The Sky Speaks — An Astrologer Reacts to Christians Who Say Astrology is Evil

Hey everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology [https://nightlightastrology.com/].

Today I am going to respond to a couple of questions that I tend to get year round from time to time. One is, hey, I'm a Christian. I'm getting into astrology. I know that you have a background in Christianity. A lot of people know that I was a preacher's kid growing up, and a youth pastor in my early 20s.

So they say, How do I meaningfully bridge this astrological world that I'm getting into, this language that I'm starting to love with my Christian faith? Because they feel to me like they're compatible, but I don't know how, or maybe they feel incompatible, but I feel like they ought to be compatible. So I get those questions pretty regularly.

The other type of question that I get, maybe a little bit more divisive, is, I have friends, family members, or I'm even in the astrological closet, so to speak, within a faith tradition that I belong to, people think it's evil, they think it's wrong. They think it's bad. How do I respond? What do I say? How do I defend myself, etc.

So if you are someone who has dealt with any of these questions, I hope that this bonus episode today will be useful for you. I'm going to give you some of the ways that my background as a Christian in my faith tradition, has been able to connect with astrology on the levels that it has. And I'll also talk a little bit about how my own faith path has evolved.

Just for context, I'll give you some points, though, for sure as to how I think these two traditions can be worked together if you have a desire for them to be worked together. Also talk a little bit about how to deal with criticism, or even real negativity being directed at someone like yourself, or astrology in general, if you're dealing with that. So anyway, I hope you find this useful.

Before we get into it, remember to like and subscribe, share your comments and reflections. Turn on that notification bell so you get updates when new episodes drop. That's the best way that you'll be aware of all of our new episodes, and it really helps our channel grow. You can find transcripts of any of my daily talks on the website, Nightlight astrology dot com. Excuse me, no promotions today, because it's a bonus weekend episode. So let's get into it.

A few things that I want to say right away before I dive into how I think these two traditions can get along, first is that you don't need to have any kind of committed faith background to find a lot of spiritual depth and psychological meaning in astrology.

You could really think of astrology as a kind of astronomical, mythopoetic language and a language of rich psychological meaning and artistic and cultural value. And I don't necessarily think you need to have any faith tradition to do that or to access it in that way.

And so if you're listening to this, please don't mistake this episode for me trying to convert anyone to a particular faith perspective within astrology, this is more specifically for people who are trying to meaningfully work a faith tradition together with astrology, and I respect the need and the desire to do so.

So anyway, the other thing I will say is that I think this talk is going to be really good for people who are looking for meaningful ways to find resonance between your Christian faith and your astrological your love of astrology.

I don't know how useful it will be for dealing with people who say astrology is bad or evil, because I'm not sure that you can use reason to convince someone out of a position that they didn't use reason to get into in the first place.

And a lot of I'm just being honest here, this is my opinion. A lot of the reasons that people think that astrology is evil from within the Christian tradition simply comes from fanaticism. It comes from self righteousness, and it comes from a kind of close minded resistance to the universality of God and the universality of Christ as a form of consciousness.

My ability to see something more universal in the heart of the teachings of Jesus, really, for me, came through deep, intense psychological experiences with Ayahuasca. I wrote at length about that in my first book called Fishers of Men, the gospel of an Ayahuasca vision quest.

In that book, I really talked about how these, let's call them mystical states of consciousness allowed for me to see the core teachings of Christ, love, compassion, forgiveness, grace as universal, and I have since studied so many different religious and spiritual traditions in earnest.

Taoism has many of the same components, though some are different. The history of the Vedic system, yoga philosophy, especially bhakti yoga, very similar in so many respects, some of the teachings of the bodhisattvas in Buddhism resemble the teachings of Christ so closely.

So to me, I have to admit, before even getting into this, that I think that for people who don't have a universal a Universalist mindset as a Christian, it's going to be very hard to open up to something like astrology because of how insular and guarded and often fanatical people within the Christian ranks who are saying astrology is evil are.

So I don't know that any of this talk will really change anyone's mind who, again, I don't think has probably used, who hasn't been reasonable in the way that they're thinking about God in general.

So I'm sure that Christians hearing this who disagree with me will take offense to that and but I at the end of the day, it's like, you know when you're if you're coming from a perspective that sees the Christian teachings as universal teachings that live in and outside of this specific institution of Christian faith, like if you can't, if you can't get that far with Christianity, I'm not sure how easy it will be to convey any of this. Does that make sense?

The other thing that I'll say generally is that I don't think that people who are scriptural literalists are going to be open to just about anything. So if someone is like, the Bible is the absolute, literal word of God, same kind of, I think, lack of nuanced and contemplative and mystical thinking that's required for scriptures to take on truth as well as an appropriate degree of relativity.

I don't mean that everything is relative in the Bible, but I mean that scripture has to be read within context and with depth and thoughtfulness, philosophically and within the context of many beautiful religious and spiritual traditions around the planet that I believe it would be very shallow to not see as God inspired as well.

So anyway, all of that is backdrop. Let's get into it. These are the 10 ways that I think that you can bring Christianity with astrology together meaningfully. And I'm going to use a scripture for each point just to demonstrate that I believe that they're not that this means that the Bible proves that you ought to do astrology, but just that there are clear scriptural references to the similar values that astrologers have always had.

And this is, I think, why we also see many Christian astrologers over centuries and centuries, in addition to those that hate astrology.

So anyway, number one, astrologers see creation. God's creation, let's call it the cosmic creation, as symbolic in nature and reflective of the intelligence of God. The cosmos itself reveals divine order and wisdom and astrology through its language of patterning that exists in and through every single experience whatsoever is pointing back to the Divine is pointing back to the fingerprints of God's intelligence.

Psalm 19 one says, The heavens declare the glory of God. The skies proclaim the work of his hands. And to me, there's you know, whether that's literally referring to astrology or not. It does not matter, because the idea is exactly the same.

Ancient astrologers believe that the beautiful language of the patterns of Heaven reveal the nature of divine intelligence, even in small part, to our little minds. And we can that can amplify our adoration, our personal devotional connection to divinity.

So to me, that's a value that both ancient astrologers and Christians may share, and this is, I think again, why some many ancient Christians were also astrologers.

Number two is that God is the author of signs and seasons. It was Genesis, 114 that says, let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years. We see signs embedded in creation. And Genesis affirms celestial lights as markers of time and divine rhythm, and that's no different than what early astrologers said that again, another version of saying the same thing that the heavens reveal the brilliance of divinity through the signs and seasons for days and years.

Number three, there are the wisdom traditions within the Bible are often both contemplative and cosmological, and that is exactly the same as the earliest astrologers. So for example, Psalm 147, four says he determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name.

Now to me, when I read that as an astrologer, I think of the earliest texts someone like Manilius, for example, a Roman poet who is saying that the purpose of studying astrology is to get to know the intimate heart of the sky, that there's something personal and beautiful that's been imbued in the heavens by divinity.

And this is what Manila says specifically, and that astrology is really about leading us to that. Now I'll talk in a little while about prediction and the role that plays, because for a lot of Christians, that's where it becomes complicated, but just purely within the contemplative tradition of astrology, it is all about an appreciation of divinity through a divine celestial language.

Christ as cosmic logos. It is John one, one through three, of course, that says In the beginning was the word the logos, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, through Him, all things were made.

Hermes, the progenitor of astrology. The mythic founder of astrology was also called the logos. And in hermetic Christianity and hermeticism, apart from Christianity, the language of astrology is thought to be a kind of cosmic, celestial manifestation of the logos.

It's not a mistake that the early Greek language and philosophers are capturing this kind of language in the beginning of the book of John, astrology was pervading the same region of the world at that time, and was being talked about as a manifestation of the logos.

I'm not saying that exactly proves that this scripture is talking about astrology, but to think that Christ comes to illuminate for us as an avatar, a divine understanding, an understanding of life that can help us walk the way the Tao is talked about in the same way you are illuminated by this kind of intelligence studying the Tao, and you learn to walk the way, which is very similar to the language around walking with The Holy Spirit that we see in the New Testament.

So beautiful Christ is cosmic logos, the divine Christ as the divine word present in creation, Hermes is thought to be the same thing present in the study of astrology. Not surprisingly, the two are compared by some early Christian hermeticists.

Omens as invitation to contemplation not control. The predictive tradition of astrology is articulated most clearly in India in relation to faith in God. And I'm going to say more about that in a second.

But there is quite, quite clearly, apart from prediction, there is a long standing belief on the part of astrologers, over 1000s of years, that astrology is about symbolic reflection, not simply prediction, that there's more to astrology, in other words, than just predicting what's going to happen, that life and the cosmos as is seen as dynamic, participatory, relational with divinity and all of the beings that live here, and that the unfolding of events can be reflected upon to find the voice of God in and through experiences is just as much a part of the history of astrology as some kind of purely mechanistic science of deterministic outcomes. Even more so, in my opinion, is astrology looked at in this way than it is about some kind of mechanistic study of deterministic outcomes.

Within the Indian tradition, the relation between faith in God and prediction is explained like this. A lot of souls in this world have anxiety about future outcomes, whether it's putting food on the table or whether it's the outcome of a surgery or if it's meeting someone they'll fall in love with. We can't help but be in attachment.

So is it ideal for even a Vedic sage using astrology to to be completely trusting of God's plan for our lives? Yes, yes. That is the ideal, and it is the ideal for many early astrologers as well, the Roman astrologer Firmicus Maternus, who, by the way, converted to Christianity, he said that this study of fate and fortune is supposed to, in degrees, help us to surrender more deeply to the divine plan for our life.

And so actually, the history of astrology is in its capacity for prediction through signs omens. It has a rich prophetic history in that way. But the point behind that, or the purpose within that, is to help people surrender more deeply to the idea that there is a cosmic, divine intelligence guiding every last step of your life.

And that, as much as it's ideal to say, just surrender and trust that that showing people that that you can measure out in some strange way the different seasons of life. What themes, topics and timelines are going to express themselves in different ways at different times, really, for the soul that's having a hard time surrendering to the divine plan in small steps, this is cultivating that trust.

That's the Indian perspective that I was taught from astrological teachers in India while I was there at a conference in Calcutta. That is how it was explained to me. And to me, what's interesting is that this was present in the early in the early centuries of astrology's existence. This was a commonplace idea.

Over time, the church attacks astrology, as though astrologers are somehow trying to take God's power and like, mechanize the universe and strip it of God's divine plan. You know, like God's in control, not us. We can pretend to know it, like we're studying the science, and we have all the control and understanding.

But, but actually, again, the earliest sages really didn't believe that the divine was moving all things, orchestrating all things, but that it's not also off limits to have anxiety about the future and to divination as a form of deepening our trust and surrender in that process, is something ancient astrologers wrote very openly about.

Number six prophecy and cosmic imagery. Prophets in the Christian tradition, in the Judeo Christian tradition, use cosmic language, the sun, moon and the stars as metaphors for divine judgment and renewal, moving in cycles and seasons. Astrology mirrors that exact same kind of language.

For example, Joel 231, The sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. These are astral omens. Anyone who tells you anything else is not being honorable to the tradition of astral omens in the ancient world, they're not honoring or understanding the history. These are astral omens.

They may be sanctioned as appropriate within a particular religious tradition while other religious traditions were being prohibited, right? It's like, you know, we may have instructions not to see diviners, not to dabble in other faith traditions and so forth.

I'm not the first person who will say this, but you know that that may have been an enlightened thing for a people to maintain a certain kind of cohesiveness 1000s of years ago that just simply isn't as appropriate now in the great melting pot of planetary awareness that we have, it doesn't necessarily mean that the advice was bad back then to stay focused on your own faith tradition, or to stay focused on trust and don't go visit the diviner.

You see the same kind of advice being given quite commonly in many different religious and spiritual traditions. Just the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.

So while I can also appreciate that it's like, you know, at a like, I'll never. Get you know my guru when I was in the bhakti yoga tradition, I was like, I'm an astrologer, and this tradition, and many texts, tells people not to go see astrologers.

He was like, Yeah, well, that's like, that advice is being given to someone a sadaqa, someone who's entered into the practice, specific prescriptions and practices within a specific community, Temple calendars, you know, a whole, you know, kind of Orthodoxy, and within that stream, it's important to stay focused on your practices, and, you know, kind of stick to what's being prescribed within the tradition.

But that doesn't mean that what's actually being said is that that stuff's evil, you know? And he also said there are many examples of astrology coming in and out of our own tradition.

So on one level, the advice might be like, hey, look, just focus on your meditation. Don't get too lost in going to the astrologer all the time with your anxieties, your meditation will help you more if you're in a specific faith based tradition.

In other words, they're like certain prohibitions around doing things outside of that have a kind of there's like a common sense reason that some of those prohibitions may be given. I'm always open to that way of thinking about prohibitions, about any kind of divination outside of a specific tradition, because I understand where that need for focus is coming from, potentially.

But to go from that to saying that any kind of astral omen divination is outside of the faith tradition is just lying to ourselves, because it's it's all throughout. It's all over the Bible in terms of the Judeo Christian heritage.

All right, let's move on. The next one on my list is incarnation and imminence. Christianity, especially through Christ, affirms God's presence in the material world. The Word becomes flesh. God becomes human, and has is both divine and human. This is imminence, right? This is God's imminence. It's in the book of Colossians, 117 For in Him, all things hold together.

I take very seriously that astrology is helping us to see that logos in matter in the material world. It is not surprising to me, for example, that astrology reflects the cross symbolism in the angular arrangement of houses in the cardinal signs around the equinoxes and Solstices that the vertical and the horizontal should cross, is a symbol 1000s and 1000s of years old all around the planet, speaking to the intersection between spirit and matter.

Christianity, at its core, the Christ story is about the intersection of spirit and matter. Divinity itself is transcendent, becoming imminent as a bridge that allows for us to partake in communion with the divine.

To me, that symbolism is so astrological. Everything about astrology through the mirroring of the moon's light of the sun through the mirroring of the 12 lunar stages of the solar year, the Zodiac, all of it is speaking to the intersection of spirit and matter.

If you take seriously the Christian message about grace and redemption of the fallen, sublunary material world, through Gnosis, through wisdom, through the illumination of the Spirit, then you are that that that is an astrological message in some ways, that astrological story predates the appearance of Christ and and has preceding expressions in different faith and mystical traditions, before the birth of Christ.

From the historical calendar perspective, I'm not suggesting I'm just saying like the idea of the word becoming flesh, of the transcendent and imminent coming together as a kind of bridge that we can resemble in our consciousness, that we can take up as what we call salvation, but is really the illumination of the soul, the recognition of our ability to receive the grace of our own divine nature as an act of love.

That is at the heart of astrology. It's at the heart of the entire system and language of the two luminaries, the sun and the moon, the transcendent and the imminent being woven together at every level of the language. So excuse me, as I get passionate, but it's like, come on.

Number eight, the Magi as astrologers, let's just be real here in at least one of the gospel stories, Matthew quote, Matthew. Two, two, we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage. Homage, the story of Christ's birth involves literal astrologers coming through omens they read in the stars from a completely different part of the world in a completely different faith tradition, and yet, the star the sky could somehow speak to the birth of a Prophet from a different tradition that was important enough for them to travel and honor.

I mean, come on. You know it's like, how simple, all right, this is what I mean, too. If people read that seriously, with without all of the BS, without all of the mental gymnastics that have to be done to discount or discredit that story, its inclusion in the Bible is mysteriously not taken half as literally as everything else is when it serves a person who is being fanatical.

But anyway, the path of the Magi just suggests to us that there is a universality of divinity that can be recognized in the stars from culture and region and people and faith traditions to another. And the fact that that's included in the birth of Christ is, I don't think we can underestimate its importance.

Freedom and Grace beyond fatalism. I would say that liberal Christianity emphasizes the freeing power of grace, love and forgiveness as universal values that transcend institutions, that transcend religious dogma.

Astrology, when it's understood as a symbolic language of the Divine, invites reflection, not fatalism. It invites us to see the grace, the meaning, the beauty of every single experience as God breathed, and I mean that goddess, God, divine.

Second Corinthians says, Where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom. To me, the spirit is what astrology illuminates. It shows us the living intelligence and the patterned movements of God's plan and intelligence in our lives every single day, if you pay attention to it, that's not fatalistic.

That's about being able to receive the grace of every single experience, the fact that we need a little bit of intelligence to be able to receive it, we shouldn't think of as bad. I mean, some people can purely get by on on prayer. Other people use this language as a kind of intellectual form of reflective prayer. If you can't see it that way. I would say that's a lack of imagination on your part, not the part of astrology being evil.

Finally, ultimately, Astrology can be about prayer and reflection. Psalm 4610, says, Be still and know that I am God. I love silence. I love prayer. I was in a bhakti yoga tradition where I'm not kidding you, I think it was, let's see. Five years, I meditated between two and three hours a day without missing a single day.

So I know what it's like to have deep, long stretches of committed prayer time in my life, and I still have silence as a part of my life. I still have a sadhana every single day that's a part of my life that helps me connect to God in my heart.

For many people, that is precisely what astrology is doing. And my advice to anyone who's struggling to tolerate or accept people who are into astrology is to try to see it as a kind of prayer life that many people have.

Now there's cheap, stupid astrology that I don't like just as much as probably a lot of Christians who don't like astrology don't like they think, oh, that doesn't seem to be doing anything but glorifying the ego, pumping up some kind of narcissistic way of looking at life. Everything's about me and my empowerment.

And, you know, I get that there. There is, like, toxic astrology that's not conducive to a faith based evolutionary mindset. Spiritually, we're here to grow, learn in the divine love, right? Like it. Can I get that?

But you know what? There's a lot of Christianity that's that way too. I've seen televangelists tell you how to pray to get money. I've seen televangelists out there telling you how to pray to you know, have a prosperity gospels and stuff like, there's, there's, there's, ways of cheapening anything.

But when you find astrologers who are coming from sadhana, who are coming from a spiritually focused, centered place, what you're going to see more of is astrology is a contemplative practice that is meant to help us see, appreciate and deepen the connection with every divine step of the journey.

So to me, there is no reason that astrology can't coexist with Christianity. Jesus is still very much in my heart. How could Jesus ever leave? I was raised in the church, going to summer camps, reading the Bible. You know, I was a youth pastor for a couple of years. I worked at in high school. I worked at Bible camps during the summer. I was a faith praise and worship leader with my guitar in college.

You can't take that out of someone, you know, in my experience, because that, for me is probably because a lot of it was pretty healthy and very liberal and universal, like I grew up in the faith tradition of Christianity, the Methodist Church, United Methodist Church, that's pretty open to a multiplicity of faiths and religious traditions being God inspired.

I don't know how easy it's going to be for anyone to bring Christianity and astrology together who can't appreciate that God can speak through multiple different faith traditions, that openness. I'm not sure if you, if you can't go that far. I'm just not sure how, how much anything I said today will really matter.

But anyway, I hope this was useful. I don't recommend trying to convert, convince, argue with people who probably aren't going to change their mind. Like I said. Don't try to use reason to talk someone out of a position that they didn't necessarily use reason to get into in the first place, and also don't I mean, one of the greatest parts about our faith is that it should be somewhat hidden and secret and private.

This is a deep internal thing that is mostly meant for the cultivation of your own virtue, your own forgiveness, your you know, your own ongoing evolution, and so there's no, no one needs to legitimize it outside of you and God in your heart.

You know, that's how I feel as someone coming from a Christian background with this anyway. So don't spend your time trying to you know, Don't cast your pearl. Don't spend time trying to convince people of things that there's no need to convince them of trust, that that spirit of divinity is living in you.

Use this responsibly. Use it to augment your faith path, and I don't think you'll have any problems. If you are having issues or problems, feel free to send an email. I can always make other talks and focus on other issues as they come up. As best as I'm able to, I'd be happy to do that. It's an interesting conversation, and I hope this was useful.

All right. On that note, I hope you have a great rest of your weekend. We'll see you again next time bye.