HAROLD BLOOM’S GOD AND SHAKESPEARE IN ASTROLOGY

[Originally begun as a footnote to my Harold Bloom article of earlier this month, the striking data that emerge seemed to warrant a separate article].

HAROLD BLOOM ON GOD

The astrology for those issues Harold Bloom has with religion and that I tackled in an article earlier this month is unusually revealing both in itself and for any untimed chart. Gratifyingly too it again empirically confirms many assumptions I have made in this area of beliefs little explored by astrology and astrologers and in which I can by now define a virtual astro-theology.

Recall that the God alienated Harold Bloom earlier in life wrote a novel, his only novel, The Flight to Lucifer. Lo and behold Bloom’s Lucifer is at 1.46 in air sign, Gemini, sign of writing and of flight, in extremely close difficulty square to his Neptune (mysticism and visions) at 1.43 of Virgo. This Lucifer is also loosely in out-of-sign conjunction with Bloom’s natal Mars at nearly 28 Taurus. This arguably reflects the outspoken, almost anti God feelings contained in Bloom’s writing on Yahweh and absolutely reflects his problems with the gospel of Mark with its declaratory demons that interest him because asteroid Marc at 27 Leo makes degree exact difficulty square with Bloom’s same contending Mars.

But where is God located for Harold Bloom and why does he so passionately write about Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine and suffer nightmares about God?

For a start Bloom’s sun at 18 Cancer conjuncts Pluto at 19. Conjunctions are very pro or con something. Since, as I’m always insisting, Pluto is the God planet, especially God as biblically imaged, this disposes Bloom towards his many arguments with and about Yahweh and their marked inner turmoil. But any potential for this is that much stronger and rendered almost inevitable by the fact that one of the two God asteroids is additionally involved. Bhagwat (Hindu name for Lord/God personally conceived) is at 17 Cancer. This makes everything that much more theological. (Just Pluto alone with Bloom’s sun might make him someone who deals with or is obsessed with death in some fashion). In my October article on Dawkins and the Fates I mentioned how the Pluto of evolutionary scientist and controversial atheist campaigner, Richard Dawkins, is opposite Bhagwat, a rather clear mark of his “out” disposition to atheism. Conjunctions like Bloom’s can as stated be very pro or con. I even maintain that Jesus had Bhagwat very closely conjunct his Pluto, one of the signatures in his case for his “I and my Father are one” claim. Under force of his Pluto/Bhagwat conjunction Bloom seems just trapped in struggle between faith and denial, impersonal and personal deity.

Bloom’s arguments over the divinity of Jesus are exquisitely mapped by the Jesus asteroid (which as stressed in my Hillary Clinton article seems to be more about the historical Jesus as opposed to the Christ asteroid’s connection to the Jesus of faith). For Bloom, the Jesus asteroid at 13 Leo is conjuncting his Theotes (divinity/Godhead) at 12 Leo so there’s plenty of potential here for battle royal over divinity and for this to become a lacerating exercise, even a bit nightmarish or hellish since Bloom’s hell asteroid, Hella (originally asteroids were registered in feminine form) is also at 12 of fiery Leo! And then Biblioran, the Bible asteroid representing the Old Testament, joins in the fray at 10 Leo. God, Hell and claims of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) which Bloom keeps pitching against those of what he calls the Belated Testament (New Testament), itself as Biblialexa at 22 Cancer within call of Bloom’s established Sun/Pluto tensions, are thus all positively at war in his mind over belief issues. The fact that the Jesus asteroid is moreover in exact semi-sextile to Mercury means Bloom simply must keep on reading, writing or talking about this whole theological problem. By contrast, Bloom’s Christ asteroid due to its exact 19 degree to 19 opportunity aspect to Pluto plus a trine to Chiron, the wounded healer (and Bloom has plenty to say and deny about the Messiah as any kind of wounded healer figure) represents a belief possiblity at the same time as it presents itself as a decidedly, painful and undesirable one (Chiron).

I am not sure whether the Achristou Antichrist asteroid conjunct Bloom’s fated nodes (North Nodes) is meant to say something or nothing – might his Gnostic sympathies have affinities for some species of post Nietzschean Antichrist philosophy? What is transcendently definite for the whole natal pattern is that the birth opposition of Jupiter (religion, faith, beliefs) to Saturn (scepticism, doubt, duty, but also tradition as of his strictly Jewish Orthodox upbringing, strengthened by Saturn in its natural sign of Capricorn) keeps Bloom in a state of largely unresolved hard working conflict over all questions of belief. If anything, the doubt and denial potential of the strong Saturn wins in opposition to the faith demands of Jupiter since covenants whether old or new cannot receive his faith assent. The asteroids simply describe in quite vivid detail what some of the tensions are and where they lie.

HAROLD BLOOM ON SHAKESPEARE

For Bloom Yahweh can be like Shakespeare’s Lear. While researching Bloom on God I briefly turned to Bloom on Shakespeare and received a few first class surprises I feel should also be conveyed. While I admit only to have read Bloom on the Western Canon and modern American religiosity he is perhaps principally famous for his critical output and illuminating lectures on Shakespeare. This matter is modestly introduced by the "meeting" aspect (semi-sextile, here a meeting of minds) of Bloom’s writing/critical Mercury to Shakespeare’s Venus (his art, his loves)in verbal Gemini. I felt encouraged to look up asteroid Shakespeare puzzled to find it was at 17 Aries within 2 degrees of Bloom’s Uranus and one degree difficulty square his Sun at 18 Cancer. Does Shakespeare make him work, surprise him, half irritate or frustrate the poet within Bloom into critical appreciation? This I can’t answer but in effect all seems explained when amazingly we can know that Bloom’s 17 degree Shakespeare asteroid conjuncts Shakespeare’s all important nearly 17 degrees writing Mercury. Small wonder Bloom has this sense of understanding the Bard so closely! We may assume he does.

Asteroids work by sound vibe, so the name Bloom, which is anyway an anglicization of the German Blume (pronounced Blumah in German, but Bloom in English) can substitute for Bloom in the asteroid lists. As indeed it surely should. Because it seems like the heavens always knew that Bloom would write about especially Shakespeare. Bloom’s 8 degree Cancer Blume asteroid conjuncts Shakespeare’s Mars at 7.40 Cancer! It seems the heavens also knew Bloom’s most famous pupil would be controversial, anti feminist, feminist, Camille Paglia – Camilla conjuncts his fated, socially connective nodes (South Nodes) – and of course it would be supporting astrology in relation to assumed references to that subject in Shakespeare that would get Ms Paglia into some (more) trouble with the intellectual community. Thou shalt not study or support astrology on pain of academic excommunication!

MYSELF, ROLLAN MCCLEARY AND ASTROLOGICAL RESEARCH

But behind all these Shakespeare links for Bloom I personally see and can now reasonably stress something else. It’s a principle of astrology that it’s not possible to research and write on figures past or present if one’s own horoscope does not set up a few rather exact contacts by synastry in precisely the sort of way Bloom and Shakespeare so strikingly do even if astrologers are not in the habit of extending the principle as here to the new field of asteroids.

So, the above this is a final link in the chain of proofs confirming I was always significantly right about the data for Shakespeare’s birth and that Shakespeare was himself and none other. This was the subject of the most popular and quoted of my articles in The Australian Astrological Monthly Review, way back in the nineties. There I maintained the true chart of Shakespeare, one that explains him and works for his life, can be set for 11.20 am with 19 degrees of dramatic Leo rising at Stratford and on the usually given date of 23rd April 1564 (Julian Calendan). This chart is so absurdly accurate it even turns up The Part of Influence conjunct Shakespeare’s career house poet’s Neptune while its all-reflecting, mirror like Libran moon is directly conjuncted by the Part of Divination which surely sits well with Bloom’s feeling that Shakespeare had almost prenatural knowledge of people and the human mind.

Astrologers have often tried to be clever or trendy by offering alternative birth dates for Shakespeare or even proposing, like some literary critics (not Bloom), that the Bard was someone other than the Stratford youth. I am getting used to being ignored or occasionally insulted by members of the astrological establishment for all sorts of good and valuable work done and it’s all too typical that a well known astrologer who demands International Reply Coupons to reply to any issues addressed to him never used my coupon to reply to comments on the date of his famous lives Shakespeare chart. It wasn’t set for Shakespeare’s given birth date and it won’t work for Shakespeare’s life. He also didn’t reply to my comments regarding his data for Christ’s birth which though I didn’t baldly state it, unlike my own, are quite unconvincing and don’t work across history to this day. However he is easily published on this subject while I am not. Explanations are required, so…

CONTRA THE MOUNTAIN ASTROLOGER, HOROSCOPE MAGAZINE AND AN OPEN CHALLENGE TO THE A.F.A

Thinking (in relation to Shakespeare issues and astrology) of Bloom’s outspoken and ever embattled disciple, Camille Paglia, I shall finish with a few home truths this censored issues blog has so far avoided.

In future I hope the astrological establishment will display greater sensitivity and not, like the just mentioned prominent astrological writer promise answers to correspondence they don’t even reckon to give. I must seriously condemn the editors of The Mountain Astrologer and American Horoscope Magazine (the latter seem to need to take 6 months to answer anyone if at all) for their inexcusable indifference regarding the Pentecost Chart for Christianity which is the only working horoscope for a world religion and which all astrologers should be using for predictive purposes. This is not my only complaint but for sheer absurdity it rather stands out. I can reserve for later criticism of some persons and policies like a leading astrological scholar whose perverse refusal of the rectification technique most astrologers reckon to use itself is damaging to quite a lot of historical work of the Shakespeare kind and, worse, any work on Christ data where it would always be necessary. I was to give a university lecture on this while in England about three years back but when I heard arrangements could involve the astrologer in question I correctly warned my publisher (for non astrological writings) to expect little result as this person would be quite likely to get in the way to stop me speaking on this research theme. There is so much ego and prejudice of this kind I seriously believe astrology could do with a bit of reform if not a whole French revolution of its closed club ways if a lot of information is ever to get out and be processed for public use and interest.

Finally, and as my last Blog word for 2007 I issue challenge for 2008 to The American Federation of Astrologers to quite simply keep its word. I have approached them more than once in the past about looking into my data for Christ’s birth and only because they have in the past specifically promised to make public announcement if they think it has been found by anyone. I declare it has been found with innumerable proofs no one will ever outdo and at that from the hands of a theologian, not an astrologer only so that a wider range of religious and historical details can be examined and proved. So the public annoucement is long overdue.

Let the AFA disagree with and reject my findings if they believe they are false, that’s fair enough, but don’t say again they can’t find my correspondence, or give no answer at all except would I (a non American) like to take on membership. The data for Christ can be discovered by anyone of any nationality and is of potential interest to any nationality and potentially historic in its significance for astrology so that membership should never be an issue. The mentioned data works to this day. (It even suitably registered the controversy of the Archbishop on the Magi of this last Christmas). Kindly just keep your word, AFA, at least respect the subject if not myself, and be open to the very real conclusive surprises I have for you if you do keep it. This paragraph will remain here for anyone to read until, if ever, someone representative takes appropriate action.

GEORGE BUSH, HILLARY CLINTON and 2008: THE HIDDEN ASTROLOGICAL FACTS

THE WASHINGTON AND WHITEHOUSE POTENTIAL

If you want the truth (and secrets) about incumbent US president George Bush and Senator Hillary Clinton as his possible successor small details may count. They do so considerably in those areas of astrology where people most want to have light shed. Some of the facts are nonetheless provocative and not all astrologers would discuss them if they knew them.

With the presidential race underway astrologers are trying to predict outcomes by conventional (planetary symbolism) means but that’s not always what’s most helpfully revelatory. In cases of doubt or to expand information use the asteroids! To start with a simple fact Hillary Clinton's birth chart shows a telling Hillary asteroid at 6 Virgo nearly conjuncting her career/ destiny Midheaven angle (4 Virgo). This links her name to her career and is good for fame. In fact, near to Hillary is precisely Fama (Latin for fame) while Glo, which some astrologers consider stronger for fame issues, makes degree exact fortunate aspect to her career Midheaven.

Opposite Hillary’s name asteroid and conjunct her so called Nadir angle,( the home base in any chart) is of all things asteroid, Whitehouse! I accept with the Bible that the skies “utter knowledge” (Ps 19:2) and this seems as near as the heavens could get to telling us where Hillary’s truest home would one day be. Granted George Bush’s natus by comparison doesn’t show Whitehouse on the same angle. Instead it’s minutes off the degree of a world point perhaps reflecting someone who can rule the world from the Whitehouse while preferring to be absent from it and perhaps not thinking of it much as home. However, both Hillary and Bush have Whitehouse in retrograde which for astrology can signify a return factor. Bush was returned to the Whitehouse for a second term, might Hillary now return home more gloriously ?

Inside Hillary’s career house we find not only Hillary and Fama (Fame) but asteroid, Washingtonia (i.e. Washington because asteroids were originally registered in feminine form) and this Washington is making close aspects, one hard, one easy, to Hillary C’s Mercury and Saturn respectively. Since Hillary has already been First Lady this combination, though suggestive, cannot by itself guarantee winning the Whitehouse race for which her chances must be analyzed by other means as I do in conclusion.

George Bush, who always had the advantage Hillary doesn’t enjoy of a natal sun conjuncting America’s sun, shows Washingtonia more like a cave of the secrets hidden in his twelfth sector. It’s nonetheless savingly in degree exact aspect to a powerful Pluto factor in his first house of persona. Washington and America are likely to be seen by him less as the career or destiny they are for Hillary than a natural possession. This impression is supplemented by GB having asteroid, America, in his second house of income and possessions. (America as the great cash cow?). With a chart more suited to the individualism of an artist than the mind of a negotiating statesman, exceptionally Bush shows not a single planet in his chart’s western sphere which would relate him to the will of others and the public. A lot of his motivation regarding especially military moves may always be secret given that his curiously hidden Washington, which in his case could mean chiefly Pentagon (no asteroid), favourably aspects his Mars (army and war). By contrast Hillary’s less possessive patriotism, her identification as “the” representative American is reflected by having her America asteroid in her first house of persona.

READY TO STEP INTO A PRESIDENT’S SHOES?

The president and/or party whom Hillary would be challenging to reach the top was clear from the first. At the Senator’s birth asteroid Hillary was degree exact opposite asteroid Busch and under the rules for reading asteroids what sounds is what counts, so Busch equals Bush in her chart and his. Hillary would always be Bush’s gadfly. She rather encroachingly appears in the President’s career house from where she makes difficulty square to his ascendant angle, the self same aspect her own Fama/Fame asteroid makes to his ascendant. By contrast the President’s own name asteroid is rather curiously not prominent for a person in his position but somewhat obscured in his fourth house of home and the father where it is afflicted by a first house Venus that rules his home sector. I believe I am correct to say this reflects the extent to which George Bush Jnr is a product of his father’s presidency and how he is increasingly unpopular and his name may not be well remembered. Like Hillary he does however – but only just – have Fama (Fame) inside his career house.

Anyway, if you look at America’s chart for its day of foundation (at any hour of the day because the foundation time is disputed) one finds something curious that’s likely to be significant. Saturn (generally a symbol of power, authority and ambition) falls at 14 Libra. From here it’s fortunately aspected by Busch from 13 Gemini. This is a degree acknowledged to be a power point of some sort for America (some believe foundation time corresponded to 13 Gemini rising though I don’t accept that). What’s interesting is that Hillary is conjuncting Busch at 12 Gemini. This looks like one of the signs for assuming power in America and stepping into Bush’s shoes and perhaps in some areas continuing Bush’s policies – there have already been charges this is what Hillary may actually do and by the time Bush steps down he may leave situations where his successor can do little else. In this connection and again to consider degree patterns, noteworthy is that 21 of kingly Leo, - 21 is deemed a special, “critical” degree, hence strong - is filled by Venus for Bush and Saturn for Hillary which looks like the easy shoes of one becoming the hard shoes of another!

I will return to Hillary’s chances presently but this matter of the Bush legacy is important so in parenthesis I will look at some curious details of the Bush chart. I only chanced to examine it in the wake of looking at the chart of Israel in relation to Annapolis.and with results which alone prompted me to write the present article. I had received such a surprise I was left wondering if I wasn’t just looking at the always possible fluke. If it wasn’t a fluke then the facts were bizarre to disturbing. Just who is the elusive ever smiling George Bush and what doing?

GEORGE BUSH AND THE GOD/DEVIL/RELIGION CONFLICT.

As described in my article, Accidental Revelations: Israel, Annapolis and Beyond It (November archive) I found that in Israel’s horoscope Busch was in the house of the nation’s open enemies conjunct Malin (French for Devil). At first I felt this must be a fluke (they must sometimes happen with asteroids). It would have been helpful to see where Rice fell but there’s no Rice asteroid. Or perhaps there is if you accept that the names Rice, Rhys and Rees are the same name, (which in origin they are). In that case Rees manages to conjunct Busch and Malin implying I might not be looking at coincidence after all.

Looking at Bush’s natal chart I then discovered that Rees is suitably prominent there in the first house of persona in close aspect to the President’s sun. This surely has to be Rice in Bush’s life, the influential, possibly rather dominant and domineering “right hand man” or rather woman, the person who as Secretary of State most represents the President’s international policies before the world. We can maybe locate Condaleeza Rice in the heavens after all!

But if so I wouldn’t then be able completely to dismiss the negative picture I was looking at vis-à-vis Israel because, like it or not, there were people from Jewish rabbis to Christian prophets insisting there was something seriously religiously questionable in what Bush and Rice were engaged in towards Israel (Israel is God’s land before even Israel’s and it is biblically forbidden to bargain over it and divide it). I also knew that asteroids Malin (Devil) and Lucifer, the devil as darkness and light respectively, well and truly work as such.

These asteroids are relevant to the charts of Satanists and they are deeply meaningful for the birth data of Jesus. The latter is something I claim to know empirically from innumerable proofs despite being controversially ignored to the point of censorship itself by mainstream publishing, media and just about everyone in a position to help as regards getting this historically important issue out to the world. One proof is that years before I could even know asteroids for remote dates I had singled out a certain time as being that of Jesus’ temptation. Sure enough, years later the appropriate, completely against chance, transit of Lucifer supported the rest of what I had always known.

So, beyond Israel’s chart I wanted to ascertain what the natal chart of Bush might reveal. More surprise. Bush’s natal Saturn at 26 Cancer, itself the planet associated by astrologers in religious/psychological contexts with the devil, was conjuncting Lucifer at 25 Cancer and Spirit at 24 Cancer! And this natal Saturn was in degree exact opportunity aspect besides to a career house asteroid, Lie. (He could engage cover ups about religion?) As regards asteroid Spirit I don’t imply this signifies Holy Spirit – in religious astrology and the life of Christ it is clearly Uranus which symbolizes this – Spirit points rather to the “spirit of” something at work. Within the pattern for Bush one would have to say divine and demonic appear in tension and Saturn by nature limits whatever it touches.

I didn’t and don’t of course believe this former Skull and Bones Club member who claims to be “born again” while unevangelically believing the God of Jesus is the same as Allah, was any Satanist. But there’s more chance than for other people that he could unwittingly serve negative spiritual agendas, play the proverbial “devil’s agent” to affairs, stretching truth where religion is concerned. This potentially dark pattern interestingly contrasts with Hillary’s less religiously fraught one which has Lie opposing her vulnerable, potentially victimized, Pisces moon which could expose her to bitter opposition through lies. She has been called everything from witch to murderess.

GEORGE BUSH AND THE OIL OF DECEPTION

But just what is Bush and religion about? Relevant here is that the Bible asteroid, Bibliolexa conjuncts his ascendant (he can project as “the Bible believing Christian”) while asteroid, Christen (German for Christians) falls at what astrologers call the “Praise the Lord” Jupiter/Uranus midpoint, supposedly any horoscope’s most fortunate point. (I claim the sun of Christianity’s founding Pentecost fell on this – my unique discoveries re the astrology of Christianity are something else suppressed by various religious and astrological establishments).

Certainly George Bush has been lucky through often well heeled, prosperity gospel Christians of the Right (Christen in privileged Leo!). Without them he might not be in power for a second term or even a first! This President is also anyway hugely Jesus identified. As governor or Texas he even gave Texas a Jesus day. He has told people Jesus was his most important figure philosophically “because he touched my heart”. And he isn’t lying. The skies actually endorse this! Incredibly, the Jesus asteroid conjuncts George Bush’s Venus (love and peace) in Leo (sign of the heart) in the first house of the persona (what we see, what we project). And yet and yet…. Christianity, strictly speaking, is about faith in the risen Christ beyond the historical Jesus, the moral teacher or philosopher that, say, a Hindu like Ghandi could likewise “love” without being Christian.

I must emphasize this distinction and especially here because George Bush is a problem for religion and by the looks of it, astrology too. Astrologically the problem is patent….the Christ asteroid conjuncts that difficult Lucifer with Saturn combination and something else of tell tale nature of which presently. Under the usual rules I am unable to read this other than that Bush is potentially someone who, deliberately or not, can deal in spiritually mixed agendas and deceive himself and others about them.

Bush takes Israel seriously – it’s in his career house – but his two approaches and seeming about face with regard to Israel is exquisitely shown by in one direction the fortunate friendly aspect of his Mars to his Israel asteroid (some willingness to lend it military support) and a hostile difficulty square to Mercury (any contracts) to it and certainly Bush wants Israel to get signing documents in the way he wants. With his Mercury in a fixed sign and imperial Leo Bush won’t be compromising much on what he wants his name associated with in this matter historically.

There may be ego and economic considerations involved in the peace plans but we don’t have to regard it as the demonic calculations some critics maintain. Bush could be just plain muddled in the beliefs area and he probably is. The ruler of his beliefs and religion sector is Neptune which in all but the most spiritual or discerning persons often makes for deception and muddle. Bush can deceive himself and Christians about his beliefs. That’s serious enough but at the material octave astrologers also take Neptune as a symbol for oil…..

Bush’s Neptune is interestingly opposed to asteroid Babylon, ancient capital of Iraq that Bush’s enemy, Saddam Hussein, tried to rebuild. We arguably can and should use Babylon as a symbol for Iraq in default of other signifiers - though in fact there is an important one. Anyway the Neptune/Babylon opposition bespeaks the known challenge to enter Iraq near to the Babylon region and for oil linked economic purposes, – which is what even Alan Greenspan has suggested was the original reason, not primarily the moral reasons some imagine. However, as said, there is another asteroid signifier and alarmingly enough it is Baghdad (which received Bush’s “Shock and Awe” attack). I say “alarmingly” because….. Baghdad at 27 Cancer conjuncts the controversial Saturn/Lucifer/Christ/Spirit combination!

Unless this is truly a major fluke and I’m seriously mistaken the message appears to be (especially with asteroid Lie neatly aspecting this line up and given that Lucifer is the devil as Light) that Bush can do something in effect Luciferian and pass it off to gullible money gospel Christians as service of the Good.

It’s only Bush on Israel rather than Iraq that is finally making even some Christian voters have a few doubts about the Christian Bush. His Middle East Roadmap for peace is really Saudi Arabia’s plan modified by himself with an eye to US profit and security in relation to oil states, Israel regardless (overall Israel’s defence system risks being seriously compromised). The President’s connection with Saudi is clearly mapped in the chart in a way I don’t choose to comment upon. So those prophets and religious critics alleging Bush is virtually selling the Holy Land from greed in the name of peace could have a point.

Whatever, the more critical religious opposition to Bush which is at variance with his prosperous evangelical support base, appears to be described by asteroid Church in radical Aquarius almost perfectly opposite the President’s ascendant angle and hence his Bible asteroid there. These opponents are after all saying Bush (and Rice) don’t know their Bible where Israel is concerned – which is by and large true. With Church in this opposed position Bush probably regards those Christians he can’t have in his voting pocket like the Christian Right as a nuisance or even threat - which is possibly the reason, despite numerous representations to the Whitehouse, he has never done anything to protect or just highlight the plight of persecuted Iraqi and Palestinian Christians. These Christians are evidently disposable in the face of the Muslim nations best called brothers worshipping the same God.

By contrast, Hillary, herself if for very different reasons opposed by sections of the churches, likewise has Church in her open enemies sector opposed to her ascendant but her Church is in dual Gemini and retrograde. So, the opposed churches will be in two minds about her but also, I believe, will have second thoughts and can come round to her as some are already beginning to do. She can somewhat overcome the opposition if she wills – she after all doesn’t have the odd or sinister religious input of the Bush’s pattern to contend with. She can also better negotiate peace for Israel (her name nicely aspects Israel’s Venus, its peace potential) assuming that too many matters wouldn’t have been set in place before she would even have opportunity to try,

Now I can revert to Hillary and the all important question will she win.

CAN AND WILL HILLARY CLINTON WIN?

First let’s be clear how we can have any clues about who can win. Here are some basic technicalities.

Personal: Obviously the candidate must have a natal pattern consistent with assuming power and enjoying fame. We’ve seen that Hillary has something of this including that twelfth house sun, normally a sign of hidden enemies and undermining factors but which can give specifically leaders contact with the collective unconscious of nations. Scorpio is a privileged sign for US presidents and Hillary’s planets in Leo are strong and imperial. As we have seen Fame is present as Fama in Hillary’s career house and the other fame asteroid, Glo, exactly trines her destiny Midheaven. There are no asteroids, President or First, but there is one Principia . It is not (as I incorrectly stated in the first published version of this article) perfectly conjunct the fame sensitive Glo, rather it is loosely conjunct her first house Jupiter. This does seem like the heavens declaring this person could be famous for being a female first of something though it won't be a giveaway as Jupiter and this asteroid are basically in difficulty square to the Midheaven!

Despite a basically encouraging picture Hillary appears to fail in especially two points natally. She has a sympathetic but unpolitical moon in Pisces. No American president has had, or would want to have, quite such a vulnerable factor (when Hillary protests her detractors have badly hurt her she means it) but perhaps a woman could be allowed it and it would humanize her to the masses. Hillary also has an unhelpfully unaspected sun – unless, like astrologer Michael O’Reilly, you take into account the four main asteroids Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta, one of which, Ceres, has recently if controversially been declared a planet, because then Hillary’s sun aspects all of these. (O’Reilly in fact links Hillary’s lifelong concern with healthcare reform to her natal sun’s aspect to her caring/nurturing Ceres in her sixth house of health issues). Whatever, the asteroids introduce a new and largely feminine consciousness into astrology. A woman president whose natal sun aspects the leading asteroids could therefore represent the new female and feminist consciousness many voters would be wanting of her.

National: The winner must have a natal chart strongly related to their nation’s horoscope like Bush with his Cancerian sun conjunct America’s sun. Hillary’s sun favourably aspects America’s Venus, obviously positive for someone aiming to be first female president! There are doubts about the time of America’s foundation but I believe the most solid case is made by Michael O’Reilly who has given both historical and astrological evidence for a 2.21 pm chart with Scorpio rising and a Leo destiny Midheaven (and isn’t there a lot of show and theatrics in American leadership?). It’s those angles that have favoured Presidents with suns or planets in Scorpio like Hillary and also those with Mars in Leo like Hillary because then their Mars would aspect America’s leadership Midheaven. Presidents are also commanders-in-chief of the army (Mars). America’s Midheaven is at just 16 Leo, Hillary’s Mars is at 14 Leo, conjuncting a powerful Pluto minutes off a world point at 15 Leo. This helps. (It is incidentally one more proof of the 2.21pm chart that its destiny Midheaven conjuncts a World point as befits America’s role in the world. The eclipse opposite America’s Midheaven in ‘08 could introduce drama into the leadership and whole life and destiny of a debt ridden America).

Also helpful to Hillary is the fact - given the 2.21 pm horoscope which unlike the other US charts puts the moon at 25 Aquarius - that the Senator’s Uranus favourably aspects the national moon exactly to the degree. It needs to do so not only because any President should anyway connect to the national moon but because Hillary would be blazing a woman first trail and Uranus is revolution, the difference, the surprise. Hillary’s Uranus is helpfully in her eighth sector of public support, crucial for any politician. Uranus there suggests she can win especially if she engages support from alternative people and voters like gays (ruled by Uranus) stressing new ways and alternative values. Obama chases Hillary here with a Uranus opposite rather than trine the national moon so he can excite but less easily realize what America wants. His Neptune conjunct America’s ascendant incidentally suggests his rule if he had it instead of Hillary could correspond to a time of confusion.

Transits: This could be a big story but I am only going to take transits for Voting Day November 4th around which time would be a very important one in Hillary’s life if she won. This day must therefore stand out dramatically in her chart and though I haven’t studied the charts of other candidates to compare, I think it is strongly enough marked for Hillary except for one point which I shall have to consider…so

ELECTION DAY (4th NOVEMBER 2008).

Action generating Mars is transiting Hillary’s Ascendant and Mercury at that time which just by itself puts her well forward and in the news. Jupiter makes opportunity aspect to her Venus, good for a woman candidate, and Venus rules the house of her dearest wish. Both Saturn and Uranus are near to favourably aspecting Hillary’s ascendant angle and Mercury, with Saturn doing this from her career house where Saturn at this crucial time is probably best placed. Pluto is nearing a power giving aspect, albeit by semi-sextile, to her natal Jupiter. This is all pretty positive unless her rivals could show stronger aspects and if we could read properly for the main rival, Obama. (He was born 4th Aug 1961 birth time unknown. If I were reading for Inauguration Day ‘09 in favour of his having won would be Jupiter conjuncting his Mercury and against would be Pluto nearly opposite his world point Venus).

The rather major negative is that dissolving, undermining Neptune will be directly opposite Hillary’s natal Saturn which relates to ambition and the duties one assumes in life. Could this Neptune, always ruler of “the end of the matter” within her chart, undo and disappoint her? It’s quite possible but I am inclined to suppose this sign has more to do with the condition of America which is not likely to be improving and which, post Bush, could even prove a bit of a poisoned chalice, an extra heavy load, for almost anyone who won. (If the strong contender Obama whose natal Neptune conjuncts the American ascendant won, it might reflect America itself would soon take the chalice as Neptune here could signify a degree of confusion for all concerned).

But assuming Hillary Clinton were to assume the difficult Bush legacy it’s interesting to note that not long after Inauguration Day (Jan 20th ‘09) a lunar eclipse hits right on her natal Saturn. If this doesn’t bespeak a period of disappointment then it announces, and more likely does so, a period of assumption of extra work and heavy duty consonant in her case with having the presidential role.
I am not an American familiar with American politics (astrological signs must be read in context)and I have not studied the possibly stronger charts of Hillary’s rivals, but within these stated limitations I am prepared to say Hillary seems 95% likely to win the race to become America’s first woman president. In fact, it almost looks like the whole thing is already in her pocket.

NOTE George Bush’s chart is always given as: July 6, 1946, New Haven CT. 7.26 AM EDT
Hillary Clinton’s birth chart, originally disputed for time, is now accepted by leading astrologers to be for Oct 26, 1947,Chicago IL. At 8 am CST. The final word of research on this (her mother had said she was born around breakfast time on the day) was given by Frances McEvoy in Astrology Newsletter, Feb/March ’98, Vol XV111 no 6.
The surely conclusive case for America’s 2.21 pm (on July 4 1776 in Philadelphia) Scorpio rising chart is given by especially Michael O’Reilly in his Political Astrology, and various articles by him on the Net.

HAROLD BLOOM’S RELIGIOUS SUPER MUDDLE

RELIGION AS LITERATURE AND NIGHTMARE

Harold Bloom is a distinguished American literary critic (and academic mentor of the Camilla Paglia) who, let loose on the subject of religion as in Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, becomes more like a hard to manage whirling top. (Published in late 05 the book has finally reached the shores of China so I've belatedly read it). Bloom’s genuine insights appear mixed with so many contradictions and questionable claims it becomes as troubling as his own concluding confessions about how Yahweh/God, for whom his Orthodox Jewish upbringing has left him a residual if reluctant awe, wakes him at night with nightmares.

Yet the seeming chaos of Harold Bloom’s beliefs and opinions still strikes a very modern note worth considering and commenting. Also there’s a fruitful approach to the Bible in his concern to understand it more as literature with analyzable characters than something to be meticulously proved (or disproved) by the historical and textual analyses that leave people the often remote, confusing images of “The historical Jesus”. It’s an approach largely pioneered by (though also partly influenced by Bloom himself) in Jack Miles’ controversial God: A Biography and Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God which are examinations of Yahweh and Christ simply as given.

Despite the title of Harold Bloom’s book and greater part of its arguments essentially I get that the author’s theme is the problem of hanging on like grim death to some system of “transcendence”. Bloom wants to justify the best in life - like literature, art and plain optimism - against the grey of secularist, humanist, nihilist or even Buddhist traps while avoiding various Judaeo-Christian options deemed too hard to accept. Perhaps, too, the book is about how to remain Jewish when you admit you distrust and reject the Covenant, sacrifice and just about everything within Judaism and you emphatically can’t like its Yahweh, nor Jesus much either as any alternative.

SPIRITUALITY A LA IRIS MURDOCH

Harold Bloom thinks he may be a sort of Gnostic Jew, which is possible, but his beliefs and the project of this book finish a bit like the late Dame Iris Murdoch’s Christian atheism - Murdoch is in fact one of Harold Bloom’s favourite modern novelists. Murdoch's ideas were similarly described in a pell-mell of ideas and I note both of these messily suggestive writers on the spiritual are emotional Cancerians. One can well mention the point because unexpectedly astrology includes a message that explicates, if it doesn’t solve, a problem that for Bloom seems utterly insoluable. Also I note it could perhaps only be a member of zodiac’s Great Mother sign who could imagine (as Bloom does in his earlier The Book of J ) it was a woman who wrote the most attractive, accessible J strand of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh, Old Testament) even if that still hasn’t made it the kind of book Bloom likes! It’s just that the Hebrew Bible is at least its ruggedly original self. Bloom’s famous theory of “the anxiety of influence” posits an oedipal factor at work in literature in which the late come seek to overthrow their predecessors. Accordingly any “New Testament” can only be a “Belated Testament” of doubtful motivation, not any fulfilment.

Harold Bloom doesn’t go so far as Iris Murdoch as to suggest that if God existed he would be a demon, but his book, critically described as “provocative”, cannot help but offend Jew and Christian alike at points in its quasi blasphemies fit for the already famous objections of Dawkins in The God Illusion. Yahweh is described as “bad news”, “a capricious God, “this stern imp” uncanny, not to be trusted, unlovable, plainly no lover of the Jewish people at any time, an entity somewhere away in the universe nursing his lovelessness. The book concludes with the suggestion Yahweh should provide us a covenant that could actually be trusted.

POWER WITHOUT RELIABILITY

Yet despite the constant negative write-ups Bloom goes on to describe Yahweh as the most powerful figure in fiction (could any “imp” be that?) even if he could somehow be proved to be only fiction and not linked to certain real enough experiences (like Bloom’s nightmares). Actually, Bloom comes down on the side of drama rather than fiction and decides there is something distinctly King Lear like about Yahweh, passionate and raging about his ungrateful children and the world at large.
Similarly courting contradictions about Yahweh’s successor or mouthpiece, Jesus, Bloom assures us that none of the gospel writers had ever seen or heard Jesus who almost certainly was never crucified under under Pilate Pilate, still less betrayed by Judas (a pure anti-semitic fiction) but a teacher who probably died in India. Yet having assumed the gospels are totally unhistorical and unreliable and John’s gospel fit to be dismissed as a “murderous” text, Bloom then takes pains to treat at least Mark’s Jesus seriously as a rounded credible character based on probably someone who did exist and so whose character can be compared and contrasted with that of Yahweh.

In the space of this article I’m not even going to try to answer some of the objections to gospel reliability especially as at the scholarly/historical level sometimes Bloom scarcely deserves reply because he gets so much wrong. One glaring error is to propose, (having decided that Christianity is a form of Hellenism), that at least the Torah doesn’t demand perfection like the hellenized, platonic Christianity in which Jewish Christians lost out to Paul. Rubbish! Even in the very Jewish Christian gospel of James it is quite correctly observed to its Jewish readers that to fail in one point of Torah is to fail in all (Jam. 2:10). That’s a perfectionist doctrine which may have been soft pedaled or lost to Judaism since Roman times, but it existed. So what deserves answer is Bloom’s more central issue namely is Jesus like Yahweh or not? Is Jesus Yahweh’s son or possibly Yahweh himself?

On this again Bloom obfuscates and muddles and the top whirls. He protests there is no likeness between Jesus and Yahweh (as befits the hopeless heresy from Judaism he considers Christianity to be) and then he finds that really there is plenty of likeness. Jesus speaks in dark riddles, he is capricious, he is ironic, he speaks with hyperbole (exaggeration) he can be fierce. In which case there could perhaps be something “like father like son” in it all but, no, Bloom thinks he couldn’t allow the Christians that possible advantage. While he appreciates their doctrine of the Trinity “as poetry” Christians by getting philosophical in that area have finished up with a passionate Jesus and what seems like a remote impassive God the Father. Traditional trinitarianism can never fit with any Yahweh/Jesus, father/ son equation. But if you want to say Jesus equals Yahweh then character- wise that supposedly works less than a Father Son connection.

CHRISTIANITY ON THE ERA CUSP OF ARIES/PISCES

Well, how do we reconcile Yahweh and Jesus and Jesus’s statement “he who has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn 14:9 ) if also “the Lord is a warrior” (Ex. 15:3) and Jesus patently isn’t?….Or isn’t he? There is at very least the picture Bloom would inevitably discount of Jesus as apocalyptic warrior in Revelation (Rev 19: 11-16). And even if one doesn’t care to attribute that book to the disciple John as per tradition, then at least don’t let’s dismiss Revelation’s Christ images as an aspect of the Christian “hellenism” Bloom automatically assumes of the religion. It’s so little an expression of hellenism that precisely the Greek churches have never allowed Revelation a status above apocrypha!

Super quirky though Bloom’s beliefs are, they are based upon debatable notions one hears among quite a few Jews, (especially those of more Orthodox tradition such as Bloom was raised in), when faced with the OT/NT problem.

1) The only true tradition of Judaism is assumed to be a monotheism so absolute it doesn’t even allow God different “faces”. Bloom reads everything he can lay hands on but he hasn’t read or I’m sure would never cite if he had, Borderlines by Orthodox Jewish scholar, Daniel Boyarin. This makes very plain that at the time of Christ and until rabbis had a reaction against the Christian movement, there was a much more flexible notion of the one God within Judaism, especially a “two powers in heaven” idea into which Father/Son and Trinitarian notions easily slipped. There was no total heresy in thinking the Messiah could be God, the scandal lay more in thinking that specifically Jesus, someone who had been crucified, could be messianic deity.

2) From their literary perspective Bloom, like Miles, sees all the differences between Yahweh and Jesus and cannot understand what causes them. Nor perhaps can some Christians at the more popular level and this has occasioned an excessive division between what constitutes a Jewish and a Christian vision. Any difference is therefore construed by Bloom as a cultural or religious mistake or worse illusion on the part of what Bloom calls “The Belated Testament”. In fact, what Jesus so clearly represents in terms of change is to a large extent the abandonment of the Age of Aries vision of a God of War for an Age of Pisces vision of a God of compassion which could and perhaps should have been expected in Jesus’ time. We know from Josephus (and it’s a reason Josephus bizarrely decided the Roman Emperor, Vespasian, was the Messiah) that Israel expected its Messiah in the first century due to a generally accepted reading of Daniel’s Prophecy of the Weeks still promoted today by Christian dispensationlists. Since however it’s not clear whether Daniel’s weeks of years are lunar or solar years the Messiah couldn’t be very precisely dated within the first century but he was clearly someone for the Aries/Pisces era cusp. God however is all the ages, all the signs. The signs are like his faces so traces of the Arien imagery and symbolism as of the lamb, the blood, the sword, are taken over and retained within the new age. Yahweh can be both a warrior God and a healing, forgiving God. Also Yahweh’s warring is anyway most essentially on the side of freedom and the righteous and/or oppressed, a link to the Piscean savior who suffers. I would maintain contra Bloom that in the new era Jesus incarnates precisely Yahweh and/or The Angel of the Lord whose father is Elohim or El Elyon, the Highest.

3) What was most “hellenistic” and also New Age about Christianity was a philosophical willingness quite simply to generalize. Mainstream Judaism, based on ritual and legal specifics seemed, and still seems, unable or unwilling to do this and to recognize that if, as its prophets maintained, its message was ultimately for all peoples this expansion would be hard to convey without some generalizations of the heritage. The extremely particularizing Talmudic mind set is something alien to most people. It seems rather purely and restrictively Jewish (it is as much as most Gentiles can do even to get through a reading of the Torah, let alone the rabbinic commentaries!). The Torah, though increasingly given a virtually divine status within Judaism, one offering almost an alternative to any Messianic incarnations, contains elements suggestive of editing and the all-too-human addition. Moreover rulings such as the law of jealousy or on the rape of women who must live lifelong with her abuser are grounded in archaic cultural values which raise the most serious questions about God, perfection, revelation and justice if they are to be regarded purely as a dictated “Word of God”. Luther’s “Down with the Law” though controversial even to many Christians, was not without all reason. And though Jesus employed proverbial type expressions about “not a jot or tittle” departing from the Law till all would be fulfilled (apparently through himself) his references to the law of Moses and the elders implies he may not have thought of the Torah as in all parts equally inspired from heaven.

There is not just a religious argument going on in the long standing Jewish-Christian debates but an intellectual one with a certain refusal on the Jewish side of the Logos in all senses of the word. Like the atheist (not devout Jew) Jewish philosopher, Jacques Derrida, the more intellectual wing of Jewry seems to want to overthrow the “logocentric” mindset of the west. But while Derrida’s "deconstruction" does offer insights that reveal the limits of reason in western philosophy, Christian and secular, the result is rather anarchic, inconclusive – Derrida himself would not allow his thought was even a philosophy, more a reading, a technique. It’s a technique rather akin to Talmudic ones whereby Torah can be not just illuminated but if need be altered, whittled down or whittled away because it doesn’t fit the times or its original purpose even while one refuses there can be any philosophically or psychologically Christian/Hellenistic fulfillment or transcendence of it.

TO FULFIL OR NOT TO FULFIL

Harold Bloom denies any text can ever fulfill another. He absolutely denies the traditionally prophetic Isaiah 53 could possibly prophetically refer to, or be fulfilled in, Jesus. I admit, and intellectually almost more than religiously, to be irritated by his fairly representative Jewish take on this one. I can obviously accept it if a Jew says such and such a passage does not refer to specifically Jesus. I remain however frustrated by the kind of denial involved that this long poetic passage, so intensely personalized and about a suffering person could ever refer to any suffering messianic figure because Isaiah’s Messiah would have to be an all conquering Cyrus of Persia (who didn’t suffer) or else (as per philosopher, Franz Rosenzweig’s interpretation), must be a plural entity, namely the Jewish people as a whole. How, to intellectual satisfaction, can one read lines like
“he bore the chastisement that made us whole and by his bruises we were healed”
and seriously maintain the reference is still collective? Whose bruises in that case is this great Israel collective healing? This kind of position seems like an a playing of games with simple logic so that I feel exasperation and even possibly something along the lines St Paul is referring to when he speaks of a "blindness" overcoming Israel (Rom 11:25).

It becomes fairly clear that for certain purely cultural reasons best known to himself Harold Bloom is more determined to remain a Jew, however dissenting and blaspheming, than to assume any other philosophical or religious position. Again this strikes me as slightly perverse. We should let truth take us wherever it will take us even if, as for the skeptical Jewish philosopher,Spinoza, it takes one nowhere in particular from our starting point. However I do see Bloom as deep down wanting something that St Paul maintained the Jews of his time according to him inappropriately wanted, namely signs (1 Cor 1:22) because Bloom writes “but trust, faith, submission are none of them knowledge”. So what would be knowledge? Ultimately perhaps signs that prove.

Granted Bloom may not quite want or expect signs from heaven, but he does demand the next best thing, a verifiable knowledge rather than any exercises of faith. He in effect wants to know how it all works and to make everything work and to make it work via texts and not by inspiration. It is most noticeable that when he has his God nightmares upon waking his reaction is not to invoke God, not to pray or to meditate, but frantically to begin all over again lacerating himself by re-reading the passages of OT and NT and commentaries that trouble him, a clear case of the Talmudic attachment to text if nothing else. Perhaps this in itself shows some kind of tension between a modern desire for purely individual understanding and the demands of a Judaism formed more than Christianity around the collective, the nation, the tribe, and whose God is thus, all religious issues apart, more psychologically difficult for the individual to encompass and approach.

WHICH GOD, WHOSE GOD?

In an interesting and topical recent book, Secrets Things of God (it is written is response to the New Age philosophies of this year’s bestselling The Secret), a Christian psychiatrist, Dr Henry Cloud, records how on a radio show he was once given some very impassioned questioning about having God answer belief problems or life quests. How can we know it’s true, that God’s true etc. On being pressed he had finally to respond that if one really asked passionately enough somehow or other God would be revealed, (a case of “seek and you will find”). One listener took this very seriously to heart. Later she arrived in town asking to meet Cloud personally. She had had this marvelous vision. It was the best thing in her life, light, bliss, peace, except there was a slight problem. What was that? Well…she had asked for God but then Jesus had appeared. Why was this? She was, after all, a Jew…. and God, you know…. Dr Cloud tried to explain using all those fulfillment passages that Harold Bloom believes never could and should be used to fulfill anything. In this case the questioner felt she would have to be persuaded.

Happy Christmas Harold Bloom and everyone!

ACCIDENTAL REVELATIONS: ISRAEL, ANNAPOLIS AND BEYOND IT

THINGS ISRAEL AND ALL OF US SHOULD KNOW

(This Blog deals in especially the censored. The following unique and remarkable information was sent to three Israeli papers last week, Haaretz, Jerusalem Post, National Daily News, not one of which acknowledged in relation to use of this as popular magazine article material or just a blog connection).

Just occasionally revelation may be accidental but carry sufficient force not to be dismissed as pure coincidence. The following information is too graphic, consistent and against all statistical probability not to merit consideration, though it came to me in an unexpected way starting from an unusual source. As per the Psalms the skies had knowledge to utter and messages for the times like you will never have heard them from astrology. Least of all on Israel.

Perhaps because they’re considered too fatalistic or medieval or require very accurate birth times modern astrologers don’t normally use the so called Arabic Parts which are mathematical formulae (like Sun plus Moon minus Ascendant). In the wake of recently buying a new computer and new softwares for it I examined a large collection of ancient and modern Parts applying them by chance to especially an Israel chart in the course of testing a software that included many Parts. But in no time things started adding up to a real picture and I was struck, so struck I began adding in modern asteroids, like Israel, America, Solomon, Tempel (sic), Showa etc which due to their precise reference can flesh out the generalities of the familiar astrological chart, although again few astrologers today do this.

Soon I was registering astonishment in a world somewhere beyond The Bible Codes and rather more substantial and convincing. I was seeing a recognizable Israel and with it the potential for genuine prophecy. First however I must persuade you some kind of revelation is involved, one of facts against which forecast is reasonably ventured.

SKIES THAT UTTER KNOWLEDGE (Ps 19:2)

I began by seeing the Sun of Israel’s birth (at 23 Taurus on May 14th 1948) was conjuncted by the Part of Destiny. One might have guessed as much - the whole story of the nation’s foundation and development is surrounded by talk of precisely fate and destiny. Jewish destiny needless to say all starts with Father Abraham but there’s no Abraham asteroid for the testing. There’s nonetheless one for Abraham’s wife, Israel’s mother Sara, so in our feminist era Sara conjuncts the Part instead. Actually, and rather neatly, to one side of Sara is Israel’s sun then Sara and Destiny are united at 22 Taurus while at Sara’s other side stands Patria (Homeland) at 21. Destiny it seems is a homeland promised!

Turning to Israel’s first house, which should describe who a people are, how they see themselves and are seen, I then found all of the Part of Influence (Jews have it) the Part of Memory (Jews live from it), The Part of Originality (all those Jewish artists!) the Part of Commerce (Israelis are adept at it) and the Part of Security (Israelis are obsessed with it). Influence and Memory respectively conjuncted asteroids Levy and Levison, in effect the traditional purveyors of rabbinical/priestly ideas that help keep the people self aware.

Jewish self awareness however has a lot to do with religion and Moses. I found the Part of Initiative was in the ninth house of religion and philosophy conjuncted by asteroid Musa (Arabic for Moses). In the same religion house, (itself interestingly enough having the degree of a world point on its cusp) I found the Part of Widowhood conjuncting Nephele (Greek for Cloud). This seemed as suggestive as astrospeak could be to evoke images of the mourning, alienated Shekinah bride that for mystics symbolizes Israel’s supposed current condition. The religion house also held what I already knew to be one of the two Bible asteroids, Biblioran and at that the asteroid I knew referred to specifically the Hebrew Bible, Tanakh, not the Greek NT which is Biblialexa.

Elsewhere in the pattern and less positively but true enough to biblical record I found the Part of Treachery. At 17 Pisces it was opposing a conjunction of asteroids Jacobi with Rebekka – we know how mother and son tricked Isaac in the matter of an inheritance blessing between twin brothers. The tricky pair therefore leave asteroid Iszak stranded in the heavens in divisive Gemini, the twins sign, in opposition relation to Jupiter, astrology’s symbol for blessings.

Israel’s Part of Vocation and Status, historically the sort of thing Jacob was playing trickster for, conjuncts quite simply Yudovitch: Son of Jew, Jew. This Yudovitch moreover is designated a child of the Law by falling in Libra sign of the Laws, and dedicated to God by conjunction to one of the only two God asteroids, Bhagwat, Hindu for “Lord” or God. Both asteroids were in apparent retrograde, a sign astrologers normally take to indicate ideas strongly interiorized and this Jew was falling in Israel’s sector of the unconscious (twelfth house). After all, Jews do take being Jewish quite seriously!

YAHWEH, THEOTES AND THE SACRED LAND

Encouraged that a meaningful picture was emerging to merit fuller examination I turned attention to the unavoidably crucial fourth sector of home, land and inheritance. It was suitably defined by the ever surprising, revolutionary and unique sign of Aquarius in harmony with beliefs that the land of Israel is unique, “chosen” like the people. The Part of Passion conjuncted its cusp – Israelis are passionate about the land. Inside the house there was a lot more.

The land became Israel’s partly as a consequence of the Holocaust (shoah or showa) so an asteroid (showa) conjuncts The Part of Discord and opposes warlike, argumentative Mars which seems like a pattern eloquent for ongoing disputes over both Holocaust itself and the sort of territorial rights it might bestow. Also inside Israel’s home sector there was The Part of Substance or Possessions. Many Israelis regard their land as their inherited possession, not just a holocaust compensation. However, that Israel’s leaders see things rather less that way is strongly indicated. Possessions (at 17 Aquarius) itself conjunct at 16 a supplementary Jacob asteroid Jakoba since originally asteroids were registered in feminine form) and thus betokening Jacob’s legacy, is awkwardly opposed by Saturn (at 16 Leo) from the house of national leadership and destiny. Since for any political astrology Saturn just in and by itself has a lot to do with land and real estate political tensions with settlers could be serious as we know has been the case. Official, basically secularist, policy regarding the land in any case tangles with specifically religious issues that this home sector also vividly speaks into.

Inside Israel’s home/land sector we find the other God relevant asteroid, Theotes (Greek for Divinity/Godhead). Its position here seems in line with belief Israel is really more God’s land given in guardianship than Israel’s outright possession. Theotes notably conjuncts Aaronson which recalls how within this Promised Land it was the sons of Aaron who by tradition were the priestly link between God and Jew.

Upon this sacred territory stood first the Ark then the Temple, chief site of God’s presence and his earthly footstool. Asteroid Tempel (German for Temple) at 25 Aquarius loosely conjuncts Theotes/Godhead at 21 and between them like an Ark of Covenant at 23 stands Constantia (lit. steadfastness). It's an asteroid I have long been convinced can refer to any covenants. If I’m correct Constantia’s exact difficulty square to the national sun implies modern secular Israel, more especially its top leaders, stands outside, or has a few problems with, Covenant. But that would be nothing new! The sheer challenge and struggle of Israel’s covenanted encounters with the divine whether through temple cult priests or more personally, is then well represented by The Part of Revelation, itself conjunct Aeternitas (Eternity) - hence Eternal Revelation! - directly opposite Tempel from the national destiny sector. The old and often repeated message of the prophets in their more negative mode appears oddly etched in the skies by the conjunction of the national Part of Soul conjunct asteroid Devience (Deviance) - the soul easily astray, so to speak!

GOD, DAVID, MESSIAH AND JERUSALEM

Regarding Israel’s leadership/destiny house which contains the important Part of Revelation much could be said. It’s dramatic and appears redolent of the Davidic heritage in its emphasis on planets in royal Leo – asteroid David(a) does in fact exactly aspect Israel’s 3 degree Leo Midheaven from 3 Sagittarius. Indeed, traces of the dynastic are so far unforgotten that beating even his father and defying every statistical possibility Solomon (as asteroid Solomin) in all his regal glory actually makes it to the leadership house exactly conjuncting The Part of Wisdom at 7 Leo! However as our theme is issues for a modern Jewish state not its dynastic history I’ll mention only two points.

First, asteroid Israel has appropriately made its way into the destiny house. From there it is in challenged opposition relation to Theotes (God) while it conjuncts the Part of Spirit and The Part of Violence - the nation is after all surrounded by violence and was born amid it. Perhaps more serious, depending upon if and how it works (I don’t claim to know!) The Part of The End of Things , conjuncts Israel’s leadership/destiny Midheaven angle. It’s anyone’s guess if this bears relevance to apocalyptic assumptions as of Christian Zionists that it will be international disputes linked to Israel that will ultimately trigger the end of age Armageddon scenario.

Though there’s no Armageddon asteroid to help enlighten us on that contested point there actually is one for Jerusalem and Jerusalem represents tension, tension and more tension within the emerging picture. On the positive side it conjuncts The Part of Bequest. This again is how the city is religiously regarded – God gives Jerusalem to the Jews and it is for the Messiah’s rule. In harmony with that rather vital point asteroid Masi, meaning Messiah, conjuncts Jerusalem! However Jerusalem is both challengingly opposed to the chart’s ascendant (moment of birth) and in difficulty square aspect to its destiny Midheaven which, as said, The End of Things conjuncts. As such the combination almost looks like an invocation of the Zechariah prophecy of Jerusalem as the ultimate cup of reeling for the nations (Zech 12:2-3), the more so as this Jerusalem falls, like Israel’s national sun, within the sector (the seventh) which deals with any nation’s foreign relations.

By now perhaps I have given a picture vivid enough to justify a bit of forecasting except that to do so meaningfully I must cover one further point first, namely this tricky fact that the nation’s sun and Jerusalem fall in specifically the seventh house.

THE DEVIL IN THE WORKS

Since Israel’s Sun falls not in the natural leadership sector but its house of foreign affairs by the rules of political astrology this means the nation’s Prime Ministers, his/her advisers and the national policies they pursue will be considerably determined by what other nations think, want and do. At times it might be hard for Israel truly to think and act for itself. It wasn’t established by itself and others who helped form it may not understand what it really requires – amusingly enough asteroid United Nations bossily sits in Israel’s first house of the people as though trying to define, control or limit them (the UN has recently unanimously voted for a Palestinian state at the expense of Israeli land and is obsessively concerned with Israel having spent a third of all its debating hours on it) but then… the UN conjuncts The Part of Perversion!

The seventh house is notoriously the sector, perhaps on the basis of something like a Taming of the Shrew psychology, that provides persons and nations their closest relations and their open enemies. Israel manifestly has both but in addition something metaphysical encroaches upon the see-saw. The fated nodes (a connections point much involved with where one should be going and what doing in life) also fall in this foreign affairs house where they rather unhelpfully conjunct Malin (French for Devil). On this basis one might have to say Israel’s truest enemy is less on earth than in the Beyond where, rather as in the book of Daniel, Michael the angelic guardian battles demonic forces! While this perspective might be easily dismissed today undeniably the Holocaust was influenced by movements steeped in a dark occultism. There’s also something else….

Conjunctions are very for or against something. Israel’s Nodes fall at 13 Taurus. On one side at 14 stands Malin while on the other at 12 is Shilow, which is rather obviously astrospeak for a mystic name of the Messiah, Shiloh. So Devil and Messiah appear locked in conflict over Israel though Shiloh is slated to win. At 10 degrees Shiloh is backed up by asteroid, Angel (Michael defending Israel?) while Shilow’s 12 degrees is identical with the leadership/destiny sector’s 12 degree Pluto and under the rules Pluto is not just technically “ruler” or chief planet of Israel’s chart, but in any religious contexts a deity symbol. And God in anything like Jewish/biblical conception, the hidden God of death, judgement, total transformation, mystery, vengeance and “jealousy” can only be symbolized by Pluto, ruler of vengeance and jealousy sign, Scorpio.

AMERICA, ISRAEL AND BUSH/BUSCH DIVISIONS

Back on earth and not in the seventh sector America’s peculiar role in Israel’s destiny appears described by asteroid America at 25 Pisces conjuncting The Part of Sudden Advancement and America has periodically given Israel some help to advance itself. Significantly, America makes both a favourable aspect to Israel’s sun (at 23 Taurus) and a difficulty/denial aspect to Israel’s Jupiter (at 26 of Sagittarius). Now, with the slow moving, devastatingly transformative Pluto has been conjuncting Israel’s Jupiter (its value system, its religion) America’s support, itself partly religion based, is on the wane and might eventually cease. The economy too may now either go into decline or just possibly skyrocket since this super strong Jupiter sits like some Deuteronomic promise of abundance in Israel’s second house of goods and income. Whatever, the issue of Israeli/American connection cannot help but be religion linked.

Israel’s spiritual role in the world and its general significance is highlighted by its natal Jupiter which is in Jupiter’s natural sign, religious/philosophical Sagittarius, from where it conjuncts the Galactic Centre much associated with world events, especially issues in religion. This super strong Jupiter also conjuncts The Part of Legal Affairs and Marriage Contracts - how much of the Hebrew Bible is taken up with just those two themes! With America interacting under a Plutonic transit with a nation so strongly marked by Jupiter it follows that President Bush’s aims to further peace by a division of Israel is contentious for the sort of religious viewpoint Bush and his assistant Rice assume they represent. After all it is said God sets his face against those who will divide “my land” (Joel 3:2) - God’s rather than Israel’s.

In light of that thought it’s somewhere between amusing and sinister that asteroid Busch (pronounced Bush, which for asteroids is considered the main thing) at 14 Taurus conjuncts Malin (Devil) in Israel’s chart. I’m uncertain what to make of this (obviously it could be a fluke) and unfortunately there’s no Rice asteroid to enlarge on the possible implications…..unless we take the name Rees from which, like Rhys, it’s derivative and with which it’s considered interchangeable if not always identically pronounced.

In that case if it’s not a fluke it could be spectacular because Rees conjuncts Busch and Devil from 15 Taurus! But if Busch is truly Bush and then Rees is Rice perhaps they do have to be seen as a kind of devil’s agents. Biblically at least they can scarcely be anything else if Israel is not for the dividing but intended rather for what the nation has - at least periodically- experienced: unexpected occasions of expansion. Undeniably Israel’s natal opposition of Jupiter to surprising Uranus, (the latter significantly ruler of the nation’s land sector ) is an aspect normally deemed to be about the challenges of mental and/or physical enlargement not diminishment.

PROPHECYING ANNAPOLIS AND BEYOND

I am finally ready for a bit of prophecy. Assuming the Annapolis conference goes ahead to date and plan what the conference will organize is necessarily what in the long term won’t succeed and could bring all the kind of disasters in its wake rather in the way some rabbis have been warning Bush it will entail. Certainly the conventional signs any astrologer would look to like previous eclipse, lunation etc are hardly promising.

The eclipse preceding Annapolis was at 18.25 of Virgo. This conjuncted Israel’s Part of Peril and its Part of The Year of Death. Obviously Israel won’t die because of Annapolis at whatever date it occurs but its arrangements could kill off much that so far Israel has known, or trusted in – it’s perhaps the year that sees the beginning of a slow end to American alliance.
.
The lunation before Annapolis fell at 17.20 Scorpio in difficulty square to Israel’s leadership house Saturn. Whether they realize it or not the leaders will be restricted and disadvantaged over land – they may even be plain deceived since a Neptune aspect of the kind that regularly favours deception is also involved in the lunation. Whether or not he’s the most corrupt leader in Israeli history that some maintain, it’s of incidental interest that Prime Minister Olmert is a Libran. Librans love peace and so much so that like Neville Chamberlain who trusted Hitler there’s a risk Olmert will sell Israel for peace, a subject Israel’s leadership is just not clear enough about (see below).

The Full moon before Annapolis gives more bad omen. It conjuncts Israel’s Part of Necessity and Constraint and opposes its Part of Catastrophe and Part of Hopes and Wishes, the peculiar natal conjunction of which possibly portrays how Israel doesn’t always hope and wish aright - which in at least one respect, as I will show, it almost certainly doesn’t. We can keep a somewhat more open mind on the fact that David is tied in with Hope and Wishes. This could reflect how some within Israel (witness some members of the new Sanhedrin) do wish and even intend to revive Davidic monarchy in modern Israel. In a more general sense David is perhaps always a name to conjure with, a symbol of hope.

Aspects around the assumed time of conference are suitably negative. I mention just two:
Restrictive Saturn opposes Israel’s conjunct Parts of Kingdom and Victory and asteroid Salavat (salvation/health). Aggressive Mars exactly opposes the Part of Fortune, itself curiously conjuncting the Part of Bondage (which suggests to me something in modern Israel’s profile holds back potential blessings. I won’t speculate here on what but the skies may supply a clue).

On the presently most likely days of conference (25th and 26th ) the moon is in Cancer. Whether or not these are the true dates the point leads me to mention a whole delusion factor among Israelis somewhat linked to the sign of Cancer.

ISRAEL’S SHALOM PROBLEM

Contrary to what some might imagine, what Israel wants is peace. The point is vividly made by the conjunction of Israel’s Part of Happiness with asteroid Frieden (peace). Israel as Lion of Judah is no Paper Tiger, but a pussy cat that can sometimes be tickled and stroked. However in any pattern a nation’s main peace concerns are always signified by Venus. Unfortunately for Israel its Venus falls in the natural mother and home sign of Cancer so that like most mothers Israel likes peace at home at almost any cost. But the Israeli Venus is opposed by The Part of Delusion! Political Israel imagines peace can be bought by purely political solutions, and at that rather along the lines of give the baby its bottle and rock it to sleep Cancerian ones buying slumber time and surrendering ever more homeland like so many feedings to people expected contentedly to keep their promises.

This disposition to delusion is amplified and confirmed by the opposition of Pax (Peace) to Israel’s natal Mercury. In context this is truly no joke since Israel’s Mercury rules its sector of debts, taxes and death. I’m not trying to say that everything Israel has done towards its neighbours is right or that implacable violence is the answer to whatever’s not working for it, but there are situations in which paradoxically desire for Pax may actually court death. Especially situations of division such as divisive, trickster Mercury “rules” in Israel’s case. There will be occasions when no compromise might prove the safer path. Israel’s much invoked prophet Elijah would probably agree. Asteroid Elias is in exact tension square to the dividing Mercury!

What’s certain is that there can be no solution that leaves religion out of the picture given that shalom/Venus is in Israel’s religion and beliefs sector. Secular solutions however apparently commonsensical won’t work even though it might be hard to see precisely what will. It’s nonetheless interesting in view of the historic call, “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem” that Venus stands in direct favourable aspect to asteroid Jerusalem which, recall, itself conjuncts Masi/Messiah without whom the issue of Jerusalem can perhaps never be sorted out.

Dividing Israel and/or Jerusalem is basically an alien, gentile idea agreeable to purely rationalist notions of what seems best. Sure enough we find it’s the asteroid Le Gentil (the Gentile) that conjuncts the birth chart’s division principle, Mercury, which as already stated rules Israel’s death house while to make matters doubly clear Le Gentil itself manages to conjunct Israel’s Part of Death. The message here seems to be that gentiles risk making for, or perhaps in some instances actively desire, the death of Israel through their plans. Whether for war or peace their divisive policies could nonetheless involve their own death to the extent the promise is that those who divide “my land” invoke judgement.

2008 AND BEYOND IN ISRAEL

Though biblical prophecy seems to indicate the Messiah would arrive (Jews) or return (Christians) following the division of a restored Israel, (a division which if our times are truly apocalyptic would therefore have to take place), the Annapolis arrangements cannot and will not work in the long term and will only cause further unforeseen troubles. Next year February’s solar eclipse that opposes Israel’s Saturn from the nation’s land and inheritance sector bodes ill for Israel’s leadership and real estate issues. It possibly indicates a backlash for what has been done or is being pushed through during 08; it could well signal the end of Olmert’s rule. Whatever, as solar eclipses colour events for a year a difficult year seems promised. At the time of February’s eclipse Neptune, a dissolvent, is exactly opposite asteroid, Israel (Israel is being dissolved) while aggressive Mars is conjunct the territory ruling Uranus in divisive Gemini (the land moves towards division?)

However, according to traditional rabbinic astrology for which this gentile cannot warrant, lunar eclipses are more important for Israel than the solars that most astrologers set more store by. In that case August 08’s lunar eclipse conjunct Israel’s Tempel in the land sector ought to promise some kind of event, decision, agreement (or possibly crisis given an eclipse in excitable Aquarius?), with regard to the Temple Mount area. Could a Red Heifer be sacrificed? Will the Sanhedrin or the Temple Mount Faithful announce something? Might nature take over? I have no idea; but I suspect late 08 or early 09 could be a real Temple time and to expect the Aquarian unexpected within the six months from the eclipse would be reasonable. Simply handing over the Temple Mount with the rest of a returned Israel would definitely be trouble making and unreasonable.

Much may happen in the volatile society that is Israel and have its international reverberation but if – improbably - effects of the Annapolis agreements will not have run into difficulties long before 2014, the eclipse of October 2014, which falls conjunct Israel’s ascendant, opposite Jerusalem and Messiah and in tension square to its destiny Midheaven, is virtually guaranteed to light many fuses.

But whatever you do and think, don’t expect that temporary setbacks and losses will cause Israel to be overcome. With its Mars (military force) conjunct fame giving king star, Regulus, in fiery Leo in the leadership/destiny house in fortunate trine to a Jupiter strong in its natural sign, fiery Sagittarius, itself conjunct the religion and world relevant Galactic Centre, Israel is all of “a blazing pot ….a flaming torch among the sheaves” (Zech 12:6) scarcely able to lose for long if it tried. (And if Irani is Iran in Israel’s chart I include Iran within that statement). “The Lord, is a warrior” sings Moses. Yahweh of Israel, Plutonic ruler of the national birth chart is “the Lord God of hosts” (armies). Start dividing or sparring with Israel and sooner or later you might discover the fact with truly mystic force.

NOTE. The horoscope used for Israel is a widely accepted one. Set for 4.35 pm EET, 14.5.1948 at Tel Aviv it takes as symbolic moment of birth the end of Ben Gurion’s broadcast Independence speech when he declared “The State of Israel has arisen”. Some Israeli astrologers use the beginning of the broadcast with Libra rather than the 0 degrees Scorpio which makes Pluto chart ruler. The horoscope is familiar to me from an astrologer friend specializing in political astrology who regularly consulted with a rabbi on the data for its interplay with Israeli history. There is every reason to suppose this is the true chart though its alternative being near in time will also render sense like a portrait taken from a different angle. However, for working Arabic Parts the time must be correct as formulae for most Parts require a correct ascendant degree. When I refer to conjunctions or opposition of Parts to planets or asteriods I usually mean within one and half degrees, possibly two which I allow for asteroids. Whereas planets are read through many aspects, some quite wide, Parts are mostly valid in close conjunction/ opposition though in isolation their position can still suggest a biographical feature worth noting. Today astrologers rarely use more than the Part of Fortune. This could be a limitation. However be warned not all Parts may apply so efficiently as here. For one thing Israel’s is a straightforward daytime chart. Some Parts change formulae for night. I am not persuaded this works so well and it’s one of the disputed points in this area among astrologers.

BROTHER YUN'S CERTIFIED MIRACLE

PRISON BREAK EXTRAORDINAIRE

The question raised by Brother Yun, The Heavenly Man’s, most famous miracle - a spectacular prison escape hard to contest seeing it was reported on the news and people lost their jobs over it - is less did it happen than would its occurrence have to constitute one of the best attested, most remarkable miracles since the Book of Acts? I mean…there are usually limits!

Not to know about Brother Yun is to perhaps to miss out on something, something beyond St Peter and Jackie Chan - of which in a sense Yun is the Christian version without making it to film. It is also something to run against ideas like those of the sceptical philosopher, David Hume, on the miraculous. The celebrated Humean maxim is: "That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish...” Well, if not miraculous it would be extraordinary to deny Yun is out of Chinese jail seeing he’s now residing in Germany. His wanted status appears sufficiently attested by arguments with Chinese authorities over him by the embassies of Germany and Myanmar. And if improbably the biographer of the best-seller, The Heavenly Man, was lying about diplomatic incidents wouldn’t the Chinese government, which doesn’t exactly shine in the book, and other governments be keen to deny the facts?

THE HEAVENLY MAN, BROTHER YUN’S ORIGINS

Liu Zhenying, Brother Yun called “The Heavenly Man” was born in poverty in 1957 in Nanyang in the central and most highly populated Chinese province of Henan. It is the province from which since Hudson Taylor’s work in the nineteenth century Protestant missions have spread out into China. His farming family had traces of Taoist allegiance through the father and a vague awareness through his illiterate mother of a Christianity she later resumed following the cure from cancer of her husband. After conversion and deep religious experiences during adolescence Yun rose to a degree of prominence as preacher and organizer within the Chinese House Church movement which especially at the time of the Cultural Revolution in the seventies was persecuted – it still periodically is so today but less so and less widely as a major threat to the nation.

If you want to have an impression of rural China and the hidden world of house churches you only have to read The Heavenly Man by Paul Hattaway (Monarch Books, 2002). It’s emphatically not a story for the faint hearted due to details regarding torture of which Yun would have more than his share and surviving which is part of a larger aura of miracle around him.

Chinese media was reasonably familiar with Yun either because of his supposed threat to authority or wanted status. He was the subject of many a public poster, had been arrested thirty times, escaped custody many times but done a couple of stints in jail and on one occasion was - sort of - miraculously released on the distinctly exceptional basis his stubbornness suggested he was too unteachable to do anything with. Other escapes or releases however don’t begin to compare with the escape of May ‘97. When he was arrested and imprisoned in March that year his judge and everyone was determined he would not escape so he was sent to a maximum security jail in Zhengzhou, Henan. Yun had been arrested because he had attended a meeting of leaders aimed to achieve greater unity of the Christian groups, something interpreted by spies of the secret police as a political move opposed to national stability. The Chinese government seems never to feel very secure in itself!

The arrest was both photographed and videoed. Trying his luck as usual Yun had jumped from a window but this time injured his feet. Police then kicked and trod on Yun fracturing his legs and once inside jail in the course of innumerable interrogations and beatings his broken legs get beaten leaving him screaming in agony and the result was that his legs turned black and presumably would have gone gangrene and needing eventual amputation. His judge had in fact said to Yun when he admitted he would try to preach the gospel again if he escaped and was given the chance: “ You delinquent! I’m going to break your legs permanently so you’ll never escape again”. Yun got known in the jail as the “crazy cripple” who was regularly carried everywhere by three prisoners designated to the job. His pain was so intense that to sleep at all he had to rest with his legs up against the wall. His situation and long term prospects were so ghastly that finally he felt let down by God.

THE DAY OF ESCAPE, MAY 5th 1997

Two months later on May 5th, a Christian prisoner in an adjoining cell gave Yun the message God intended him to escape which at the time seemed absurb - short of crawling out to be shot in the back it what could it mean given Yun’s personal condition and his jail?. Rather than encouraged by the message it only brought out all of Yun’s gathering depression and triggered an intense argument with God based on passages of Jeremiah which he was reading though he knew whole tracts of the Bible by heart, Chinese style. When he reached a certain passage of warning and promise to Jeremiah Yun suddenly had an intense vision (such seem to feature widely in Chinese culture and Christianities). He saw his wife, who had also been arrested, out of prison and making medicines. He asked her about her release; her only reply was to ask why not open “the iron door”. The vision ended there and Yun heard the voice of God say “this is the hour of your salvation”. Acting on the instant in obedience almost blindly Yun did the only thing he could which was knock on the wall using the signal to be taken to the toilet for which he would have to be carried outside the cell.

Brother Xu appeared at his cell to carry him but promptly commanded him, before returning to his cell for toothbrush and bathroom regalia for himself: “you must escape now”. This was hardly feasible when crippled Yun would need to pass down through 3 floors with 3 iron gates each regularly watched by two armed guards, then cross a prison yard with a further guarded gate to the outside world plus the time was 8 in the morning when there was a lot of activity in the prison. Whenever a prisoner left a cell for anything a gate to the corridor was locked from the outside so there was no chance of exit.

A sort of dream sequence now takes over which if the book has so far periodically made the reader nauseous with its tortures might now leave one feeling a bit dizzy. No longer thinking how and why he is even moving Yun propels himself towards the first gate and because someone is entering it accompanied by one of the two guards of the gate he manages to slip through unobserved because a telephone suddenly rings temporarily distracting the other guard of the gate who runs off. Moving down to the next floor Yun picks up a broom from the wall which makes him looks like he’s on a working job. The next floor has an iron gate that is occasionally left open because a guard would always be on duty day and night beside it. The voice of the Holy Spirit now tells Yun “the God of Peter” is his God and he must go through. The guard is staring straight at Yun but somehow dazed with it so that Yun passes straight through this second gate after which no other guards either on the descent or out into the yard manage to see him as he carries his broom (or if they do they presumably decide he must be a worker).

Yun is still human and realistic enough to fear he must surely be shot in the back as he crosses the open yard in full view of the prison compound towards the main entrance yet still nobody sees or stops him. When he reaches the main gates these are mysteriously ajar. Just as he exits, a yellow taxi stops at the gates of the prison and he automatically gets in giving the address of a Christian family in the city he knows who will need to receive him and pay for the fare he doesn’t have. When he arrives at their home there is great excitement but minimal shock as the family had been told in a vision while at prayer the day before that Yun would escape and call on them as the first thing. Knowing this they had already arranged a secret hiding place for him. Meanwhile…

It’s not long before alarm is raised road blocks are put up around the city, a hunt is on and Yun’s escape is on the news but Yun has already left on a bicycle with a member of his protector’s family steering him down small alleyways to avoid the blocks that were set up. The city hunt is then made more difficult by the intervention of a sudden violent storm which brings on near darkness and torrential rain washing away traces which sniffer dogs could otherwise have used in pursuit. It’s only as he pedals the bike that Yun finally absorbs that his legs must actually have been healed, something a prisoner later said he had realized had to be the case when he saw Yun slip upright through the first of the three gates.

In its way the miracle, whether of healing or escape, can be seen, and has come to be seen, as a divine reply to authorities who had challenged Yun’s God with the prospect of the prisoner’s permanent injury and incarceration. Even those who have questioned this story because, “well, it’s just not possible” have no way of accounting for the simple fact of escape. If one presumes to say (as no one has) that Yun had the resources to bribe or drug all the guards we would only begin to arrive at the Humean situation where explanation finishes as or more remarkable than the given story. The loudest voices against Yun have at one time, distressingly to churches inside and outside of China who rushed to his defence, have come from a small group within the house churches pushing their own apostolic type authority as fifth generation Christians from the times of Hudson Taylor.

To be precise, what happened is that a Chinese in Germany put out a nasty report which some reasonably well known and influential house church leaders, (who when questioned later admitted they hadn't personally met and knew virtually nothing about Yun), were willing to endorse, apparently on the basis of "no smoke without fire" (and perhaps because they sensed a threat to their standing if some upstart seized the international limelight). With the venom of the Pharisees or those Nestorians who tried to wreck the work of the Franciscan, John of Montecorvino in medieval Pekin, these people concentrated not on the escape story but simply the character they were happy to assassinate portraying Yun as a modern Judas, intent on dividing and betraying churches, a greedy con man (though it is well known he and his family lives very modestly within prosperous Germany), a liar and thief. At one time Yun’s self righteous enemies thought nothing of putting his family’s lives at risk by betraying their whereabouts within Myanmar.

Yun’s breakout story is so extraordinary one feels it could well be celebrated in the kind of poetry that concludes Keat’s celebrated St Agnes Eve with its purely mythic, dreamlike tale of escape of another kind from which I excerpt lines:

Down the wide stairs a darkling way they found…
In all the house was heard no human sound.
A chain-droop'd lamp was flickering by each door….
And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor.
They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall;
Like phantoms, to the iron porch, they glide,,,
The wakeful bloodhound rose, and shook his hide,
The key turns, and the door upon its hinges groans.
And they are gone: ay, ages long ago
These lovers fled away into the storm….

Yun too may have fled into a storm but it wasn’t ages ago and it wasn’t myth because he went on to escape China causing scandal among embassies.

YUN GENERATING POWER AND MIRACLE

There is understandably much controversy, perhaps even more, over another of Yun’s reported miracles, namely his 1984 seventy four day fast, allegedly of both food and water - for which he would needless to say require to be supernaturally sustained as he claimed to be! There is no question he was on some kind of fast, the authorities had tried to torture him out of it with beatings and electro-shock and people knew and saw he was reduced to skin and bones.

Unless you dismiss him and especially this story as a total fraud so far as one can tell Yun does earn his popular name of “Heavenly Man” because beyond his own bodily survival in so many situations of danger it looks suspiciously as though his fast was if not the trigger, then one of the major triggers to what has become the virtual spiritual explosion of Christianity within China. This is something that followed soon upon his fast seriously accelerating after 1989 when the faith moved beyond peasant circles to more middle class and intelligentsia ones.

I have yet to read his book but according to former Time magazine journalist, David Aikman, in The Beijing Factor (2002,2005), about the rise of Christianity in modern China, the situation of the rapidly growing movement he analyses is complex. There is both severity and indulgence in different regions for different reasons as the government essentially tries to limit and contain, or if possible canalize to national benefit, the trends it sees this religion, - which is probably now the main religious future of China - as encouraging.

HEAVENLY MAN CHARACTER - BEYOND NORMAL ASSESSMENT?

It is hard to encompass and assess a figure like Yun who in some respects could be seen as an Asian St Francis of Assisi - certainly his character and experiences are more impressive than seriously flawed modern saints like Mother Teresa (see Sept archive). At the same time the Heavenly Man’s honestly recounted human side surprises. One wonders if even the average believer with far less experience of the divine than Yun would quite, as he frankly admits, have ignored and disobeyed the divine voice as he did over the issue that brought on such fiascos in Myanmar. It seems that Yun can be a bit exasperating by virtue of stubbornness or insensitivity (as his own very devout wife virtually attests) and in the style he himself accuses some of the best Chinese Christian leaders of being. Yun’s wife, Deling, mentions being troubled by the reckless generosity which has thought nothing of giving to strangers what to herself were treasured mementoes or what could have contributed to make a home for her and her children (who have of course greatly suffered and whose story in some respects justifies St Paul’s preference for the celibacy of evangelists). Women often have it rough from male saints!

I don’t doubt too that Yun has caused unnecessary guilt and anguish to quite a few women on subjects like abortion - which many women are forced into in China by government policy or resort to after falling victim to what seem like the periodic outbreaks of rape and violence in rural areas - which Yun calls “a great sin” and “not even an option”. He sought to avoid it for some distressed women by arranging for dirt poor families to raise infants they could not really manage as again Yun’s wife more realistically attests. Without approving all abortion or policies of the Chinese government in relation to it, such absolutist ethical positions are controversial and as I indicate in Sense and Nonsense in Right to Life (June archive) the Bible Yun knows largely by heart seems anything but a good and clear support for any unqualified right-to-life claims (these owe more to philosophy and tradition than scripture). And that’s without considering the frequency of stillbirths and miscarriages (as God’s will?) before the days of modern medicine!

But then I don’t quite appreciate Yun’s use and understanding of some biblical texts. In the case of such persons it’s perhaps a matter of just what works and at a rather visionary plane. And Yun has heavenly man saintly characteristics. He attests and it must surely be an achievement to think:

God is my witness that through all the tortures and beatings I’ve received I have never hated my persecutors. Never. I saw them as instruments of God’s blessing and his chosen vessels to purify me and make me more like Jesus.

Heroically admirable though this is, even here one has a few questions because this looks like conflating a possible result (that God can use evil for good) with divine intentions and so to arrive at the kind of Buddhist position that teaches your enemies are your greatest friends. Christianity never teaches that belief and is more nuanced about both opposition and forgiveness. Even Jesus who forgave those who crucified him called some of his enemies “vipers”. Surely Yun must believe at least some of his torturers were simply evil, a sort of devil’s agents who must be called to justice. If not, then the martyrs under the altar in Revelation who call on God to be avenged (Rev 6:10) would be wrong and Jesus should never have told the apostles they can pronounce or refuse to pronounce forgiveness for some evils. So there’s forgiveness and forgiveness in Christianity and criminals must be called to justice, a justice Christians don’t get enough of in China.

But that’s to be theological and cerebral about this whole subject and if Yun’s super saintliness releases spiritual energies in China and he has healing powers he has directed upon people including in some cases his enemies one should not be too easily critical. There’s room in the world for more saints and miracles and perhaps Yun is in himself more a miracle than even his certified one of the Henan jail.

FROM HEAVENLY MAN TO APOCALYPSE MAN

Presently Yun is travelling the West where he is a prophetic gadfly to the churches –he is understandably enough a critic of America’s “prosperity gospel” . He is also behind the peculiar and ambitious Back to Jerusalem movement which is training believers in China and Asia to evangelize back towards Israel along the old Silk Road and other regions west minimally reached by Christianity. Christians of the Sinim Fellowship which have been the original backbone of this movement believe, not without all reason, that the biblical Sinim or Syene, whose people from “far away” will in latter days come to Israel according to Isaiah 49:12, is China. (Sinim would be ancient Hebrew’s only possible rendition of Chinim and China is named from the Chin of the Chin dynasty). Yun believes it is a Chinese destiny to reach out to the Asian nations between China and Israel before the apocalypse he anticipates.

This of course in itself belongs to the radicalism and protest position Yun has always represented within his native land. The Three –Self Patriotic Church movement which the House Church movement has always distanced itself from and formed itself in reaction to due to the high levels of political control Three Self tolerates, has not until quite recently even been permitted by the Chinese government to mention Second Advent as any belief within Christianity. The Book of Revelation, it seems, remains one of China’s more censored works just as Yun remains one of its more censored, if celebrated personalities.