The Gospel in the Stars

The Suffering Saviour.

How clearly and fully all this corresponds to the great conflict of Christ, and His dear bought victory in achieving our redemption, any one can easily trace. The text exhibits Him as victor in just such a conflict. Though it refers to the success of God’s people in general, and their security under the shadow of the Almighty, the New Testament applies the passage to Christ, who is always the kernel of everything pertaining to the powers and triumphs of His people. What they get, they get in and through His going before them in the matter. He is to His Church what the head is to the body—the chief of the whole thing, without which all the rest is powerless and nothing. Therefore we must understand the declaration as including Him and as referring pre-eminently to Him. It accordingly represents Him as in conflict with serpents, scorpions, asps, dragons, and all deadly and venomous things, just as in this sign and its Decans.

In the Egyptian Zodiac this sign is represented by a monster serpent, Typhon, or Python, the hundred-headed son of a malignant, envious, and intractable shrew, the father of the many-headed dog of hell, of the Lernaean Hydra, and of the three-headed, fire- breathing Chimaera. In the Hebrew Zodiac this sign was counted to Dan; and Dan is described as “a serpent by the way, and an adder in the path.” Scorpio certainly ranks with the Serpent, and stands in close affinity with the Dragon.

The Serpent’s seed is everywhere and always the enemy of the woman’s Seed; and the conflict is above all between Christ and the Devil, until all evil is finally subdued and crushed. The great office of the divine Son of the woman, and his experience in it, were sketched from the beginning, as the bruising of the Serpent’s head and the bruising of His heel. No sooner did Christ come into the world than the Dragon sought to devour Him through Herod’s executioners. No sooner had He come up from the waters of baptism, attested from the open heavens as the Messiah, the Son of God, than the Devil made attack upon Him. And as He came to the final act of discharging the debt of a condemned world, the most terrible of all the assaults of the powers of darkness had to be encountered.

We know something of the wrestling and agony which our Saviour suffered in the Garden of Gethsemane. We know how sorrowful was His soul, as though His immortal being were about to be broken up. We know how He was inwardly wrung with anguish until every pore issued sweat of blood, clotting on His body and falling in great drops to the ground. It was “the hour of the powers of darkness,” as He himself explained. It was an experience of agony the like of which never had been, and never could be again. It was the sting and poison of the great Scorpion struck into the Son of God, making all His glorious nature vibrate as if in dissolution. It was the prophetic sign of the Zodiac fulfilled in the Seed of the virgin.

The Serpent.

A further confirmation that we are on the right track in thus interpreting this sign is the fact that the first Decan, or illustrative sidepiece, presents us with a picture of the Serpent itself in all its giant proportions.

It was the particular admonition to the Church in Philadelphia: “Hold fast that thou hast, that no one take thy crown.” We have likewise seen in the preceding sign that there was held forth a celestial crown for Him who was to suffer on the cross. It was for the joy thus set before Him that the Apostle says He “endured the cross, despising the shame.” On the other hand, mythology represents Python as aiming to acquire the sovereignty of gods and men, and only prevented from gaining it by the struggle which ensued between him and the greatest of the Olympian gods. That myth was simply the story of this constellation, for here the Serpent is stretching after the celestial Crown, has almost reached it, and is only kept from taking it by being held fast by a manly figure grasping him firmly with both hands.

This serpent in the Decan is, of course, to be construed with the Scorpion in the sign, as the one is expository of the other; just as Spica in Virgo is to be construed with the Infant in Coma. The conflict in both cases is the same, only the images are changed to give a somewhat further impression of it. In the first instance it is the Evil One attacking and inflicting the intensest of anguish; in the other, it is a fierce contest for the Crown.

I will not here discuss the question whether it was a literal serpent that tempted Eve. I suppose some earthly serpentine form in the case, but whether it had wings or organs of speech matters not to the integrity of the record or of the ideas meant to be conveyed. The simple narrative, as it strikes the common mind, is as clear and satisfactory as any learned expositions can make it. The physical creature was not the real enactor of the temptation, but was the image associated with a dark and subtle intelligence operating in that form to deceive and ruin our first parents. And from that, for ever afterward, the figure of a serpent became the universal symbol and representative of that Evil Spirit, hence called the Dragon, that old Serpent, the Devil, and Satan, who is the arch-enemy of all good, the opponent of God and the deceiver of men. And it is as the symbol of this evil power that these serpentine figures appear in the constellations.

The Bible everywhere assures us of the existence of a personal Devil and Destroyer, just as it everywhere describes a personal God and Redeemer. It tells us plainly whence he came, what he is, what power he wields, and what is to be his fate, just as it tells whence Christ is, who He is, for what purpose He came into the world, and what is to be the result of His marvellous and complex administrations.

The doctrine of a Saviour necessarily implies the doctrine of a destroyer. The one is the counterpart of the other, and belief in both is fundamental to the right explanation of things, as well as to our proper safety. Men may doubt and question, and treat the idea of a personal Devil as a foolish myth, but their language nevertheless bewrayeth the unfittingness of their skepticism. The doctrine is in the oldest, worthiest, and divinest records ever made for human enlightenment, and in the common belief of all nations and peoples from the beginning of the world. And here we have it pictured and repeated at every turn of the starry configurations, precisely as we find it presented in the sacred Scriptures. Nor can we be on the safe side without honestly receiving and believing it. People may make a jest of it if they will, but they will find out some day that this story of the Serpent is a terrible reality.

Ophiuchus.

Any attentive reader of the Scriptures will observe how constantly the Redeemer of the world is represented in the attitude and character of a Physician, a Healer, a Mollifier of wounds, a Deliverer from the power of disease and death. Before He was born the prophets fore-announced Him as “the Sun of Righteousness” who should “arise with healing in His wings”—as He “with whose stripes we are healed”—as He who “healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds”—as He who saith, “O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction.” So the record of Him in the New Testament is that He “went about all Galilee, preaching the Gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people,” and giving every demonstration of power to make good His word, that if any one would receive His teachings and believe on Him that sent Him, the same should never see death, and be raised to life eternal at the last day. His great complaint against men ever was, and is, that they come not unto Him that they might have life. And this again is accurately and most strikingly presented in the second Decan of Scorpio and the myths connected with it.

We have here the figure of a mighty man wrestling until he is bald with a gigantic serpent, grasping the same with both hands, disabling the monster by his superior power, and effectually holding him fast so that he cannot get the crown. With one foot lifted from the scorpion’s tail as stung and hurt, he is in the act of crushing that scorpion’s head with the other. He thus appears as the one who hath power over the Serpent and over death, holding, disabling, and destroying them, though himself wounded in His conflict with them. Such is also the representation of Krishna in two sculptured figures in one of the oldest existing pagodas of Hindostan.

In one of the old Egyptian spheres the picture is that of a man enthroned, wearing the head of an eagle or a hawk, the enemy and slayer of the serpent, and assigned a Coptic name which means the chief who cometh. But the more common figure is that which appears on our modern atlases, whom the Greeks in their own language called Ophiuchus, the Serpent-holder, otherwise, from two Arabic words signifying the same thing, Cheleb Afei or Aesculapius, who figures so illustriously in the mythologies and worships of Greece and Rome.

The Great Physician.

This Aesculapius was held to be one of the worthiest of the gods. It was to him that the great Socrates in his last hours sacrificed a cock. His temples were everywhere, and everywhere frequented and honored. But, though regarded as a god, the son of Apollo, or the Sun, Homer applies epithets to him never applied to a god, and the greatest of his achievements are mostly ascribed to him in the sphere and activities of a man. He therefore comes to view as both god and man, after the same style as the Seed of the woman in the Scriptures. He is assigned seven children,...