatar of the Age of Pisces. This interpretation explains the linkages across the ancient world from India to Egypt.

My view is that the Gnostic cosmic seers who wrote the Gospels could see that a messianic individual presenting a message of integrity at the time of Christ would suffer crucifixion. So, they presented the story of Jesus as saying what a messiah would have been like had he existed, so that the ethical message of truth and love could be disseminated through the world over the Age of Pisces, in preparation for the Aquarian Age when it would finally become comprehensible.