Celestial Symbols

 

            Any interpretation of the book of Revelation must deal with the meaning of the celestial symbols which pervade the book.  Indeed, the vision of Christ in chapter one shows Him “in the midst of” the stars, holding them as on a leash.  Christ is, therefore, the Supreme Celestial Symbol.

            First of all, these symbols must be interpreted in the context of the Biblical Canon.  We must ask: How did the Biblical community view the sky and its inhabitants, the sun, moon, planets and stars?  And: how did these things relate to the earth?  In our industrialized societies, we suffer a great divorce from the sky; however, in ancient times the sky was an interactive part of life and the angels were part of the social environment.[1]

             Secondly, since the message of the Church was destined to be universal, what were some of the cultural concepts of the heavens that would permit the message to be translated for the wider world, for example, of the Greeks and Romans?  For this wider context we must examine some of their views of the heavens and of the heaven-and-earth relationship, the cosmos.

            A great deal of scholarly research has been done in the field of the history of religion concerning the use of celestial symbols.  The school of nature-myths which thrived in the mid 1800’s has done a great disservice to Biblical interpretation of these symbols.  The influence of this research has been extreme in liberal Biblical scholarship.  Max Müller is perhaps the foremost representative of this school and his writings were very influential in that era.  Although his theories did not outlive him and were all shown to be without merit by opponents as the result of further research data, fossil remains of his theories are extant in commentaries and lexicons.

            This school of thought was based upon a false premise lying behind the entire thrust of research into the history of religion in that era: the theory of progressive Evolution.  They took as a given that Man had evolved from the lower animals and therefore the farther one could look back into history, the lower the forms of Man, his intelligence and his ethics.  Some theories proposed that there was a stage of Man’s development in which there was no religion at all.  Then with the dawn of religious ideas, there was an evolutionary progression through fetishism, totemism, animism, polytheism, monotheism, and then a synthesis of religion and ethics, or religious humanism.  All of these theories were based on a lack of historical, cultural and ethnic data.

            The Europeans who were doing the research were, of course, thought to be at the highest stage of development, the point where religion had given way to ethical humanism.  Indeed, all religious faith was thought to be a vestige of pre-scientific intellects and that the European scholars had evolved to a superior point where this primitive kind of thought was no longer necessary.  This mind set was no doubt the very pinnacle of racial bigotry and furnished the basis and justification for the racial discrimination that became such a tragic part of the ensuing history of the world.

            Another correlative postulate of this era of research into the history of religion was the belief that there were some contemporary tribes of men who were yet in the lower stages of the evolutionary process and were therefore nearer to the animal-like stages of development.  These “savage” tribes were therefore studied in order to produce evidence of the theoretical stages of historical religious development.  As historical and ethnographic data continued to accumulate, it became evident that these hypotheses were entirely wrong.  There were no “savage” tribes who had no religion.  Furthermore, most fetishism proved to be merely the use of objects as symbols, and there was no historical process of “evolution” from one kind of religion to another. 

            Another theory of the nature-myth school was that astral symbols were used for magical, astrological purposes based upon the pre-scientific idea that the stars and their positions magically influenced events on earth.  Some went so far as to say that all ancient astronomy was merely astrology.  Through the recent work of the new science of archaeoastronomy, this theory has been disproved decisively.  As data became available, the old theories were refuted point by point.

            Archaeoastronomy consists of two lines of investigation: examination of material remains of astronomical instruments, objects and observatories and analysis of myths which symbolically portray astronomical data.[2]  Through their research and methods we now have another means available for determining more exactly what the ancient mind was regarding celestial objects and their relationship to the earth.  This gives us the means of determining another aspect of the context of Biblical writings.

            I therefore propose to treat the interpretation of the celestial symbols in regard to their context in: (1) The Biblical Canon; (2) The material remains of instruments, temples and other structures for observing the heavens; and (3) The use of literary works and devices as records of astronomical events and lore.