Matthew: Yes. During the Newtonian-Cartesian industrial age, angels were banished. There’s no room for angels in a machine. There wasn’t even room for souls in a machine. And not only were angels banished, they were trivialized. Think of Baroque churches built in the seventeenth century, the same century that science and religion split. Religion took the soul, which became more and more introverted and puny, and scientists took the universe. In Baroque architecture, angels became chubby, cute, little babies that you want to pinch. What we need today is angel liberation.
For theologians it became an embarrassment for three hundred years even to mention angels. But angels are mentioned throughout the Bible. In fact, there are legions of angels. Whenever you talk about cosmology, the angels come out.
In the first century, when the Christian scriptures were written, the number-one question going around the Mediterranean basin was: Are the angels our friends or our foes? Everyone believed in angels in Greece and Rome; they were part of the accepted cosmology. But the question was: Can we trust these invisible forces of the universe that are moving planets and the elements? How trustworthy is the universe?
That’s so interesting because in the twentieth century Einstein was once asked, “What’s the most important question you can ask in life?” And his answer was, “Is the universe a friendly place or not?” It’s the same question. I tell my students that every time you see angels mentioned in the Bible you should think Einstein, because you’re dealing with the same issue. It’s the ultimate cosmological issue. Can we trust the cosmos? Is the cosmos benign?
In the numerous hymns to the Cosmic Christ in the Bible, there are allusions to the angels (see, for example, Romans 8.38-39; Ephesians 1.20-21; Colossians 1.15-16; Hebrews 1.3-4). The early Christians were responding to this buzz question in the first century: Christ has power over the angels and archangels, the powers and principalities. What are they saying? They’re saying, no matter what these invisible forces are doing with the elements of the universe, the smile of God as represented by the Christ means you can relax, be cool. The universe is a friendly place. There is a benign power over the angels: it is the Christ. The Cosmic Christ tradition is set up in the context of angelology because it’s set up in terms of cosmology.
Rupert: Even though the heavens have been secularized and mechanized, these questions have not gone away. A spiritual void was created when the religious imagination withdrew from the heavens, and because the scientific imagination is so impoverished, science fiction has risen up to fill the gap. The heavens have been peopled by the fantasies of science fiction writers. Some of these writers are talented and use the heavens as a projection screen for stories of interest and value. But most are banal; they’re not up to the job of giving us a real sense of the awe and wonder of the universe. Spaceships shifting into time warps, the evil empire, star wars, space cops, and aliens—these are hardly adequate representations of the cosmic intelligences. Yet science fiction is the main influence on the way most children first think of the heavens. The cosmological void caused by the expulsion and trivialization of the angels has simply been left to science fiction writers and UFO enthusiasts.
What an incredible loss this is! The conventions of science fiction were established in the context of the mechanical universe, before the cosmological revolution of the 1960s, and take little account of what has been discovered since. We now have a vastly expanded view of the heavens, with countless galaxies, quasars, pulsars, black holes, and 15 billion years of cosmic history. I think one of the things we need to do is recover a sense of the life of the heavens so that when we actually look at the stars, when we actually look at the sky, we become aware of this divine presence in the sky and of the intelligences and the life within it.
Matthew: Yes, today we are recovering the sense of the living earth, Gaia, and in many native traditions, Mother Earth, but it is equally important to recover the sense of the life of the sky, and to bring the two together. Jose Hobday, a Seneca woman who teaches with us, says that when native people dance, their knees bend to go into Earth, but their shoulders roll to pick up Father Sky energy, and it is the two energies together that give the whole complement of energy.
We have not only secularized the sky, we have shot our rockets out there and left our debris out there. We are now out there. But the universe is so much vaster and more amazing and constantly expanding than we had ever imagined. And we are not just talking space; we’re talking time. We are picking up light from billions of years ago. When we relate to the sky as well as to the earth, we’re talking about the resacralization of time as well as space.
Rupert: In the past, people had a sense that what happened on earth was related to what happened in the heavens. This is the tradition that is preserved in a living form today by astrology. But unfortunately, in the seventeenth century astrology split off from astronomy. Astrology gave meaning to the movements of the heavens and their relation to Earth. The planets still bear the names of gods and goddesses, like Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter, who in the Christian world were regarded as angels. These planetary gods, spirits, or angels with their different dispositions and relationships affected life on earth.
In India it’s still generally believed that this relationship between the heavens and the earth is of vast importance. When people arrange marriages—and many marriages are still arranged—an astrologer consults the charts of the prospective bride and bridegroom to make sure they’re compatible. If they are, the astrologer will then select the time that they should be married. When I first started living in India, I was surprised to receive wedding invitations from Indian friends and colleagues stating, for example, that the marriage of Radha and Krishnan will be celebrated at 3:34 A.M., or some such outlandish time. And although Indians are late for almost everything, they got it right for such an important event. The tying of the knot linking the two together in marriage would happen at the exact moment when their union was in harmony with the heavens.
Elective astrology, choosing the right dates and times for important events, was still practiced in England up until the eighteenth century. And it was even practiced in the White House by President and Mrs. Reagan!
The relation of the heavens and the earth was very important in the old cosmology. But because astrology and astronomy have split apart, astronomers see no meaning in what’s happening in the stars; they see no life, intelligence, or consciousness in the heavens. Astrologers see meaning, pattern, and a relationship between what happens in the heavens and what happens on earth, but unfortunately most never look at the sky. I know very few astrologers who can actually identify the stars and planets. Astrology is done from books, or nowadays, from computer programs. I hope someone will soon start giving courses on astronomy for astrologers. I think it is important to bring these two traditions together again.
In many traditional cultures, myths tell of the way that the people are either inspired by or actually come from particular stars. For example, the Dogon in West Africa have a strong relationship with Sirius, the Dog Star. And to my mind it’s perfectly possible that by looking at stars and connecting with the intelligence that’s there, by forming a direct link to stars and their spirits, some influence or inspiration could pass from the star to the person consciously opening to it. This has certainly been the belief of people through the ages.
The implications of this tradition are staggering. When we look at the stars, we can consider the possibility not only that some may have planets around them with living beings on them, which I think very probable, but also that the very stars themselves may have a kind of life, intelligence, or spirit.
The stars are organized in larger units, galaxies, each of which contains billions of stars and has a galactic nucleus at its center with unknown properties. There are billions of galaxies in the heavens. And there may be a governing intelligence for each galaxy. And galaxies usually come in clusters, which may in turn have an organizing spirit.
Thus there may be hierarchies of organizing intelligences. Galactic clusters include galaxies; galaxies include solar systems; and solar systems include planets. And at each level there’s a wholeness, which is included within a higher level of wholeness. So we have many levels of organization, all of which can be thought of as associated