Well, thanks for sharing your views once again Akhenaten. I have debate going on about the MP right now on that thread as well and it's the usual apologetic sources which have already been refuted many times over. I'm sure that you went through them all yourself in the course of looking up refutations as you were weighing out both sides of the issue. I'm just letting it play itself out here as well because readers like yourself can see the back and forth and perhaps get a copy of CiE and see for themselves what all of the primary source material and respected scholars that are still available say about the Egyptian and Christian parallels.

Most of the mythicists I know have a back ground in Christianity, even the atheists we're generally brought up Christian. We're not a bunch of people born atheist or foreign or naive to Christianity, for the most part. Murdock was raised Catholic and then converted to Protestantism before ever moving on. I held some extremely ignorant religious beliefs growing up myself. I believed the world is only 6,000 years old and created in 6 literal days. That's the very height of Christian oriented ignorance. And there is no going back to something like that once you've fully grasped the error involved. I agree completely.

If you've come to understand the Great Year in all of this reading and researching that you've been doing and have your own opinions and theories we'd enjoy hearing them. Robert and I are usually alone on this topic even in mythicist based forums where precession and it's role in religious astrotheology is known. It's a pretty taboo topic for sure and my ideas about how social manipulation may tie into it tends to show something in the way of an explanation for why it's such a taboo topic. Perhaps people are not meant to understand the details of how they are being led around. Certainly not to understand how one can easily predict the way that leaders will likely want to move society around in the future.

Ak, you sound as though you've switched one flavor of kool-aid for another.

I really like the idea that since the precession of the equinox has been happening for such a long time that it could have made some kind of imprint on humans. That's very interesting.

It would be even more interesting if the precession of the equinox signalled changes in the season, length of days, temperature, placement of the moon, etc... I don't know enough about astronomy to know this.

Also, I'm aware the universe is expanding so the stars are never in the same place they used to be. I think I've brought this up before. This may have little to do with the big picture of astrology but it could very well distort some internal clock you've suggested.

PC,

From your very limited exposure to these ideas I can understand why you might find someone who has accepted them as being someone heretical to your view of reality. I can only encourage you to hang in there and educate yourself more by reading some books on the subject before casting aspersions. I've been the skeptic to these ideas myself and I see you merely at the beginning of trying to figure out what all this talk of the great year, astrotheology and mythicism is about. After educating myself on the mythicist position for almost 3 years and being a skeptic of religion for 9, I'm very confident I know what I'm talking about. It takes a fair amount of reading to get to this point but you'll have your "ah-ha" moment too if you give it more than a cursory glance.

Hello Tat,

Yes, I've noticed over the years of watching your posts how very few people do chime in and participate when the topic of the great year and astrotheology come up. It's a difficult subject to talk about I think because so very few people outside of astrology forums would have the background to understand the esoteric language. I myself having come from a religious background shunned any such talk of the zodiac. However, in short order I picked up the terms and concepts quickly and could easily follow the debates between you and Robert. I must admit I did find it odd how few did openly participate in the discussion since I had found it so facinating and illuminating. I mean how thoroughly could one really understand the mythicist position without understanding what the great year was all about? I understood what was being presented and agreed with most of it but if one doesn't get the books that go into detail what is being discussed it would be so very hard to follow those discussions given that I think most people watching were like me and only had an extremely limited background in astrotheology concepts lest we sin. Now I easily see the wizard behind the curtain so to speak. It's so taboo to even contemplate astrology for most that it's suspect. When you are shown from various cultures and regions around the known world at the time where and when religious writers got the concepts when creating the fiction of the bible you feel so taken advantage of. And in this day and age believing the bible literally is like being a blissfull lamb being led to the slaughter. For so very few people are playing by those rules that it's almost like begging to those around you to be taken advantage of.
Educating yourself on the great year and mythicism is a way out of the fog of war for our souls by the various abrahamic faiths. Then read the apocolapse of John again and tell me that it doesn't make all the difference in the world in understanding that with your new mythicist decoder ring on.

Yeah, the code key for interpreting the bible changes a lot of things. I think that what needs to go down is a video about the Great Year free of Cruttenden and Wests ideas about the Great Year, just the facts with no binary star theory or any of that. ZG part 1 gives a short summary, but once again not enough to really understand the issue because the Greek and Vedic Yuga's rising and falling theme is absent.

Someone just pointed out that the "Law" has more to do with the Aries-Libra axis more than anything. It's pretty obvious that Moses ushers in the age of Aries and the rejection of the Bull. He brings in the Law and Ram symbolism which is the Aries-Libra axis. Then Jesus and Mary come on the scene, when the next age hits, providing the Pisces-Virgo axis. The law is over and grace begins. "belief" becomes a central theme in keeping with the ages. There has been conscious effort involved in trying to keep society in alignment with the ages and change it up around each new age. There's always a conflict involved because everyone gets accustumed to the way things are over the course of the 2150 year time periods of each age and by the end of the age they don't want to change anything. Moses had people killed for clinging to the Taurus calf, and Jesus comes along for the next age demanding that people hate their family members who refuse the new age that he is symbolizing. It seems that the priesthood always has to make abrupt and radical commands, via the mythos, in order to move the people along to the symbolism of the new ages. The amount of corruption in the former institutions is usually sky high by that point and it seems like a periodical cleaning of house goes down as well. I tend to think we should expect much of the same at the end of the current age. It's already building up to a boil. The fish symbolism will be out. The Aquarius-Leo axis will be in. I'm sure that the projection in Revelation of much "wailing and gnashing of teeth" at the end of the age isn't very far off the mark.

Here is a set of short introductory videos on the Great Year and the astronomy of the 2012 cosmic alignment. These have been made by Jim Smith in Chiapas to engage in debate and education regarding what he sees as "woo-woo" theories.

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p ... 1DCA9C7DFF

Four billion years of life on earth = one trillion days. The earth's axis wobble has been extremely stable over this entire time. The only slight change is due to the slow increase of distance to the moon of about one metre per year. Earth’s seasons have also been stable over this incredibly long time, of which the ten thousand or so years of human history is 0.00025%. The seasons are embedded in all DNA, such as plants and animals following annual cycles of spring and fall. It is possible that this annual cycle has subtle deep presence in all DNA that evolves in it. As to the presence of the longer cycle of the Great Year in our DNA, it is hard to see what the adaptive advantage might be, but with 4 billion years of microbes evolving within this rhythm, providing such an extremely long time of planetary stability, you cannot just rule it out. The intuitive match between the themes of the Zodiac Ages and the themes of human history provide prima facie support for the hypothesis.To a minor extent this happens with the Milankovitch climate cycles. The 25,765 year cycle of the Great Year, like the annual path of the zodiac, is solely a product of the physical relation between the earth and the sun. The stars are just convenient markers, and do not have any relevant dynamic causal effect on the earth. This is something many people find hard to grasp, that “star signs” have nothing to do with stars, but are calculated solely from the changing angle of the earth in relation to the sun.

The change of position of stars is very slow by human standards. It takes about 250 million years for our sun to orbit our galaxy, equal to about 9,000 great years. The sun has orbited the galaxy about a dozen times. One great year ago, the stars were in very similar positions as today. But in any case, the stars are just markers, not causes.

I think I need to stop reading about this stuff. This is one of those subjects that starts off innocently interesting and ends with delusion. Stop trying to get into my head Tulip.

Study of the Great Year provides a scientific basis to explain religion, something that rationalists and theists agree is impossible. No wonder this topic is consigned to the junk pile as taboo.

To illustrate the depth of hostility to this material, the wikipedia page for the book The Jesus Mysteries says “When the BBC approached N. T. Wright, asking him to debate Freke and Gandy concerning their thesis in The Jesus Mysteries, Wright replied that "this was like asking a professional astronomer to debate with the authors of a book claiming the moon was made of green cheese." The Jesus Mysteries is one of the best scholarly works available that is informed by the mythicist perspective of precession. N.T. Wright is probably the foremost orthodox Christian theologian in the world today. For him to make such a blatantly bigoted, ignorant and fearful attack on this book as the work of lunatics illustrates the extreme difficulty of rational dialogue.

I went to hear Wright talk a few years ago, and he made a similarly bigoted attack on Joni Mitchell for her song Woodstock, which he said contains the silly phrase ‘we are starlight’. In question time I pointed out to Wright that Woodstock says ‘we are stardust’ which is empirically true. It is just another example of how Christianity has degenerated, even among its foremost intellectual advocates, into a mean-spirited and narrow-minded cultural tradition with a brittle and intolerant attitude towards dialogue. Theologians such as Wright are the decayed remnant of a Piscean vision that had vitality 2000 years ago but is now one of those empty vessels that make the most noise.
I think the fear of this discussion is because it points towards a transformative vision of history with potential to provide a rational explanation of the Christian doctrine of the End Times. The fear is illustrated in the current Booktalk fiction selection Good Omens, which strongly implies that anyone who is interested in these topics is a lunatic. When you have that sort of savage attack made prior to any substantive discussion, it is hardly surprising that people are very cautious about it. People see all such wholistic visions as intrinsically dangerous. Study of the Great Year provides the basis to see the error in all traditional supernatural religion, because it seeks to explain religious myth by correlation with a purely empirical model of time. As such, it is compatible with materialist atheism, while also opening a way to see the psychological and cultural basis of myth as a source of meaning and belonging. You cannot understand the mythicist view that Christ is spiritual rather than historical without the empirical framework of the Great Year.This material picks up big ideas about the nature of time and the soul, setting mythology into an empirical astronomical context. People see this project as fatalistic, but that is wrong; rather it is about understanding our environment better so our freedom is better informed.

The question of which books to read is very difficult. The Great Year by Nicholas Campion fails to engage with the religious dimension. Hamlet’s Mill by Santillana and von Dechend has a wealth of material on myth, and on how knowledge of the Great Year has been lost, but is like an allusive crossword. City of Revelation by John Michel is excellent but drifts way too far into mysticism. Acharya’s work is excellent on comparative mythology but only scrapes the surface of the Great Year as an organising principle for philosophy.

By the way, I’ve long thought that the Wizard of Oz was a mythical reference to Australia! People call Sydney the Emerald City. Yes, literal faith in Jesus as a historical figure is based entirely on fraud. Fundamentalism is the corrupt and degenerate result of 2000 years of belief as an organising principle. At the time when belief looks most powerful is when its feet of clay are exposed and it starts to topple. The model of history of the Great Year supports the Chinese idea of the mandate of heaven as the principle of dynastic succession. The mandate remains with Piscean belief for now, but it will soon reach a tipping point and shift to Aquarian knowledge as we establish a transformative global civilization.

With science, we just have to say ‘believe nothing’, and build understanding on empirical observation. The Great Year is purely empirical as a model for cultural evolution. Saying culture follows the paths laid by the Great Year is like saying a river follows the course laid by its banks. Where a drop of river water will end up is known in general terms even if we can’t predict it exactly. Abraham is just as real as the products of Tin Pan Alley. Your comparison of religion and fog is very good. Setting myth within the cosmic framework of our planet provides clarity. You are right that precession provides a decoder for Revelation. It shows that the traditional timescale of 7000 years from fall to redemption makes sense, and how this vision of time was understood in the ancient world and encrypted into the Bible. Revelation contains numerous cryptic references which become perfectly clear against the empirical frame of precession, such as the alpha and omega, the four creatures, the tribulation, the holy city, the tree of life, and the river of life.

The thing about it is that both ideas grain together. The old sages or "followers of Horus" were the astronomer priest elite of ancient days who followed the movement of the sun both annually and precessionally. If we suppose that precession has effected the DNA of life on earth over these vast time periods then perhaps they were on to that in some way. That is, perhaps they noticed that precession seemed to effect people. Then the manipulation of men and events according to the celestial time table of precession is still underway but the dimension of there being an actual effect going on that some were privy to, and worked along side of, comes into play. What I've done is just focused on the social herding issue by itself. But it may well be both in the end, there's just no way of knowing absolutely at this point.

Fair enough. My interest in this material is in finding a way to see how the ancients understood the structure of time, and how that may be relevant for today. It gets caught up with a lot of crazy magical opinions, and despite what you might think, can be approached against a purely scientific understanding. It is an intriguing question why this material is at the basis of the so-called “perennial philosophy” yet gets so little attention from dominant trends in philosophy.
I see James Earl Jones plays the part of Darth Vader in Star Wars. That obviously makes him credible.
Cruttenden’s movie on the Great Year is good and bad. It presents a simple outline of the idea, but then mixes that with untrue speculation about the physics based on disproven ideas of a binary star. This use of bad physics serves to throw the whole concept of the Great Year into some suspicion.

In fact I live in Australia, and have not travelled anywhere for a long time. Walter Cruttenden, main advocate of the binary sun idea, is regarded as a fruitcake charlatan in scientific circles. He tried to defend his ideas on the http://www.bautforum.com astronomy discussion board and got nowhere with the scientists, basically because the binary star idea is completely incompatible with scientific observation. Fair enough. These ideas suggest a scientific basis for Biblical prophecy, and this deserves a sceptical reception. Where it is interesting though, is that it seems very likely to me that this stellar framework provides an actual back story for the Bible, in secret teachings that provided the impetus for the public fairy stories. The mystic community formed an inner church around the time of Christ, but they could not control how the outer church used the public ideas, and the core of their texts were largely destroyed, leaving only fragmentary remnants of the Great Year theology. It is ironic that the inner Gnostic teachings are aligned to the theme of Aquarius (knowledge), while the outer literal teachings are aligned to the theme of Pisces (belief). In the Age of Pisces, the Piscean vision triumphed, vindicating Christ's claim that the world was not ready for him. The underlying theory suggests the cycle of the Ages had to pass through a Piscean period of belief before the world would be ready to hear the Aquarian message of knowledge. These ideas appear to be compatible with science, but there has not been sufficient careful and rigorous study of them, separated from religious emotion, to assess their true worth. The match with observation looks to be far more than anecdotal cherry-picking, but far less than scientific proof. Perhaps you are right Camacho. However, the motive for study of the Great Year as a framework for mythology has real difference from traditional supernatural religion. The argument is that the evolution of myth is built into the natural structure of time for our planet. There is no supernatural cause, as religion evolves naturally as a product of regular cycles that have been the same since the dawn of life. The passage of the Ages creates an unconscious framework, and ideas that are attuned to their point of the natural cycle tend to dominate. This is a hypothesis that is scientifically possible, and that also provides a method to deconstruct the supernatural claims of religion. As well, it sets the predictions of the Bible into a natural framework, presenting a path to reconcile science and religion. Mythologists use parables to explain their intent to a popular audience, but then the parable often gets taken as a literal truth. The loaves and fishes is a good example. The use of Easter Island is just a symbol, and can only be understood as part of the bigger picture.

The cyclic vision of the Great Year matches to the Christian doctrine of fall and redemption. The idea is that human life in Neolithic times was actually more harmonious and happy than today. Then, the shift from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to settled agriculture from around 10,000 years ago provided a surplus that enabled communities to fund salaries for priests and soldiers. These were attractive new vocations for individuals and communities who instinctively wished to increase their power, but they put humanity on a slippery slope to alienation from nature.

Today, this alienation from nature is causing mass extinction of species at the fastest rate since the end of the dinosaurs. As well as destruction of habitat and killing for food, we have nuclear weapons that have capacity to send our planet sterile and dead, and CO2 emissions that threaten to cause a runaway greenhouse effect and the extinction of all life. A paradigm shift is needed to a new global consciousness, as the Piscean path is heading us to certain destruction. The story of the Great Year provides a cosmic myth that explains this collapse, and the inertia of current world politics and culture, while also suggesting a possible path to a sustainable future.

The Great Year follows the annual cycle in reverse, understood as the cycle of light where the low point is the December solstice and the cycle of life where the low point is the March equinox. Considering the annual cycle of life, the claim is that the Age of Pisces is a low point in the overall cycle of the Great Year, much as February-March, the annual period of Pisces, is a low point in the cycle of the natural year. This annual low point is also a new beginning, with the buds of fresh growth emerging ready for the spring. However, the fact that the Great Year is a mirror reverse reflection of the annual cycle, with the sun precessing backwards through the signs, makes these sort of analogies hard to define. A further point of difficulty is that these cycles are reversed in the Southern Hemisphere. My view is that the tens of thousands of years in which world culture has primarily evolved in the northern hemisphere justifies a primary focus on correlations between the Great Year and northern cycles.

In any case, all these ideas are just a skeleton of possibility, a framework for a possible interpretation of the evolution of myth. The point is that the Great Year provides our only regular cosmic framework, and is worth investigating to assess the match to history as an intellectual exercise. If it then provides the salvation of the earth, that is a bonus.

Here's a nice video about the "first time" (Leo-Aquarius) and we're now coming up on the "last time" (Aquarius-Leo) making for half the precession which lines up to the stellar minimum and maximum of Orion on the meridian. The visual illustrations are pretty good:

Zep Tepi - Egyptian Creation Myths



I stumbled upon this interesting website, which I have not had the chance to read or digest, only skim. I don't know how scientific the information is, but there might be some good insights to be gleaned from it.

Picking up this older thread, this post explains the astronomy of the supposed 2012 galactic alignment. In fact, the solstice point moved across the galactic plane in 1998 and has never got within a degree of arc of the galactic center, as shown in these two diagrams.

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~tanner/gcintro.html shows the position of the galactic center.

Using SkyGazer 4.5 the diagrams below show the position of the Galactic Centre, the galactic plane, the ecliptic (the path of the sun) and the solstice point in 1998 and 2011.

I have included the constellation outlines for reference. They are Sagittarius at left, the foot of Ophiuchus in middle, and Scorpius at right.

Here is a youtube powerpoint that I have made to show the changing position of the heavens over the period of the Great Year.