Astrolatry, Astrotheology and Astral Religion

"The horses of fire and the chariot of fire, which carried Elijah in a whirlwind, are very probably the horses and chariot of the Sun. In the same way, when Mithra's mission on earth was fulfilled, he had been conveyed in the chariot of Helios to the celestial spheres [. . . .] The Emperors in particular were commonly reputed to become companions of the Sun-god after death, as they had been his proteges in life, and to be conducted by him in his chariot up to the summit of the eternal vaults."

The star larvae hypothesis endorses this form of the motif and so commends Christianity for its atavism, for staying true to the plan by instituting a dogma in which bodily ascension (Jesus) and assumption (Mary) remain central. In outer space, whatever is vulgar in the physical form is transformed into the sublime. But the physical body has to get there first.

The apostle Paul invoked an aeronautical dimension in his description of the return of Christ. in his first letter to the Thessalonians, he wrote,

"For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel's call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord."

The Manichaean branch of Gnosticism held tight to the linkage of cosmos and spirit, of solar and divine. Joan O'Grady, in Early Christian Heresies,summarizes the Manichaean scheme.

"According to the Manichaean myth, Satan invaded the Kingdom of Light. To fight against him, God created Primal Man, who was, for the Manichees, an Archetype—an original ideal pattern, not the first human being. Satan overcame his opponent and, although Primal Man was rescued by God, Satan robbed him of some particles of light and mingled these with five elements of the dark world. Out of these mixed elements God formed the visible world in order to deliver the imprisoned light. Primal Man and his helping spirits dwell in the Sun, and the twelve constellations collect any particles of light set free and pour them into the Sun. Here they are purified and can attain to God."

Persisting through Chaldean astrology and its influence on Hellenic thought and into medieval Christian theology and on into the revival of Hellenism during the Renaissance, the astral motif retained a prominent place in Western religious sensibility. The divine status of stars crossed effortlessly from the Pagan to the Christian world. It passed from Patristic Fathers, such as Origen, through the retention of Aristotelian cosmology in the medieval world, to Renaissance philosophers, such as Ficino, Bruno and the later angelologists, such as Dee and Fludd. It was fundamental to Hermetic magic as well and has a discernable counterpart in Jewish Kabbalism.

Astrotheology in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment

During the Renaissance, the revival of Hermetic-Hellenic philosophies brought with it a marked stellar influence, as Frances Yates describes in Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition,

"Egypto-Hermetic sun-teachings undoubtedly influenced [Marsilio] Ficino's sun-magic, and they connected philosophically with Plato on the sun as the intelligible splendour, or chief image of the ideas, and religiously with the Pseudo-Dyonysian light symbolism. All these influences can be perceived, working together, in Ficino's De sole and De lumine. As we have tried to to outline in previous chapters, the concentration on the sun in the astral magic, led upwards through the Christian Neoplatonism of Pseudo-Dyonysius to the supreme Lux Dei, and in this way the sun very nearly is for Ficino what it is for Hermes or for the Emperor Julian, the 'second god', or the visible god in the Neoplatonic series."

Later, during the Enlightenment, American revolutionary Thomas Paine adamantly defended his belief in the astrological origins of Christianity. In his Essay on the Origins of Freemasonry he explains,

"The Christian religion and Masonry have one and the same common origin: both are derived from the worship of the sun. The difference between their origin is, that the Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun, in which they put a man whom they call Christ, in the place of the sun, and pay him the same adoration which was originally paid to the sun, as I have shown in the chapter on the origin of the Christian religion.

In Masonry many of the ceremonies of the Druids are preserved in their original state, at least without any parody. With them the sun is still the sun; and his image in the form of the sun is the great emblematical ornament of Masonic lodges and Masonic dresses. It is the central figure on their aprons, and they wear it also pendant on the breast of their lodges, and in their processions. It has the figure of a man, as at the head of the sun, as Christ is always represented."

In a letter to his friend, Andrew Dean, Paine elaborates,

"Everything told of Christ has reference to the sun. His reported resurrection is at sunrise, and that on the first day of the week; that is, on the day anciently dedicated to the sun, and from thence called Sunday - in Latin Dies Solis, the day of the sun; and the next day, Monday, is Moon-day. But there is no room in a letter to explain these things."

Web sites such as Zeitgeist, The Pharmacratic Inquisition, and Truth Be Known present in detail the case for Christianity's astronomical/astrological origins. The coronal treatments of Jesus, Mary, and the saints in Catholic art , among many other symbols, preserve the astral connection. Jesus' transfiguration is an overt premonition of stardom. But Jesus is not alone. Lesser celebrities also report the experience. From the biography of a medieval Christian mystic, Mircea Eliade cites a dramatic account of a transfiguration experience:

"As this light continued to shine with ever increasing brightness and became like a midday sun shining in splendour above him, he saw that he was himself at the centre of the light and that the sweetness invading his whole body from so near filled him with joy and tears. He saw the light unbelievably uniting with his flesh and gradually pervading his limbs. He saw this light finally invading his body, his heart and his bowels, the whole light invading his whole body and turning him completely to fire and light."

In The Two and the One, Eliade collects this and similar accounts of what he calls "the mystical light." The Buddhists' "clear white light of the void" and similar metaphors evince the universality of the stellar archetype. Eliade documents varieties of mystical experience that include not only the mystical light, but also "mystical flight," the sensation of ascendance, along with instances of precognition, an intuitive sensing of future events. This complex of motifs argues for a stellar core inside religious sensibility.

Evidence of these themes throughout the world's religious traditions points to a well-developed complex in the human psyche that revolves around stellar attributes and anticipates human participation in the stellar life cycle. We star-struck, starry-eyed humans are driven toward the heavens by our stellar nature. "Every man and every woman is a star," declared the notorious English occultist Aleister Crowley. Through his hermetic investigations he had distilled the collective calling of humankind. Today, illuminated entities, enlightened beings, and ascended masters populate the firmaments and astral planes "New Age" cults as reliably as they did the ancient occult cosmologies.

The halos, auras, nimbuses, and coronas that crown the assumptive and ascending heads of Catholic, Hermetic, and Alchemical sacred art testify to the archetypal appeal of the solar. In today's pop culture, the revered, adored, and glorified luminaries are called by their fans, "stars." The star larvae hypothesis suggests that even such an innocuous convention as this evinces a nascent intuition of the evolutionary program. Stardom resides in terrestrial human beings and expresses itself psychologically as the illumination or enlightenment of the individual and collectively as the cult(ure) of the sun and of a future Heaven beyond Earth to be attained by ascension. But the star larvae hypothesis is more than an exposition of archetypal psychology. It proposes that the archetype of the astral divinity is a blueprint for historical events, a premonition of future evolution. Astrolatry, astrotheology and astral religion institutionalize the evolutionary program. Humankind's religious sensibility needs to shift its urging to that of engineering an extraterrestrial environment for a transfigured humanity.

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The Empyrean, by Gustav Doré, from The Divine Comedy

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