The Mystic Tye

"Astrology in the Western Esoteric Traditions" Bro. Jaime Paul Lamb at EFC2022

• Troy Spreeuw

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 1:03:13

Recorded at the Esotericism in Freemasonry Conference 2022, this throwback episode features Br. Jaime Paul Lamb, professional astrologer and author. Recently uncovered from an archive of conference recordings, this presentation is titled Astrology in the Western Esoteric Traditions. Please forgive any audio irregularities, as this was captured live at the event. Slides are available to follow along on our YouTube channel.

Br. Lamb opens with a personal story: two weeks after being raised to the sublime degree of Master Mason, he came across Robert Hewitt Brown's Stellar Theology and Masonic Astronomy, a book he describes as producing a kind of Sixth Sense moment, where the symbolic architecture of the Craft suddenly resolved into something far larger. That book remains a touchstone for everything that follows.

The presentation offers a definition of astrology as the study of the mirroring of celestial events on the terrestrial sphere, the sympathetic resonant relationship between microcosm and macrocosm. Lamb draws a structural analogy: astrology is to astronomy as alchemy is to chemistry, as magic is to technology. What separates the pairs, he argues, is the quality of enchantment, the qualitative dimension that the Enlightenment stripped from the quantitative sciences and which he identifies as a genuine cultural loss.

Lamb traces the history of astrology beginning in the Mesopotamian cultures of Sumer, Akkadia, Assyria, and Babylon, where a proto-astrology of celestial omens developed into electional astrology, astrological magic, and the first recorded articulation of the as-above-so-below axiom, found in the Babylonian diviners' manuals centuries before the Tabula Smaragdina formalized it. He follows this transmission through Homer and Porphyry's interpretation of the Cave of the Nymphs, Plato's Myth of Er, and into Hellenistic astrology proper, which he defines precisely: planets in signs in houses and how they are aspected. Those four components, he argues, are what distinguish astrology from related but distinct celestial traditions.

The cosmological model underlying all of this is Ptolemaic: the sublunary sphere of the four elements surrounded concentrically by the seven etheric planetary spheres, the sphere of the fixed stars and zodiac beyond that, and the primum mobile or unmoved mover at the outermost limit. Lamb calls mastery of this model the ring-not-pass of understanding everything else in the tradition. Without it, the rest won't hold.

He develops the Platonic-Hermetic account of the soul's descent through the planetary spheres accompanied by its daimon, taking on character qualities at each sphere, and connects this to the predictive logic of natal astrology: Heraclitus' ethos anthropos daimon, character is destiny. The natal chart, on this reading, is a schematic of that descent, a map of the character the native carries into embodied life.

Porphyry receives particular attention as Lamb's preferred Neoplatonist, distinguished from Plotinus and Iamblichus by his technicianlike insistence on understanding the mechanics of the ascent rather than simply contemplating union with the One. His commentary on the Cave of the Nymphs and his introduction to Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos are recommended as entry points.

The presentation continues through Gnosticism (which Lamb engages with reluctantly, finding its cosmology inelegant but noting the relevance of the demiurge concept for Freemasons thinking about the Grand Architect), Mithraism (its planetary grades, the Anabasis through the spheres, and the tauroctony as a star map showing Perseus atop Taurus with Scorpio, Canis Major, and Hydra below), and the Perso-Arabic transmission through Baghdad and Harran, where the Sabians preserved and developed the tradition, producing the Picatrix and forming the basis of the Solomonic grimoire tradition in Europe.

The Sefer Yetzirah is addressed as proto-Kabbalistic rather than Kabbalistic proper: its three mother letters corresponding to three of the four elements, its seven double letters explicitly planetary, and its twelve single letters explicitly zodiacal. This is not interpretation, Lamb notes. It is in the text.

Marsilio Ficino and the Renaissance reception of the Hermetic corpus receive dedicated attention. Ficino learned to play a seven-stringed modal lyre specifically to draw down planetary influences by matching musical modes to planetary spheres, an act Lamb identifies as practical Hermetic magic in the Neoplatonic sense.

The single slide devoted to Freemasonry proper covers the circumambulation of the lodge as primary motion mirroring the sun's path, the Senior Deacon as a Hermetic psychopomp archetype corresponding to Mercury, and the tetramorph, the lion, ox, eagle, and man of Royal Arch heraldry, as the four fixed signs of the zodiac traced from the Babylonian lamassus through Ezekiel's vision in captivity and into Revelation.

Lamb closes with a brief critique of Theosophical astrology, sun-sign pop astrology, and the twelve-letter alphabet system, contrasting these with the ongoing scholarly recovery of Hellenistic and Perso-Arabic techniques from critical editions of the Greek, Latin, and Arabic sources. He identifies this as a significant moment in the history of the art. The Q&A touches on the difference between Vedic (sidereal) and Hellenistic (tropical) astrology, and the foundational document of Jyotish, the Yavanajataka, which translates as Nativities of the Greeks.

Br. Jaime Paul Lamb's published works are available at the sales table. His next manuscript, which he describes as addressing Platonic cosmology before the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, is underway.

Resources mentioned:

  • Stellar Theology and Masonic Astronomy by Robert Hewitt Brown (available as a Kessinger reprint)
  • Approaching the Middle Chamber by Br. Jaime Paul Lamb
  • Tetrabiblos by Ptolemy, with Porphyry's introduction
  • The Corpus Hermeticum, especially the passage on anagogic ascent through the seven planetary spheres (cf. Romans 1:25 in context)
  • Picatrix (Perso-Arabic grimoire, foundational to the Solomonic tradition)
  • Sefer Yetzirah (proto-Kabbalistic, letter-to-planet and letter-to-zodiac attributions)
  • Chris Brennan's Hellenistic Astrology course
  • Christian Astrology by William Lilly
  • Masonic Conferences
  • https://www.jaimepaullamb.com/

Links and resources


Support the show

If this episode resonated with you, the most helpful thing you can do is leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. We are also building a directory of Freemasonic events and publications. If you know of something coming up, send Troy an email at troy@mystictye.com.

Graphics and web hosting by Art Szabo Creative. Theme music by Organist.

Happy to meet, sorry to part, happy to meet again.



SPEAKER_04

Welcome to Mystic Tie, a podcast for Freemasons. I am your host, Troy Sproof. You can find us online at Mystictie.com. Support us on Patreon at patreon.com slash mystictie. Email me feedback, guest suggestions, and any other questions at Troy at Mystictie.com. Recorded at Esoturicism and Freemasonry Conference 2022. This throwback episode features Brother Jamie Paul Lam, professional astrologer and author. Jamie has been one of our most popular guests on this show and speaker at EFC many times. This presentation, entitled Astrology in the Western Esoteric Traditions, was recently uncovered in an archive of recordings we'll be editing and posting for the edification of our band. Please forgive any audio issues as this was recorded at a live event. Feel free to watch the slides and follow along on our YouTube channel. Enjoy. If you're at all interested in Freemasonry, especially books published support Freemasonry, esoteric or not, you'll be familiar with this next speaker. Brother Jamie Paul Lamb has been an absolute dynamo in the world of Masonic publications. In four years, he published three major works, including one that runs over 500 pages. It's an unbelievable amount of work he's put out. And I'm inspired that he's here today. I'm amazed that he's here today. I'm super happy to introduce Brother Jamie Paul Lamb. Brother Lamb? His talk today, Astrology and the Western Esoteric Traditions, Brother Lamb. I'm going to give you the longer mic.

SPEAKER_03

This one?

SPEAKER_01

Greetings to everybody. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks so much to Troy and Ken Lane. So this is just going to broadly situate us in just this astrological domain, right? And uh particularly as it pertains to the Western esoteric traditions, I've got a little bit of a plan of what I want to talk about. And that's defining astrology. Let me go back a second. Uh, if you've read any of my stuff, you've probably seen that I get into astrology and cosmology and stuff like that, esoteric cosmology and these sorts of things and how it relates to Western esoteric traditions, particularly. It's just a touchstone for me, for better or worse. You know, it's not for everybody, so I'm just kind of putting that out there. But I can tell you this just a personal story. They say when you're talking like this, you should have some sort of personal story to rope everybody in. So uh I'm gonna hold this. So, yeah, my personal story is like two weeks after I was raised to the sublime degree of Master Mason, I came into a copy of Robert Hewitt Brown's Stellar Theology and Masonic Astronomy. You know that one? Who knows that one? Could you raise your hands? Stellar Theology and Masonic Astronomy. This book is massive. I mean, it's so incredible. I just I encourage you to check out that book. You can get one of those cheap O'Kessinger reprints of it for like 10 bucks on uh Amazon or whatever. But uh, it's just a really fantastic kind of entry into that astrological perspective into our work. So I just I just love that work so much. But and and consequently, when I was reading that book, so I was granted two weeks I was raised. I came into a copy of that book, and then you remember anybody ever seen the Sixth Sense with Bruce Willis? You know, where it's like his ring falls off, and you're like, oh my god, this guy's been dead this whole time. You know what I'm talking about? Where it's like, oh yeah, it was that sort of thing where it was like where it was, I kept getting that impression all the time. Like I'd literally have to put the book down and like pace back and forth, just reeling. Like, what did he just say? I mean, and not that that's the only perspective on let's say the hieramic tragedy. That's not the only way to. And when I put that that quoted, you had a quote where it was like holds up to the minutest scrutiny from whatever angle. I just meant that I think the context of that was like, you know, you can approach it from this interpretive perspective, that interpretive perspective, and just kind of approach our work in the craft from a lot of different vantage points and have it hold up to some scrutiny there. Have it hold up to like, you know, it's a pretty tight and tidy system that we have. Like Newman, you brought up Newman, dear friend of mine. I love him. He's in England right now, actually doing this big highfalutin, uh, I forget what it's even called, some big conference, but we've been texting. And um anyway, so that's what I mean. Our work is so tight and so so rich that we can kind of approach it from these different interpretive perspectives, none of which I'm trying to like sell to you. You know, it's you know, you get in where you can fit in, just to be colloquial about it. But uh anyway, this let's get back to what I'm trying to talk about today, which is astrology in general, in the context of the Western esoteric traditions. We're gonna define astrology. I've spent a lot of time in this subject dealing with this and taking courses. I took Chris Brennan's Hellenistic astrology course. I read about it all the time. My wife is so sick of it, she could puke. And um, you know, I'm just it's on my mind. I keep thinking about it. And I'm not like, this is such a long preamble, but uh I'm not like sold on anyone. Uh, you know, I'm into Freemasonry and I I personalize that for me. I mean, I gotta say that. And my work, like approaching the middle chamber and stuff like that. That's yes, it's for the fellow craft because I go through the seven liberal arts and sciences, but uh it's really I didn't, I wasn't gonna publish that book. That was my notes. Those were my notes. Those were things that I was writing because I felt like I never really uh provided my master's piece. I never felt like I proved proficient in that work. And that was bugging me for some years. And I was like, okay, I need to buckle down and actually learn about these sort of things so I can move forward, you know, and that's how that started. But uh so anyway, today we're gonna talk, we're gonna define astrology, we're gonna get into some cosmology, of course, a little bit of the philosophy underlying it. Who's from who feels like who can say they're an astrologer right now? Okay, so a lot of this, you're gonna get a lot of this. Anyone over here raise their hand? I know you're into astrology. We talked about that. So, but primarily, here's what I want to do is get into you know, this historical overview about astrology and how it fits in the Western esoteric traditions, how it is foundational to the Western esoteric tradition. So here's a definition I'm gonna offer it's the study of the mirroring of celestial events on the terrestrial sphere. So that sympathetic, resonant relationship between the microcosm and the macrocosm. Does that kind of make sense? That we watch these, this is South, right? Is this actual South or symbolic South? So we see the planets rise, the sun and the moon and the planets rise, culminate and set in the West, right? And uh we watch their sort of this cosmic drama play out, the planets and their various, their various sort of cycles and epicycles and direct and retrograde motions and the sort of the the astro mythologization, if I can make a word, of of those processes. And this is an old story. It's maybe one of the maybe the oldest story, right? That we when we mythologize the movements of celestial bodies, it's so central to uh certainly the Western esoteric traditions, but uh to western to culture in general. So I'm gonna do a a little analogy here to help cement this. This is just uh kind of making this a little more concrete for everybody. I say astrology is to astronomy, as alchemy is to chemistry, as magic is to technology. Does that make sense? So what differentiates those three pairs, let's say, is this enchantment, right? The quantifiable and the qualifiable, and how they've been divorced, right? We'll talk about that in a second. So, yeah, the enlightenment, uh worshipful brother Wes was talking about. Uh I'm kind of like, at least on this front, I'm anti-enlightenment. I'm so like personally, this is not I'm again, I'm not trying to sell an opinion, but personally, I'm like the enlightenment was for me, from my perspective, one of the worst things that could have happened to mankind because uh we we exorcised as one would a demon, we exorcised the anima mundi from our worldview. Uh we just all of that, the numinous sort of presence of that spirit or soul of the cosmos was just pulled out for what was quantifiable, you know, what was measurable, what was calculable, what was um what we could observe and notate and things like that. And these sort of qualitative elements fell to the wayside. I put in here positivistic arrogance just as a cue for me, but what I meant by that was like, how could you look just in in plain observation? Look at what was going on, let's say in 2012, or not 2012, 2020, right? When we saw that conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, you know what I'm talking about. We saw the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, this great conjunction, capital G, capital C, and everything that was going on on the terrestrial sphere and a bunch of other metrics, astrological metrics that we fitted into this mundane conception of uh mundane as in mundane astrology, to put this all together and see what was going on and to through direct observation to watch this drama play out, to look at that and say that those planets only have meaning and purpose because I, through my solipsistic Kantian lens, like that's all I'm bestowing that on these planets. And I think that is like colossally hubristic. I think that is the most arrogant thing, right? To divorce the cosmos from any sort of inherent purpose and meaning is just arrogant to me. So I've already talked about oh astrology's esotericism. So let's talk about this. So this is an esoteric Freemasonry conference, right? What is esoteric? Esoteric is stuff that's meant for the initiated, and it's it does cleave away those things that are accepted, you know, because we think of esotericism and occultism as rejected science, you know, things that have the dustbin of scientific inquiry. These are the things that we fit into the file folder of esotericism and occultism, right? And that's just the case. But um before the Enlightenment, let's say, alchemy and chemistry were one thing. It contained the qualitative and the quantitative components, those that merit, that Pythagorean marriage of those two things, you know. These were it was a holistic system. Same thing with astrology and astronomy, right? They were one thing before the enlightenment. You wouldn't even say like uh astrology is an esoteric art or alchemy as an esoteric art before the enlightenment. You wouldn't say that because that was not a thing. That was not part of the conversation. So I think that's a big point to make because we're talking about esoteric stuff right now, and you have to know when that qualitative component was cleaved away from the quantitative measurable component of things. We wouldn't say alchemy was esoteric before the Enlightenment. We would say it's chemistry, science, it's a holistic system. So let's go all the way back many thousands of years to uh the Mesopotamian complex of cultures, right? We have Sumer, we have Akkadia, we have Assyria, we have Babylon, these four great cultures in in that region, right? They had a proto-astrology. I say proto-astrology because it was it was uh devoid of planets in signs, in houses, and how they are aspected. I'll say that once more. Planets in signs, in houses, and how they are aspected. That's what astrology is. Planets when they're in signs, in houses, the existential sort of domains of action on the terrestrial sphere, right? And how they're aspected with one another on the ecliptic. They make a square or a shrine, 90 degrees or 120 degrees, or these sort of regular polygons inscribed in this circle of the ecliptic, you know, the 360-degree circle. Thanks, Sumer, for this 360-degree circle. So, um what happened around that time? They had this proto-astrology, these celestial omens. They would watch the, you know, these movements and placements would portend events on the uh the terrestrial sphere. Uh, they were largely, you know, how they pertained to the king or how they pertained to political affairs in the empire, etc. And because of that, they would uh the next sort of development was they would elect certain times to do things. It's an election. You elect certain times to set cycles in motion, and you use astrology for that. That worked out while the while Mars was in cancer, right? Um, so why don't we reverse engineer that with an election and do do something at that time while we have this uh this auspicious placement of a planet in a sign in a house? Does that make sense? So what that led to is astrological magic, and you see this in this numberbe texts, right? And these just have to do with certain times to do things. It was largely electional, picking the right cycle to engage. And um, propitiation and and uh you can mitigate bad placements if you had a a planet that was like like let's say you had a bad transit or something like that. You can do a certain operation, uh, astrotheurgical operation to sort of placate that planetary archetype, that deity associated with that planet, is how that started. And we see a lot of people talk about as above, so below. Everybody knows that thing, right? So that's from, of course, the tabula smaragdina or the emerald tablet is where we get that. But um, there's a precursor to that in these Babylonian diviners manuals, right? So it says a sign that is evil in the sky is evil on earth. One that is evil on earth is evil in the sky, where we find this connection between the microcosm and the macrocosm and really sets us up for astrology going forward. So let's go back to Homer. He talks about, or they, Homer is probably not one guy, right? So in the cave of the nymphs sequence there in the Odyssey, Porphyry, a much later Neoplatonist, has has a sort of an interpretation of that. And he talks about how the cave of the nymphs is this cosmological model. I don't need to drill into this sort of stuff right now, but it's important that you know that there was this sort of astro, let's say astrotheological, because it was not properly astrological. It was this um astrotheological or astro-mythological. I put a word right there, conception of these sort of movements, right? These sort of cycles and cosmology itself. Cosmology being meaning, in this sense, sort of the constitution or structure of the cosmos, the study of that. And Plato got into, or rather, Homer got into things like the Great Bear, you know, which you see near the pole star, the Great Bear asterism and Ursa Major, and how that sort of revolves around the pole star. So he they were talking about these things in this numinous, mystical, cosmological sense, right? So this kind of leads to Plato with his myth of air. You know, I've done a lot of work on this sort of thing, and I feel like I need to unpack this right now. This is actually, this slide alone is pretty much the subject of my next manuscript that I've already started on. So, so imagine the soul outside of the cosmos, outside of the sphere of the firmament, the sphere of the fixed stars and the zodiac. Imagine the soul outside of that, in these a-causal spheres, the sphere of the prima mobile, the unmoved mover, right? Outside of the stars and the constellations. The soul stands outside there, outside of the Ogdoad, right? The sphere of the fixed stars and the zodiac. And the soul is coupled with a daimon. Yes, it's a demon, but not in a Linda Blair sense, in the sort of in this Platonic sense. The soul is coupled with this daimon who guides it down through these celestial spheres. And at each celestial sphere, the soul takes on a certain quality associated with that planetary sphere on the way down through that ladder, right? So that's where we get characteristics. So they could be positive, neutral, or negative, depending on the placement of that planet when the native or the subject of the natal chart is born, right? So when we see that natal chart, we see the the schematic of character of the native, if you believe in this sort of thing, right? Uh, we see the schematic of the character of the native. So that's why astrology is predictive, because you can look at somebody's natal chart and you can you can deduce kind of uh the condition of that planetary sphere as they pass down through it. And you can get a character schematic. And Heraclitus said ethos anthropos daimon, he said, which is popularly translated as character is destiny, right? So character is destiny because people tend to act within the confines of their character in any particular situation. Your character sets how you're gonna act in a situation, so natal astrology is predicting. Is based on this schematic of character that is the natal chart. Does that make sense? I'm trying to get better about explaining that because I know that if I can verbally explain that, I'm gonna do a better job on this book. And this book, little sidebar right now, this book probably will not even have the word Freemasonry in it. It may or it may not, I don't know. Probably not. But uh that doesn't mean I don't love you guys. But like uh but I'm just like you know, I've done I've I've done a lot of work in the mesanosphere, and now it's kind of time for me to do something else. So this is good kind of way before the tree of life, right? But I'm gonna get into that. I'm gonna get into the Sefrietzerah. I'm not gonna touch the Zohar where the tree shows up and um Kircher's tree and all that stuff. We're thinking Kircher's tree when we say that. Um so yeah, the allotment of character. So here's what I'm talking about with that cosmological stuff. So we have to have this is so important. We have to have an understanding of this Ptolemaic cosmology, and that situates in the center, the sublunary sphere, which is that of the earth, because we're below the moon, right? So in that sublunary sphere, you have the four empedoclian elements, which are earth, air, water, and fire. That they're below the moon. They only exist here according to this cosmology, they only exist here below the sphere of the moon. Malkuth, if you like, for the Kabbalist, right? Umside of that, concentrically enveloping that in these etheric spheres, the fifth element, fifth element, ether, the quintessence, in these etheric spheres, uh you have the spheres of the planets, right? Seven visible planets from the moon to Saturn. The moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Jupiter, or rather, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. Do you got that? Seven planets concentrically enveloping this sublunary sphere of the elements.

unknown

Okay.

SPEAKER_01

And then outside of that, you have the sphere of the fixed stars and the zodiac, another sphere, a concave sphere that we're looking at this way. We see the stars and the constellations of the zodiac, and we see the planets. So planet means a wanderer, planetes asterisk, like a wandering star. We see the planets move against this canopy of fixed stars, this star-bedecked canopy, I think we call it somewhere in masonry. And um, so that's how they get the, and then outside of that is the Aristotle's unmoved mover, his primum mobile is outside of that. So you have the Earth with the elements in the center, you have these concentrically enveloping etheric spheres that correspond to each of these seven visible planets, and then outside of that, you have the sphere of the fixed stars and the zodiac hocma to our Kabbalists. And outside of that, you have the unmoved mover. So this is the cosmology that we're working with. And getting that, like you can't, that's the ring not pass. I mean, if you don't have that in your head, you're never gonna understand the rest of this stuff. So it's this Ptolemaic cosm cosmological model is massive. It is so important, right? This the sphere of the elements surrounded by these planetary spheres, the spheres, the sphere of the fixed stars in the zodiac, and then outside of that, whatever deific sort of figure you care to deposit there. So in Hermeticism, you see this. Look at uh next time you're in the Corpus Hermeticum, look at Pomandris 125. I didn't print it out here, but it involves what we say an anagogic ascent through those seven planetary spheres. The soul ascends through those spheres. And at each point, it sort of gives up one of these points of or these characteristics of dross materiality, now deactivated, is how they put it. It's a really beautiful passage. So we see these vices and virtues that we were talking about in the um the natal chart, you know, and the allotments of the daimon as you as the soul comes down through these planetary spheres. In in the Hermetic literature, they talk about seven governors. And I wanted to mention this is technical Hermetica, right? So you don't, yes, I did bring it up in the context of the Corpus Hermeticum, but there's actually a body of what we now call retrospectively technical Hermetica that is different from philosophical Hermetica, right? So the philosophical Hermetica is more sort of theurgic and neoplatonic, whereas the technical Hermetica has to do specifically with alchemy, astrology, and practical magic or theurgy. So it's very specific technical stuff that we see like in the PGM or the Greek magical papyri. So Gnosticism, because what we're doing right here is we're just going through all these traditions and situating astrology in these traditions, right? So Gnosticism, not my strong suit. I'm frankly not that interested in it, but I had to put it in here because, and the reason why is because they have such a convoluted cosmology. Their whole story is just, oh my God, there's too many people, there's too many deities, there's too many moving parts and stuff. It's just the most inelegant cosmology I've ever seen. But yes, they do have these ideas of archons as being planetary uh archetypal concentrations of the planets, you might say, right? Uh, and they do have the idea of a demiurge, which I think is important to look into if you're a Freemason and you're looking into things about our uh our grand architect of the universe, our great architect of the universe as a demiurge. So this is not God, this is a demiurge from the Gnostic perspective. So that's something to look at. Uh that's not what this presentation is about, and I don't want to get in trouble, but um but yeah, you can there's a case to be made for the grand architect of the universe being this demiurgic, lesser than the tetragrammaton, Yodhe Vavhe, etc. There's an argument, there's a critique there. So this has been my jam for a few years now. So um I've already kind of talked about this in the sort of the way it unfolds in the natal chart and the daimon and this sort of porphyry. Porphyry talks about a lot about this. He was a Neoplatonist, and um whereas Iomblicus and um Plotinus were more subscribed to this sort of like this contemplative or meditative idea theurgically, like you commune with the one, Tohen, they say in Greek, right? You commune with the one through um meditation, contemplation, and the nouse or this intellectual sort of connection with the one. Whereas Porphyry was like, nope, I'm an astrologer, I'm interested in seeing how this works, nuts and bolts, and I'm interested in the cosmos, and I want to know the mechanism by which this whole thing works, and how I can reverse engineer my anagogic or anabasic ascent through these spheres, his words, stuff like that. He was that's why he's my favorite Neoplatonist. It's kind of a little intimidating at first, but I promise you, get into some porphyry stuff like his cave commentary on the cave of the nymphs and um his introduction to Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos, four books of astrology, and you'll see that he is a technician. And he, if you're a systems-oriented person like I am, I just like systems. I'm a project manager by day. You know, I'm like a lighting project manager. I do all this tedious nuts and bolts spreadsheet stuff, and I like little systems and I like stuff to be tidy, you know, it's gotta be neat and orderly. Uh, I position stuff on my desk so it's totally square, right angles. My pen, if I have my pen at some oblique or something like that, I'm like, no, that bugs me. So that's why I'm interested in astrology. It's kind of like it's a tick of mine. It's and it's not for everybody. But anyway, so do check out Porphyry if you're interested in this sort of stuff, because there he really outlines this entire method by which we can ascend through the spheres through the intercession of the daimon. The daimon is your tutelary spirit, your holy guardian angel, if you will. They have a name for it in every uh in every idiom, right? Right, and in every sort of system, there's a name for this entity. Connect with that entity and it'll guide you up through those spheres because it's the one that guided you down through those spheres. And if you use it for intercession, theurgical intercession, I actually, so I'm crazy, I guess, because I actually believe in this sort of stuff personally. So Mithraism, do you know that it was like we were a toy we were a coin toss away from being a Mithraic society in the West? You know that it was very close between this whole Christian West and a Mithraic West? It was like closer than you think. So I just bring this up because their grades were planetary, they corresponded it, they corresponded to these seven planetary spheres. They had this idea of an anabasis or anagogic ascent through these spheres. It was a very prevalent motif in the grades of Mithraism. One more about Mithrasm. Well, here, I'm gonna sell it right now. This is you see the semicircle, this zodiacal semicircle above Mithhras, like the Persian Mithras, right? And he has this cape, which is the star-bedecked canopy. Mithras is Perseus, the Persian. It's a constellation that sits atop Taurus in celestial latitude. If you look at celestial latitude, right above Taurus, you see Perseus. Perseus sits atop Taurus, and underneath him, I don't know if you could see these little pictures, but there's a scorpion, a snake, and a dog under on the underside of the bull. This is a ubiquitous motif in what they call Tauroctonies, these Mithraic ba reliefs. This is like everywhere. There's thousands of them. And um of course that's Perseus atop the bull, and then on the underside of the ecliptic, just as on the underside of the bull, you have Canis Major, Hydra, and Scorpio underneath. So it's it's a one-for-one. I mean, it's inarguable. There are many papers on this, it's not my argument, but I've read a lot of papers on this. It's like you, it's the odds of this being by chance or just some throwaway thing is like they're astronomical in themselves. You know, it's like definitely not the case. So this is a real deal. And plus, look on either side. You see those uh that's cautes and cautopates, those little figures on the uh left and right there, one holding his torch down, the other holding his torch up. These are the Saints John, same as the Saints John, same thing. They're the uh they're the solstices. I made that point in my first book in in 2018. I made that point about the Taurian age, the equinox occurring in Taurus. I don't believe that anymore. Like I kind of switch gears. Remember, I told you like I'm okay with switching gears. I'm pretty flexible. If I find out a better idea, I'll go with that better idea. So I got a better idea about that now. Yes, so the Annelukas 4000 BCE would be the about the commencement of the Taurian processional age. Yes, absolutely. That is the case. No, you're right, and thanks for bringing that up. I wrote a whole thing about that, so that's it's noteworthy, right? But in terms of Mithras, the figure Mithras representing the equinox slaying the bull, I think he is actually Perseus, which was another grade, right? So it's close to that, and it doesn't negate that sort of thesis, right? It doesn't negate it, it just repositions uh Perseus as Mithras, the Persian. So back to the astrological transmission, right? We see this Perso-Arabic trans transmission, and they are very Aristotelian. And like cities like Baghdad, for example, was the foundation of Baghdad was astrologically elected. I think it was Abu Mashar or Mashallah. One of the two, Abu Mashar or Mashallah, astrologically elected the foundation of Baghdad. It was they were very serious about this. They picked up some strands of Neoplatonism, and you see this transmission sort of go into Eastern Turkey with the city of Haran. And Mackie talks about the Haranians and the Sabians, right? In in history of masonry, he talks about them. Why would he position, this is just a rhetorical question, why would he position the Sabians and the Haranians in the Masonic milieu of our tributaries to the craft? I don't know. I don't have an answer for that, but he did. He wanted to do that. He felt it was important enough to locate these Sabians and Haranians within the purview of our hyro historical transmission of of uh material, right? So it's it's worth looking into. Anyway, these uh Sabians at Haran had many temples and sort of taking off from the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, which were of course always seven-tiered and planetary, or often seven-tiered and planetary. They had this temple of the moon, etc. And that's where you get these ideas of the Picatrix. And Picatrix is this old Perso-Arabic grimoire that is sort of the foundation of so much, so much of the grimoire tradition in general, uh the Solomonic grimoire tradition, uh, like that wouldn't happen in the absence of this grimoireic Aristotelian Perso-Arabic transmission into Europe. That's precisely why that happened, right? So worth looking into. I know I I put a lot into the buildup of this thing, so now I gotta scoot through these. The Sephirietzerah, it's actually proto-Kabbalistic because they're not talking about Kabbalah. So we don't say the Sefrietzerah is Kabbalistic, just to be technical about it. It's proto-Kabbalistic. It exists before the Kabbalah, but that's where we get the inklings of this sacred algebra, the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and their cosmogonical, the creation, the genesis of the cosmos, their impact cosmogonically, right? Uh, we see this in terms of their planetary and zodiacal attributions. The three mother letters are, of course, in that sublunary sphere because they represent three of the four elements. The seven double letters, why do you think they're seven? Because they're absolutely planetary, the seven visible planets. Um, and it's this isn't an interpretation. It says it in there, right? And then the 12 single letters are absolutely zodiacal. Again, not an interpretation. It you read it in there. It they're not hiding it or anything. This isn't occult stuff, this isn't even esoteric stuff. This is like it's in the literature. So then we see this astrological transmission pass into the Renaissance. Marsilio Ficino gets a bunch of documents at the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire. The Byzantine Empire falls. Marsilio Ficino comes into contact with or comes into possession of these Platonic, Hermetic, Neoplatonic documents. He translates many of them and he is bought and sold. He's all in. He's like, okay, I am a magician. I am a Hermetic magician. He learns how to play the lyre, a seven-stringed modal lyre, where in this Pythagorean sense, he can draw down the planetary influences of each sphere by playing certain modes of this seven diet, and it's our diatonic scale. Do, re mi, fazo, lati, do. It's that same scale, but the modes of that scale, doe to do, ray to ray, etc., using the same step patterns, all correspond to a particular planet, you know, and you can draw down that planetary sphere like the Babylonians or the or even back to the Akkadians, when it's like, oh, I've got a bad Mars transit coming up. Propitiate Mars by playing the right mode on your lyre. And you can draw down that cosmic sympathy. You could draw that's magic. That's what Facino was into, nuts and bolts magic, theurgy, really, in the Neoplatonic sense. So then you get it, then all of a sudden the Renaissance, whatever, and then it goes into uh into Rosicrucianism, which we're getting closer to Freemasonry now, right? So in Rosicrucianism, you have this idea of millenarianism, that is this successive ages, the idea that there is an age of, let's say, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, or that, you know, and that these are the harbinger of these ages are certain astrological placements, the stella nova, this new star that the Rosicrucians found, Kepler among them. So I'm I'm exactly putting Kepler in with this Rosicrucian current, right? Because they did that, you know, and passing just like we did. All right, here's something kind of cool. We passed into the from the fire trigon that the Rosicrucians were passing into, we passed into the air trigon at that great conjunction that occurred on the first of Jupiter and Saturn. Great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in 2020 that occurred on the first degree of Aquarius passes us into this Aquarian age, right? Not a precessional Aquarian age, like you were talking about. This new Aquarian age that has to do with passing into the air trigon, because Aquarius, despite its name, is an air sign, right? So we passed into these air signs, we'll be there for about, I don't know, two or four hundred years, I forget. But it's a very important cycle that the Perso-Arabic astrologers brought to our attention. These great conjunctions and how they how they play out on the mundane or terrestrial sphere. I don't want to lose anybody, but we are gonna have a Q ⁇ A. But I also like, is it cheap to like I can go for the middle of the room sort of thing and just which is what I'm trying to do? But I'm sorry if this is challenging. I it's not my fault I didn't make this stuff up. I anyway, let's go into the enlightenment. An era that I dislike, you know, because of that disenchantment. You know, I've made my case, it's a simplistic case. I'm not a sociologist, right? But uh I've made my simplistic case about it, and I'm like, yeah, that's not good, right? Because uh that holistic system that contained that that allowed for an anima mundi, that allowed for this numinous interaction, this holistic system that. That that allowed for the planets to have their own sense, their objective sense of meaning and purpose that is not something that I'm like projecting on it. Oh, Mars means that because I think Mars means that. I just that doesn't sit right with me. So yeah, we get into Elias Ashmole, which I think you know, he was mentioned a couple of times this morning, an early, an early speculative or accepted Mason. He was a collector of alchemical codices. He was the patron of William Lilly, the eminent British astrologer William Lilly, Christian astrology was his main book. Ebonies or Sibley, he was just another one in the mix there. And of course, this sort of stuff gets us in the zone of Freemasonry, and then the Society or Societas Rosa Cruciana, and then into the Golden Dawn. So one slide, here's my one slide, I promised you, on Freemasonry. So, yeah, we have planetary archetypes in the lodge. What do we do? We circumambulate in this what astrologers call primary motion. We have primary motion from the sun rising in the east. At the south, the beauty and glory of the day, the royal arch of the heavens, right? The local meridian, and then down to the west. So, yes, you can put in your trimurti there if you like, Brahvishna Shiva. I think that's the order. And you definitely get the these sort of planetary movements, the way that we move. And this is a Robert Hewitt Brown thing. So he makes a pretty good case for this. Also, planetary archetypes. Look at the uh senior deacon. The senior deacon is the most hermetic archetype of the lodge, right? The the candidate is guided by the senior deacon, and the senior deacon in that thonic sort of role is the psychopomp, and the psychopom is Hermes, and Hermes is Mercury. So that sounds like, no, Jamie, you're making all these chains of correspondences trying to get to Mercury. No, it's pretty clear. If you look at he's the messenger, the winged messenger, carries messages from the worshipful master, blah, blah, blah, elsewhere about the lodge, etc. Uh, he also guides the case, he's the psychopompic guide. And I'm just picking out one of the officers, right? You could take all the officers and find their sort of planetary archetype. Psychologically or objectively or mythologically or otherwise, you can kind of make this connection. It's been done. I don't have enough time to get into it, but it's oh, and then the tetramorph, of course, you see in that little heraldic shield right there, there's the lion, the ox, the eagle, and the man. You see this all over Royal Archmasonry, let's say. And it definitely has to do, nobody would, nobody, I don't think this is refutable, right? It's the fixed signs of the zodiac. Those are the fixed signs of the zodiac. They are Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, and Aquarius. The lion, the ox, the eagle, and the man. So look into that, but that is like demonstrably the case because Ezekiel brought those to us, right? In Ezekiel, he talks about the the in his vision, he sees the Merkaba chariot, which is carried down, and underneath it are these four living creatures, the tetramorph, and they are a lion, an ox, an eagle of a man. They had the same face, the face in one, they were wheels within wheels, they moved together, and he was just fresh out of the Babylonian captivity. And the Babylonian captivity is where the zodiac was codified. So if he just came from Babylon, he brought back the Lamasu. Remember, was it you who no, it was Lon who showed the Lamasu, those sphinxes, those Mesopotamian sphinxes. What four creatures do you think those Mesopotamian sphinxes consisted of? Exactly, a lion, an ox, an eagle, and a man. That's what they were. That's definitely no conjecture. That's precisely what they were. And that's that's what feeds, that Mesopotamian idea feeds into this uh Judeo-Christian Ezekiel idea of the tetramorph, and then it winds, you see it again in Revelation. So here's where, here's sort of the the nadir of astrology. We start getting into this theosophical astrology, which is great, but that's where you begin to see the psychologizing of the art, right? And then finally it sort of culminates after Alan Leo and and uh Alice Bailey and um you know the Theosophical Society gets a hold of it. The Golden Dawn did a pretty good job with sustaining a at least a Lillian astrology. The Golden Dawn's astrology is from Lily. You will find a hard distinction between this theosophical, post-theosophical, psychologized astrology and real Hellenistic and Perso Arabic astrology. You will find a line there, a very distinct and hard line. You know, you will definitely find that. So yeah, they look at planets as and planets as compartmentalized aspects of the psyche. And ancient astrology did too, but not all of the planets. They had provisions for the psychologization of astrology. Mercury was the rational mind, the moon was the irrational mind, the first house, for example, was character and personality. You know, there were provisions in ancient Hellenistic astrology for a proto-psychological look at the perspective on the planets. It was there, but it didn't need to be so uh so dumbed down. That's just my critique, I'm sorry. So then it goes, then we go a little further, we get into sun sign astrology where it's like in the 60s and 70s, hey baby, what's your sign? You've heard that stuff? Hey baby, what's your sign? So that sucks because uh because somebody's sun sign has no bearing on whether you're gonna get laid, let's say. The fifth house does. So you would say something like, hey baby, what are the transits to your fifth house tonight? That would make sense. That would be like, hey, you know, how what's the condition of your Mars, who's a planetary significator of lust? You would say, Well, where's Mars in your natal chart? You'd be better off asking where what's your Mars sign? Where's your Mars? So yeah, is this sun sign stuff is like so simplistic. I mean, it's and that's where you get these supermarket horoscopes and these uh, you know, this whole these uh horoscopic columns and things like that, where it's just they say they're horoscopic. This is what's even funnier. They say they're horoscopic, but they're concerned with the sun sign. So the sun sign isn't even the horoscopos, that's the ascendant. The horoscopos is the ascendant, the hour watcher. So if you're saying, what's your horoscope? What's your sign? You should be saying, like for me, Pisces, my son is in Capricorn. That has nothing to do with anything we're talking about. My my ascendant is in Pisces, that might tell you something about characteristics and physique and things like that. But yeah, you can't really, and this cat nailer is the one who really codified this dumb, like as if as if all of mankind can be fitted into 12 personality types. So then we get into something I hate even worse. My my mother's astrology. Ugh. She was a hippie. And uh no offense to any hippies there out here today, but I particularly, I was a punk rocker as a kid. We hated hippies. Anyway, whatever. So I kind of carried this into my uh my astrology, and and but it's it's demonstrably the case because the hippies gave us this 12-letter alphabet. That's where they say, for those of you who are a little conversant with astrology, 12-letter alphabet means Aries equals Mars equals the first house. It's not the case, right? And then they say Venus equals Taurus equals the second house, and their significations are blurred. It's again oversimplification of the art, which is such a complex and nuanced, cool, like art to I mean, it's you can go into it and just get into it forever. I'm there now. I think about it before I go to bed at night, and I literally think about it when I wake up in the morning. I'm thinking about I'm geeked out on it. I'm thinking a lot about astrology. It's important to me, anyway. And I hope I'm like, that's what I hope is I'm communicating some of that. Tomorrow I'll get into how it pertains to Freemasonry. I know I only gave you one slide today. Oh, and then some hope. Here's some hope. Wes had some hope in his last slide, too, where he tells told us how we can uh some ideas or a prescription of how we might best handle this situation. So what's happening in astrology is uh there are these translation, they're going back to what they call the CCAG, which are these old critical editions, astrological critical editions from the Arabic, the Latin, and the Greek, and they're translating those. So we're finding a lot of that happening, and that and now we're starting to get new astrological information, and we're resuscitating and reconstructing a lot of old astrological doctrines and techniques. It's fascinating. This is a massive time to be an astrologer. I mean, this is so great. We're, you know, we talk about this Renaissance and Freemasonry, it's being mirrored in the astrological domain. There's so much going on right now, and there's so many people are moving away from, let's say, placidus houses to um whole sign houses, which is the ancient Hellenistic way to do your houses. I know that might not mean a lot to you, but take my word for it, that's massive. That's important. So, what did we do today? We talked about a definition of astrology. We talked about some cosmological stuff, particularly when we were talking about Plato's Myth of Air and Homer's Cave of the Nymphs. We talked about that stuff, this cosmological uh models and things, the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic cosmos. Uh, we talked about that vis-a-vis the the Kabbalah, the Kabbalistic tree of life. We talked a little about the philosophy underlying astrology and how that's sort of changed over the years and how it's maybe coming back. And then the last uh what we did throughout this whole presentation was hopefully I took you from uh these early Mesopotamian cultures and brought you through today the state of the art, what's going on today, so you have a broad overview of um of astrology and whence and wherefore of astrology. So do you feel like I brought you that? I hope so. So that's what I was trying to do. And maybe most of all, I hope that I transmitted some excitement about this really complex and nuanced art, ancient art, holistic art, in that it contains the qualifiable and the quantifiable, or the qualitative and the quantitative, I guess is better words. Thanks so much. That's all I got.

SPEAKER_04

That was excellent. A couple of thoughts that I had when I was sitting over here. Did you try, hey baby, how are those transits into your fifth house? Have you ever tried that? It sounds like you had some personal experience with that. Should I, or should I be asking your wife?

SPEAKER_01

Is that what I I haven't tried that only because I've been married for 20 something years at this point. So I I had just haven't had an opportunity.

SPEAKER_04

Something tells me if you tried it now, it's not gonna work the way you think.

SPEAKER_01

Hey, baby, what are your transits to your fifth house? Fifth house is the house of sex, not the seventh house. A lot of people think seventh house because it's the house of partnerships and uh relationships and things. Fifth house is recreational sex. So if you're in a bar, you've got two ways to go about that.

SPEAKER_04

Hey, baby. Just pointing out, this is very practical advice. That's what I'm saying. Very practical. Don't say you went away from esotericism and Freemasonry conference with zero practiceable material. Again, sorry to interrupt you, brother.

SPEAKER_01

So you could do fifth house transits or you could do Mars, the planetary significator for or natural significator for lust.

SPEAKER_04

Sounds amazing. The other thing I was thinking when you and I was just amused when you were talking about um Facino and then Pythagoras and the music of the spheres. It's possible that the satanic panickers in the 80s were correct that rock music would lead you to the occult.

SPEAKER_01

And it absolutely could. It did with me. Yeah, the flat five interval.

SPEAKER_04

Now I'm dominating the QA. We have some questions. Questions? Anyone? Questions for Jamie Paul Lamb that fully understood everything. Come up here, brother.

SPEAKER_00

Your name and your question. Um Tim, I'm not a Mason. Hey Tim. Nice to meet you. Um, so I was wondering if you could expound a little bit on the difference between Vedic astrology and uh the Hellenistic astrology you were discussing. Sure. It's kind of like what that difference is.

SPEAKER_01

Sure. So Vedic astrology is sidereal, Hellenistic astrology is tropical. And what I mean by that is Vedic astrology uses the fixed stars. It's sidereal because sidereum is a star. So they use fixed stars for their placement. So their constellations line up with our signs, right? So it's due to precession. Whereas in Hellenistic astrology, they once both lined up. Science and signs and constellations, which are two different things, were once together. So when you said Aries, the the constellation of Aries was there, actually. But it's moved about 24 degrees or something like that over the course of 2,000 years since the advent of Hellenistic astrology. So that's one big difference. But tropical astrology is seasonal, so the seasons line up. It's more Aristotelian and Ptolemaic. That's why we use uh tropical astrology. The other difference is now this isn't a difference, this is a critique because I gotta say, you will hear Vedic astrologers or Yayotish, they call it, right? You will hear them say our astrology is 4,320,000 years old. And it's like, not exactly, because the foundational document that they use for geotish and Vedic astrology is called the Yavana Jataka. And the word Yavana Jataka means nativities of the Greeks. So I'm not trying to be ethno-chauvinist here. I'm just saying the real fact of the matter is that doctrinal astrology, planets and signs and houses and how they are aspected, those four components. Because we don't call anything that don't contain those four components astrology. We don't we just don't call it, we call it omen uh omenic proto-astrology or something, right? Astrology is a thing, it happened in Alexandria, and when they had the can when they found out how to navigate the trade winds in the Red Sea, that's when you get the transmission of the Yavana Jataka into India. So I'm just saying that. Again, I don't have a dog in the race, I don't care. I'm neither Indian nor Greek, so I don't care who gets the credit, but I can say that the Yavana Jataka is nativities of the Greeks, and it's foundational to Jaioti.

SPEAKER_02

I can't say for certain, but I think anybody who might know for sure is dead. Yeah. Good.

SPEAKER_03

Once again, everybody, a round of applause for Jamie Paulam. Uh, he brought his three books in print out at the desk.

SPEAKER_04

I'm surprised you didn't send us a box of Robert Hewitt Brown's Stellar Theology and Maton. No, but it's not me job. But I'm surprised you only referred to his book briefly during that presentation because I hear you talk about it more than you talk about anything else.

SPEAKER_01

True. I cite his books pretty I I love his mask. Didn't I just no, I just talked about five minutes, Doc.

SPEAKER_04

It's a good book. All right, thanks everybody. Thanks for listening today. You can support the show by liking, sharing, and subscribing on your favorite podcast indicator. Even more helpful, leave it to review. We are looking to create a directory of Freemasonic events and applications. If you are aware of something coming up, please let me know by email. In the meantime, check out the Masonic Conferences website at Masonic Conferences.com. Our keynote speaker will be Brother Law Milo Duquette, author of The Carol Architect. Brothers Ike Baker, Doug Russell, Dago Frick Frequett, and Joseph Wages are all slated to present. Give your tickets at SOPureMasonry.com. For other events, check out our calendar at mystictie.com and don't forget to sign up for our newsletter while you are there. Graphics and web hosting are by Artsable Creative. A special thanks to organists for our theme music. Happy to meet. Story Depart. And happy to meet again.