The Astrology Podcast

Transcript of Episode 546, titled:

Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and Ancient Astrology

With Chris Brennan and M. David Litwa

Episode originally released on August 28, 2026

Original episode URL:

https://theastrologypodcast.com/2026/08/28/gnosticism-hermeticism-and-ancient-astrology/

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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com

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Transcribed by Teresa “Peri” Lardo

Transcription released September 19th, 2026

Copyright © 2026 TheAstrologyPodcast.com

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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey. My name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Joining me today is scholar M. David Litwa, and we’re gonna be talking about Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and ancient astrology. So hey, David. Thanks for joining me. Welcome to the show. 

M. DAVID LITWA: Thank you so much, Chris. It is very good to be here. 

CB: Yeah. I’m a big fan of your work; I’ve been following your work and especially your translations for several years now, so I’m really excited to talk to you. And you’ve just been translating up a storm over the course of the past decade, but your most recent work was you actually did a new translation of the Corpus Hermetica that I’ve been reading through over the past month. And I have to say, it’s really a big contribution to the field. So congratulations on publishing that. 

MDL: Thank you very much. Yeah. It’s been a long journey, but yeah. Hopefully it will be a service to scholars and practitioners alike. 

CB: Absolutely. So tell me a little bit about your background and how you got into just to introduce you to my audience and where you’re coming from as an academic and in terms of your training. 

MDL: Yeah, so I got my PhD at UVA, University of Virginia, in 2013. I did kind of a dual classics and religious study degree. I do mostly early Christianity, but I pride myself as, I guess, an expert in Greco-Roman religions with a focus on early Christianity and Judaism. 

So, you know, I wasn’t trained in the Hermetica, but I feel in love with the famous or infamous history of religions school when New Testament scholars actually paid attention to other esoteric movements. And I just think it was the greatest thing in the world, and I still today – I mean, these are radically understudied texts. And I guess, in the end, one could say that I studied the underside or the I don’t wanna say “the dark side,” but the side of Christianity which mainline scholarship doesn’t look at, which is Gnostic Christianity or esoteric Christianity or however you wanna call it at the earliest phase. So looking at mostly early second and up until the third century pre-Nicene movements. I do a variety of other things as well, but yeah. That’s the main dish. 

CB: Okay. Brilliant. Yeah, I know – I saw in another interview that you said that there’s scholars that have a lot of training in reading, like, the early source texts of Christianity and especially the standard Orthodox texts, but that they will seldom go outside of those texts, even though they were operating in a world and sometimes in dialogue with a lot of other religious of philosophical or esoteric traditions, including Hermeticism. 

MDL: Definitely, yeah. I mean, these are just the logical obvious texts that you would use if you were comparing Christianity with other things in the Greco-Roman world. If you were – assuming that Christianity was a Greco-Roman religion, which it is, then you would compare it with other developing Greco-Roman religious phenomena. And the Hermetic movement is should be on the top of everyone’s list, as should be, you know, other things in the classical world, whether it be magical spells or Homer or, you know, the Ephesia Grammata, astrology, all those things were on the street when Christianity was growing and developing. And so those are the most obvious comparanda if you wanna understand Christianity historically. 

But there’s been a huge swing toward just viewing Christianity in terms of Judaism, and that has completely dominated the field and continues to do so. And one should do that, but of course, one shouldn’t just do that. And if you’re just studying the Bible in terms of the Bible, looking at the New Testament and the Old, you know, that’s wonderful – or the Old Testament and the New, I guess – that’s a wonderful thing, but it’s not gonna get you a historical understanding of how this movement developed. And we need to be looking at all sorts of Greco-Roman, Hellenic Roman religions if we’re gonna understand Christianity. 

CB: Right. That makes sense. And one of the ways that this is important and shows up is that in the early foundational phases of Christianity in the first century or two, there may have been regional variants. I don’t know if that’s the way to phrase it. But essentially in the second century CE, especially in Egypt, there were certain texts and certain approaches to Christainty that developed that may have been somewhat unique. And I think you said at one point, if I’m remembering correctly, that they eventually came – the forms of Christianity that developed there may have come into competition later with the forms that developed in Rome. And eventually some of the ones in Rome may have won out in terms of what became the Orthodox Church. Is that a good way of framing it and making the segue into Gnosticism? 

MDL: Yeah. I mean, I try not to make it look too much like a horse race, but you’re absolutely right. What people call Gnostic Christianity in my theory is just Alexandrian Christianity that has been exported to a western context, and then western theologians in a kind of, I would say, reactionary mode identified those kinds of Christianity as heresy. 

But it is really a regional competition. So it’s the competition between Rome, North Africa, and more Assyrian and Alexandrian forms of Christianity that get hereticalized early on in the late second century. So yes, if you were to take a time machine and go to second century Alexandria and then sail to Rome, I think you’d find pretty different manifestations of Christianity. And but you know, not radically so. Of course, we – our sources are biased, because they belong to theologians, and they don’t represent the Christianity on the street, the Christianity that people actually practice. 

So, you know, one of the things that we’ll talk about today, of course, is astrology. And I think that Christians, both in Alexandria and potentially in Rome, were very conversant with astrology, and we’ll talk about a couple groups, I’m sure. Whereas if you were just reading the theologians like Irenaeus or Tertullian or Athanasius, you’d never see that. They don’t care about that. They wanna destroy that; they wanna hide that. And that’s just their way of doing things. 

CB: Right. 

MDL: They didn’t win, by the way! The battle is still continuing, so you know, Christians today are still doing astrology, and that’s perfectly fine. Like, that was never stomped out, and you can definitely be a Christian and an astrologer. And you know, right in the New Testament, you’ve got a highly astrologically charged passage with the birth of Jesus where, you know, they’re looking for Jesus; they find Jesus because of a star, however we interpret it, it’s some kind of star formation, and it’s a weird astro phenomena. That’s how they find Jesus. So God obviously uses the stars in order to sign the history of salvation, and that’s right in the New Testament. So you’ve got a kind of, like, foundation for thinking astrologically. And Christians debated whether or not, yeah, natal astrology would be kosher or not. And but the fact is, you know, we should always remember that the theologians sitting, you know, at their armchairs, they were never able to stop basic Christians from going down to the market and getting their chart read. I mean, can’t do it today; they couldn’t do it then. So you know, they’ve never won. Anyway. 

CB: Right. And then even in one of the Passion narratives, you have, like, an eclipse happening when Jesus dies, I think, right? 

MDL: Yeah, actually, the Gospel of Luke uniquely says it was an eclipse. And the others aren’t that specific. But yeah. And then you’ve got Origen later kind of like, trying to do the calculation and trying to, you know, justify it based on actual data of recorded eclipses in the eastern Mediterranean. Yeah. 

CB: Yeah. Yeah, people are still trying to do that today with both the birth and the death. But it’s just interesting that even in then in those narratives you have, like, an astrological omen marking the birth as well as the death of Jesus. And that’s just in some of the texts that become standard or canonical or orthodox, and it turns out there’s a bunch of other texts as well. 

But one of the points that you brought up is that up until recently, we’ve only been able to study some of the other Christian texts or only had an awareness of them through later Christians that wrote attacks on those texts and wrote criticisms through marking things as heresy, essentially, and naming them as Gnostic. But then in the 20th century, there was a huge revolution that took place where a new group of texts that were original was actually found, right? 

MDL: Yeah. Yeah, the Nag Hammadi Library is still the absolute must-read of early Christian studies. And yeah, it’s 50 texts, at least 30 of them which were completely new. We didn’t know – I mean, we had heard about some of them, but we never had a single copy survive. So absolutely – that revolution is still ongoing. And unfortunately, yeah, we’re back into a phase of scholarship where there’s some pushback from, you know, traditional scholars. But absolutely. Everyone should be reading that. I mean, that’s just as important as anything in the Bible, and everyone should be reading that in terms of what was actually happening. Because that’s a historical document, and those people aren’t marginalized. The fact that, you know, we have such a thin line of transmission and that were hidden for so long, you know, that says nothing to the popularity in the ancient world. So we need to pay very close attention. 

CB: Yeah. I mean, maybe to make an analogy, it’s like the difference between maybe a modern person trying to understand what ancient astrology looked like by reading Sextus Empericus or, like, Cicero’s Criticism of Astrology versus reading the actual surviving text of Vettius Valens from a practicing astrologer in the second century. And here we’re talking about something similar where, for a long time, scholars didn’t have access to those original texts, but now with the ability to read them, that’s something you continuously seem to emphasize in your work when reconstructing what different “Gnostic” Christians believed is to focus first on the fragments and the texts that survive, and then secondarily on any critical reports of those texts from that time period. 

MDL: Yeah. Well, so one of the earliest translations I did was the Refutation of All Heresies, which I’ve got over here. And the good thing with this particular book is – I know it’s not coming up clearly on my screen, but – it’s what this author does is he gives you the report in the exact words. So he’s actually the first one who gives us Sextus Empericus. He’s the first one who takes a real interest in astrology. And the way that he summarizes things, he’s basically quoting, but in a sort of random fashion. And so when we’re saying – it’s a little bit different than reading, like, a full-on critic like from Cicero. So because we are getting, in the Refutation, we are getting the precise words in many occasions of the enemies, as it were. But yeah. In other texts, you’re absolutely right. Yeah, you have to kind of do a reverse-engineering. And so, you know, when we got Nag Hammadi, there was this initial upsurge or uptick in reading Nag Hammadian literature; Gospel of Thomas, like, became super popular. But I also represent the movement of saying, “Hey, well, we do have these other sources which scholars continue to ignore and people just don’t know about, they don’t look at. And we need to also do that, because these sources are in the original Greek, and so in some sense that they are closer to the original.” So that’s why I represent – bringing that knowledge forward. 

CB: Got it. That makes sense. 

So in terms of Gnosticism, though, there’s been a lot of debate in the academic community about whether that title or term is important, and whether to reject it or whether to accept it. And recently you seem like you’ve been embracing it to a certain extent, like, conditionally or partially. How would you recommend the use of that term at this point? 

MDL: Yeah, so it’s been misused. It’s a misused term, and everyone acknowledges that for conservative scholars and for a certain, you know, scholars of Gnosticism like Hans Jonas, they’ve been using it to basically mean heresy, just under a different name. So they’ve been too trusting of the heresy hunters, and they’ve just kind of filtered everything through a heresiological framework. So they still think like Irenaeus and Tertullian and the Refutator. So when they talk about Gnosticism, it ends up being everything that’s bad about Christianity. And so everyone is familiar with that use of “Gnosticism.” But the problem is that you can have a bad use of a term, but if you just say that, “Oh, we’re not gonna use the term anymore; we’re gonna say that this broader phenomenon doesn’t exist because we’re just aping the heresy hunters,” then the problem with that is it just throws the baby out with the bathwater. And people begin, you know, conservatives absolutely rejoice over that. They absolutely love the fact that, “Yeah, Gnosticism doesn’t exist;” that’s, like, a favor paid to them, because now they don’t have to spend any time or money reading the texts. And the point is always to say, “Well, what scholarly terms are we gonna use?” You know? A number of years back, people said, “Well, we shouldn’t use the term ‘religion,’ because the ancients never used the term ‘religion.’” And we could say the same thing about identity and about spirituality. All of these terms can be abused. But the fact is, you can also have the term in a helpful way and you can also use the term in a helpful way. And we need to call it something, so this is the most ready and serviceable term, and if you can cleanse and purify your imagination and really learn, then you can still use the term. 

Obviously, we’ll never – you know, people will still go on YouTube and say, “Oh, the Gnostics are bad and Gnosticism is Christian heresy.” It doesn’t matter. Okay? We as scholars and as human beings, you know, we can use terms in a way which is good and helpful and academically useful for knowledge. It’s basically just an umbrella term to discuss alternative – for me, it’s an umbrella term to discuss alternative Christians who claimed to have gnosis – that is, special intuition of God, typically by revelation, who thought that that was absolutely needed for salvation. That’s it. And so it didn’t matter if you were Orthodox or later pegged as Orthodox, or if you were later pegged as heretical. Literally dozens of people, theologians, and possibly hundreds of others whom they represent, self-identified as Gnostics. And we need to pay attention. And we should call it something. Ideally not “heresy.” Gnosticism, it’s not perfect, but we’ve got to call it something, because these people deserve to be studied, okay? And that’s my whole M.O. 

CB: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it makes sense that there are, you know, in this stage in the second century, a lot of the canonical texts of Christianity hadn’t been put together. Like, that doesn’t happen until the third and fourth centuries, essentially, right? And so — 

MDL: Yeah.

CB: — we’re talking about, like — 

MDL: Well into the fourth century. Yeah. I mean — 

CB: Yeah. 

MDL: — so today, Christians don’t agree on what should be in the Bible. Yeah. Go ahead. Sorry. 

CB: Yeah. And so there’s other texts, essentially, that didn’t make it into the Bible or that represent views that later came to be seen as heretical. But instead of approaching them from that context of labeling things as heretical, simply recognizing that there are different forms of Christianity that were developing around the ancient world that, while they may not have become what is familiar to us today in terms of standard, mainstream Christianity, whatever that is, that there are other types that were worth studying back then before everything kind of got streamlined a little bit. 

MDL: Yeah. You can think of Gnosticism as a variety of things, but basically, the point I want to get across is that… Yes, you know, these heresy is retrospective; it’s also retrograde. It’s not true to history, you know? It’s taking – this is about taking people seriously. So regardless of, you know, if Athanasius in the year, you know, 360 said that Valentinus was a heretic, it don’t matter, because in the second century, he was just a church leader and a theologian, and no one ever said that he was a heretic. And we ought to have the maturity not to have an anachronistic frame and an Orthodox frame. And we also ought to challenge the academy to say, “Listen, why are you pouring all this funding into Eastern Orthodox Christianity when you completely ignore all these early Alexandrian theologians?” You know, “What are you doing? You’re just basically doing what good Christians have always wanted to do – that is, to support the Catholic tradition.” And by supporting Gnosticism, essentially what I’m saying is that there’s a whole raft of Christians, probably the majority, who are not Catholic. And you know, again, there might be slight anachronism here, but to be an early Catholic just means that you identify yourself, you know, with a certain kind of theological stream, which later gets labeled “Orthodox,” okay? But there are hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of Christians who are not in that particular stream, and they deserve equal time. And they happen to live in the late first, second, early third century before the imperialistic takeover of Christianity – before one type of Christianity, that is early Catholicism, got all of the state funding and basically then started attacking the other branches. So that’s the goal. We wanna pay attention to everybody. I’m not, you know, I’m not here to say that the other stuff isn’t legitimate. I’m just here to say, like, why are you ignoring all this other material? 

CB: Right, that makes sense. And to bring it around to sort of our topic, one of the things – especially when you situate it like you do as especially the form of Christianity that was developing or did develop flourished in Alexandria in the second century CE is Alexandria was both the birthplace of Hellenistic astrology and so sometimes you see astrology show up in a bunch of different Gnostic texts in different ways. And then secondarily, Alexandria was also the birthplace of Hermeticism, and so you see a lot of overlap between Hermeticism and Gnosticism. And that’s something that I’ve become very interested in recently, because of realizing – and I wanted to run this by you – but one of the things I was realizing is usually the Hermetic texts are dated to the first century through the third century CE in terms of the Corpus Hermeticum especially. But from my perspective with Hellenistic astrology, we can actually date some of the technical Hermetica on astrology that were specific texts attributed to Hermes and to Asclepius and Nechepso and Petosiris to the second century BCE pretty securely, which then to me pushes back some of the Hermetic trend a little bit further than scholars are usually used to thinking. And if that’s true, and to whatever extent any of the Hermetic philosophy that we might associate with the Corpus Hermeticum then also might go back a little bit earlier, it sort of situates the development of some of the Gnostic texts a little bit differently for me, which is that you would realize that they’re being influenced by Hermeticism chronologically, especially growing up in Alexandria. And I was wondering if that makes sense or if you’ve heard that before, or if that’s sort of a different perspective. 

MDL: Yeah, of course. I mean, listen, we’ve been debating about the date of the Corpus Hermeticum for a long time. And there’s really nothing in the Corpus Hermeticum that would deny that it was written in the first century BCE. I think there’s a kind of – people forget that, and scholars are also very traditional people. So if someone in the early 20th century said, “I think these texts are from the first to the third century CE,” then that just keeps getting repeated and repeated and repeated. But really, there’s absolutely nothing in the texts themselves that would require them to be, you know, at that period. We could push them back earlier. They have absolutely no engagement with Christianity; they don’t seem to know it, which is significant. The reason why people have dated them to the third century CE, which is because of the Asclepius where you have this apocalypse and it seems like Christianity’s kind of, like, taking over and the temples are in disarray, and so they think of, “Oh, well, this must be the third century crisis when the Roman Empire kind of like, was starting to fall apart at the seams and there was no funding for the temples.” But, you know, there are dozens of Hermetic tractates, and they’re not all written by the same person or group. And so we don’t know when they came up. The distinction between technical and philosophy Hermetica is artificial as everyone knows. But it is worth reflecting, you know, like – so if we know Nechepso and Petosiris or, you know, those are pseudonyms, if we know that they’re writing, say, in the first century BCE, if we just throw that out as a date – it could have been slightly earlier – do they belong to the same group as those who were writing the Philosophical Hermetica? Well, we don’t really know, because you know, we don’t have any evidence of actual communities. All we have are the texts. So does someone writing the astrological manual view themselves as part of the same group as someone writing a philosophy metaphysics? Maybe, but also maybe not. I mean, that’s kind of like, an unanswerable question at this point. So I would be very cautious of someone who just said, “Well, because we have Nechepso and Petosiris and Asclepius and Hermes writing astrological manuals, that we definitely know that a full-blown Hermetic movement existed in the second century BCE.” And I would just say that, well, we know that they were guys interested in astrology ascribing their material to Hermes. Definitely we know that. But did they belong to a group? Did they have a group consciousness? Is there any evidence of that group archelogically? Do they say anything in those texts that would indicate a community life? I mean, they’re lost, so – in large part – so, you know, we lack good data. And we circle back to these questions. I think, though, for the practitioners and people who love the Hermetica that the point is not necessarily to kind of prove that, oh, there was this holy sacred community of united minds like a church, like a Hermetic church or like a Masonic lodge or something like that. But just to point out that interest in Hermes and in attributing, say, you know, lore to Hermes, we know when that started. And we don’t know if they were conscious – had a group consciousness. But it’s extremely significant that the earliest Hermetica are astrological. Can’t get away from that, you know? 

So you know, you could develop a theory that, oh, well, maybe the early Hermeticists were astrologers, and then they only developed into, like, philosophers later. Cool, you could say that. I mean, why not? Or maybe you could say that the philosophers and the astrologers existed at the same time, and they always coexisted throughout time and they belonged to the same group and they shared the same meal. Or you could be more of a skeptic and say, no, they were just random people in Egypt; maybe they were dislocated priests who, you know, they had a particular expertise and they were kind of living in different areas and they weren’t talking to each other, but they just started attributing their philosophy and their astrology and later on alchemy, et cetera, to Hermes because he’s the most obvious kind of guy; he’s the lord of wisdom. I mean, who else would you wanna attribute it to? And you know, they never met; they never talked, and all we have are texts. You know, you could definitely take that route too. 

CB: Yeah. Well, one of the things I’ve been focused on lately with my research is tracing back what things do we associate with the philosophical Hermetica that we see any traces of or parallel with with the early technical astrological Hermetica, especially with Nechepso and Hermes and Asclepius to whatever extent we can reconstruct some pieces of those texts. And one of the episodes I just recorded last week was about arguing that Nechepso is actually the earliest source we have for the ordering of the planets that puts the Sun in the center of the cosmos. And if you go through and, like, look at all the other references, we actually have no secure references prior to that where Thrasyllus says that Nechepso dealt with this, and then Pliny says that he addressed it within the context of giving actual, like, distances of the size of the cosmos and harmonic ratios related to the planets. So it’s, like, there’s a doctrine like that that’s in some of the earliest astrological texts that then becomes a dominant like, core doctrine in later Hermetic and Gnostic texts with the ascent and descent of the soul through the planetary spheres. 

And then also there’s a passage in Valens from Nechepso that’s still in verse where Nechepso one night has a vision where he ascends into the sky and then has a revelation, basically, from the god Kneph is the implication. And again, that’s, like, one really early instance then of some of the earliest “Hermetic” authors that we know of having this revelatory paradigm taking place where different figures are revealing gnosis or wisdom to people who are still alive. And so that’s, you know, what I’m interested in is maybe, like, how much can we trace back. 

And then secondarily, with the astrological texts, over the past few years, there’s been a lot of archaeology taking place where they’re discovering these large caches of texts that are written in Demotic in the temples, and they found, like, hundreds of horoscopes in Demotic that are actually changing our knowledge of how they were practicing astrology and confirming something that was long-suspected, which is that astrology was one of the forms of divination that was practiced in the temples by the Egyptian priests. So it’s like, we’re starting to get a clearer picture that some of the views of more recent scholars about Hermeticism having some connection with the priests of Egypt could be, you know, more legitimate or more plausible. And I know you, you know, relied a lot or you were really influenced by Christian Bull’s work in that regard, and you reordered the texts of the Corpus Hermeticum in order to reflect more of, like, a path or a series of revelations, right? 

MDL: Definitely, yeah. It is an initiation, and definitely I depend on the work. I mean, it began with Garth Fowden, but yeah, Christian Bull really brought it to perfection, this whole idea of – this is a progression. And the Hermetic authors say different things, because they’re talking to people at different levels. Obviously, the texts contradict each other. You know, there’s no creed that you could make; there’s no systematic theology that you could make. Why is that? Well, because they’re contradictory? Maybe. Because they’re written at different times? Maybe. But all of those are compatible, also, with the idea that they’re written to different people at different stages of spiritual maturity. And so you know, at bare minimum, you know, we can reorder them and read them in a direction where we think the texts themselves are leading. 

But on your point, yeah, I mean – listen. Christian Bull, his thesis is not proved, but it’s a wonderful thesis that a lot of the Hermetic authors were kind of dislocated priests who were pushed out of the temples due to a variety of issues. This radically accelerated in late antiquity. But one of the things that Clement of Alexandria does is he says he saw this parade – and we don’t know if he’s reporting this or he actually saw it himself, but – he saw this parade in which these priests were carrying a bunch of books. There were 42 books for the – and four of those books were carried by the astrologer. And they don’t seem to be about horoscopic astrology; they seem to be more kind of traditional just looking at rising of Sun, rising of Moon, looking at the Sun, he’s looking at Sirius or Sophis, and so that was kind of, like, more I guess omen astrology. But if anyone was capable of going from the more omen-based astrology to horoscopic or natal astrology, it would be these priests. I mean, they just knew the heavens like the back of their hand. Like, that’s what – that was their training. So if anyone, you know, was – like, I envy their education. I mean, if anyone was prepared to go be an astrologer on the street, it would have been an Egyptian priest who had been learning the constellations since infancy. 

So the whole theory makes a lot of sense. It’s not proven, but it makes a lot of sense, in which case, you know, it becomes a question of, well, how early was this phenomenon happening? How early were priests kind of saying, “Well, you know, I could stay in this temple of Sekmet, or I could go to Alexandria and sit in the marketplace and give people’s horoscopes and make a lot more money and send it back to the family.” You know? Like, how early were they doing that, you know? That’s a sociological question. 

But I think what you’re doing with Petosiris and Nechepso is absolutely brilliant. I mean, that’s exactly what we should be doing – to see what are the actual bridges and overlaps between the astrological and so-called philosophical Hermetica, because yeah, if they think the same way, if they have roughly the same cosmology, then why couldn’t they belong to the same movement? You know, we have no hard evidence, but these are the kinds of things that we should be doing, absolutely. 

CB: Yeah. Yeah, and I should clarify it’s like, I don’t know that the authors – that whatever this Hermetic circle of texts was, it was like, three or four core texts. It was the Hermes text on the dodecatropos, the 12 turning; it was the Asclepius text on the octotropos, which is the eight turning, and then it was these texts attributed to Nechepso and Petosiris, which sometimes they’re together and sometimes they’re separate, so there’s an ambiguity there. And I don’t know whether those were, you know, Egyptian priests necessarily or somebody writing in Greek possibly connected with the Library of Alexandria, because Stephan Heilen’s done some really interesting analysis of the form of verse that’s used in some of the Nechepso and Petosiris fragments which he said became popular in the 140s and 130s BCE. So they could have just been Greeks, but whoever it was, they were conversant in and had some connection with what was going on with the astrology in the Egyptian temples, which had been adapting Mesopotamian astrology for two or three centuries at that point. They were familiar with Greek philosophy and Platonism in some form or another and probably the Timaeus. They also had background in Mesopotamian astrology and natal astrology, because they were taking pieces from that and adapting it to create some new system. But one of the points that was really important, one of the points that Christian Bull makes that might give us a centerpoint for our discussion is he tries to make an analogy between the Egyptians having this idea of the god Amun, who was, like, a hidden god, and then that there was, like, a visible version of that god called Amun Ra who becomes associated with the Sun. And I thought this was really important, because this is something that comes up over and over again in Hermeticism – the idea that there’s a transcendent god who’s out there outside of space and time, and then there’s a second level where there’s a visible god, which may be the cosmos itself. And that paradigm which also is obviously in Plato and like, the Timaeus keeps coming up over and over again and then also seems to influence the Gnostic texts as well, right? 

MDL: Yeah. I mean, the Hermetic authors, they never quite agree on demiurgy, but definitely yeah. In, like, I believe it’s Corpus Hermeticum 16 and in various places in the Stobaean Hermetica, there’s a lot of emphasis on the Sun as the creator, as the image of god, and that seems to be, yeah, just right out of native Egyptian ideas of Amun Ra as the deity who, yeah, helps in the creation of human being and, or you know, brings up the plants and, you know, so. That’s a good analogy that could go way, way back into ancient Egyptian thought. So yeah, the centrality of the Sun as demiurge is definitely Hermetic. There are other Hermetic texts which to say, you know, there’s just one god and there can only be one god and one creator. So they never quite agree on that point. But yeah, there’s definitely – you could write a whole book on the Sun in Hermetic literature, because there’s definitely an emphasis there that you wouldn’t necessarily see in Greek philosophy. They’re not so fixated on that. So there’s definitely something Egyptian going on there. Whether it goes back to a distinction between Amun and Amun Ra, I don’t know. I’m not – I make no claim to be an Egyptologist in any way. And I would love the time to read Demotic, but I’m still trying to find that time! 

CB: Right. 

MDL: But yeah. I think, yeah, this is the way of the future – that we’re gonna advance Hermetic studies by looking at this gray zone between, you know, third century BCE and like, third century CE and start making connections. Because there’s been a lot lost in those early kind of BCE centuries, and yeah, we’re slowly piecing that together. But it’s still a gap; it’s still a gray area. And so we need, you know, experts in Egyptology to help us out. So we need the classicists; we need the religious studies experts; we need the Egyptologists to all get in a room and say, “Okay, here’s everything we know, absolutely everything we know, about Hermes and Thoth and astrology and all those things,” and bring all that knowledge together, have a conference where all those experts can talk to each other. Because right now, yeah, we’re completely siloed off and frankly, in the academy, there’s very little interest broadly in the Hermetica. 

But I’m thrilled at what you’re doing. I mean, I think that you are making a real contribution. Frankly, most academics I know, like, they don’t even know about Petosiris or Nechepso, and they certainly – they don’t bother going back to read those fragments if they know them, yeah. 

CB: Yeah. Well, that’s the piece I’m hoping to work on, and it’s just the role that astrology played in ancient philosophy and religion and the way that it influenced but also represented a unique philosophical or religious school that hasn’t been previously recognized. 

So one of the points, though, is in some of the astrologers, they have the doctrine in that original Hermetic school they developed the doctrine of the Thema mundi or the birth chart of the cosmos. And in one of the early authors, Antiochus, and Porphyry for that matter, they call it – they actually say explicitly that it’s the nativity of god, that it’s the birth chart of god. And either that could be – we could take that in a Stoic sense, in that the Stoic sense is they’re treating the entire cosmos as god, or in a, you know, middle Platonist or later Hermetic sense that is the second god in terms of being the visible cosmos that is an image, somehow, of the transcendent god who is associated with Nous and everything else. 

So that may be an access point, and that’s something I really want to talk about here, because that whole dynamic of there being a transcendent god versus a secondary demiurge or creator god seems to become such an important dynamic in ancient philosophy and religion around this time, and it seems to cross over a lot of those different religions. 

MDL: Yeah, it does. And I think, you know, the Hermetic authors, the philosophers, they’re not totally unique, but I do think that they are distinctive in really emphasizing that exact point – that the cosmos is the second god. He basically fulfills the function of Christ in Christianity. Like, that is the image of god, and in some mysterious sense the cosmos is consubstantial with god. I see the Stoics, obviously, saying something similar to that. And Plato indicates something similar to that where the demiurge in the Timaeus is making the best of all possible worlds. But I – yeah, based on the forms, but I just don’t see them heavily emphasizing the language of the cosmos as “son of god.” That’s really Hermetic. You know, you could definitely make a case for it. Certainly by the time we get to Lactantius, like, he makes the point that yeah. I mean, it’s in the Asclepius and he’s quoting the Asclepius; he’s like, “Yeah, the cosmos is the second god,” and he tries to Christianize that. But he was able to recognize that as that’s distinctly Hermetic; that language – like, I just don’t see Platonists – maybe there are some Platonists that calls the world the son of god or the child of god. But that’s really the Asclepius there, really drives that point home with absolute distinctiveness. So I think you could run with that. 

CB: Yeah. Well, and then that becomes our access point, because then let’s say that that paradigm exists in Hermeticism for a century or two, and then we have the development of Christianity in the first century CE. And then by the second century CE, we have some of the first surviving texts that we associate with Gnosticism and this idea of there being two gods, essentially, or, like, a transcendent god and a god of the cosmos starts getting integrated with the preexisting Christian and Judaean doctrine, basically, at that point, right? 

MDL: Yeah. Well, I’m not sure about Christian teaching, but definitely Judaism. You see hints of Judaism kind of sprinkled in even, you know, virtual quotes from the Septuagint, which is the Hebrew bible in Greek. So yeah, I think probably a good access point for really studying this is to study the most Gnostic of all tractates in the Corpus Hermeticum is the Poimandres. It is really the outlier. Now, I say that with some trepidation, because people, you know, they’ve been reading that tractate first for years and years and years, and they’d be like, “Oh, wow, this is the essential Hermeticism!” But actually, the Poimandres, when you look at it theologically, it is really the outlier. It’s really the most Gnostic of the Hermetic tractates; it’s where the planets all look malefic. It’s where you have lots of secondary creators, and a logos figure and they throw in the son of god who is not the world but is a human figure who comes down and is incarnated and then, you know. So it’s the most Gnostic of all tractates, but that would be the point where you would say, “Well, you know, here’s the overlap.” It’s also got a quote from the Septuagint; you know, multiply and multiplying, you know, and essentially, like, the “be fruitful and multiply” kind of quote from the Septuagint. And yeah, you can tell it’s imitating Genesis one and two, because it’s this language of creation story and they’re interested in creation of animals coming up out of the ground and out of the abyss. And you know, so there’s all these allusions and echoes to that Jewish kind of way of thinking of, like, a definite point of creation. Whereas I would say in more centrist Hermetic texts, they don’t – they basically – they view the world – they don’t have, like, a separate demiurge like the creator kind of making the material world. The material world itself is its own kind of self-generating creator. And it’s producing everything from eternity. And yeah, but like I said, you know, they never quite agree on that point. I guess the way that 20th century scholars like Andre-Jean Festugiere described it would be, like, cosmotheism – that the centrist Hermetic view is cosmotheism, where it’s not pantheism, but it’s pretty darn close to it. It’s this radical sense where god interpenetrates everything in the world, and the world is itself a living organism and creating itself and renewing itself constantly. And it is a god in flesh, as it were, that is in matter; it is the material god. And so that’s a huge Hermetic emphasis. And you really don’t see that in other philosophies; there really is a distinctive point. I mean, there’s overlap, but this is really quite distinctive. 

CB: Right. Yeah, that makes sense. And then that brings up another doctrine, though, that’s shared between Gnosticism and a lot of – well, Hermeticism and a lot of Gnosticism in – you mentioned Corpus Hermeticum I, the Poimandres, where it does have this notion of the ascent and descent of the soul through the planetary spheres and the notion that the individual soul picks up qualities as they go through the planetary spheres. And then there’s a – and then after death, there may be the possibility of an ascent back through the planetary spheres and giving some of those qualities back. And that’s kind of a distinctive feature that we see a lot of crossover in Hermeticism and Gnosticism, right? 

MDL: It is. It’s a weirdly gnostic passage, because you get the impression that all of the energies of the planets are negative. And that’s definitely not the case in other Hermetic texts. So and it’s why everyone needs to be as good a reader of the Stobaean Hermetica as they are of the Corpus Hermeticum. And the Stobaean Hermetica are just the Hermetic tractates preserved by John of Stobi around the year 400. And so we have an earlier transmission of Hermetica before we get to the Byzantine Hermetica. And yeah. So in the Stobaean Hermetica, we have this beautiful tractate called the Kore Kosmou, and it’s got this beautiful passage where the planets, humanity’s about to be incarnated, and the planets are wanting to give all their wonderful gifts to humanity. And so each and every planet gives just this beautiful, wonderful gift. Even Mars, you know, I mean – war or the ability to defend yourself is itself a gift. It’s not, you know, portrayed as anything evil. And then you have this hexameter poem in Stobaean Hermetica 29, I believe, where all you see, again, all the gifts of the planets. All the planets are positive. They’re giving positive energies. They’re blessing the universe. They are a part of a good and wonderful world. But then – whoa. You turn to the Poimandres, and oh my god, it’s a completely different story. It’s like, you’re soaring through to get back up, and everything that you give back to the planets is negative. I mean, possibly the energy of the Moon is the growth and decrease, so that’s not necessarily negative. But I suppose it could be from one perspective. But all the rest are, like, extremely negative like greed and hatred and vice and, you know, you’re stripping that off and giving back those energies to the planets. 

So I mean, in theory, although maybe the planets also gave good energies in the Poimandres, the overwhelming impression is that all the planets are malefic. And I would say that that’s, yeah. That’s a weirdly gnostic element in the Hermetica. That’s weird. And again, I know people have been reading the Poimandres – they’re like, “Whoa, no, no – this is essentially Hermetic.” I would say, no, this is the weirdest point of the Hermetica. This is where the Hermetists – whoever wrote this are much closer to the Gnostics. As you allude that the overwhelming tendency of Gnostic interpreters is to view the planets as archons who are under the control not of a good god, but of an evil demiurge. And so their energies are overwhelmingly negative. They’re basically like, the planets are demons. And although, you know, that’s not the case in every Gnostic movement – we can talk about the Parati and several others – it is the case that for Sethian Gnosticism, that is the Gnosticism represented by the Sacred Book of John and by other Sethian texts, the planets are basically the evil lackeys of the creator, of the demiurge, Yaldabaoth. And they’re all negative, and you know, there’s this big hullabaloo about the creator likes the number seven, and so he made seven planets, and they’re all bad. And the point of life is to get out of this world. To kind of poke a hole out of the cosmos and get back into the world of light. 

CB: Right. So it’s like, there’s already a preexisting Hermetic cosmology that has the planets and has that notion – has a notion of ascent and descent, and also the notion that there’s a transcendent god who’s outside of space and time who is identified with Nous. And you translate Nous as consciousness, right? I thought that was really interesting translation. 

MDL: Higher or divine consciousness, yeah. I mean, it has a variety of meanings, so I don’t – I’m not, like, wooden in my translation. So I try to translate it in context. But yes – here’s another point where the Hermetists never quite agreed. So you have some saying that god is Nous, and then some saying god is beyond Nous. That would simply mean that either god is higher divine consciousness, or he’s something beyond consciousness, beyond the highest kind of thinking one can get. He’s whatever – I shouldn’t even say “he.” But god is whatever is enabling that higher consciousness. And so that would, again, put the emphasis on the hidden aspect of god, the Amun aspect, I guess. 

CB: Yeah. And a notion that in the best case scenario after death your soul ascends through the planetary spheres and gives back whatever qualities it got at birth. But then the ideal is to then eventually transcend through the 8th sphere, which is the sphere of the fixed stars and the zodiac and the decans, and then eventually to reach the 9th sphere, which is the sphere of god, which is outside of the physical cosmos seems to be, like, one of the recurring themes. And that’s actually one of the tractates that survive from Nag Hammadi that was a Hermetic text was the discourse on the 8th and the 9th that has to do with that, right? 

MDL: Right. And I think the discourse of 8th and 9th presumes that there’s a 10th. So the 10th – a 10-heaven scheme is very popular in Alexandria. We see it in second Enoch as well. So the 10th heaven would be reserved for the absolutely transcendent god. But to get to the 8th and 9th is just to say that, yeah, we got out of the cosmic system which is governed by the planets. The planets are governors, and they control our bodies, but the goal of life is to get out of this cosmos, out of material flesh, out of the realm of corruption, and then become a power in god. What does it mean to become a power? Well, it’s something like I guess the Christian concept of angel. They’re apparently doing a lot of singing in the 8th and 9th, and that’s kind of – it has some overlaps with, you know, Christian eschatology as well, where we’re kind of like, well, we become kind of like angels and we’re always hymning, praising god, and you know. That is also very Hermetic. They’re always singing in just, like, this state of transcendent gratitude. But they’re always looking upward, so they’re singing to someone. So even to get to the 8th and then 9th, yes, the 8th would be the fixed stars, and the 9th would be the realm beyond the fixed stars, and maybe there’s nothing really there. And we don’t, you know, it’s not totally clear what kind of body you’re in in the 9th realm. But even in the 9th realm, you’re directing your praise higher. So I think it assumes that there’s a 10th. But could be wrong on that. But that’s the basic cosmology that we see also in other texts as well. 

CB: Got it. Okay. So then that cosmology exists in probably in Egypt and probably in Hermeticism. And then some of the Christian authors of the second century – like, for example, let’s say the Sethians – have, they sort of take that cosmology and say that there is a lesser creator deity who created the physical world that we’re all in some ways, like, entrapped in, and that the planets are the sort of prison wardens that are keeping us here. But that the goal is to transcend through the spheres eventually to in some forms give them the secret passwords that are necessary to sort of get past the prison wardens and then to return back to the original source, which is the divine transcendent god in some ways, right? 

MDL: That’s right. Yeah, because your essential self is supercosmic; it’s superastral. And the Hermetists point this out as well, that in our original creation we were above the stars. So the stars can’t control what’s above them; the stars can only control what’s below them. So you wanna get above, back on top, as it were. Everybody acknowledges – Gnostics, Hermetists, pretty much everyone in antiquity – that, yeah, the stars have a huge amount of influence on all of us. But certainly for the Hermetists and I think for the Gnostics as well it would be an influence only on the false self that is this mortal stuff that, you know, peels off and dies and it gets old and wrinkly and eventually turns to dust. And so that’s not your most important self. Everyone has a divine spark, which is not affected by astral influences. 

So in your essential self, which for Hermetists would be your Nous or your higher consciousness, you’re not affected by the stars at all. And that’s why you can sort of have dominance over them. But then why would they be interested in astrology if they thought that? Well, because they obviously still acknowledge that stars would have control over your mortal body as well as your mood and your emotions and your certain things that would happen to you, to your body, that is. And so I think what you’re seeing in the Hermetic movement is some in a much more philosophical vein are saying, like, “We don’t need to pay too much attention to the stars because our essential self is not affected by that.” And then there’s another vein saying, “Well, no, we still need to study this, because this is absolutely relevant for life on earth and very important for determining the destiny of our body and that’s still valid knowledge and still useful signs and learning how to be able to predict accurately is just part of the will of God.” And it’s more, you know, like, if you believe that the world is a god and it’s trying to communicate with you, then why wouldn’t you try that? You know, why wouldn’t you accept that as knowledge? 

So yeah, there’s different tensions there, but the difference with the Gnostics is they are, yeah, every planet would be a malefic, basically. There’s no bonification. There’s nothing good that can come from the archons. And yes, they’re trying to keep you here, and in order to get past them, you’ve got to know more than they do. And you can do that. And so part of that knowledge might include astrology, you know. They think that astrology works, but it’s – those energies of the planets are exactly the sort of things that are keeping you down here. And so by learning astrology for a Gnostic, it would be sort of like, learning your enemy’s playbook. How is it that they are able to affect your body? The more you know about that, the more you’re able to say to yourself, “You know what? I’m in a shitty mood today. I feel like I wanna punch someone in the face. Maybe I’m being hit by a ray from Mars or something like that,” or, you know, the more that you can understand why it is that you may be feeling or why it is that you may be suffering I think would still be helpful for a Gnostic. But the overwhelming goal of salvation is to say, “We’re getting out of here. We are definitely getting out of here.” Now, is that a pessimistic view of the world? Well, in some ways it is. But also I think for the Gnostics, it’s always important to remember as well as for the Hermetists, the world is the whole 10-sphere system, so if you’re negative about the first seven spheres, you know, okay, that’s fine. But let’s talk about eight, nine, and 10, right? So overall, we’re not negative; the cosmos isn’t negative. And you know, in the Gnostic eschatology is just that inner core of the seven spheres, you know, that’s eventually just gonna collapse down in on itself; it’s gonna implode, because matter just can’t keep its coherence for billions of years. And you know, we know that today. Like, the Sun will die out; things will collapse; all life will be destroyed. And it’s just gonna implode back into itself. And then all that there will be is the 8th, 9th, and 10th. So I would say overall, that’s a positive view of the cosmos, as long as we’re including the whole cosmos. 

CB: Sure, yeah. If you include everything outside of here. Although it’s like, some of the Gnostic authors, they did take that earlier notion of like, there being two gods – a transcendent god and then a god of the cosmos – and they reframed that in Christian ideology by saying that the god of the Old Testament was the creator deity of this cosmos who was somewhat negative or malefic in some ways, and that that god, though, is not the god of the New Testament, they said, who was the transcendent god who’s outside of this cosmos, right? 

MDL: Yeah. I mean, I think a variety of Christians said that, and I think a variety of Christians – even Orthodox ones – recognize that there was a fundamental difference between the very local Lord of Judea who acts more like an angel who’s very tribalistic, he’s helping out his tribe, and really concerned about, you know, Israel’s politics and making sure that they have their borders. You know, like, that the state of Israel – I know that’s now, you know, too modern. It sounds too modern. But that the ancient Judaic state, you know, that was watched over by the guardian angel; they called him Yahweh; he was also called Yaldabaoth. But whatever he is, he’s very, very local. He might not be, like, absolutely evil; he’s not necessarily absolutely evil in every single system. But he doesn’t have all knowledge. He’s not really concerned about the universal. He’s a bit egocentric; he’s always talking about himself. And but that’s typical for gods at the middle management level. They tend to kind of like, preen themselves and, you know, we’re used to that. 

But the main point would be, yeah, he’s just sitting on top of the cosmos, and he has this inkling or intuition that there’s a bunch of stuff above him, but he’s trying to deflect attention away from that by producing a world which is very transactional, is based on obedience to him, and is also loaded with pleasures. You know, he’s filled the world with a bunch of pleasures which are distractions. So and he’s given us brains which are very easily distracted. Like, you know, we’re all getting into these dopamine loops, you know. The creator is very happy about the invention of the cell phone, because now he’s like, “Wow! These guys do it themselves. You know, I don’t have to do anything anymore.” You know? Like, “My job is done here! They’ve created this system of pleasure and dopamine chains, and they’ve basically put the noose around themselves! You know, I’m done here; I can go on vacation,” you know? 

But yeah, in all seriousness, whether you view him as basically neutral or outright evil, the point of existence is to get out of that. Out of his realm, out of his kingdom, which is destined to collapse anyway. It’s like a dictatorship that kind of parades or masquerades as a democracy. I don’t want to offend anyone, but yeah, there are certain places on earth that do exactly this, and you know, so people who live in Iran and I would say Russia and maybe even people who, you know, live in America think this. I mean, it just – it looks like a democracy on the outside. People vote. But you know, people try to maximize their pleasures. But it’s really just a dictatorship, and a bunch of corrupt politicians who are just doing whatever the heck they want and trying to keep everyone ignorant. That’s basically the Gnostic view of the lower cosmos. Again, not the upper ones. 

CB: Right. So they’re – yeah, and in some versions, it’s like the lower creator deity is just ignorant in some ways. But then that becomes the core message of a lot of Gnostic authors is remembering that you have a spark of divinity in you, and ultimately the urge to return back to the divine source and to transcend the current realm – like, whatever that means specifically. 

MDL: Exactly, yeah. Again, we can’t fully generalize, but that for the Sethian system, that’s a pretty good summary. If we look at some other “Gnostic groups,” like the Parati, sometimes called Paratics, they have a pretty different view. They look at the stars not as hostile; they look at the stars as a kind of sign system of, you know, how to get saved, basically. They’re still trying to get out of the cosmos, but they have a more positive view of the stars themselves, so they’re interested in astrology; they’re interested in learning the names of the lower rulers and getting that lore accurate. Sort of knowing their enemy’s playbook. But they also see very positive symbols in the sky, like Draco is a very common symbol for Christ himself, which is interesting. And some of these Gnostics appear to be trying to identify the place where you poke out or peak out of the cosmos. And so they were interested in star charts just to see, like, where the souls kind of popped into the universe and where you could pop out. You know, like, the gateway to get you out of the lower realm. Kind of like if you’ve seen – is it – what’s the movie with Jim Carrey? Like, is it The Truman Show or something like that where — 

CB: Oh yeah, the door. 

MDL: Yeah. Yeah. He’s put in this kind of fake world, you know, and eventually he finds the doorway out. And so yeah, they think that it’s somewhere in the stars, and so the more that you know about the stars, the more you can figure out where your soul’s gonna peak out of the universe or pop out, as it were. The gate of — 

CB: Yeah, let’s — 

MDL: — Capricorn or something like that. 

CB: Yeah. Well, I think it’s – Porphyry has that famous passage where he talks about the Cancer and Capricorn being the gate where the souls enter and leave the universe, and then that’s actually really interesting then in terms of the Thema mundi and the birth chart of the cosmos having the Moon in Cancer in the first, and then Capricorn in the 7th, and actually will tie in with the Paratics, because the Paratics mention the world being destroyed by water, I think, or fire, and it’s very reminiscent of the periodic cataclysms that Berossus mentions of the world being created and destroyed when the planets all align in Cancer or Capricorn. So there’s some kind of recurring like, doctrine there that carries through traditions. 

Let’s talk about this group, though. So they’re called the Parati, which means the traversers, because their goal is to transcend or learn how to traverse out of the physical universe. And you connect them with another group, which I think you said is unique in that you do this – you connect them with the Ophites, right? 

MDL: Yeah, I think they’re basically the same group, because – well, for a couple reasons. The Refutator says that they’ve got the same leader – a guy named Euphrates. And so we know that Euphrates is a named leader – he gets named in the Paratic report, and he gets named by Origen in the Ophite diagram. And the Ophite Diagram is all about stars and star formations and learning what to say to the planets, memorizing certain formulae, and so they seem to have that kind of overlap. So yeah. That’s my view; I don’t know if it’s been refuted. If it has, let me know! 

CB: Yeah. Well, it’s really cool; I wish we had more from them. We just have the reports of some of the later people that are talking about heresies like Hippolytus. But it seems like they were actually using some technical doctrines in astrology, like the angular triads or the angular houses and the notion of what modern astrologers call, like, angular, succedent, and cadent houses, and then kind of like, allegorizing those somehow in a religious or philosophical context. And even at one point, they cite or they seem to be drawing on some notable Hellenistic astrological texts or at least mentioning some authorities we associate with some core texts, like Hermes Trismegistus, Petosiris, Berossus, and Zoroaster. So that’s always been really fascinating to me, and I wish we had more texts from them – like, a Nag Hammadi find that told us more about what their actual doctrines are and to what extent they were integrating other astrological doctrines into their theology. 

MDL: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that – again, it’s an understudied text. I think that there’s a lot there if people really devoted, like, a full monograph to the Parati, which is yet to be done, I think that you would discover a bunch of really cool things in the texts even that we have. It’s a very jumbled report. He’s kind of like, pulling from a variety of random places and so there’s that problem. But I think the gift of the Refutator is that he says, yeah, that he’s directly quoting – so that’s the one kind of – it’s the one grace that we have, that he’s disorganized but he’s at least quoting sections of their texts. 

So yeah, that primal metaphor – they view themselves as traversing the Red Sea, so the cosmos is kind of like the Red Sea, and salvation is god kind of, like, teaching people to go through the stars, basically. And the reason why you would learn star charts and things of that nature is you wanna know the exact names of who it is that you’re gonna meet on your astral journey, because all of us are gonna go through the astral journey. And so you wanna know their true names. And yes, they try to go one up on astrologers, right? I mean, astrologers are – they’re already mathematic-y. They know – they’re really super smart, you know, mathematician kind of people. But the Parati say, “Oh, well, we’re even smarter than you, because you don’t even know the true names of the planets,” or the true names of what they call “outlying officials.” And yes, they bring in all this kind of… It sounds like soup, like the first time that you read it. Like, it strikes you as just a list of names. But whatever it is that they’re reading, they’re really in tune with Mesopotamian lore. And they’re really in tune with Egyptian lore. And so this is one of the characteristics of Gnosticism that I draw out, that whatever Gnostics are, they are very creative, combinative kind of thinkers. If you like the term syncratic, that’s fine. But they are able to combine a variety of traditions and conform it to, I think, a basically Christian worldview. I think that might not be recognizably Christian today, but it was certainly in antiquity. And they were able to combine all this astrological material, allegorize it, revise it, and put it in this larger frame narrative to say, you know, “This is about salvation. And there’s Christ in the skies and we’re going to Christ and we’re learning about stars, and we have a reason to learn about the stars. Not so that we can do our natal -” you know, we don’t see them doing horoscopes, which is interesting. I mean, maybe they did; maybe they didn’t. But even in Nag Hammadi, we don’t see natal astrology, but we see this intense interest in stars and star formations. 

So yeah, something is going on here, and honestly we should pay a lot more attention to it. 

CB: Yeah. The Parati are the closest you’d get to using actual birth charts because of the way they’re talking about the angular and succedent and cadent houses is something that only kind of makes sense in the context of natal astrology and they have that great line which I guess is a quote where it says, “We alone who have known the necessity of birth” – and it uses the word “genesis,” which can also mean nativity – “can cross over and traverse destruction.” And they’re talking about escaping the realm of the planets and using that, an allegory of exodus about crossing the Red Sea being, like, escaping from the realm of the planets, which is really, really interesting seeing that there. 

MDL: Yeah. Yeah. And then they allegorize the snake biting in the desert. Like, the planetary powers are like the snakes, which bit the children of Israel in the desert, and so the point is to focus on Christ, who is actually Draco in the sky, and to put all your focus on Christ and that will heal you from the snakes. So it’s a kind of mixed view of the stars, you know. Some of the stars are good; some of the stars are bad. But they are all – some of them are signs of good, some of them are signs of bad – but it’s interesting… Yeah. They know the lingo from natal astrology. It’s interesting. It would be interesting to find out them actually practicing it or what use they would find from it. But their main goal is to kind of go one up on astrology, to use the lingo, and then to come up with another system which gets them to a realm where astrology doesn’t work anymore. You know, that’s the goal. But they need a map, and obviously they use the science of their time, which is astrology, to get that map. And once they’ve got that map, then they can poke out of the cosmos, and yeah. April DeConick has a good I think article on the Parati; I think she gets the basic point. There’s a lot of details where I disagree with her, but just the idea, the basic point that is that Christians, they’re intensely interested in astrology because it gives them a map to get out of the world of astrology. Sort of like an Orphic religion where the gold plates, they inscribed directions for the underworld. You know, like, for the Gnostics, the underworld is where we are. And when we die, we – our souls – are kind of confused, and they don’t know where to go. But if they remember the map, which is highly astrological, then they can get out. If they remember the formulas and the – it’s like a street map, you know, from star formation to star formation. And you know who to talk to. You can get out, and that seems to have been the major focus. 

So what Orthodox – so-called Orthodox – I shouldn’t call them Orthodox, but what early Catholics like Justin Martyr were doing with the Old Testament, the Parati were doing with astrology. That is, they were allegorizing that material in order to see Christ. Justin wanted to see Christ in the Hebrew Bible or the Septuagint, and the Parati were doing a very analogous task; they saw Christ in the stars. And one group said that the other was a heretic, and you know, we don’t need to get into that church politics. They were both doing interesting things, and they were both being Christian, doing what Christians do, just with different material. 

CB: Right. Yeah. One of the – I mean, one of the things I’ve always reflected on is I don’t know if it’s been fully recognized how much astrology in the ancient world, it especially tended to be more Stoic. Most of the astrologers of the Hellenistic era from the second and first century BCE through the first and second century CE, when you look at astrologers like Manilius or Valens or most of the ones that express philosophical insights, their primary thing that every astrologer repeats is this notion that you wanna know the future so that you know what you have to accept about your life. And that’s why you wanna study your birth chart, and that’s kind of a profoundly Stoic way of approaching things, and whereas when Christianity really kicks up in the second century CE especially, there’s in some instances – not all – but there’s a profound uneasiness, I feel like, with astrology and a tension especially over the doctrine of free will versus fate. And here we see, like, some of the – I don’t know if you classify the Valentinians as Gnostic necessarily, but there was at least one Valentinian teacher in the second century, Theodotus, who said that when you’re baptized that this actually frees you from fate and from astrological fate, and it makes it so that the prediction of the astrologers are no longer true, right? 

MDL: Yeah, you’re right; he does say that. Yeah. I would say, so we start seeing major philosophical differences between Orthodox Christianity or early Catholic Christianity and astrology a bit later. I would say with Origen in the 3rd century and beyond. I think in the first century, second century, and to a large degree the third, it was still kind of a free-for-all. And I think people could – Christians could definitely feel comfortable as astrologers. But yeah, there came a point where beginning with Origen and then certainly as we get up and to Augustine talks a lot about it. They came to think that astrology contradicted a Christian doctrine of free will. And we don’t see a lot of earlier reflection on that, and but yes, they come up with that line. In some ways, it’s very artificial. And we would love to take a time machine and go back to, like, say, yeah, the era of Valentinus or Theodotus and ask their opinion about this one, because I’m not sure a Christian in the second century or the third century would necessarily say that, you know, astrology contradicted free will or it made the judgment of God invalid. And I think you probably know more about this than I do. Like, there are a variety of philosophical positions you can take about astrology in terms of whether it’s hard determinism or self-determinism or even, you know, very, very little determinism. You know, you can still make room for free will if you want on some level. It might be kind of, like, the decision between “Do I get Crest or Colgate at the store?” You know, in terms of toothpaste, in which case, you know, it really doesn’t matter; it’s all been set up for you. But yeah, they’re always in some degree of free will, and what seems to have happened is that by the time we get to Augustine where early Catholicism just simply becomes Catholicism, and you know, they keep to the Augustinian line, even to this day. They convince themselves that Christian doctrine of free will contradicted astrology. And that, I think, is still up for debate. I really don’t see that as being proven. That was something that Augustine believed, but I think today, again, you can be a Christian and an astrologer; you can believe in free will and do astrology. I think you’ve got a lot of wiggle room. And certainly they felt that in the second and third century. 

With Theodotus in particular, yeah, I don’t think we – you’re right, that is what he said, that once you’re baptized, something happens. But I’m not sure the logic there, and I – because it’s a very kind of sketchy passage. So why would astrology not work after you’re baptized? He never really explains that point. After you get some — 

CB: I have a quote. I think it’s — 

MDL: Oh, do you have it? 

CB: If you want. Yeah. I think – as long as this is correct. It says, “Until baptism, they say fate, Heimarmene, is real. But after it, the astrologers are no longer right, for it is only the washing that is liberating, for it is not only the washing that is liberating, but the knowledge of who we were, what we have become, where we were, whither we have sunk, whither we hasten, and from what we are redeemed, what is birth, and what is rebirth.” 

So there’s something there, especially tying it in with the notion of baptism. And I mean, to what extent was the notion of baptism itself viewed as a rebirth in the ancient world? Do you know?

MDL: Yeah. Pretty extensively. I mean, that’s a pretty primary metaphor. Yeah, I think they get it — 

CB: Right. 

MDL: — from the Hermetic – I think they get it from Hermetists, actually. But yeah. Okay, so that does make sense, actually. I mean, it’s not fully explained, but yes. If baptism is rebirth, then yeah, essentially the doctrine would be your old birth doesn’t work anymore; now we need to focus on a rebirth, possibly into a new kind of body with a new set of energies and abilities. So yeah, your astral chart wouldn’t work. But I would still think that for most Christians, you could – I think the position was more like the Hermetic position where you could recognize that you were born of God and born from above. But at the same time, it doesn’t mean that you immediately exit your body – that is, your mortal flesh – so your mortal flesh is still subject to astral influences, which are part of God’s good creation. And so I think it would still make sense to most Christians to get your birth chart, because it would be helpful for understanding your moods, your dispositions, the fate of your mortal body. But yeah, Theodotus makes that extra claim, which again, it’s not fully clear what he was thinking of, but the predictions themselves wouldn’t work. But would they work for your mortal body or for your immortal body or for your old body or for your new body? I don’t know. Like, what is he talking about? That’s up for grabs. 

CB: Sure. Yeah. I guess I just always thought about if astrology was more deterministic or if the more fully deterministic trend was more popular in an era where Stoicism was more popular, that any religious group that offered to give you freedom from fate or from your birth chart or to even alow something like baptism have you be reborn and to have a new birth chart or what have you would have been tremendously appealing. And I always thought that that made more sense to me, like, the rapidity in which Christianity takes off in the first few centuries if it’s coming in a context of that where, you know, people could have framed one’s fate or astrology or the planets or other things like that in a negative context. And that is often how we see the Gnostic authors framing the planets, as these archons that are sort of like, keeping us as prisoners in some way. 

MDL: Yeah, I think a good text to read here would be the Pseudo-Clementine literature, but the Homilies and the Recognitions where it’s really like early Catholic – it’s early Catholic fiction, but it’s anti-astrological. And they make this exact point, which worries me about that as a historical theory. I think on some level, there is a certain plausibility that, yes, by the time we get to the 4th century, early Catholics were making the argument that, “Hey,” you know, “You don’t need to be worried about fate. I mean, you’ve got Jesus, and he frees you from fate, and you know, whoop-de-doo.” That astrology is bad and determinism is bad, and there you go. But I think ultimately that’s a simplification. Now, I think that early Christians like Valentinians and Parati who really did in a sense practice astrology or who knew a lot about it and did so very intentionally, they wouldn’t have bought that argument. And I just think that they would have been a lot more sophisticated about it. I think they would have thought more seriously about the compatibility options between free will; I think they would have thought of astrology as just part of God’s system of providence. That God is a good god, and therefore he gives good signs, and he wants you to know about your, you know, what’s gonna happen, about the struggles you’re gonna have in life. And so astrology is a gift of God; it’s not something that represents an evil world system. It’s completely compatible with providence. And I think that, although we don’t have a lot of evidence for the Christian material trying to square this circle, certainly in the Hermetic writings – again, only in the Stobaean Hermetica – you get the Hermetists really puzzling this out and doing it, I think, in a fairly sophisticated way where they say, “Okay. We believe in fate. But it’s not just fate; it’s providence is the overall concept we wanna work with, which is something fundamentally good. And then there’s necessity – what must happen, because of the nature of our material world. And then there’s fate, which is basically another name for astral influences.” So those three forces are ordered very specifically in Hermetic literature. They say that overall, providence. God is good, and is making things work out in the way that God wants it to work out. So that’s controlling the two lower factors – necessity, which is what has to happen based on the limitations of our mortal encasing, our platforms, you know, material reality and physics and so on and so forth. And then even on the bottom of that is astral influences. And so astral influence is within the overarching category of God’s providence. And I think for Christians who thought seriously about this and who did practice astrology, they would have not necessarily had the same exact kind of system. But they would have viewed astrology as part of God’s providence. I think it’s too easy as historians to say, “Well, there were these Gnostics who, you know, we really don’t like and they lost and lost for a good reason, and they believed the world was deterministic and run by evil archons.” And, you know, so the truly good and attractive message was the message saying, “Oh, well, there’s Christ and there’s free will and, you know, whoop-de-doo, here you go. We’ll see you in heaven,” and that’s just, I don’t know. That never – I don’t know. It just seems to be like that’s playing into the hands of the heresiologists on some level. What I would want to say as a historian is we know that Christians were interested in astrology. Some of them were in we can call them proto-Orthodox; some of them were of the Gnostic variety. But why is it that in the second, third, and fourth century, why is it that they are still utterly fascinated and fixated on astrology, and why is it that some early Catholics sitting in their armchairs and writing fiction like the Pseudo-Clementines or theology like Augustine, why is it that they spend loads and loads and loads of time trying to demolish every bit of astrology? Well, as a historian, I would say it’s because it was really popular! I mean, why would you spend so much time, unless this was really attractive? And so if it was really attractive, then why was it really attractive? Because if it’s just so easy to say, “Well, yeah, I’ll free you from fate and accept Christ, bow the knee, and you know, accept Jesus into your heart,” and if it’s just that easy, then it doesn’t make sense why they would even need to make these long, complex arguments against astrology and fate. I think that a lot of theology is invented because they’re trying to get rid of perceived competitors, and they are subject to these black-and-white, unnuanced pictures. And Augustine is a good example of this; he’s a Manichaean from day one to the end of his life. He thinks in black and white terms. So whereas for a Valentinian Christian or for a Paratic Christian, they’re like, “Yeah! Christ and astrology. Totally compatible,” you know? “God and astrology, providence and fate, totally compatible.” It’s Augustine with his Manichaean mind – who by the way is anti-Hermetic as well – but it’s with his Manichaean disposition which says, “No. There’s my truth, and everything else is a lie. And I’m gonna take down every perceived competitor to Christian philosophy, which just, you know, happens to be my own particular take on reality.” We don’t need to get sucked into that. That would be my intuition. 

CB: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good point. And like, Nicola Denzey Lewis spends a lot of time talking about that in her book, in the insider-outsider view thing and how so much of it is framed by people that are outside criticizing and saying what these other views are, and that we have to be really careful then about accepting those versus viewing it from the perspective of let’s say the people that believed in astrology or the Hermeticists that were into astrology who obviously had a much more positive view on it, especially like, the early technical Hermetica that are creating entire astrological systems. And you can see this a little bit in Valens where after rereading your translation of the Hermetica recently, I was rereading Valens and going through some of the philosophical passages, and he almost seems to treat foreknowledge as taking the place of gnosis in his approach to astrology. Like, he has this really elevated view of foreknowledge, which is literally like, pro-gnosis, and the ability of astrology to tell you about your future and your destiny and part of, like, the divine plan and providence and all these other things. So there’s certainly a way that we could have an access point for understanding the more positive or sympathetic views of some of the ancient people that either used astrology or were sympathetic to it. Yeah. So that’s – but it’s interesting to see both sides of that coin and understand the way that some of that sometimes got warped or framed in a negative way or inverted in some instances. 

MDL: Definitely, yeah. And I think – I haven’t read Valens all the way through, but I think that my own intuition is – and you can correct me – is that, yeah, astrology is part of God’s providence; it’s part of a system of salvation that contributes to human flourishing. And there’s nothing really bad about it. I mean, and there’s nothing really bad with determinism. It’s that for years and years and years, Christians have been painting determinism with this awful black brush, you know, and saying, “Oh, well, this is bad, because we have this theological necessity that at the end of time, Christ will judge all humanity. And in order to have that doctrine – which we have in all our creeds and we just can’t get rid of that one – we’re going to bash determinism because we really need to, you know, up the ante on free will. So we’re gonna be all for free will. And you know, everyone loves free will in a democracy. You know, we all wanna give ourselves a big high-five, you know? Oh, yeah, we choose! Yeah. Crest and Colgate. Yeah! Biden, Trump. Yeah, yeah, yeah! Yeah, we’re in control here. We like to choose. Yeah.” And so it even plays into kind of these biases that we have, but the truth is, if you just have this mature way of looking at it, if you’re a determinist, like a Calvinist, or you grow up in the Reform tradition, that’s salvation too. I mean, God chooses who gets saved and who gets damned. I mean, that’s what Calvin believed; it’s determinism. It’s also gospel; it’s also what he thought was from the Bible. It’s also truth and there’s nothing black or awful about it. It’s just part of the goodness of God and some of it is mysterious, but you know, there’s nothing to boohoo about. You know, so it really – a lot of what we’re anticipating here, or a lot of what we’re talking about here when the Christian tradition tries to like, bash on its opponents is more of this emotive sense where it’s like, “Oh well, you know, we don’t determinism because that’s bad.” But it doesn’t matter if you think that it’s bad for free will or not. It might be, it might not be. But that’s irrelevant. It could still be God’s system of salvation and being able to predict human actions is still part of providence. And it’s still part of the goodness of God to say, “I’m gonna give you these signs. You know, if you learn to read them, great. If you don’t, you know, continue to wander in darkness, I mean. But here it is. Here is the information. Just read it in the chart.” I think that’s a wonderful gift, and a Hermetic attitude toward astrology would be like, “Yeah, of course we would use that gift. The planets are here to help us. The stars in general are here to help us. The world itself is a god; it’s trying to communicate with us; why are we walking around deaf? Why are we walking around blind? We should all be learning astrology in primary school, because if that’s God’s system of signs, then why wouldn’t we learn that, you know?” And that would be the greatest defeat of atheism, you know. It would be like, atheists could no longer say, “Well, how do you know God is trying to communicate with you?” Well, you’d just say, “Look up!” You know? I mean. So I think this is perfectly compatible with Christianity and with providence. And I think Hermeticism shows that. We just don’t have a lot of texts; I don’t think we have any surviving texts of Christians – well, maybe we do in the period which is beyond my area of expertise, like in the Renaissance or something – but I don’t think we have any ancient texts, truly ancient texts, of Christians defending astrology, which is a shame. I’m sure that they existed. But all we have are texts like with the Parati where it’s clear that they’re using it and it’s clear that they believe it. And I think, again, if you were to take a time machine, go back to the second century, I think that 99 percent of Christians would be like, “Yeah. Astrology, yeah – we use that. I go get my chart read all the time.” And it’s really, like, the one percent are people like Augustine who are sitting, you know, grumpy in his office writing out these horribly long treatises against astrology, because why? He knows everybody believes it. And, you know, again, this is the world we live in. You just can’t be fooled by this stuff. 

CB: Right. All right, well, in the very – I know we’re out of time, so I’m gonna wrap up. The very last point that something you just said made me think of was just that we may have an astrologer that may have had Corpus Hermeticum III, and like, writing notes about positive things about astrology and fate. And in your translation following a recent editor and editorial suggestions, you separated out, like, some of those to try to clarify what was in the text, and what was the commentary of somebody with astrological sympathies who was reading or writing in this text. 

MDL: Well, it’s more complex than that. Yeah, so Christian Wildberg wrote a very, very, you know, a wonderful article on Corpus Hermeticum III, and yes, he argued that it had been interpolated or glossed by a figure who he called a “barely literate astrologer.” You can tell his attitude there. And that systematically these glosses had been put back into the text, and so that the only way to read the text would be to kind of vacuum out that material that had gotten interpolated. And so that’s what he did. And I think in many ways he’s half right that there are definitely some material – some – you know, everyone knew since the 16th century that some of the Hermetica doesn’t make sense. And there’s even comments in there that are obviously Christian comments. Like at one point in the Corpus Hermeticum, you have a scribe writes, “This is totally ridiculous,” but it’s right in the text, you know? So I mean, we can tell that people are reacting to the Hermetica, and it’s snooty Christian scribes who are reacting to some things in the Hermetica. 

So the problem is, again with Wildberg, I think is that he – it’s not a purely philological kind of analysis that he’s doing. He also has his biases, which are informed by the kind of western tradition, broadly Germanic – he is himself German – which to some degree essentializes what is Hermetic and what is not. And I think he falls into the trap that a lot of people did in the 20th century where they’re like, “You know, the philosophical Hermetica, that’s the true Hermetica, and the technical Hermetica, that’s just mumbo-jumbo and, you know, we need not worry too much about that.” And that was very much the attitude of, yeah, like Jean Andre Festugiere who wrote this big, you know, four volume set. He’s a French-Dominican, you know, he wrote I think 2,000 pages on Hermetic philosophy, and it’s still worth reading. But that was his attitude. And I think, for better or for worse, Wildberg, whether he’s conscious or not, he is falling back into that trap of saying that, “Oh, you know, yeah, the true Hermetica tells this beautiful story of creation and the false Hermetica brings in this technical, astrological garbage, and we need to peel that away.” And that’s just not true. As you point out, that the earliest known Hermetica are astrological, and so we, you know, that itself is a huge warning, you know? The warning lights are flashing red, bright red, you know – do not mess with that material. 

But yeah. I think that essentially was Wildberg does is he de-astro – I can’t say it! De-astrologizes – there it is – the Corpus Hermeticum III, and then you see him doing similar things in Corpus Hermeticum 13, which mentions the zodiac, and yeah. He apparently doesn’t think that’s original either. So that’s an unfortunate trend, and I don’t think that’s based purely on philology. So what I do is I look at all of Wildberg’s results, and I try to say, “Well, on some points, you’ve got, you know, a real philological point here, that there’s obviously this looks like a comment from someone who has a completely different vocabulary and is just writing something in the margin.” But then again, there was stuff that Wildberg removed which I think, yeah, it’s perfectly fine to keep that in. It is astrological, but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t there originally. 

So you know, we need to be very careful about our biases. Again, if we’re doing the Hermetica right, we should not be making these false distinctions between the technical and philosophical Hermetica. It’s all just Hermetica. So we have no – it would be an absolute falsity to try to, like, peel away technical elements from a philosophical text. They just belong together. As you know with Valens and I’m sure if we had Nechepso and Petosiris, you know, we might be surprised. You know, it might not have been a bare, you know, astrological manual; there might have been some really high philosophical passages in there, you know, talking about the role of the Sun or as like, a second god figure or a creator figure. I mean, for all we know, yeah, that was there. I don’t know those fragments well; you know them better than I. So I think we need to be very careful. 

CB: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I saw another article where Wildberg seems – he goes through all the Hermetica and seems skeptical of most astrological references in it and treats it as if, like, he contrasts them at one point, the lack of astrology he sees in the Corpus Hermeticum with that astrology’s all over the place in the Stobaeus fragments. And then he inverts that and he says, “Well, so Stobaeus must have just had an interest in astrology to pick out a bunch of astrological fragments,” but then I was thinking, no, maybe instead that says something about the filtering mechanism of the Hermetica that came down to us through the scribes and things in the Middle Ages. And ultimately, it’s a good thing to remember both that the technical Hermetica go back further and are our first reference to Hermes Trismegistus and Thrasyllus, but also just when we’re approaching looking at ancient doctrines and religions and other things like that that we sometimes have to set aside whatever our own beliefs or prejudices or other perspectives are in order to look at the material honestly, and this is something that comes up, you know, no where else more clear than some of the work you’ve done with like, Gnosticism and looking at how some of the reports we have of that are from outsiders that are criticizing it. And when you contrast that with the original texts of the Nag Hammadi how different the picture looks, and therefore why it’s so important to be careful when we approach these texts as modern people. 

MDL: Yeah, exactly. And I think that’s a careful – it’s a careful methodology. I mean, every scholar should, as a basic rule, and I don’t wanna include just people with PhDs, but everyone seriously studying this material should be aware of the filter of their own biases – their own hermeneutical horizon. So you know, it would be equally bad if you started, like, seeing astrology everywhere and thinking, like, the Hermetica was just essentially about astrology. It’s — 

CB: Right. 

MDL: — it’s not. So I mean, Wildberg has a point, but — 

CB: Which is a good point —

MDL: — at the same time — 

CB: — that he made where he’s, like, people expect to see astrology everywhere and just claim that it’s everywhere, but it’s not as frequent in the Corpus Hermeticum, which actually is a good point on his part. 

MDL: It is. And you know, you could raise an argument from silence, which might be a good argument, that well, it’s because the Christian Byzantine scribes, they took out the astrological material because they were only interested in, you know, Hermes as a prophet of Christ, and so they weren’t interested in the magical names and the stars and so on and so forth. You could definitely make that argument. 

The problem with making that argument, though, is yeah, there’s just, there’s not proof of it. But maybe. I think the basic point to be aware of is that, yeah, there’s still anti-astrological biases in the academy today. And so I think that Wildberg might not be fully conscious of his own biases, and maybe he is now, but I think at that point, yeah, there’s something fishy if you’ve basically removed all the astrological material and you’ve done so very systematically, even when there’s not an absolutely compelling philological reason for you to do so. That just smells fishy. And so there’s a point where you need to ask yourself as a scholar, “Am I letting my own hermeneutical framework drive what I’m seeing?” And that’s a question we all need to ask, and it’s a humbling question, and everyone should be doing it. 

CB: Yeah. And I’ll make just one last point and then we can wrap up, which is that I see it happening other times, and sometimes I don’t know what’s true. So for example, there’s like, that passage in Plato in the Timaeus where he – there’s a reference that seems like it’s to astrology at one point about the planets giving signs. And then one scholar of Thrasyllus, Harold Tarrant, who’s an excellent scholar in middle Platonism, suspects that that passage was, like, inserted by Thrasyllus because Thrasyllus was an astrologer, and he doesn’t see it in Cicero, for example, Cicero’s version of the Timaeus. But then we have a question there. There’s a few times like that in history where we have a question which is are astrologers inserting passages like that due to their pro-astrology bias, or are other scholars like Cicero, for example, removing it due to an anti-astrology bias? And ultimately, we don’t know the answer to that. 

But thanks to people like you and like careful scholarship that’s addressing the text and translating them very carefully and deliberately, I think we have much better ability to deal with some of these things than we used to. 

MDL: Well, I appreciate that. Yeah. And you know, I should say to your audience, I should have said this first – like, even during my PhD, I received absolutely zilch in terms of astrology. Like, that was not part of my academic training; they didn’t think that was important. It’s a huge gap. And I honestly, yeah. I mean, you go to get a PhD to get the languages and to get the background in history and philology and so on and so forth, but yeah. We need more people like you who – and you know, independent institutes who can fill this gap, because astrology is hugely, hugely important, and people on the street, they know the signs and they can draw the zodiac. They might not be able to read, but everybody knows astrology; it’s just part of their basic DNA and part of their blood. It’s as common as Superman to them. You know, like, as Superman is to us, and you know, and as the big bang is to us, so astrology was to them. They just knew, you know, the signs, and they could see the stars. And they were much more literate in that respect than us all. So it’s just a huge – I mean, we’re the dumb ones by not knowing the stars. Partially, I guess, that’s a problem of light pollution now, but it’s also just a problem of willful ignorance, that we just don’t focus on that. It’s not the be-all and end-all, but it should be in everyone’s toolkit. It should be in everyone’s toolkit. Everyone interested in ancient history or theology or religion or spirituality or esoteric movements. If you don’t know astrology, you’re not gonna get what these people are talking about. I mean, you’re not gonna get the allusion or the echo; you’re just gonna be completely tone-deaf. 

CB: Yeah. Well, and by extension if you read ancient astrological texts but you don’t know the philosophical and religious context in which they’re being practiced, then you’re also missing a huge piece. So that’s one of the reasons I wanted to have you on. And tell me, you teach courses; you have a ton of books. Where can people find out more information or like, what would my audience be interested in knowing that you have in terms of your offerings? 

MDL: Well, I appreciate that. Yeah, I mean, I have a website; it’s just my name – M. David Litwa. You can find me on YouTube as well. Yes, I do have many, many books now, which you can see listed on my website, and courses as well if you’re interested. I’ve got a bundle package called the Gnosis Academy where you can get that package and basically get all my online courses. There’s about a dozen. And I add more periodically as well with a monthly hang-out with me, so if that interests you, by all means. But yeah, if you’re interested in early Christianity and I would say like, the Parati in particular, I’ve got a book called Found Christianities which could be helpful. The Refutation of All Heresies and obviously Hermetica I and II would be very key sources, yeah, before — 

CB: You’ve also got —

MDL: — The Refutation of All Heresies. 

CB: You’ve also got the recent book, Understanding Gnosis, which is really good. Little intro to Gnosticism as well. 

MDL: Yeah. It’s like, a primer. Yeah. I’m working on really kind of developing a larger project, but that’s kind of like, my primer for gnosis. And I’m trying to stand out there, because yeah, we’re in an academic culture where they don’t wanna talk about Gnosticism, and therefore they don’t. And so a lot of these figures get swept under the rug. So Valentinus, Basilides, and so on and so forth. So if you’re interested in the figures, read Found Christianities; if you’re interested in the thought of gnosis and the framework and the kind of the generalizations that we can make, like a more systematic theology kind of approach, you can read Understanding Gnosis as well. So yeah. I mean, I’m just trying to be helpful as best I can. 

CB: Yeah. Awesome. Well, yeah, people should check out your website – MDavidLitwa.com – and your YouTube channel if they just search for your name. And I’ll put links to those in the description below this video on YouTube or on the podcast website for this episode. 

So thanks so much for joining me today. I appreciate it. 

MDL: Thank you, Chris. It’s been very, very fun. Appreciate it. 

CB: Awesome. Yeah, it has! 

All right, thanks everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast. And we’ll see you again next time! 

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