If an individual entity can exist through time, then by implication it can cease to exist too. This is why Saturn is the god of destruction. Saturn eats his own children. He is sometimes portrayed as Old Father Time and sometimes as Death himself. Because of Saturn’s influence everything that lives contains the seeds of its own end, and it is because of Saturn that what feeds us also destroys us. Death is in everything in the cosmos — woven into the bright blue sky, a blade of grass, the pulse of a baby’s fontanel, the light in a lover’s eye. Because of Saturn our lives are hard. Because of Saturn every sword is double-edged and every crown a crown of thorns. If we sometimes feel our lives almost too hard to bear, if we bruise and if we do cry out to the stars in despair, it is because Saturn pushes us to our limits.
And it could have been worse. The potential for life in the cosmos could have been extinguished even before birth. The cosmos would have remained through all eternity a place of the endless sifting of dead matter.
In the course of this history we will see that Saturn has returned at different times and in different guises to pursue his aim of mummifying humanity and squeezing the life out of it. At the end of this history we will also see that his most decisive intervention, an event long predicted by the secret societies, is expected to take place shortly.
In Genesis the Evil One’s attempt to nullify God’s plans at birth, this first act of rebellion of a Thought-Being against the Mind that emanated it, is dealt with in just one short phrase, but, as we have already suggested, the Bible is not here dealing with a scale of time we would recognize today. Saturn’s tyranny over Mother Earth, his murderous attempt to squeeze all potential for life out of the cosmos, continued over vast periods immeasurable to the human mind.
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.
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.
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.