Eschatology is the branch of Christian theology that studies ideas about time. The Greek word ‘eschaton’ means end, so eschatology is the study of ideas about end times, the apocalypse and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. These ideas are strongly shrouded in mythological tradition and fantasy, especially regarding the traditional concept of the end of the world. The challenge facing modern thought is to explore how these mythological traditions evolved, how they sit against modern scientific knowledge, and what prospect there is for ideas about eschatology to be reformed to hold any contemporary meaning and relevance.
The first step in exploring these big questions is to place eschatology within the scientific framework of the real context of time. Time is often perceived as an insoluble mystery, but at the planetary level of the evolution of life on earth time can be seen to have definite measure, order and structure. Life first appeared on earth about four billion years ago. Modern humans evolved more than one hundred thousand years ago, and modern DNA analysis enables us to map the peopling of the world since humans left Africa about 80,000 years ago.
Planetary time has a regular stable structure, driven by the patterns of earth’s orbit. We all know the patterns of the day, the week, the month and the year, all of which appear in regular natural cycles such as tides and seasons. In addition to these well-known ordinary structures of time, there are larger slower structures, discovered by modern astronomy, which provide the orbital drivers of our long slow natural planetary climate cycles, seen in the patterns of glaciation. Four primary orbital cycles drive the climate. These are
1. Earth’s axial wobble, causing the precession of the equinoxes and solstices and poles around the background stars of the galaxy with period 25771 years;
2. Rotation of earth’s orbital ellipse around the sun, with the closest point, the perihelion, like the base of an egg, taking about 113,000 years to cycle around the background stars in the opposite direction from precession of the equinoxes;
3. Obliquity of the axis, which means that the plane of earth’s orbit changes with respect to the solar equator, so the tilt of the earth varies between 22 and 24 degrees with a regular 41,000 year pattern;
4. Ellipticity of the orbit, also known as eccentricity, meaning that the shape of earth’s orbit varies between circular and oval every 413,000 years, driven mainly by whether our orbital perihelion is aligned or perpendicular to the perihelions of Jupiter, Saturn and Venus, with the other planets also having a smaller effect.
These big slow orbital patterns are not widely known and understood, but science has intensively analysed their combined effect on the terrestrial climate. The result is that when the northern summer solstice at 21 June each year is at perihelion, closest to the sun, the world climate is warmer, and when perihelion is at 21 December each year, the June solstice is at aphelion, the point furthest from the sun, and the climate is cooler. This cycle takes 21,600 years, due to the combination of axial wobble and rotation of the ellipse. When perihelion is in the northern winter, less snow melts in the summer, and glaciers grow. When perihelion is in northern summer, more snow melts, and glaciers retreat. The northern hemisphere pattern drives the climate for the entire planet because most of the land on earth is north of the equator so naturally warms and cools a lot more, while Antarctica is surrounded by sea which tends to be more stable in temperature. This 21,000 year pattern of the perihelion is also modulated by the other slow patterns described above, and creates strong consistent traces in geological records such as ice cores and ocean sediment. The perihelion was last at the June solstice at the dawn of the Holocene era about twelve thousand years ago. The perihelion crossed the December solstice in 1246 AD, moving forward at the rate of one day every 59 years to its present date around 4 January every year. The date of the perihelion is a main marker of the natural cycle of terrestrial climate.
The scale of this slow subtle effect is actually immense. The last glacial maximum 20,000 years ago produced glaciers across North American and Europe that were two miles high, down to the latitude of New York, like a bulldozer from the North Pole leaving glacial moraines as big as Long Island. These ice age glaciers sucked up so much sea water that the ocean surface was 140 meters lower, exposing vast areas of continental shelf that have since been flooded.
How does this scientific context relate to eschatology? That is a complex and difficult question, but it is one that we can approach using rational evidence-based methods. A first clue is from India, with the old myth of cycles of ages. These are known as the Yugas, with a descending series of successively worse ages through gold, silver, bronze and iron followed by a mirror ascending series of successively better iron, bronze, silver and gold ages. While these Yuga cycles are traditionally thought of as lasting billions of years, there is also a tradition that says the whole cycle lasts 24,000 years. India has been through three full orbital climate cycles since the great Mt Toba eruption of 73,000 years ago, which basically killed the whole subcontinent by dumping two metres of ash on it. The mythology of the Yuga cycle of gold and iron ages maps to the real pattern of climate, if we see the golden ages as the times of relative warmth and light and the iron ages as the times of relative cold and dark.
This theory of ages of gold and iron found its way like many Indian myths to the west, appearing in the writings of Daniel in the Bible and of Hesiod in Greece. While we cannot know to what extent these cultural borrowings were deliberate or accidental, or to what extent the origin of these ideas was informed by accurate knowledge, this broad framework of ages of light and dark provides a useful starting point to explore how religion relates to the orderly rational understanding of time provided by astronomy.
Just considering this temporal framework from our modern rational perspective, we can consider the climate cycles as analogous to the seasons of the year, marked by the date of the perihelion. When the perihelion was in the northern summer 12,000 years ago, we had a planetary summer. As the perihelion moved past the September equinox 6000 years ago, we entered planetary fall. When the perihelion passed the December solstice in 1246 AD we entered planetary winter, which will last (ignoring anthropogenic factors) for another 5000 years through a steady gradual ascent to a planetary spring when perihelion crosses the March equinox, followed by the next planetary summer in about ten thousand years time. This regular cycle has provided the context for evolution of all life on earth, recurring in that stable pattern about 200,000 times over the four billion years that our DNA has lived on our planet.
Theologically-minded readers may have been able to tell where I am going with this. The period that is the natural planetary fall, roughly the last 6000 years, is also the period that Judaism and Christianity conventionally understand as the fall from grace. So we find in this simple large astronomical pattern a direct natural correlation with the supernatural imagination of conventional religious mythology, with its theories of states of grace and corruption, fall and redemption. The actual material order of our planet provides the framework within which mythology somehow intuited its powerful organising concepts to understand time. Using this large model of time, we can explore how the long periods of five to six thousand years in length, characterised as cosmic seasons, somehow imbue the events that occur within them, just as morning, afternoon, evening and night have a different character through the structure of the day, and spring, summer, autumn and winter each have their own nature. Looking at such long periods as the orbital climate cycles, it is plausible to imagine that the character of one ‘season’ has considerable inertia, continuing well into the next period. So the situation now, with the perihelion in January, is that we are in a time we can call cosmic winter. However, it seems that the cultural norms from the previous season, the cosmic fall, remain powerful. In some ways we have not yet achieved the full paradigm shift into a new season, although this shift has begun to emerge with the steady shift from belief to knowledge, from religion to science and from faith to reason as the basis for ethical values and social organisation.
Christianity, for example in the writings of Augustine and Irenaeus, conventionally imagines time as lasting 7000 years from creation to redemption. Mapping the idea in 2 Peter and Psalm 90:4 that a thousand years is as a day for God on to the Genesis myth of the seven days of creation, the Church Fathers developed the idea of 6000 years of work from 4000 BC to 2000 AD, followed by a millennium of rest and restoration, with the Second Coming of Jesus Christ imagined as inaugurating the millennium in about 2000 AD, to provide a total framework of 7000 years equivalent to the seven day pattern of the week.
As a way to rebase faith in science, the overall model of time provided by the orbital drivers of climate change presents a potentially fruitful method to reform Christianity on the basis of rational understanding of evidence. My own view is that our historical understanding of the scale of trauma in the ancient world is weak, and that the impact of the rise of metal technology over the course of the Holocene was more highly disruptive than is generally imagined. Older peaceful cultural traditions of mystical wisdom were conveyed purely by mouth to ear, and were vulnerable to destruction at the edge of the sword. So the records we have, especially in the Bible, should be read as containing fugitive traces of an old high wisdom, covered by the rubble of simplistic and ignorant politics over thousands of years. Excavating these fugitive traces is difficult but possible, and I here give several main examples.
The Book of Revelation, usually now dismissed as a weird dream, contains abundant evidence of being informed by the high Babylonian knowledge of astronomy. For a thousand years before Christ the priests of Babylon could accurately predict eclipses, and so must have had wider knowledge of astronomy than has survived. A key example appears in Revelation 13, with the story that the dragon would give his power, seat and authority to the leopard-bear-lion. This seemingly fantastic story maps precisely to the precession of the North Celestial Pole, conventionally the divine seat of power and authority, from its former position in the constellation of Draco the Dragon until 3000 BC to its current position in the bear, adjacent to the lion and leopard. This slow movement of the pole, one degree of arc per human lifetime, was measurable by a society able to accurately record all stellar and planetary movements on clay tablets for a thousand years and more. The suggestion of Neugebauer and others that the Babylonians had no interest in the position of the celestial pole or capacity to measure its slow movement is implausible. Similarly, the Holy City of Revelation 21 contains abundant precessional imagery, including the twelve jewels and the 12,000 unit diameter.
In the Gospels, the idea of the incarnation of Jesus Christ maps directly to how an astronomer-priest in ancient times would have imagined the will of God in heaven, understood as the natural observed order of the cosmos, as being done on earth. In 21 AD, the spring equinox, traditionally the start of the Jewish Year, moved from its traditional position in the constellation of Aries across a definite perpendicular line of stars into the constellation of Pisces. This observable event would have been long predicted by the astronomer priests of Babylon and elsewhere. At that precise time, the conventional theory of the signs and seasons matched the background stars, indicating a perceived cosmic harmony that aligns to the idea of divine incarnation of God on earth. That moment was when the year moved from beginning in the traditional first sign to beginning in the traditional last sign, plausibly giving rise to the myth of Jesus Christ as alpha and omega.
The single miracle that appears most frequently in the Bible is the loaves and fishes, a story which can be interpreted as a parable for how universal abundance can be obtained through understanding of the new axis of the world, as a symbol for how the equinoxes had moved into the signs of the fishes (Pisces) and loaves (Virgo, the virgin holding the ear of wheat).
Considering the meaning of this material for Christianity today, an important place to start is the recognition that there is no evidence that Jesus Christ lived as a real historical person, and abundant evidence and motive for how Jesus was invented by theology. The early church gradually added flesh to the myth. They then found this solar God a convenient basis for political stability, locking down the historical doctrine as unchallengeable dogma for a thousand years and more. Jesus was imagined as what a messiah would have done if he had actually existed, a way to sublimate the massive psychological trauma inflicted upon Israel by Rome, and a basis for long term non violent cultural resistance to the empire. The story had to be made plausible in order to provide a basis for social organisation, but the origins in Gnostic mystery imagination were gradually forgotten, suppressed, ignored and denied as the comfort and appeal of Jesus overwhelmed any surviving true memory.
Despite these failings, which we should remember occurred in what we can consider the depth of the iron age, we can imagine the myth of Christ as an ancient way of invoking the presence of the golden age in the midst of the iron age, envisioning a slow path for recovery and healing. While there are obvious errors in the Bible, such as the claim that Christ would return in the lifetime of the ancients, there is also a clear and coherent strand that is fully compatible with the eschatological timeline believed by Augustine and Irenaeus. This timeline appears primarily in the teaching of Matthew 24 that the Son of Man would come on the clouds of heaven only when the Gospel of the kingdom had been preached to the whole inhabited earth, and also in images such as the man with the water jug (Aquarius) seen on the way to the upper room (heaven). The implication I infer from these images is that a Gnostic mystery school, with Therapeut roots in Alexandria and India and Babylon, had a theory of zodiac ages as the structure of time, and imagined a story of a messiah as the avatar of the successive ages.
While we should not today give credence to the magical folk elements within astrology, we cannot understand the evolution of Christianity without restoring the lost astral framework provided by the observation of the movement of the stars of the zodiac. This movement involves seeing how the spring point, the start of the year, moves every 2000 years like the hour hand of a cosmic clock. Over the 7000 years imagined as the Christian framework of time, there are 3.5 ages, a period which can be seen in the mysterious phrase of the tribulation, times, time and half a time. These ages, assuming the time of Adam was imagined as beginning in 4000 BC, are successively when the spring equinox has occurred with the sun in Taurus, Aries, Pisces and the first half of Aquarius. The authors of the New Testament wrote at a time when the Age of Aries was being replaced by the Age of Pisces. The key point here is to investigate how themes traditionally associated with Pisces were embedded in the ideas of Christianity, and how the Second Coming was conceivably imagined as occurring at the dawn of the Age of Aquarius.
This natural structure of time in terms of zodiac ages does in fact align directly to Christian theology. The theme traditionally associated with Pisces is compassionate mystical belief, while the theme traditionally associated with Aquarius is innovative humanitarian knowledge. Therefore, for ancients seeking to map these themes to the structure of the ages, we may imagine that they recognised the Age of Pisces as a time of great trauma and ignorance, and therefore invented an Avatar who embodied the comforting themes of compassion and mystical belief. For these thinkers imagining the vast sweep of history, and how religion would evolve in an ascending subsequent time, when the spring point had precessed to the constellation of Aquarius around 2000 AD, it is possible that they imagined the myth of incarnation and return against this real framework of the visible cosmos, in terms of the Aquarian theme of innovative humanitarian knowledge as providing the core values of the rule of Christ on earth.
To test this hypothesis, we must look for evidence of the Aquarian themes of innovative humanitarian knowledge as associated with the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. These themes appear most vividly in Matthew 25, the Last Judgement. Here once again we see the old idea of six plus one from the Genesis creation story. This time the six days of work are reflected in the six messianic labours, to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, welcome strangers, visit the sick and visit prisoners, while the seventh day, the Sabbath day, the day of rest and the day of peace, is reflected in the unifying commandment of the Last Judgement with its ringing defence of universal rights, that we should always treat the least of the world as though they are Jesus Christ.
Here we find in this old message of the love of Christ for all the world the simple clarity needed for sustainable development goals, reconciling faith and reason in a way that enables Christian religion to become entirely compatible with scientific knowledge.
Robert Tulip
16 August 2015
