The Secret History of the World

His tyranny was eventually overthrown, and Saturn, if not entirely defeated, was kept in check and confined to his proper sphere. Again, Genesis tells us how this came about: ‘And God said Let there be light, and there was light.’ Light was pushing back the darkness that had been brooding over the waters.

How was this victory achieved? Of course there are two accounts of creation in the Bible. The second, at the start of the Gospel of St John, is in some respects fuller and it can help us to decode Genesis.

But before we can continue to decode the biblical story of the creation, we must deal with a sensitive issue. We have already started to interpret Genesis in terms of the Earth goddess and Saturn. Anyone brought up in one of the great monotheistic religions will naturally feel some resistance to this. Surely this polytheistic belief in the gods of stars and planets is characteristic of more primitive religions like those of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks or Romans?

Conventionally minded Christians may wish to stop reading now.

TODAY’S CHURCH PREACHES AN EXTREME and radical monotheism. This is perhaps partly because of the dominance of a science that leaves little room for God. In science-friendly Christianity God has become an undifferentiated and undetectable immanence in the universe, and spirituality is nothing more than a vague and fuzzy feeling of at-oneness with this immanence.

But Christianity has roots in older religions of the region in which it arose and all of these were naturally polytheistic and astronomical. The beliefs of early Christians reflected this. For them spirituality meant commerce with actual spirits.

Christian churches from the cathedral at Chartres and St Peter’s in Rome to small parish churches all over the world have been built on the sites of ancient holy wells, sacred caves, temples and Mystery schools. Throughout history certain sites like these have been regarded as portals for the spirits, cracks in the normal fabric of the space-time continuum.

The science of astro-archaeology has demonstrated that these portals are aligned with astronomical phenomena, intended to funnel influx from the spirit worlds at propitious times. At Karnak in Egypt at sunrise on the summer solstice a thin ray of sunlight would enter the portals of the temple and travel five hundred yards through courtyards, halls and passageways until it penetrated the darkness of the Holy of Holies.

It may surprise some Christians to learn how far this tradition has continued. All Christian churches are astronomically aligned, normally due east on the saint’s day to which the Church is dedicated. Great cathedrals from Notre Dame in Paris to the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona are covered with astronomical and astrological symbols.

^{Christian chapel of the Seven Sleepers, built over a dolmen neat Plouaret, France.}

^{Beautiful astronomical symbolism on the exterior of Notre-Dame Cathedral, Paris.}

Modern churchmen are often quick to condemn astrology, but none can deny, for example, that the great Christian festivals are all astronomically derived — Easter being the first Sunday following the full moon that falls on or follows the vernal equinox, or that Christmas is the first day after the winter solstice when the rising sun begins to move visibly back in the reverse direction along the horizon.

Even a glance at the biblical texts reveals that today’s radically monotheistic reading of the scriptures is out of step with what the writers of these texts believed. The Bible refers to many disembodied spiritual beings, including the gods of rival tribes, angels, archangels, as well as devils, demons, Satan and Lucifer.

All religions believe that mind came before matter. All understand creation as taking place by a series of emanations, and this series is universally visualized as a hierarchy of spiritual beings, either gods or angels. A hierarchy of angels, archangels and so on has always been a part of Church doctrine, alluded to by St Paul, elucidated by his pupil St Dionysus, codified by St Thomas Aquinas and vividly imagined in art and also in literature by Dante and others.

These doctrines are often overlooked and disregarded by modern Christianity, but what Church leaders have been actively determined to suppress — what has been reserved for esoteric teaching — is that different orders of angels are to be identified with the gods of the stars and planets.

Though it hasn’t filtered down to the wider congregation, modern biblical scholarship acknowledges that the Bible contains many passages that should be understood as referring to astronomical deities. For example, Psalm XIX says: ‘He set a tabernacle for the Sun, Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, His going forth is from the end of heaven, And his circuit unto the ends of it.’ Study of this passage in conjunction with comparative texts from neighbouring cultures reveals that it describes the marriage of the sun to Venus.

^{The Four Cherubim in Ezekiel’s dream in Raphael’s painting.}

^{The combination of the Cherubim — the ‘Tetramorph’ — in Hindu mythology.}

A passage like this might be dismissed as incidental to the main theological thrust of the Bible. You might suspect it of being an interpolation from a foreign culture. But the reality is that after layers of mistranslation and other types of obfuscation have been removed, the most important passages in the Bible can be seen to describe the deities of the stars and planets.

The four Cherubim are among the most powerful symbols in the Bible, appearing in key passages in Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Revelation. Popular in Hebrew and Christian iconography, prominent in Church art and architecture everywhere, they are symbolized by the Ox, the Lion, the Eagle and the Angel. In esoteric teaching these four Cherubim are the great spiritual beings behind four of the twelve constellations that make up the zodiac. The proof of their astronomical identities lies in the imagery associated with them: Ox = Taurus, Lion = Leo, Eagle = Scorpio, and Angel = Aquarius.

This fourfold pattern of symbolism regarding the constellations is repeated in all the world’s great religions. But for the most important and telling example of polytheism in Christianity we must return to the story of the creation as it is told in Genesis and the Gospel of St John.

Genesis 1:26 is usually translated as ‘In the beginning God made heaven and earth’, but in fact any biblical scholar will admit, even if only when pressed, that the word ‘Elohim’ here translated as ‘God’ is plural. The passage properly reads ‘In the beginning the gods made heaven and earth’. This is a rather puzzling anomaly that clergymen outside the esoteric tradition tend to turn a blind eye to, but inside this tradition it is well known that what is being referred to here are astronomical deities

We can discover their identity, as I have suggested, by matching the passage in Genesis with the parallel passage in the Gospel of St John. ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God… All things were made by him… And the light shineth in the darkness and the darkness comprehended it not.’

This parallel is helpful because John did not newly mint the phrase [the Word]. He was referring to a tradition already ancient in his lifetime, and which he evidently expected his readers to understand. Some four hundred years earlier Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher, had written ‘the Logos [i.e. the Word] was before the Earth could be’. The important point here is that according to ancient tradition the Word that shone in the darkness in John’s gospel — and so we now see, the gods who ‘let there be light’ in Genesis — are the seven great spirits who work together as the great spiritual influence emanating from the sun.

^{Thus both Old and New Testaments allude to the role of the Sun god in creation as it was generally understood in the religions of the ancient world. Depiction of Apollo from a Roman sculpture. In the ancient world the Sun god was typically depicted emanating seven rays, as a mark of the seven sun spirits that make up his nature. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead they are called the Seven Spirits of Ra and in ancient Hebrew tradition as the Seven Powers of Light. Exactly the same Sun-god imagery is used to depict Christ in the very earliest Christian art, here in a mosaic of the third century in the Vatican grottes.}