431 - Joshua Sturgill & Dcn Seraphim Rohlin - The Art of Imitating Heaven: Structure and Meaning in Ancient Cosmology

all throughout ancient literature, whether it's Greek, Hebrew, whatever, 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 hourglass, 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 Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. Hello, everyone. This is Deacon Seraphim Rowland, and I'm here with Joshua Sturgehill, and we're not in a studio. We're sitting outside under the heavens. I actually hate sitting inside if sitting outside as an option, Josh, and so very often I just work out here with the weather's good. We'll just take my laptop out here and sit behind the yield burner 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? - No, I teach it to small private classical schools in which you talk, 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 is right. - We're everywhere, we're everywhere. So, Josh is here today because we discovered, Josh and I have had a long friendship now of, I wanna say almost 10 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 touch on conference, anything like that. You probably see eight day, you've probably left them a significant portion of your hard earned wages as well. - If I did my job. - If Josh did his job, which he usually does. I'll tell a little story about Josh, which Josh didn't know I was gonna 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 got us taking our family right now. I would like a book recommendation, but don't give me an intro to orthodoxy book. Give me, you know, give me something, be on that. And you recommended two books to me. And which are not the books I would recommend to a new choir, but God must have given you a word because it was definitely the right thing for me. And then also you recommended the chat to the life of elders of SEMA from brothers Karamazov. And so very indebted to you for that. 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 to each other at conferences and things like that. 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 reenchantment. I actually feel like the some ways we'd probably move beyond that terminology. But in the, you know, the thing that's happening right now it feels like people are waking up or the fairies are coming back. Or, you know, the magic's coming back into the world. Or maybe the, 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 weird for a lot of people to think about the way that mathematics would have been considered a magical art or adjacent to magical arts. And yet, just sort of 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 the world right now, you know, those of us who work in the tech industry, you know, we know, you know, on paper, what exactly what a 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 pass the touring test. They're indistinguishable for, you know, you know, for most people, if you interact with the chatbot, you may not even know the tourner interacting with one. So all that to say, how do we, how do we approach this? It because this is, of course, astronomy is, or astrology is one of the seven liberal arts. And so if you're going to 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 and people I know are actually just great books people, which is nothing wrong with that. I'm a great books guy at big time, but there, but nobody really knows between materialism and then a very strong Christian response to these things. Nobody really knows how to teach this stuff. So that's all by way of introduction. Maybe you could just open up with talking about your approach and why you think it's important. And then I'm going to try to debunk everything you say with facts and logic. - Alright, yeah. - Thank you. - Yeah. - Appreciate that. I like to get attacked. My students do that sometimes too. Greetings, friends. Cosmographers, fellow symbolists. This is Joshua from eighth day books, inviting you to join me in studying a remarkable cosmic coincidence. Why is it that writers, philosophers, and prophets from many times in 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 Pythagorean 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 wonderful 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. (clears throat) 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 of 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, that 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 classical education, teaching astronomy and thinking through what did the ancient texts say about it, we end up making almost like a world view 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 New Testament, especially like Matthew, Matthew is the astronomical gospel. Matthew is the gospel that uses the kingdom of the heavens. Exclusively, Matthew is the gospel where we get the star that guides the magi. We use the text of the Lord's Prayer from 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 pedagorean tradition. And we spend a lot of time diving into the Tameas, which is I think Plato's most fantastical and wild and interesting dialogue. - Yeah, for sure. - 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 gonna give you a likely story that is gonna 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 craftsmen 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 Plato's Tameas. So, and it's an important text. It was one of the few ancient Greek texts that came over into a Latin translation in the early Middle Ages. And so it was very influential both in East and West. And has been studied and commented on for years and years. But then how do you put these things together? And if you have a Hebrew tradition, you have a Greek tradition, well, what about other traditions in the world? What about the Hindu and Buddhist tradition? What about ancient China? Could you go into those traditions and also see heaven and earth? 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 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 Taoism and reading things like the Upanishads. And of course, as soon as you start mentioning some of these things, some people 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 logos and see it form, who talk about, you know, plundering the Egyptians, being the bee, you know, all these different things. All the way up to St. Nikolai of Gita, who's the Pedro Saint of the symbolic world, you know, who writes insane poetry in which he says things, you know, about some of these, these pre-Christian traditions, 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 in the Bible, or if it's not, you know, in the Holy Fathers, which is kind of the, you know, a 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're crazy ant's horoscope or something like that, 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. - Okay, good. - Like I said, facts and logic, here we go. Okay, so, this is from the dedicate. My child do not become a bird observer, a bird watching, or a mathematician, because from all these stems idolatry. Now, obviously, 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, 'cause a hawk was circling right there as we were talking. And, 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. - Here in Dallas, Fort Worth area, you can't look up at the sky and actually see which stars are stars because there's so many airplanes. - That's right, that's right. Oh, that's a really, right? Oh, no, just airplane. - Oh, it's moving off the fast to be Mars. - Yeah, 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 was an airplane. So no phylacteries, no magicians or mathematicians. That's the 36th canon of the council, we've got to see ya. And then, of course, the famous third in Athens against the originists from Justinian. If anyone shall say that the sun, the moon, the stars are also reasonable beings and that they have only become what they are because they turn towards evil. Let him be anathema. And a lot of that has to do with the origin, origins, preexistence 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 of Great, Saint John. Chris is doing very important saints in our tradition. Really denouncing this kind of practice and really cautioning people against even the study of what today we would consider astronomy. So, what do we do with all of that? Well, one thing is, I rarely argue. Yeah. So if somebody just says, not interested in like that, you're not interested. No problem. 100%. 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 believed, 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 suggests 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 is drawing near and he talks about signs in the heavens. So it's the very simple fact that Christians have traditionally prayed towards the rising sun. Yes, we orient our churches toward the east 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. What do St. Paul say about the majesty of God is known by created things. He's particularly referring to the heavens. St. Athanasius, 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. There's a, there's a Syriac tradition that the reason that Abraham did not fall into idolatry and actually knew the, knew the one true God. And instead of the idolatry that his father had fallen into, everybody around him in order of the counties to fall it into was because he was, he was an astrologer, 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 if for people who 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, doing, 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 invasion or something like that. - Well, as you do, as one does, well, what you do is you go and you make a sacrifice to Marduk, you know, if this is ancient Babylon or Jupiter, if it's ancient Rome, 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 who just, you know, 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 you're Orthodox, 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 showeth his handiwork, day and today, uttereth speech and night and tonight showeth knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their line has 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 rejoiced it 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, this line from Psalms is obviously about, it's about the zodiac, right? Those are the, those are the, their sound or their line has gone out through all the, all the earth world and their sayings, the ends of the cosmos. Right, that's the zodiac. And this, 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 12 signs of the zodiac to the 12 tribes of Israel, the 12 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 12 or 13 or 14, or, you know, but the some number of apostles, but ultimately there's 12, 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 12 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, the 12 signs, you know, their sound has gone out into all the earth. I mean, that's the Prochumon for the feast of, of the apostles, right? So we do it on Thursdays and the orthodox church and on, you know, any feast of the apostles that'll be the Prochumon 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 sun rises, 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 begin with, like, even a mechanical knowledge. Yeah, just a mechanical knowledge. This is how it works when you look up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I've, I've just always kind of, really thought that's, that's interesting. And I think one thing that might be, kind of an interesting direction to go with a conversation now, then would, would be to say, can we take a concrete example of something in astronomy, something, you know, looking up to heaven's, a concrete example of how, enriching your thinking in this way could help you appreciate the scriptures more. It could help you appreciate the church calendar more. Obviously, you know, even the very, you know, date of Easter requires very sophisticated and astrological knowledge, you know. And, and I do use the word astrology advisedly here. What I mean by that is, you know, you've got astronomus, which is the law or the culture of the stars, you know, how the stars relate to each other. - I prefer culture. - Culture, yes. No more says, it culture is much better, a translation of no more. Yeah, so the culture of the stars, and then you have astralogos, which is the word of the stars, which is the, 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's also, there is a thing that the heavens tell us, which is of course a glory of God. 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 astralogos. So, one of the things that the stars tell us is, when is Pascha, right? So, let me put this to you in a form of question. What does spring mean? - Astronomically. - In any way, you want to take that direction, yeah. - Well, let's-- - Because I bring this up specifically because I've had conversations with people, even Orthodox people, who, because 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 spring time, you know, in the, you know, with all the, which the fact of declaring something that it is spring 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 the, anyway, the idea that, the idea that Christ did this at this time is essentially arbitrary. - It just happened, it just happened to work out that way, or if there is a meaning there, it's a, it's a meaning that we have imposed upon it ourselves. You know, we've just said, oh, look, look, I noticed these two things happen at the same time, and so I'm going to read a meaning in, but there's no sort of intrinsic meaning. - Yeah. - Which I don't, I just refuse to accept, I guess. And so, anyway, so what does spring mean? - Well, this is a beautiful question, because you could say so many different things, but I, I think, 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, it 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 this sense that Earth received the blessings of heaven. And spring time, especially thinking about the equinox, is that moment of perfect harmony between night and day, 12 hours equal a night and day around March 21st, 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 spring time 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 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. And the coincidence of spring and resurrection would have been very obvious to ancient Christians. This is the time that resurrection is appropriate. And of course, also, Christmas at, right at the winter solstice, which I'm a very strong believer that, you know, this is the time of your Christ was born. You know, 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 that 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 that, - Two of them on the nose, two of them. - You 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 that don't happen in 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 in 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 night, you know, there. Well, I hear people make the argument, oh, yeah, Saturnalia, or this was a pagan festival or something like that, whether there's historical validity to that or not is really unimportant. Because if you're going to reject every pagan element in Christianity, well, it's gonna be a long project. And you'll have to start with the crucifixion because crucifixion itself was a pagan practice. 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 bringing together Jew and Gentile to make something new. And so the early Christians thought of Plato as being the Gentile Moses. And they, St. John begins his gospel with the phrase, you know, that Christ is the logos, which is borrowing from pagan philosophy, if you want to follow that. So if you try to, somebody who uses the argument of Christmas was a pagan holiday, I wonder, do you, are you really trying to think through how Christmas came to be or are you just looking for an excuse to argue? - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right. - So I'm gonna read you a little bit from St. John of Damascus. - Which should I prepare myself as this? - No, this is anti, no, no, I just really think it's quite fun. This is from his exact exposition of the orthodox faith. - Okay. - You know, so this is a close to an authoritative document on, you know, what orthodoxy teaches about various subjects is you're probably ever likely to find your foot before 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 nights 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 12 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 12 signs further, the sun makes a complete month in each sign and traverses the 12 signs in the same number of months. These then are the name of the 12 signs in the respective months and then he gives the zodiac and the dates of the zodiac beginning with the RAM which receives the sun and 21st of March, which is of course right, right at or around the rental equinox and also POSCA, right? - It's traditional to, when you're obviously the zodiac signs are in a circle but it's traditional to start with arrays the RAM. - That's right, the beginning of the year, yeah. And then he goes on to talk about all of this and he, the only thing that he says is wrong about the way that the Greeks before Christ understood this is to say that these things control our wills and I think that Christianity as such has always rejected any form of determinism. - Yeah. - So we recently, John said I just recently finished teaching through Paradiso and so in our very first lecture of the Paradiso class I did kind of like a crash course in medieval astronomy so people would understand some of the astronomical astrological references in Paradiso and throughout the comedy and then also just understand 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 are important to his point but then also what are the, what are the, what are the things that have actually been, because obviously as soon as you mention, even the name of a constellation very often, certain Christians get a little itchy about it. Yeah, they're like, hold on. So what are the things that church is actually prescribed and I would say it's divination and especially divinatory practices associated with idolatry, which is 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 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 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 Myers-Briggs personalities or your anyogram. Your anyogram, I very often, just to be a little provocative sometimes, somebody will mention the anyogram in a conversation and please don't hate me, anyogram people, but I'm always like, oh yeah, astrology's just anyogram for Christians, you know. Just to mess with people a little bit, you know, but your anyogram 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 and I've got to get the serotonin and the cortisol. I've got to get all the scenes balanced out and I'm feeling really bad today but it's because my stress level's 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 can even sort ourselves in categories by, you know, alpha-beta sigma or, you know, anyogram types, I'm a seven-wing 12, I don't know anyogram things. Or, or, or, you know, Myers-Briggs types or whatever, you know, I'm a, I'm a cat, you're a dog, you know, all the different things. - Sure. - 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 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, 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 lump like personality tests and all those other things we just talked about into this. You can use 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 wants and desires and they don't, you know, they don't look out, they don't, you know, exercise 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 what the saints are, you know, because 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 it 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 when the 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 comments arise. And these are obviously signs of the death of kings. And so not even the star which the mage 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 St. John's Christian system. He is homily on the star that the mage I followed, which of course St. John is one of the hardest on astrology or even he would say 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 and the Christian world at the time that St. John was around. But St. John gives a whole kind of homily on the star that the mage I followed and it's very clear he has very deep, deep astronomical understanding himself because 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 so that's an interesting question. I'll tell you a, this is getting a little rambly I guess, but I'll tell you a kind of a fun tradition that I encountered this year, which I did not know before, which is that it's another Syriac tradition. I like Syrian stuff. - We need more of it. - Way more of it, yeah, way more of it. One of the things I'd like to do with symbolic world in the coming years is actually bring into existence some really beautiful additions of translations of Syria, cameography and poetry and homolytic verses and things like this. There've been some really good translations that have been done, obviously, but so many of them have just terrible, terrible binding. And I feel like this is a problem I could fix. But anyway, there's a Syriac tradition that the star, which the mage I followed is the same angel that grabbed the Prophet Habakkuk 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 St. Romanos' canon on the Nativity, the famous contaction rather, on the Nativity. And so it was a footnote in that addition and I came across it and 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 a astrologer. And that's the, of course Daniel's, all the apocalyptic visions in the book of Daniel are all very astronomical, astrological in nature. And he is usually traditionally considered to be the sort of the source of the knowledge of the true God, which carries on somehow in the far Eastern lands, Babylon, Persia, et cetera, which is ultimately inherited by the mage I who come to worship Christ. And so that's the connection kind of between the two. And I just thought that was really-- 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 heavens in this idea of hierarchy. Yeah, so it could be a good time to mention. Well, yes. Why were even higher in this country? 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 so Josh can introduce-- to introduce you guys to Josh, because Josh-- and maybe with a little bit of hope for me in the late January, he'll be doing a course for us on cosmology. We're going to get really deep down into all of these things. And hopefully dig into the objections, dig into the things that make us squeamish, but also ultimately try to find out like what is the real way for it to approach these things, to appropriate them, and to teach them as part of a Christian education? Well, in just the practical idea of being able to go out with yourself or your kids or your friends and do some star gazing 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. The ancient people knew the sky, the way that we know the highways around our cities. Yeah. But I think it would be very difficult to understand that just the baseline knowledge of the night sky that your average person in the ancient world would have had and taken for granted. I mean, when you read denunciations against astrology and things like that, what they're really addressing is people who have, 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 could also happen down here. I don't want to get too much into it, but in ancient Babylonian divination, there was idea of 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 life at a different level, and they made crazy 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 they have some kind of influence in the world, that's not the thing that's usually being condemned. So anyway, that being said, take, continue your point. - Well, I was gonna say, I'm fascinated about the angel who grabbed Habakkuk by the hair. If you live in a hierarchical world, then of course, 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 take him on place for others. I just, sorry, I just thought that idea. - It's a cool, it's a cool image. And of course, I think it's in Habakkuk's 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, and that's also moved from like, from Israel or Jerusalem to Babylon, and the major are coming from Babylon back the other way. And so it's, it's really interesting. And I don't know much more about the tradition other than that factoid, but I am determined to dig into it in the following year. So I'll let you know what I find, yeah. - Okay, so one of the things you also mentioned, you were talking about, people that dig into, can you all see this beautiful little puppy over here? - This is Argos, he's my boy. People will, they'll get deeply into a 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 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, oh, 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 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 we would be aware of-- - I think most of the people who-- - What's going on in the heavens. - Who'd like to talk about those kinds of things could not actually pick out Libra in the sky. Let alone tell you that it's got something to do with this 30 degree arc the sun makes across the sky throughout the year. And it's not just any other constellation that's these in particular because of all those things, yeah. Related to this and back to kind of the broad context is all throughout ancient literature, whether it's Greek, Hebrew, whatever, 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 hourglass 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 wanna 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. - And I think that even our understanding of the saints of the heavenly hierarchy, of how we, of, you know, obviously Peridante's, you know, the Peridete was 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 with the rose, you know. But the idea is that our very earliest idea of the saints when God tells Abraham's descendants will be as the stars of heaven, right? Our very earliest ideas of the saints, you know, the heavenly host from the scriptures basically fall back on this astral imagery, you know. It's the closest, you can 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 yes, our fate lies as early Christian thinkers, even people like origin always insisted that the fate of the seed of Abraham that is Christ and those who were in Christ, that there are destiny lies above the stars, which is why, so this is one of the things that I talked about when I was doing, I gave a pretty long talk on astrology and astrological imagery in the Bible and in the church fathers and how it's used and what's out, what's in all those things at the Lord of Spirit's conference earlier this year. But one of the things that I talked about is this, you know, the four living creatures, you know, the cherubim, which, or the four, you know, the four beasts, the four living creatures, and easygoing in a revelation, which are the four cardinal points of the zodiac. But what's interesting is that in Christian art, they're almost always portrayed flipped. - Yeah. - And I think that 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 stars are under the feet of the the the the the theotokos, the virgin, the woman of the apocalypse, right? You know, the moon is under her, under her feet. Whereas normally in a an image of a chronocritories, the the like the rulers of time, the time lords, if you will, in a Hellenic zodiac, they would show usually two figures, one with a male helios for the sun and then, you know, Phoebe for the 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. And but the image that you find in the apocalypse is of the moon under her feet. - Yeah. - 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 12 apostles replace the signs of the zodiac, the way. And this is why early Christians did not celebrate the birthdays, because there is, they're, well, I mean, common people didn't celebrate the birthdays anyway. You celebrate the Emperor's birthday, you know, but early Christians didn't celebrate the birthday, and that's where the practice of celebrating a name day comes from. It's to say, ultimately, the most important thing about you is not that you're born on, you know-- - In this configuration of the heavens. - In this configuration of the heavens. But rather that, you know, that for me, the truth about my life, about who I am, has something to do with St. Sarah from Sarov. And it doesn't mean I'm very much like him, you know, other than the chronic back pain. But hopefully I could be, you know, hopefully I could be. But he's the thing that's ruling over my life, that's the guiding principality, you know, ultimately, you know, through him, you know, Christ. 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 that's basically okay. 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, but pretty much until city lights came along. - Yeah. - 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 has a weird way of totally disconnecting us. - Well, what you just said was you, we've destroyed our connection to heaven and our connection to earth, both. And so where are we? - Yeah, and that comes out of that idea of the kairos, 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 was to determine the proper time, whether it's the proper time for an idolatrous ritual, but also when is it 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 St. 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. But so you need to know when the Vernal Equinox is, because you need to know 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 sunlight is coming. So what's the proper and fitting time, the chirodic moment for spring to begin? You know, that's what the equinox is telling you, and that's what air is 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 not interesting. It's barely important that the Vernal Equinox, what day exactly it falls on. For me, it basically affects what I guess my heating and cooling bill a little bit. What I, you know, that's about it, you know. So the fact that, and I think that the goal of modernity, one of the goals of modernity has been to totally cut us off from chiroths. There are no fitting moments for things. And the 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, something like that. So it starts with eroding those things. And then it comes down to, you know, eroding, even the very basic kind of earthly things, just the time of year, the season harvest. We have the technology to grow, you know, blueberries and hothouses, you know. So I can have, I can have, I gave a, I gave a talk this fall called, "Eat your blackberries before Michael Miss or the devil will get them." And it was all about this basically, this idea and taking some Anglo-Saxon poetry and ideas about the calendar and harvest. - Have you ever been to Chaco Canyon? - No. - Any chance? - No, you've only been about it though. So tell them about it. - Okay, so I lived in New Mexico for a long time. Love the high desert. Chaco Canyon, if you're not aware, is a Native American site out in North-Western, New Mexico and for a long time, it was thought to just be an abandoned city, but as archeologists 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 maces far off on the horizon and one of the buildings will have a wall angled toward those two maces. And when you stand there on the Vernal Equinox, the sun, which has been slowly traveling, will now come up right between those two maces. And there are coincidences, not mere coincidences, 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 3D. 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. 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. - 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 that's just the way it is. I mean, it's not even just that humans are lazy. It's that, that, well now, okay, great. Now I've got more important things to do. Why would I spend time doing this thing that somebody else has already done for me? Like I have, if you've got all the things. But I think that if I were to approach, and I am approaching when 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 principles to reconstruct a calendar, which is going to take multiple years 'cause 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 figure out where we live with the ratio between the longest day and the shortest day of the year is. And once you have that ratio, which is why when the Greeks, when the Greeks, when the ratio is brought to the Greeks from Babylon, basically, they're like, yeah. Ratio is man, that's the most, you know. And nowadays, you're like, 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 at 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 lunar year and there's a solar year and that those two things have a ratio together, which together gives you the months. But then also, 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. - Yeah. - And so on and so forth. And so I think that's gonna be the project the next few years at my house is, you know, let's put together a sundial, let's start making some measurements, let's start charting and let's build a calendar from scratch. And the thing is, by the time you did 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, 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. - Yeah. - 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. - Yeah. - He starts out with-- - All of geometry. - He starts out with points making lines and what is that, but a star tracing its path across the sky. - Right. - And he ends up with the, what we call the platonic solids at the end, which Polito says are the building blocks of all the physical world around us and the heavens, so 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 your time at 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. - So let's talk about the course real quick for people. I feel like we just go on 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. - That's just what they told me. - Yeah, it's usually five to six weeks. But yeah, so 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 save it for the course. And then you'll be looking at the Pythagorean tradition. You'll be talking about practical naked eye star gazing 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 'cause 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 $150 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 don't hook people in? Well, I do a year-long astronomy course at the classical school. And one thing I really want to do is take that year-long course and condense it. So it's gonna be, I think a good balance of very basic things with some leaps into high symbology and cosmology that will intrigue people enough to do a little more research. And I love everything that symbolic world does. You could probably hear the geese in the background. The geese are excited about this. I love what symbolic world does and I feel like there are different ways to approach a symbolic world view 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. I actually think about future symbolic world events. One of the things that I would like to do would be like do go out and have it a bit 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. It's done. 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 Patreon 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 get slabbered on by St. Bernard. It's the peaceable kingdom here. That's right. That's right. So, all right, before the dog eats the microphone, thanks everybody and God bless you all.