Religion

The astrological roots of Rosh Hashanah

art by Karin Foreman

The correlations between astrology and religion has always fascinated me. Religion denigrates astrology as fortunetelling, but also utilizes it to date all important holidays.  A portion of this article was posted back in the mists of the history of this blog, but it is still fascinating to me.  Back in 2010 an article from Gahl Eden Sasson in Huffpost offered this fascinating connection between Rosh Hashanah and astrology:

According to rabbinical lore, Adam and  Eve, our primal parents, were created on Rosh Hashanah, which traditionally falls on the New Moon of the seventh month (see quote above). A closer look at the biblical text reveals that God did not only create Adam and Eve on the sixth day, but also gave birth to the concept of relationships. Friday, Veneris in Latin, named after Venus, is the day Adam and Eve were born. The fact we were created under the influence of a benevolent planet is a reassurance that we cannot be that bad after all.

Since the biblical and zodiac year begins in Aries, then Libra, the seventh sign is the month mentioned in Leviticus. Libra, ruled by Venus, is the sign of relationship, marriage and contracts. The fact that our common ancestors, Adam and Eve, were created on a New Moon in Libra is a great sign for all of our relationships. It means that embedded in our mythological “DNA” is the potential of having harmonious and balanced relationships. To this affect, at least according to Astrology and the Bible, we are innately good.

On Rosh Hashanah it is a custom to blow the Shofar, the ram’s horn. This ancient ritual is multi-layered and carries a great deal of symbolism. […]

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By |2021-09-03T07:58:31-04:00September 3rd, 2021|Holidays, Religion|6 Comments

The nature of Truth in the doorway between Pisces and Aquarius

jesus

This article was originally posted in 2013 and is reposted today in honor of Jupiter entering Pisces.  As we transition into the Aquarian Age, we are leaving the traits of Pisces behind.  We usually think of Pisces as being Neptune-ruled since Neptune is the modern ruler of Pisces and explains the dreamy and imaginative nature of Pisces.  Neptune is  associated with magic and spirituality, but also with delusion and the negation of the Self – all characteristics of the 2000 year domination of the world by Christianity.  Note the astrological cardinal cross that creates the halo around the head in this image.   

I am reading Reza Aslan’s book Zealot, the Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.  I have been waiting for this book for years – it is a beautifully written  history of the times in which the historical Jesus was born and spent his years as one of many Jews fighting the oppression of the Roman overlords.

One interesting point made in this book, which I have never heard before, is the distinction between “facts” and “truths.”  Aslan says:

How we define history, in the modern world, as a collection of observable and verifiable facts, is wholly a product of the modern age. That definition of history is a couple of hundred years old. It would make no sense at all to the gospel writers or frankly to the ancient mind, for whom history was not about uncovering facts but about revealing truths. This is, admittedly, a very difficult concept for modern people, not just Christians, but just modern people to understand that what they call history didn’t exist 300 years ago and so when I question some of the “historical claims of the […]

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By |2022-04-15T09:17:58-04:00May 14th, 2021|Favorite posts, Religion|4 Comments

Was Jesus a family man?

Jesus and the Children

This article has been updated from an earlier post.  A few years ago Titanic director James Cameron produced a documentary connecting ossuaries found in a tomb in Talpiot Israel to the family of Jesus of Nazareth.  The eruption into mass consciousness of questions about the life of Jesus corresponded nicely with Pluto’s final travel through Sagittarius before entering Capricorn in 2008. Pluto creates chaos and upheaval in whatever sign it moves through, and one of the areas ruled over by Sagittarius is the concept of shared ideologies and belief systems that constitute religion.

Pluto also reveals secrets, and one of the biggest mysteries in our world today concerns what actually happened in Jerusalem 2000 years ago. Scriptures have been retranslated and edited over the last 2000 years in order to fit the theological fashion of the day, and there is little actual contemporaneous history to support the stories that we find in the New Testament.

Long before the book The DaVinci Code, my reading had convinced me that Jesus and Mary of Magdala would have had to be married. Jesus was a nice Jewish boy and a rabbi, and as a Jewish boy with a Jewish mother he would have been under enormous pressure to be married. The whole concept of celibacy among priests did not become a rule until the early fourth century CE; previous to that time the first pope, St. Peter, is known to have been a married man and subsequent popes and bishops were married, many with children. This became a problem as the early church began amassing property since children become heirs and inherited the priestly property. It was only after the early fourth century that […]

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By |2019-11-10T19:26:51-05:00September 5th, 2019|Religion|7 Comments

How the Christ surpassed Yahweh at the dawn of the Piscean age

YahwehImage credit: “God the Father” by Cima de Conegliano.  Because the earth orbits at a slight tilt, and the tilt of the orbit changes over time, the celestial equator is always moving and the vernal equinox is always moving along the ecliptic, the apparent path of the Sun around the Earth from our perspective.  We call this the “Precession of the Equinoxes,” and that is what we mean when we talk about the Age of Aquarius, the Age of Pisces, etc.

There is no accepted timeline for the transition from one Great Age to another.  The Great Year is approximately 26,000 years and each Age spans approximately 2160 years. However, because cultural changes mark the shift between ages it becomes somewhat easier to define these transitions.

Yahweh, the god of the ancient Hebrews, was a warrior god- Moses says so right in Exodus in the Bible:  “The Lord is a warrior/man of war.”  In Isaiah 42:13 we find this exclamation: “The LORD will march out like a champion, like a warrior he will stir up his zeal; with a shout he will raise the battle cry and will triumph over his enemies.”

There is a great deal of confusion in the Bible over the name of God – both El and YHWH (Yahweh) are used interchangeably.  However, archaeological evidence suggests that El was a senior god in Canaan: a beneficent god who presided over creation and ruled over the more junior warrior gods such as Baal and Astarte.  The use of the plural for god in the Bible – “Elohim” – could refer to the family of Canaanite gods that included not only Baal and Astarte but also El’s consort Athirat.  There is some evidence that El and […]

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By |2019-11-10T19:26:53-05:00December 25th, 2015|Religion|12 Comments

The rise of militant atheism under Saturn in Sagittarius

militant atheismFrom an astrological perspective, religion is a shared belief system and symbolized by Jupiter and Sagittarius.  A belief system is a collection of ideas that help us to find meaning in our lives.  When we find a group that shares our belief system, this becomes a religion.  From an astrological viewpoint, religion is a collection of small “t” truths – a truth that we create for ourselves.

From this perspective, atheism is just as much a shared belief system as any of the other religions that give meaning to the lives of humans – and the attempt to impose an atheistic world view on other humans is just as dangerous as the attempt to impose any other world view.  The idea that militant atheists never killed anyone has just been shattered.

The town of Chapel Hill where I live was the scene of the execution-style murder of three Islamic students by a white neighbor who called himself an “anti-theist.”  His Facebook page is full of pro-gun statements and rantings against all religions, including Christianity.  It is still unclear whether the victims were targeted because they were Muslim.

Sagittarius is associated with religion and theology along with long distance travel, foreign languages and culture, media – the expansion of the human experience through ideas and experiences.  The passage of Pluto through Sagittarius between 1995 and 2008 oversaw the spread of globalization and the transformation (Pluto) of all kinds of media with the rise of the Internet.  This was also the period that marked the rise of religious (Sagittarius) extremism (Pluto) and militancy – violence BY religion.

Now that Saturn is in Sagittarius the Celestial Taskmaster is challenging our ideas of religion and foreign cultures, and with it the rise of militant atheism – […]

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By |2018-08-04T08:52:58-04:00February 17th, 2015|Religion|2 Comments