Star-Lore Part 4: A Few Problems Solved, and a Few Conjectures

Part 4:

A Few Problems Solved, and a Few Conjectures

'A dialectical soul-constitution can make nothing of the Gospels, which in the hands of scholars have become just a well-picked carcass.' Rudolph Steiner

 

We have noticed how a number of incidents in this Gospel cease to be problematic when considered in the above fashion.

·     Jesus’s behaviour towards the Syrophoenician Woman is just a dramatic enactment of our own clannishness, made all the more striking because Jesus is doing it.

·    Jesus’s strange journey is a clever way of putting yet another Cancerian signature upon the section.

·   Walking on water is symbolic of the need for human beings to be in control of their emotions.

·      The two feeding stories emphasise the universal availability of God’s saving grace.

        

The zodiacal structure also helps us to solve other conundrums presented by this Gospel.

·    Mark does not begin his Gospel with stories of Jesus’s birth because to do so would upset his scheme. The birth stories in Matthew and Luke concern themes drawn from Virgo, but Mark wants to start with Aries.

·  The story of the Transfiguration of Jesus is not, as some have suggested, a misplaced resurrection narrative. It is exactly where it is supposed to be, in the Leo section of the Gospel, the section dealing with identity.

·  Jesus makes three predictions of his forthcoming Passion because the major themes of the sections in which these occur are intimately connected with the events of Holy Week and some of the constellations which surround the zodiacal sections (Leo, Virgo, and Libra) - The Cup, The Branch, The Cross, The Victim, the Crown - actually reflect the events of Holy Week.

· The Last Supper is a Passover meal, despite there being no mention of a lamb or of bitter herbs. It is a ‘new passover’ (Mk 14:24), a passover from Aries to Pisces. This new passover is celebrated with bread (Virgo) and wine (Pisces). The Fish (of Pisces) would eventually be eaten on Fridays, the day of Venus, the planet ‘exalted’ in Pisces. And, of course, bread and fish are distributed among the Five Thousand and the Four Thousand. Virgo is the sign of the harvest, and so it is the House of Bread (which is what Bethlehem means in Hebrew.)

·  In Mark, Jesus cleanses the Temple towards the end of his career because this event fits perfectly with the Sagittarian nature of the action. Jesus has just ridden into Jerusalem on an unbroken horse, symbolically demonstrating his mastery of the animal passions. He cleanses the Temple after this, suggesting that his actions in the Temple are not the result of the red mist of blind rage, but the justifiable anger required to rectify an obvious wrong. The Fourth Gospel uses the same basic story but for a different purpose, placing it at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry and relating it specifically to the Passover. To ask, ‘Did it happen at the beginning or the end of Jesus’s ministry?’ is to ask a pointless historical question of a deeply symbolic story. It is just a silly pedantic diversion. We must always ask about the function of a particular story in its context before we even consider its historicity or even its provenance.

·  Verses 17-18 of Chapter 16, the ‘longer ending’ of Mark is probably an authentic part of the original because it perfectly reflects the constellation, Ophiuchus, The Serpent Bearer. These two verses belong in Mark 10, probably after verse 45.

Who is Jesus?

Jesus consistently calls himself ‘son of man’ in the Gospel. It simply means ‘human being’. In Psalm 8 we read:

What is man that you are mindful of him,

And the son of man that you keep him in mind?

       This is an example of 'parallelism', a Hebrew literary convention in which consecutive statements say essentially the same thing.  ‘Son of man’ is just another way of saying, ‘man’. In the Book of Ezekiel, the term is used 92 times to mean ‘human being’.

        The name ‘Jesus’ is a Greek version of the Hebrew Joshua; Joshua was the great hero who took the Chosen People into the Promised Land. One can assume, therefore, that it was an extremely common name among the Jews throughout their history.

Jesus is said to be from Nazareth, but nobody knows where Nazareth was. Josephus mentions 45 Galilean cities by name, but Nazareth is not among them. The Talmud mentions 63 Galilean towns by name, but not Nazareth. The name does not appear in the Old Testament. The Abarim website, which investigates the meaning of all the names in the Bible, asks, ‘Why did Jesus become known as Jesus of Nazareth (Jesus of Nowhere Ville, Jesus of Irrelevance) and not as Jesus of Bethlehem or even Jesus of Capernaum?’ Christopher Hitchens, in one of his numerous anti-religious videos, says that the fact that Jesus is said to be from Nazareth proves the historicity of this ‘deluded’ person: ‘Why would a fictional hero be given such an obscure birth-place?’ he asks.

       The answer to Hitchens’s question is simple. Mark’s Gospel wants to present Jesus as an ordinary human being with a common name who comes from nowhere in particular. In this Gospel, he does not appear to have a father so he can boast no impressive lineage.[1] Jesus rejects the prevailing Jewish idea that the Messiah would be a Son of David (Mk 12:35-37). There is no mention of Bethlehem[2] in Mark. Mark’s Jesus is John Smith, Jane Doe, John Doe. He is Nobody and Everybody. He’s from Palookaville. And yet, he is a ‘son of God’ (Mk 15:39); he is ‘the Christ (Mk 8:29).

       This is the real messianic secret: we are all Christs, all Anointed Ones. Even the lowliest among us.[3]

          

Bibliography

Allen, R.H. (1899) Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning  Dover Pub. Inc, New York.

Bailey, A., (1974) The Labours of Hercules: An Astrological Interpretation, Lucis Publishing Company, New York.

Barclay, W. (1966) The Gospels and Acts Volume 1 The First Three Gospels. St. Andrew’s Press, Edinburgh

Carrington, P., (1952) The Primitive Christian Calendar: A Study in the Making of the Marcan Gospel. C.U.P. England.

Carter, C., (1965), Essays on the Foundations of Astrology, Fowler, London

Cumont, F., (1912) Astrology and Religion Among the Greeks and Romans. Kessinger Publishing Company, Montana, U.S.A.

Darlison, B., (2007) The Gospel and the Zodiac: The Secret Truth about Jesus. Duckworth, London

Darlison, B., (2008) The Celestial Journey of the Soul. First published by Dublin Unitarian Church. New edition (2018), Lulu, England.

Darlison, B., (2019) Moses the Matador: Allegorical Astronomy and Astrology in the Book of Exodus, Lulu, England

Fox, M., (1990), The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, Bravo, Ltd

Goldstein, J., (1983), The Experience of Insight, Shambhala, Boston

Manilius, M., (1992) Astronomica, Translated by G.P. Goold, Harvard University Press

Manilius, M.  (none) The Five Books American Fed. of Astrologers, Washington.1697 translation.1953 edition

Mayo, J., (1964), Teach Yourself Astrology, E.U.P., London

Ptolemy, C., The Tetrabiblos, translated by F.E. Robins, Heinemann, London, 1940 edition

Seiss, J., (1882), The Gospel in the Stars, Kregel Publications, Grand Rapids, 1972 edition.

Staal, J.D.W. (1988) The New Patterns in the Sky: Myths and Legends of the Stars, McDonald and Woodward, Blacksburg, Virginia.

Strachan, G., (2005) The Bible’s Hidden Cosmology, Floris Books, Edinburgh

White, G., (2007) Babylonian Star Lore, Solaria Publications, England

Greek Dictionaries: Liddell and Scott; Thayer’s Greek Lexicon

Two indispensable websites: Bible Hub; Abarim

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[1] Joseph is not mentioned in Mark. Jesus is said to be Mary’s son, and ‘the carpenter’ (Mk 6:3). In Matthew he is called ‘the carpenter’s son’ (Mtt 13:55) and in Luke he is called ‘Joseph’s son’ (Lk 4:22). In Luke’s genealogy, Joseph’s father, Jesus’s grandfather, is said to be ‘Heli’ (Ἰωσήφ τοῦ Ἠλὶ ) possibly a contraction of the Greek word ‘hēlios’ meaning ‘Sun’.

[2] Bethlehem was where the prophet Micah said the Messiah would be born (Mic 5:2).

[3] Matthew Fox puts it like this:

‘What good is it to me if I am a king and do not know I am a king?’ asks Meister Eckhart. The name ‘Christ’ means ‘the anointed one’. All of us are anointed ones. We are all royal persons, creative, godly, divine, persons of beauty and of grace.  We are all Cosmic Christs, ‘other Christs’. But what good is this if we do not know it? Everyone is a sun of God as well as a son or daughter of God, but very few believe it or know it. The ones who do Meister Eckhart calls ‘the enlightened ones.’ (Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, page 137).