Monday, November 25, 2013

The Bible and the Zodiac





"The heavens declare the glory of God; and the skies proclaim his handiwork.
Day after day they utter speech, and night after night they show knowledge.
They have no speech or language, no sound is heard from them.
Yet their sound has gone out through all the earth, and their utterances to the end of the earth. "
~Psalms 19:1-4


The Bible is filled with references to astrology and
 was widely accepted as truth in Biblical times.  Jesus himself made numerous references to astrology. "
 
"There shall be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars." - Jesus Christ, Luke 21:25

 
 
People have always believed in the study of the stars.The influence of the sun on the Earth certainly mades a pattern, so far as life on Earth was concerned - it shaped everything, or at least nourished everything - the sun to give life to it was represented God for eons to ancient peoples.
 
 
With the coming of the Sumerians was probably the oldest known language. About 3000 BC the Sumerians started using abbreviated pictograms by pressing a reed stylus into clay tablets. It is syllabic language which basically developed from simplified pictograms which became abstract. Many signs have multiple word and phonetic meanings so determinatives were used. The number of signs was later reduced to about 600. It is a very complex language.     
Sumerians had stories similar to those in Genesis which tells about the creation of the world and man at times before civilization began.They used a square in practical astronomy to keep track of stars.
 
 
Astrology in the Bible has been theorized by many people. Over the centuries, ancient peoples observed the movements of the celestial bodies, personified them and created stories about them; this could mean the biblical authors might have also personified the stars, by then writing them in the language in the Bible.
Based on the many thousands of years of observation by the ancients, the sun was seen as a symbol of spirit because it rises and sinks. The sun was the “soul of the world”, signifying immortality, as it is continuously resurrected after “dying” or setting.
Astrology dates before written history, and there is evidence of it all around the globe. If the gods lived in heaven, it was natural for priests to look to heaven for signs to what the king had to know to please them. Egypt has star charts that go as far back as 4,200 BCE. Other early forms of astrology came from Babylonia, Assyria and Egypt.


“That black, maddening firmament; that vast cosmic ocean, endlessly deep in every direction, both Heaven and Pandemonium at once; mystical Zodiac, speckled flesh of Tiamat; all that is chaos, infinite and eternal. And yet, it's somehow the bringing to order of this chaos which perhaps has always disturbed me most. The constellations, in their way, almost bring into sharper focus the immensity and insanity of it all - monsters and giants brought to life in all their gigantic monstrosity; Orion and Hercules striding across the sky, limbs reaching for light years, only to be dwarfed by the likes of Draco, Pegasus, or Ursa Major. Then bigger still - Cetus, Eridanus, Ophiuchus, and Hydra, spanning nearly the whole of a hemisphere, sunk below the equator in that weird underworld of obscure southern formations. You try to take them in - the neck cranes, the eyes roll, and the mind boggles until this debilitating sense of inverted vertigo overcomes you...”
― Mark X., Citations: A Brief Anthology