Speaker 1: All throughout ancient literature, whether it's Greek, Hebrew, wherever, there's
a constant reiteration that the inner life of man and
the exterior appearance or world of the stars and planets
are connected to each other like the hour glass, and
we're kind of at the center. And then there's this
interior life that we have that echoes the movements of
the stars. And all of these ancient sources say, if
you want to order your inner life, your mental, emotional,
even the deepest, most spiritual and intangible parts of yourself,
if you want to order those, you have to be
observing the movements of the heavens, because this interior part
of me is modeled on this exterior part of me.
And as a human being, I'm joining all of these
things together. This is Jonathan.
Speaker 2: Pegel, Welcome to the symbolic world. Hello everyone. This is
Deacon Seraphim Roland, and I'm here with Joshua Sturchill and
we're not in a studio. We're sitting outside under the heavens.
I actually hate sitting inside. If sitting outside is an option,
josh and so very often I just work out here
when the weather's good, you know, just take my laptop
out here and sit behind the you'ld barn up podcasting
and do some work. So Josh is a bookseller, world traveler, poet,
and also you teach at your local Is it an
Orthodox school?
Speaker 1: No? I teach it two small private classical schools in
which tah neither of them are Orthodox. But I'm kind
of infiltrating. Yeah, that's right, that's right, trying to sneak
a little ancient Christianity.
Speaker 2: Right, we're everywhere where, everywhere. So Josh is here today
because we discovered. Josh and I have had a long
friendship now of I'm going to say almost ten years.
But we have to sneak our friendship in at conferences.
So Josh works at eight Day Books, which if you've
been to any kind of symbolic world event or any
kind of you know a lot, almost any big classical
Christian event, touchdown conference, anything like that, you've probably seen
Eighth Day. You probably left them a significant portion of
your hard earned wages as well. If I did my job,
if Josh did this job, which he usually does, I'll
tell a little story about Josh which Josh didn't know
I was going to tell. And that is when I
was when I was first inquiring into Orthodoxy. We visited
eight Day Books for the first time and I went
in there and I said, I'm really interested in Orthodoxy.
I really feel like this is the direction God has
taken our family right now. I would like a book recommendation,
but don't don't give me an intro to orthodoxy about it.
Give me, you know, give me something beyond that. And
you recommended two books to me and uh and which
were not which? Which are not the books I would
recommend to a new inquirer, but it but God must
have given you a word because it was it was
definitely the right right thing for me. And then also
you recommended the chapter of the life of Elder Zosima
from Brothers caramels Off and so very indebted to you
for that. And and you know, but like I said,
we've been friends for a number of years now, but
we have to sort of stretch our friendship out over
you know, running into each other at conferences and things
like that. So so about I want to say, the
last couple of times we've gotten together, we've had some
long chats about cosmology, about the stars and planets, about
the zodiac, about all these things. And this is really
interesting and important to me because in the current moment
that we're in, you know, you can call it re enchantment.
I actually feel like in some ways we've probably moved
beyond that terminology. But in the you know, the thing
that's happening right now, it feels like people are waking up,
or the ferries are coming back, or you know, the
magic's coming back into the world, or maybe you know,
technology is now pushing into boundaries that make us realize
that the magic never really left. But we just thought
for a moment that we could control everything, and now
that we're making things that we can't even control, maybe
that's maybe that's changing our perception of the world. But
in any case, in this current moment, one of the
things that it seems like it's really necessary is to
recover a proper way of relating to the heavens, a
proper way of relating to the rest of the cosmos.
You know, what is sometimes called cosmology, what has also
been called, of course astronomy, astrology, and for the modern period,
those are interchangeable terms and sometimes also mathematics lumped in there.
You know, it's it's weird for a lot of people
to to think about the way that mathematics would would
have been considered a magical art or adjacent to magical arts,
and yet so obviously it is. And if you you
know now that we're getting, you know, getting into the
world of AI and a lot of the big technological
pushes that we're experiencing in a world right now. You know,
those of us who work in the tech industry, you know,
we we know, you know on paper what exactly what
a large large language model is, which is basically it's
just a very very sophisticated statistics engine. And yet it
is able to generate things that are you know that
past the touring test, they're indistinguishable for you know, uh,
you know, for most people, if you interact with a
with a chatbot, you may not even know that you're
interacting with one. So all that to say, how do
we how do we approach this? Because this is of
course astronomy is word astrology, it's one of the seven
Liberal arts. And so if you're gonna have a classical
education worthy of the name, this actually has to be
part of your curriculum. Which is why I'm so interested
in what you're doing, because most classical ed of people
I know are actually just great books people, which is
nothing wrong with that. I'm a great books guy, big time.
But but there, but but nobody really knows between materialism
and then a very you know, strong Christian response to
these things. Nobody really knows how to how to how
to teach this stuff. So that's all by way of introduction.
Maybe you could just open up with talking ab about
your approach and why you think is important, and then
I'm going to try to debunk everything you say with
facts and logic.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, thank you, Yeah, I appreciate that. I like
to get attacked my students students sometimes too. Greeting's friends, cosmographers,
fellow symbolists, this is Joshua from Eighth Day Books, inviting
you to join me and studying a remarkable cosmic coincidence.
Why is it that writers, philosophers, and prophets from many
times and places have all told us that contemplating the
night sky makes our own souls similarly more beautiful and
more ordered. Hebrew and Hindu, Greek and Chinese. They've all
told us that looking up is the same as looking in,
and that we are as much citizens of the sky
as we are of Earth. In February, we will be
looking at Pythagorea and folk tales, biblical wisdom, literature, and
contemporary novelists to ask these questions. It'll be a challenging course,
but not technical. I teach medieval philosophy and Renaissance literature,
and I'm condensing a year's worth of information into a
few wonder filled hours. Please join me for some Plato,
some poetry, and some practical skygazing, all to help us
pursue the art of imitating Heaven. See you very soon.
So I'm very interested in the intersection of cosmology and symbolism,
and the more I think about it, the more I
can't really see that there is a difference. A very
rich symbolic way of thinking is a cosmology. And I
hear Jonathan, I hear a lot of people who read scripture,
or who read any world literature talk about the fact
that the fundamental context that we live in is heaven
and Earth. But we kind of throw that phrase out,
the heaven and Earth, but we don't dive into what
that means, and then we end up with some vague
ideas about a place of clouds and harps and everything
that the soul floats away to when it's gone. But
for the ancient world, for whether you're Greek, Hebrew, Chinese, Egyptian,
when the culture talks about the heavens, it's talking about
the sky, particularly the night sky, and how the night
sky is the face of the eternal it's the face
of the hierarchy of reality. And it's a classroom. So
in trying to put together a curriculum for like class education,
teaching astronomy and thinking through what did the ancient texts
say about it, we end up making almost like a
worldview class. We start out with ancient creation stories, and
ancient creation stories all over the world say there's a
heaven and an earth. They are radically different from each
other in appearance and behavior, and yet they're one reality.
So every culture has had to explain why they're one
thing and yet two things at the same time. And
our culture inherits particularly the Hebrew biblical tradition and the
Greek Pythagorean Platonic tradition, and weaves the two together. And
so we move from ancient cosmology and origin stories in
our class to thinking about what does it mean that
in the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth.
If you read Genesis one, why is it that the
heavens plural and the earth are created first? And then
when God moves to forming the earth, he divides it
into just like the heavens and the earth at the beginning,
and then he names part of earth heaven and part
of it earth, and then the earth part he divides again.
And this fractal idea where you have these repeating patterns
that all rest in each other like Russian dolls, and
this idea of reflections in the lower of the higher
is not just in Genesis, but it's all through the
Old Testament. It's very very present in the Psalms. And
then when you get to the Testament, especially like Matthew,
Matthews the Astronomical Gospel, Matthew's the gospel that uses the
Kingdom of the Heavens exclusively, Matthews the Gospel where we
get the Star that guides the magi. We use the
text of the Lord's Prayer for Matthew, which is an
astronomical prayer. And so in my class we look at
all of these texts and talk about, Okay, well, what
does this mean that we live in a world that
is both heaven and Earth, and that the human being
is the bridge between them. So then setting that aside,
we take a look at the Greek, particularly the philosophical
and Pythagorean tradition, and we spend a lot of time
diving into the Timaeus, which is I think Plato's most
fantastical and wild and interesting dialogue, and this is the
explanation for the world, for the Cosmos, which in which
Plato is taking everything that he knows, from the simplest
and most mundane to the craziest and grandest and most abstract,
and he is telling a story that fits all of
it together. And he says right at the beginning, there's
no way to fit all of reality into a story,
but I'm going to give you a likely story that
is going to show how all of these things fit together.
And it's beautiful and it's the students love it because
there's just there's math, there's morality in there. There's just
crazy stuff about the divine craftsman cutting things up into
pieces and putting them back together, and how he smashes
together the things that don't want to be with the
things that do want to be. And some of the
best discussions we have in class are looking at Playtos
demands so uh, And it's an important text. It was
one of the few ancient Greek texts that came over
in into a Latin translation in the in the early
Middle Ages, and so it was very influential both in
East and West and and has been has been studied
and commented on for years and years. But then then
how do you put these things together? And if you
have the you have a Hebrew tradition, you have a
Greek tradition. Well, what about other traditions in the world.
What about what about the Hindu and Buddhist tradition? What
about ancient China? Could you go into those traditions and
also see heaven and earth right? And would you see
insights common to all of these different places. It wouldn't
just be a merely European Western idea. If it's real,
it should be it should be everywhere. And so we
do take a little bit of time to look at that.
It's a little outside my classroom, but it's my personal
interest is looking into Daoism and reading things like the Upanashads.
Speaker 2: And of course, as soon as you start mentioning some
of these things, some people are going to get really uncomfortable. Yeah,
and there's always been kind of, I think, an ongoing
you could almost say, discussion within Christianity where you have
certain church fathers who talk about the you know, the
logo Suceeed form, who talk about you know, plundering, the
Egyptians being able to be you know, all these different things,
all the way up to Saint Nikolayo Jica, who's the
patriot saint symbolic world, you know, who writes insane poetry
in which he says things you know about some of
these these pre Christian traditions which which I personally would
be uncomfortable of, you know, saying you know, but you
know he said them. And then there's also people who
would just say no, no, no, it's not it's not
in the Bible, or if it's not, you know, in
the Holy Fathers, which is kind of the you know,
different version of the same impulse, then we shouldn't have
anything to do with it. Obviously, there are a lot
of denunciations of not just astrology as you know, like
you know, you know, you're crazy Ant's horoscope or something
like that, but but even denunciations of even studying the
stars as such. So I thought it would be fun
to read a couple of these to you, Like I said,
facts and logic. Here we go. Okay, so this is
from the de decay, my child, do not become a
bird observer, no bird watching, or a mathematician, because from
all these stems idolatry. Now, obviously this is this is
talking about certain divinatory practices which are forbidden to Christians. Right,
So flights of birds, of course, we have speaking of
the heavens. You know, we've got a bunch of wonderful
birds around here on the farm. We have some crows
over that direction, and they're really upset right now because
a hawk was circling right there as you were talking.
But then also the heavens above have been kind of crowded,
you know. Now we have you know, planes going overhead,
and satellites totally confusing, you know, naked eye astronomy and
all these things.
Speaker 1: Here in Dallas Fort Worth area. You can't look up
at the sky and actually see which which stars are
stars because there's so many airplanes.
Speaker 2: Right, that's right, And you're oh, that's a really right.
Oh no, it's just an airplane.
Speaker 1: Oh it's moving off the fast yep to be Mars.
Speaker 2: Yep, right, exactly. It is forbidden for priests to be
magicians or mathematicians or to construct the so called amulets
which are prisons of their souls. So no, it is
an airplane, So no phylactories, no magicians or mathematicians. That's
the thirty six canon of the Council of Play I
to see you. And then, of course the famous third
anathema against the originists from just Sinian. If anyone shall
say that the sun, the moon, the stars are also
reasonable beings and that they have owned become what they
are because they turn towards evil, let him be anaphema.
And a lot of that has to do with the
you know, the origin origins, existence of souls and things
like that. You know, But you can find this kind
of stuff. You can buy very strong language in for instance,
Saint Basil, the Great Saint John Crisystem is very important
saints in our tradition, really denouncing this kind of practice
and really cautioning people against even the study of what
today we consider astronomy. So yea, what do we do
with all of that?
Speaker 1: Well, one thing is I rarely argue. Yeah, So if
somebody just says not interested like that, you're not interested,
no problem. But I would say if you're interested in
knowing more about the world that you live in, and
you want to know what ancient people believe, then studying
ancient cosmology is a good place to begin. I also
think there's a lot there's a lot in the New
Testament about the heavens that suggest that the visible heavens
is revealing to us something of the angelic world, and
that the visible heavens, the Sun, the moon, the stars
are participating in the work of God, like the Sun
and the moon hiding their faces at the crucifixion, or
Jesus clearly saying that when things get crazy on earth
at the end of the world, look up for your
redemption as drawing near. And he talks about signs in
the heavens.
Speaker 2: So I it's it's the very simple fact that Christians
have traditionally preyed towards the rising sun.
Speaker 1: Yes, we orient our churches toward the east that for
that reason. So what do you do if you now
live in a world where the computer screen has taken
the place of heaven and you're looking and you're always
looking down And it used to be if you wanted
to learn geometry, if you wanted to learn something about
order and beauty, you looked up at the night sky
and you were taught perfection. Where Saint Paul, what does
Saint Paul say about that the majesty of God is
known by created things? He's particularly referring to the heavens.
Saint Anathanasius, in on the Incarnation says that there are
a few ways that you can know the perfection of
God and you're not your soul to him, and one
of them is to study the heavens.
Speaker 2: There's a there's a Syriac tradition that the reason that
Abraham did not fall into idolatry and actually knew the
knew the knew the one True God and instead of
the idolatry that his father had fallen into everybody around
him or the counties had followed into, was because he
was he was an astrology actually or an astronomer, you know.
But again those words are basically interchangeable before the modern era.
And but the idea was that he he unlike everybody
else who was using for idolatrous purposes. So for people
don't know the way that astrology worked in the ancient
world is that you would let's say you're planning on,
you know, doing doings, you know, and again most of
the stuff is for kings, you know. But let's say
you're planning on doing something kingly, like an evasion or
something like that. Well, as you do as soon as
one does, well what you do, as you go, and
you make a sacrifice to Marduke, you know. If this
is ancient Babylon, ort you, but if it's a gimerrome,
and then you and then your priests watch the heavens
to see what Jupiter is doing and if the outcome
will be favorable or unfavorable for the enterprise you're undertaking,
you know. And so that's that's the way in which
these ancient divinatory practices were directly related to idolatry, you know.
And obviously I think it should be very clear that
for Christians, we just you know, you can't do these
kinds of things. However, the Bible speaks, you know, very
specifically about the zodiac and the role of the zodiac,
and the role of the sun in the zodiac. So
I thought I would just read this which most people
probably know this passage, and if you don't know it.
If your orthox you you you hear some bits from
it every Thursday in the Orthodox Church. So the heavens
declare the glory of God and the firmament. Show with
his handiwork day and to day uttereth speech a night
and tonight show with knowledge. There is no speed language
where their voice is not heard. Their line is gone
out through all the earth, and their words the ends
of the world or the ends of the cosmos. In
them hath he set a tabernacle for the Sun, which
is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber and
rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race. His
going forth is from the end of heaven and a
circuit unto the ends of it. And there is nothing
hid from the heat thereof. So this line from the
Psalms is obviously about it's about the zodiac, right, those
are the Their sound or their line has gone out
through all the world, and their sayings to the ends
of the cosmos. Right, that's the zodiac. And this idea
of the tabernacle of the Sun, this is referring to
where the sun rises, you know, in the points of
the zodiac throughout the year and what's really interesting the
thing that we've done. You know, in ancient Judaism, there
was a school of thought that kind of tied the
twelve signs of the zodiac to the twelve tribes of Israel,
the twelve Sons of Jacob, you know, or you know,
the actual number of the Sons of Jacob being a
little ambiguous at times, which is okay, because so is
the number actual numbering of the apostles. You know, there's
twelve or thirteen or fourteen or let you know, but
the some number of apostles, but ultimately the twelve, right,
And so you have this, you know, Christ saying I
think it's in Matthew that the apostles are going to
dwell judge the twelve tribes of Israel, right, And so
the Church actually kind of did this overlay and said, okay,
but now the sun is Christ, and now the twelve signs,
you know, their sound has gone out into all the earth.
I mean, that's the procumenon for the feast of the Apostles, right,
So we do it on Thursdays in the Orthodox Church.
Then on you know, any feast of the Apostles, that'll
be the prokeminon verse that we use before the scripture
is read, and because the idea is now it's the
it's the proclamation. It's the apostolic proclamation of the Gospel.
That's the line that's gone forth into all the world,
and that's the thing that is showing us how the
sun rises, where the sunrises, kind of what age we're in,
all those things. So, I do you know, but the
thing is like that, that imagery doesn't work if you
do not have some basic knowledge of astrology to.
Speaker 1: Begin with, like even a mechanical knowledge, just just a
mechanical this is how it works when you look up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, So I've I've just always kind of
really thought that's that's interesting. And uh, I think one
thing that might be kind of an interesting direction to
go with our conversation. Conversation now, then what would be
to say, can we take a concrete example of something
in astronomy, something you know, looking at the heavens, a
concrete example of how enriching your thinking in this way
it could help you appreciate the scriptures more. It could
help you appreciate the church calendar more. Obviously, you know,
even the very you know, data of Easter requires very
sophisticated astrological knowledge, you know, and I am and I
do use the word astrology advisably here. What I mean
by that is, uh, you know, you've got astronomos, which
is the law or the culture of the stars, you know,
how the stars relate to each other.
Speaker 1: I prefer culture.
Speaker 2: Culture, Yes, nomos is culture is much better a transition
of normals. Yeah, So the culture of the stars. And
then you have astor logos, which is the word of
the stars, which is, in other words, this is what
they say tell us about, right, And so you can
you can do that in a wrong way obviously, and
I would say any use of that that the Church
condemns is not what I'm trying to talk about or
advance here. But there is also there is a thing
that the that the the heavens tell us, which is
of course a glory of God. And we just read that,
you know when it says their line has gone out
into all the earth. That's the logos of the stars, right,
that's the astro logos. So one of the things that
the stars tell us is when when is pasca right?
So let me put this to you in a form
of a question, what does spring mean astronomically in any way,
do you want to you take that direction. Yeah, Well,
because I bring this up specifically because I've had conversations
with people, even even Orthodox people who because they're they're
working off still a kind of you know baseline, I think,
sort of evangelical materialism that they you know, they'd say,
you know, that's basically this idea that it's actually the
fact that Christ rose from the dead, you know, at
or around the vernal equinox, right, the fact that Christ
rose from the dead in springtime, you know, you know,
in the you know, with all the which the fact
of declaring something that it is spring is is that's astrology,
that's astronomy, like to say it's spring. Now, what do
we mean by that, Well, we mean the sun is
in a certain position, the stars around the sun are
in a certain position, and that's how we know it's
the equinox. So but anyway, that the idea that the crime,
the idea that Christ did this at this time is
essentially arbitrary and it just happened that it just happened
to work out that way, or or if there is
a meaning there, it's a meaning that we have imposed
upon it. Ourselves. You know, we've just said, oh, look
look at I noticed these two things happened at the
same time. And so I'm going to read a meaning
in but there's no sort of intrinsic meaning, which I
don't I just refuse to accept, I guess. And so anyway,
so what a spring mean?
Speaker 1: Well, this is a beautiful question because you could say
so many different things. But I I think as a
as a way to go back to an ancient context,
there's an idea that Earth is the receptive principle and
Heaven is the initiatory or the active principle. And ancient
people doesn't matter where you were, if you were in
if you were an Aztec, or you were a Pacific islander,
you had a sense that every good thing came to
you from Heaven, whether it was sun or rain, or
warm air, or the growth of crops or the expansion
and contraction of daylight. You had the sense that Earth
received the blessings of Heaven. And springtime, especially thinking about
the equinox, is that moment of perfect harmony between night
and day twelve hours equal of night and day around
March twenty first, and also coinciding with the moment that
Heaven is calling life back out of dormant earth. And
so for the ancient world, the idea of springtime is
not just oh well, we live on a mechanical kind
of ball of rock that you know, it floats around
through empty space and it just happens to get warmer
and cooler at regular intervals. But you know, that's just
kind of it's all according to impersonal laws. For the
ancient world, there's there was a sense of this is
the promise of God renewed, this is the union of
Heaven and Earth being restored to us, or we're being
reminded of it once again.
Speaker 2: And the.
Speaker 1: Coincidence of spring and resurrection would have been very obvious
to ancient Christians. This is the time that resurrection is appropriate.
Speaker 2: And of course Christmas also Christmas at right at the
at the winter solstice, which I'm a very strong believer
that you know, this is you know, this is the
time of year Christ was born. You know, I don't
I don't see any compelling reason to you know, I
know some people try to make arguments around you know,
the Jewish lunar calendar and all these different things, but
I would just say, you know, this is the date
the Church has always has always used, and I don't
see any reason to you know, it's I'm a little
suspicious actually of the debunking impulse, because it seems like
the thing that the reason that people reject the traditional
date of Christmas, for instance, is because it makes too
much sense, and deep down you have this feeling, deep down,
you have this feeling that well, if something's you know,
if something really happened historically, then it's all got to
kind of be random and undifferentiated. But the things don't
happen in the symbolic ways, which I would just say,
based on my own experience of my time on this earth,
is not true. You know, almost everything major that's happened
in my life has happened in the symbolic way. And
you know, yeah, you can say maybe you're reading some
kind of pattern and that's not there, but I don't,
you know, I don't think that's the case. You know,
but it's not a coincidence that, you know, Christ, the
light of the world comes into the world at the
darkest dight, you know, the air well.
Speaker 1: I hear people make the argument, oh, Saturnalia or this
was a pagan festival or something like that. Whether whether
there's historical validity due to that or not is really unimportant,
because if you're going to reject every pagan element in Christianity,
well it's going to be a long project, and you'll
have to start with the crucifixion because crucifixion itself was
a pagan practice. Right, So where do you begin and
where do you end if you're trying to purge the
Church of pagan elements? And Christ says specifically, I am
I am bringing together jew and Gentile to make something new.
And so the early Christians thought of Plato as being
the gentile Moses, and they Saint John begins his Gospel
with the phrase that you know that that Christ is
the logos, which is borrowing from pagan philosophy, if you
want to, if you want to follow that. So if
you if you try to somebody who uses the argument
a Christmas was a pagan holiday, I wonder do you
are you really trying to think through how Christmas came
to be or you're just looking for an excuse to argue.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. So
I'm going to read you a little bit from Saint
John of Damascus.
Speaker 1: Wait, should I prepare myself as this anti?
Speaker 2: I just I just really think it's it's quite fun.
This is from his exact exposition of the Orthodox faith. Okay,
you know, so you know this is as close to
an authoritative document on what what Orthodoxy teaches about various
subjects as you're probably ever likely to find you for
being honest, you know. And it says so, then it
is the Sun that makes the seasons, and through them
the year. It likewise makes the days and nights, the
day when it rises and is above the earth, and
the knights when it sets below the earth, and it
bestows on the other luminaries, both moon and stars, the
power of giving forth light. Further, they say that they're
in the heaven twelve signs made by the stars, and
that these move in an opposite direction to the Sun
and Moon and the other five planets, and that the
seven planets pass across these twelve signs. Further, the Sun
makes a complete month in each sign, and traverses the
twelve signs in the same number of months. These then
are the name of the twelve signs and the respective months,
And then he gives the zodiac and the dates of
the zodiac, beginning with the Ram which receives the sun
in the twenty first of March, which is of course
right at or around the vernal equinox, and also Pasca.
Speaker 1: Right, it's traditional to when you're obviously the zodiac signs
are in a circle, but it's traditional to start with Ares.
Speaker 2: That's right, Yeah, the beginning of the beginning of the year.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And then he goes on to talk about all of this,
and he he the only thing that he says is
wrong about the way that the Greeks before before Christ
understood this is to say that these things control our wills.
And I think that I think that Christianity as such
has always rejected any form of determinism. So we recently,
Jonathan and I just recently finished teaching through Parediso, and
so in our very first lecture of the Parediso class,
I did kind of like a crash course in medieval astronomy,
so people would under you know, understand some of the
astronomical and astrological references in Parediso and throughout the comedy,
and then also just understand what are the things that
what are the things that people in Dante's time believed,
So you can actually see where he's differing from them
and changes that he's making that that are important to
his point. But then also, what are the what are
the what are the the the things that have actually
been you know, because obviously as soon as you mentioned
even the name of a of a constellation, very often
certain Christians get a little itchy about it. Yeah, like
hold on, you know, so what are the things that
church has actually proscribed? And I would say it's divination
and especially divination, divinatory practices associated with idolatry, which is,
you know, most of them in the ancient world. And
then any form of you could call it astral determinism,
the idea that we don't have any kind of free
will that you can just sort of blame, blame your
luck on the stars and so on. Now, what's interesting
is that nowadays people don't do that with stars. But
it's it's not because we're pious or anything like that,
is just because we don't believe there's any connection anymore.
But we do blame all kinds of things on your
Meersbriggs person high or your your aneagram, your aneagram. I
very often, just to be a little provocative, sometimes somebody
will mention the Aneagram in a in a conversation, and
please don't hate me Anyagram people. But I'm always like,
oh yeah, astrology is just aneogram for Christians, you know,
just to just mess with people a little bit, you know.
But you're aneagram or or if you're like a science bro,
or you're even just like a podcast bro, maybe you're
really into Oh well, you know, I've got these certain
chemicals in my brain. I got to get the serotonin
and the cortisol got to go. These things balanced out,
and I'm feeling really bad today, but it's because my
stress level is high because of this, you know. And
so to me, what it seems like is we still
basically believe in these various forms of determinism, and we
even sort ourselves in categories by you know, alpha, beta, sigma,
or you know, Aneagram types. I'm a seven weeing twelve.
I don't know any Agram things or or or you know,
Myers Briggs types or whatever.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: I'm a I'm a cat, you're a dog. You know,
all these different things. So we still have determinism, but
the determinism is like from the ground up instead of
from the heavens down. And I think that's the that's
the real difference in what we're kind of dealing with today.
And the funny thing is that, for instance, Thomas Aquinas,
his argument is that these things are mostly true, like
there is a there is a there is an effect Aquinas,
what are you There is an effect based on the
time of year that you're born, on your personality and
disposition for things. Now, you can chalk that up to
the influences of the stars and planets. You can chalk
that up to you know, in modern terms. You could
come up with some kind of naturalistic way to explain this,
but you could say, yeah, it's the time and circumstances
of your birth will affect the kind of person that
you are to some extent. And he said, because most
of us do not exercise our free wills, you can
basically use these kinds of things. And I would I
would lump like personality tests and all those other things
we just talked about into this. You can use those
Those things are true in the same way that an
actuarial table is true. Because most people are just governed
by their passions. Most people are just governed by their
you know, by their their wants and desires and they don't,
you know, they don't look up, they don't you know,
exercise their their reason, they don't exercise their will. So
because of that, you can say that these things are
true about people in general, but they don't have to be,
you know. I think that I think where I've kind
of come down on the question of free will, and
I think this is really the Christian view of it,
is that everybody has has free will, at least potentially,
but only some people have a will that's really free,
you know. And that's that's what the saints are, you know,
because they're they're in total alignment with God and with
God's desires. So John of Damascus talks about this, and
he says, all right, the stars aren't the causes of
the things that occur, nor the origin of the things
that come to pass. He's talking about human events here,
nor the destruction of those things that perish. They are
rather signs of showers and changes of air. And then
he goes on to say that they're not the causes
of wars, yet they are the signs of them. And
in truth, the quality of the air which is produced
by the sun, wind, stars produces in various ways different
temperaments and habits and dispositions. But the habits are among
the things that we have in our own hands, for
it is reason that rules and directs and changes them.
So it's a very similar idea, like, you're not necessarily
bound by these things, but they are in some way
kind of related to who you are, at least to
begin with. And then he goes on to say no,
it also happens the commets arise, and these are obviously
signs of the death of kings, and so not even
the star which the maje I saw at the birth
of the Friend and Savior of Man, our Lord, who
became flesh for our sake, is of the number of
those that were made in the beginning. And this is
evidently the case, because sometimes its course was from east
to west, sometimes from north to south. At one moment
it was hidden, and at the next it was revealed,
which is quite out of harmony with the order of
nature of stars, which is very much along the signs
of Saint John. Chris system is homily on the star
that the magi followed, which, of course Saint John is
one of the hardest on astrology, or even he would
Saint John would say that the study of the stars
is only for the spiritually mature person because there's some
inherent danger in it because of the astrological pagan context,
which is still very much going on in Europe in
the Christian world at the time that Saint John was around.
But Saint John gives a whole kind of homily on
the star that the magi followed, and is very clear
he has very deep, deep astronomical understanding him self, because
he he basically says, Okay, stars normally behave in this way,
and planets normally behave in this way, and this star
this is something else. And uh, and so that's that's
an interesting question. I'll tell you. Ah, this is getting
a little rambly, I guess. But I'll tell you kind
of a fun tradition that I encountered this year which
I did not know before, which is that, uh, it's
it's another Syriac tradition. I like. I like Syrian stuff.
Speaker 1: We need more of it, way more of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, way more of it. One of the things I'd
like to do with symbolic world in the coming years
is actually, uh, bring into existence some really beautiful editions
of translations of Syriac camnography and poetry and you know,
homeletic verses and things like this. There have been some
really good translations that have been done, you know, obviously,
but so many of them have just terrible, terrible binding,
And I feel like this is a problem I could fix,
you know. But anyway, there's a Syriac tradition that the
star which the mage I followed is the same angel
that grabbed the prophet Hebacic by the hair and brought
him to Daniel in the Book of Daniel. Wow. And
when I read that, it's just like a footnote in something. Actually,
it's referred to in Saint Romanos's Canon on the Nativity,
the famous Kentuckia Kentuckian rather on the Nativity, and so
it was a footnote in that edition and I came
across it, It's like what and also why? And I've
been noodling on it kind of ever since then, And
as you were talking, it just kind of hit me that, well, obviously,
it's because Daniel was an astrologer, and that's the you know,
of course, Daniel's all the you know, apocalyptic visions in
the Book of Daniel are all very astronomy astronomical astrological
in nature, and he is the usually you know, traditionally
considered to be the sort of the source of the
knowledge of the True God, which carries on somehow in
the land in the far eastern lands Babylon, Persia, et cetera,
which is ultimately inherited by the magi who come to
worship Christ. And so that's the connection kind of between
the two, and I just thought that.
Speaker 1: Was really that's a great life, that's a great tradition. Well,
it also speaks to the ancient idea of hierarchy because
in the cosmology, of course, we'll talk about the seven.
Speaker 2: Heavens in this idea of a time to mention, well, yes,
why we're even high are we doing? I'm so bad
at this, you guys, all right, So the whole actually,
I really just wanted to have the conversation with Josh
in general, and then we decided it would be really
great to actually have a whole course on cosmology. So
the whole reason that we're talking about this is for
so Josh can can introduce to introduce you guys to
Josh because Josh and maybe with a little bit of
help from me, in the in the late late January,
he'll be doing a worse for us on cosmology. We're
gonna get really deep down into into all of these things,
you know, and and hopefully dig into the you know,
the objections, dig into the things that make a squeamish,
but also ultimately try to find out like what is
the real what's the real real way for its to
to approach these things, to appropriate them, and to teach
them as part of a Christian education.
Speaker 1: So well, in just the the practical idea of being
able to go out with yourself or your kids or
your friends and do some stargazing at night and know
how to orient yourself to the night sky and where
would the planets be and how fast do they move
and what do we see in their relationship to each other?
Because it's just fun. But for the ancient world this
was more than just fun. It was deeply important. Like
the ancient people knew the sky the way that we
know the highways around our own right cities.
Speaker 2: So I think it would be very difficult to understand
that just the baseline knowledge of the night sky that
your average person person in the ancient world would have
had and taken for granted. I mean when you when
you read denunciations against astrology and things like that, what
they're really addressing is people who have I mean, all
the way back to ancient Babylonians, they made very detailed
omen charts for different kinds of omens that you could
see in the sky, different kinds of omens that you know,
could also happen down here. There's you know, I don't
want to get too much into it, but in an
ancient Babylonian divination, there was idea there's like, there's omens
up here, there's omens here, and there's omens down here,
and each one of them is sort of addressing, you know,
life at a different level. And they made detailed, in
you know, crazily detailed charts for all of this stuff.
And so when those things are condemned, I mean, that's
really what we're talking about. But as far as the
basic knowledge of the sun, the moon, and the stars
and a belief that that they have some kind of
influence in the world, that's not the thing that's that's
usually being condemned. So anyway, that being said, to continue
your point.
Speaker 1: Well, I was gonna say, I'm fascinated about the the
angel you grabed habacic by the hair. If you have this,
if you live in a hierarchical world, then of course
you you have some angels that are closer to us
and some that are further away. You have this idea
of the seven heavens, and so for an angel to
be able to guide the magi and move around, that
angel has to be close enough to also grab somebody
by the hair and yeah, take them one place from others.
Speaker 2: I just sorry, I just it's a cool Uh, it's
just a cool image. And of course I think it's
an Hebactics prophecy that you get this image of the
mountain overshadowed by the forest and like all those things
which are ultimately prophecies of the incarnation. And of course
then and that's also a move from like from Israel
or Jerusalem to Babylon, and then the major are coming
from Babylon back the other way. And so it's yeah,
it's uh, it's really interesting. And I don't know much
more about the tradition other than that that factoid, but
I am determined to dig into it in the following year,
so I'll let you know what I fine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, So one of the one of the things
you also mentioned. You you were talking about people that
dig into Uh, can you all.
Speaker 2: See this beautiful cargos These.
Speaker 1: People will they'll get deeply into astrology or the Myers
Briggs or whatever the latest kind of dietary chemical kind
of thing is. And positively, we all feel disconnected from
the reality around us. And these are all ways, maybe
over simplifications, but they're all ways to try to make
sense or to see the sense because we're because we're
not making sense. The sense is there, but try to
see the pattern and the sense and get a grasp
on the union of the physical and the emotional. But
one of the things that I would love to see
is that spiritually minded people understand astronomy well enough that
if somebody comes and says, well, I'm a Libra, I'm
supposed to have a bad day today, you could say, well,
do you know why this period of time is you know,
is Libra or Aquarius, And to have those with a
more symbolic understanding say, well, it's because we would know
that it's when the sun is in that particular zodiac sign, and.
Speaker 2: We would be aware of I think most of the
people what's going on in the heavens we'd like to
talk about those kinds of things, could not act atually
pick out Libra in the sky, let alone tell you.
You know that it's got something to do with this
thirty degree arc the sun makes across the sky throughout
the year. And you know it's not just any other
constellation that's these in particular because of all those things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, related to this and back to kind of the
broad context is all throughout ancient literature, whether it's Greek, Hebrew, wherever,
there's a constant reiteration that the inner life of man
and the exterior appearance or world of the stars and
planets are connected to each other, like like the hour glass,
and we're kind of at the center, and then there's
this interior life that we have that echoes the movements
of the stars. And all of these ancient sources say,
if you want to order your inner life, your mental, emotional,
even the deepest, most spiritual and intangible parts of yourself,
if you want to order those, you have to be
observing the movements of the heavens, because that because this
interior part of me is modeled on this exterior part
of me, and as a human being, I'm joining all
of these things together.
Speaker 2: And I think that even our understanding of the saints
of the heavenly hierarchy of how we you know, obviously
period Dante's got a sup you know, the Paradiso is
a supreme example of this, where he shows you a
hierarchy that's based on the cosmology of the heavens, and
then you get to the very top and it's like, okay,
well it's maybe not like that at all. Maybe it's
actually like this, you know, and the rose, you know.
But the idea is that that are our very earliest
idea of the saints, when God tells Abraham's descendants will
be as the stars of heaven, right, our various early ideas,
our very earliest ideas of the saints, you know, the
heavenly host from the scriptures basically record fallback on this,
on this, this pastoral imagery. You know, it's the closest
you could say, you know, in the visible world. It's
the closest thing that we have that shows us the
order and the beauty ultimately the invisible world. And and yes,
our fate lies. As early Christian thinkers, even people like Origin,
always insisted that the fate of the of the the
Seed of Abraham, that is Christ and those who are
in Christ. That there our destiny lies above the stars,
which is why. So this is one of the things
that I talked about when I was doing I give it.
I give a pretty long talk on astrology and astrological
imagery in the Bible and in the church others, and
how it's used and what's what's out, what's in all
those things at the Lord of Spirits conference earlier this year.
But one of the things that I talked about is
is this, uh, you know, the four living creatures, you know,
the Cherubim, which or the you know, the four beasts
of the four Living creatures, and Easy and Revelation, which
are uh the four cardinal points of the Zoda. But
what's interesting is that in Christian art they're almost always
uh portrayed flipped. And I think that the the insight
I had into this is that it's because you're looking
at them always from the top down, and so you
have all this astrological imagery in the scriptures. But for instance,
the the stars are under the feet of the Theotokos,
the Virgin, the woman of the Apocalypse, right, you know,
the moon is under her under her feet, whereas normally
in an image of a chronocratoris that the like the
rulers of the time lords, if you will, in a
Hellenic zodiac, they would show usually two figures, one with
a helios for the sun, and then you know, Phoebe
for the moon, and the one would be crowned with
the sun a man, and the other would be crowned
with the moon as a woman. But the image that
you find in the Apocalypse is of the moon under
her feet, and there is I think there is a
sense in which the Church has, you know, in what
our Lord has done in elevating our humanity, which is
also his humanity, you know, above the stars, at the
right hand of the Father, in the seat of power,
ruling and reigning over the cosmos, is to subject all
these things to us. And so there is a kind
of replacement, if you will, like the way that the
twelve apostles replaced the signs of the zodiac. The way
and this is why, so why early Christians did not
celebrate their birthdays, because because there's there well, I mean,
common common people didn't celebrate their birthdays anyway. You celebrate
the emperor's birthday, you know. But but early Christians didn't
celebrate the birthdays. That's where the practice of celebrating a
name day comes from, is to say, ultimately, the most
important thing about you is not that you were born
on you know, in this configuration of the heavens, but
but rather that you know that for me, the the
truth about my life, about who I am, has something
to do with Saint Seraphim Sarov. And it doesn't mean
I'm very much like him, you know, other than the
chronic back pain. But but but hopefully I could be,
and hopefully I could be. But he's the thing that's
that's ruling over my life. That's the like the guiding principality,
you know, ultimately you know through him, you know Christ.
But but but that's the idea of celebrating the name
day instead of the birthday. And you know, modern practice
we celebrate both. And I think it's basically okay. But
but the thing is, none of that actually makes any
sense unless you get the baseline knowledge of the stars,
planets and heavens, which everybody had, not just in medieval times,
not just in ancient times, pretty much until city lights
came along. I mean, I think that probably the two
most destructive things in terms of the modern worldview are
you know, electrical lighting, which of course I make it
take advantage of just like everybody else, you know, to
stay up night working when I should be sleeping, you know.
And then just the fact that you can buy any
food you want any time of the year, which which
has a weird way of totally disconnecting us.
Speaker 1: Well, what you just said was you we've destroyed our
connection to heaven and our connection to Earth, right both,
and so where are we?
Speaker 2: Yeah? And that that comes out of that idea of
the Cairos, that there's a proper time for something, which
is the main thing that you know, observing the stars
was used for in the ancient world, is to determine
the proper time, whether it's the proper time for an
idolatrous ritual, but also when is the proper time to plant.
I mean, that's the whole reason you have to know
when the equinox is coming, is because the world, as
Saint John of Damascus will tell you, Earth lags behind
the heavens by a few weeks. So in most of
northern Europe, where my ancestors are from, for instance, it
is not spring at the vernal equinox. The vernal equinox
tells you spring will be here soon, but it's still
quite cold. And but so you need to know when
the vernal equinox is because you need you need to
know when When should I get ready? When should I
get ready to plant? When should I get ready to
do the other things? The warm air is coming, The
warm air is coming, the sunlight is coming. So what's
the what's the what's the proper, proper and fitting time,
the chirotic moment for spring to begin. You know, that's
what the that's what the equinox is telling you, and
that's what aris is telling you. That's what spring is.
That's what spring means. Life is coming, you know. And
we don't have to know that anymore. It's it's not interesting.
It's it's barely important that the vernal equinox, you know
what day exactly it falls on. You know, it bas
for me, it basically affects you know what, I guess
my heating and cooling bill a little bit, what I
you know, That's that's about it. You know. So the
fact that and and I think that the goal of modernity,
one of the goals of modernity has been to totally
cut us off from cairos. There are no fitting moments
for things, and this started with religion. There's no fitting
day on which you have to worship God. There's no
fitting day on which you have to celebrate his birth
or his resurrection. There's no fitting day on which you
would celebrate, you know, your name, day on which you
would celebrate you know, the patron saint of your village
or your town or your country or something like that.
So it starts with eroding those things, and then it
comes down to, you know, eroding even the very base
kind of earthly things. Just the time of year, the
season harvest. We have the technology to to grow, you know,
blueberries and hot houses. You know, so I can eat,
I can, I can have. I gave a I gave
its TWK this fall called eat your blackberries before michelmiss
or the devil will get them. And it was all
about this basically, this this idea and taking some Anglo
Saxon poetry and ideas about about the calendar at harvest.
Speaker 1: Have you ever been to Chaco Canyon? No any chance?
Speaker 2: Oh you told me about it, though, so tell them
about it.
Speaker 1: Okay. So I lived in New Mexico for a long time.
Love Love the High Desert Chaco Canyon, if you're if
you're not aware, is a Native American site out in
northwestern New Mexico, and for a long time it was
thought to just be an abandoned city. But as archaeologists
have kind of sifted through the area, they have not
found enough evidence that it was populated. And so it's
all of these kind of monumental buildings in a shallow canyon,
and there's evidence of all of these roads that used
to come to it from all different directions, and so
the current theory is that it wasn't a city, that
it was a school, and all of the buildings have
been discovered to have been oriented toward astronomical events on
the horizon. So say in one direction, there are these
two masas far off on the horizon, and one of
the buildings will have a wall angled toward those two masas.
And when you stand there on the vernal equinox, the sun,
which has been slowly traveling, will now come up right
between those two masas. And there are coincidences, not mere coincidences,
but there are coincidences like that all up and down
the canyon that are being discovered, and the idea was,
we have a calendar that hangs on the wall, and
they had a calendar that was living, an architectural, and
three D, and all of these different Native American groups
could send people to go and study and see when
was the proper time to do things. As you're talking
about a proper day to celebrate. But in the hierarchy
of time, you have to have proper days and proper
seasons that are all working together, and the seasons lead
to the days, and the days lead to the seasons.
And that was just the way of being human for
all of history up until just recently.
Speaker 2: Every time we make a piece of technology to do
a certain bit of heavy lifting for us, within a generation,
we usually lose the ability to even do that heavy lifting.
And you know, that's just the way it is. I mean,
it's not it's not even just that humans are lazy.
It's it's that that, well, now, okay, great, now I've
got more important things to do. Why why would I
spend time doing this thing that somebody else has already
done for me? You know, like I have gone on
with things. But I think that if if I were
to approach and I am approaching, and I have kids
that I'm educating, But to approach this question from a
classical education standpoint, like what would be the important thing
to teach the kids? I think what I've kind of
landed on is that we have to build a calendar
from scratch, and we have to learn kind of from
first first principles to reconstruct a calendar, which is going
to take multiple years because the first thing we'll have
to do is actually measure when the solstice happens, which
means we've got to measure the length of each day
for a while to we figure out where we live,
what the ratio between you know, the long stay and
the shortest day of the year is. And once you
have that ratio, which is why like when the Greeks,
you know, when the Greeks, when the ratio was brought
to the Greeks from from Babylon, basically they're like, yeah, ratios, man,
that's the most you know. And nowadays you're like, I
don't why is that even significant? But it's huge, huge,
important discovery. And so once you know that ratio, then
you can figure out the dates that the solstices and
the equinox, and then between that and then looking up
the night sky. That's how you get the months. And
then you realize there's a there's a lunar year, and
there's a solar year, and that those two things have
a ratio together which together gives you, you know, gives
you the months. But then also there are there are days.
There's a lunar day and a Venusian day, and the
ratio of those two things together is how the Babylonians
got the arc second, which is what we still use
as our most basic measurement of time is the second,
and so on and so forth, and and and so
I think that's going to be the project the next
few years at my house is, you know, let's put
together a sun dial, let's start make taking some measurements,
let's start charting, and let's let's build a calendar from scratch.
And the thing is, by the time you do this,
you'd also have a pretty good understanding of mathematics, certainly
as much as you need to kind of move and
operate in the world for non specialized purposes and a whole.
Speaker 1: And not just a knowledge of mathematics, which is true,
but you'd have an appreciation for math as coming out
of and guiding the physical world around you, and not
just some abstract timetables that you have to memorize. I
have a going theory because one of the classes I
teach at the classical school is Euclidean geometry, and I
think Euclid's his text The Elements, is actually an astronomical text.
Speaker 2: He starts out with geometry.
Speaker 1: He starts out with points making lines, and what is
that but a star tracing its path across the sky.
And he ends up with what we call the platonic
solids at the end, which Plato says are the building
blocks of all the physical world around us and the heavens.
Uh So, for the for ancient people, math wasn't just
some boring thing you had to slog through and memorize
how to multiply and divide fractions, but it was actually
seeing like you're talking about ratios and proportions. It was
seeing relationships that guided beauty and guided truth and kept
things that were the same but different. How do you
distinguish between two chairs that look identical? Right? And this
would have been a whole science for the ancient world. Yeah,
related to astronomy.
Speaker 2: So let's talk about the course real quick. For people,
and I feel like we just go all day, but
at some point the babies may want some lunch. Maybe
it'll be I think six weeks, which is very ambitious
on your part.
Speaker 1: That's that's just what they told me.
Speaker 2: Yeahs are usually five to six weeks. But yeah, so
I think I think you are going to start with
an introduction to competing cosmologies, and then in the second class,
we're going to do some stuff from the Hebrew tradition,
from Genesis to Matthew. I'm really interested to hear what
you mean by saying that the Lord's prayer is an
astronomical prayer. I really wanted to ask you that, But
I think we'll say that for the corpse, and then
you'll be looking at the Pythagorean tradition. You'll be talking
about practical naked eye stargazing, and then I think you
and I are going to wrap up with some thoughts
and a deeper discussion about some of the things that
we talked about here. So if you watched this video
and you're really frustrated because we didn't say something we
should have, or you disagree with something we said, come
take the course and chat with us in the Q
and A and let's get into it. So it's going
to be one hundred and fifty dollars for the course,
and that'll be on the Symbolic World Circle community, just
like the rest of our courses. Is there anything else
you want to say about the course or anything salty
that you want to throw out just to hook people in?
Speaker 1: Well year long astronomy course at the at the classical school.
And one thing I really want to do is take
that year long course and condense it. So it's it's
gonna be I think a good balance of very basic
things with UH some leaps into high symbology and UH
and and cosmology that will intrigue people enough to do
a little more research. And I love I love everything
that Symbolic World does.
Speaker 2: I could probably hear the geese and the the geese.
Speaker 1: Are excited about this. I love what Symbolic World does,
and I feel like there are different ways to impro
approach a symbolic worldview, and that astronomy cosmology is one
of the most important. And I'm hoping that groups of
people will listen to this and do stargazing together and
read books together.
Speaker 2: I actually thinking about future Symbolic World events One of
the things that I would like to do would be
like go out and have it event where we go
out with somebody who's really knowledgeable and do some naked
eye astronomy and then also maybe tell some of the
old stories around some of the constellations. All right, well,
the dogs are circling. I think it might also be
time to feed the children lunch. So the course is
called the Art of Imitating Heaven. There is a discount
for pre orders and for patron subscribers. As usual, all
that stuff will be on the website, so please check
it out. Thank you Josh so much for joining us.
Here at Symbolic World South, there's more animals than Symbolic
World North. You know. I think Jonathan has one cat
that he basically tolerates, you know. But here you'll get
swarmed by geese, you'll get slaughered on by Saint Bernard's.
Speaker 1: It's the peaceable kingdom here.
Speaker 2: It's the peaceabul Kingdom here. That's right, that's right, So
all right, before the dog eats the microphone, Thanks everybody,
and God bless you all.
Speaker 3: If you enjoy these videos and podcasts, please go to
the Symbolic World dot com website and see how you
can support what we're doing. There are multiple subscriber tiers
with perks. There are apparel in books to purchase. So
go to the Symbolic World dot com and thank you
for your support.