Cultish - Navigating the World of Astrology, Pt. 1

Tonight, on this edition of John Ankerberg, is astrology a true or false practice?

This is an important question, since 40 million Americans believe in some form of astrology, and over 1 billion people in the world look to astrology for help in guiding their lives.

Recently it was learned that astrology has influenced even the highest levels of our national government, the

White House. And as you will hear, also influences our industry, the sciences, education, the church, and the home.

All right, welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to Cultish, entering the kingdom of the cults.

My name is Jeremiah Roberts, I'm one of the co -hosts here. I'm here as always with Andrew, super sleuth

Andrew, the super sleuth of the show. How are you doing, man? I'm ecstatic, man. We got one of our favorite guests on, it's

Marsha Montenegro. And, I mean, how can you not be excited? We went over the Enneagram last time with her, and it was an extreme detail, but now we have her back.

Yes. Yeah, it's good to have you back. Marsha, how are you? Oh, I'm doing fine. Thank you guys so much for having me back, and for saying

I'm one of your favorite guests. That's really quite an honor, so I'm really happy to be here again.

Excellent. And so in many ways, we're excited to have you on, because last time, it was the end of last year, and we had an in -depth conversation about the

Enneagram, and that rattled the cages a little bit, and the internet, and them, as Jeff would say, them internets.

And so, but it was really cool, you know, we had people that listened in and looked at the facts of what we presented there, and there were people even who were teachers of the

Enneagram in churches. And they realized that they just, they repented of it, and they realized this is something

I cannot do if I'm a Christian. And so if you're wondering what that's all about, if you're new to the podcast, go to one of our earlier episodes,

Decoding the Enneagram, and check that out. So Marsha, it's always a pleasure to have you on, and in many ways, because astrology, that's your forefront, that's your area of expertise, and even a lot more than you'd say the

Enneagram, in many ways, what we want to do is we want to give you unprecedented permission to just show this for what it is, and in many ways, we want to release the

Kraken. So on that note, we got to play this little clip here. Release the

Kraken. Yes, that's our nickname for you, Marsha Montenegro, you're the

Kraken. Yes, so we're here to talk about astrology. We want to release the

Kraken on everything regarding that, because this is honestly one of those things that the

New Age is so inundated with our society on every aspect, whether it's physical fitness, whether it's whole foods, both either the actual facility, the actual store, or even really just marriage, relationships, every aspect, it's all over the place.

So in many ways, unexpectedly, the aspects of astrology will sneak in there, and in many ways, the clip that we play at the beginning of the show, that was from the

John Ankerberg show, kind of talking about during his time, during the 80s, where even Ronald Reagan, the

President Ronald Reagan, he had an astrologer. His wife, yeah. Yeah, his wife had an astrologer.

And yeah, so a lot of big fascination back then, and even more so now, given where we are.

So Marsha, if you could tell everyone just a little about your story, how you got into astrology, because while this really was your area of expertise, and you even went through a certification that you can talk about, that really, people had to go through where you were living at the time, that you kind of had a journey that led you to getting interest into astrology.

Can you share that with the audience, just so people can kind of know about your experience and kind of your, what makes you an expertise on the subject at hand of astrology that we're going to discuss?

Yeah, sure. I had an interest in astrology in high school, and I just,

I don't know why, I can't remember exactly when it started, but I know I had a very strong interest in it.

I read the horoscope columns in the paper by Jean Dixon, who was very popular at the time, although she was a psychic and not an astrologer, and I continued to have that interest in college, and people would ask me about zodiac signs.

I didn't know a whole lot, but I knew a little bit more than other people. And so after college,

I had already been interested in the supernatural and Eastern religions.

Also, well, I got interested in Eastern religions in college. I had been interested in the supernatural a little bit in high school, but my interest in those two areas continued after college, and I was seeking things.

I was interested in contact with the dead. I was reading books. I went to psychics.

I went to an astrologer, and then I decided that I wanted to learn something that I could use, you know, because at this point,

I was like a student who was reading and listening to other people, and I wanted to be able to learn something that I could actually do on my own.

So that was sort of my motivation. And astrology is what really had fascinated me and was the only thing that I wanted to actually learn, you know, really take the time to understand, even though I honestly didn't really know that much about what was involved.

So I did start taking some astrology classes, and they were offered at this place in Atlanta.

And when I realized what I realized at the beginning, it was kind of a rude awakening that at first it's all math.

You have to learn all these formulas to calculate the chart, and that was really, really scary because I'm terrible at math.

So initially, I thought, oh, no, I don't know if I can do this. You know, I was really kind of afraid, and I thought maybe this is a big mistake.

You know, I don't want to do any math. But you have to. So I just kind of, you know, forced myself to stick with it, and I learned it.

And then you get into the interpretation. And I was, you know, just learning in the class.

And in Atlanta, which is where I was living at the time, that's where I went after college, they had a very unusual setup.

And the setup was that in order to practice legally in the city limits, you had to have a business license.

But in order to qualify to purchase the business license, you had to show that you had passed an exam that proved you knew astrology.

And the reason they had this like this is because years before, astrology, practicing astrology was illegal in the city limits.

And this is true in a lot of cities. It's usually classified under fortune -telling, and a lot of cities have laws or ordinances on the books that fortune -telling is illegal.

They're not always enforced, but they're on the books. And so the astrologers in Atlanta, one in particular, wanted to change this and went to one of the city council people and said, you know, look, there are serious people who do astrology.

We're not fortune -tellers. We're not like con artists. We really know our stuff.

And what we should do is just make sure people who say they're astrologers really know astrology.

And so what they decided to do was make it so that you would have a business license, but you'd have to qualify.

And the way you qualified was you took the test given by the American Federation of Astrologers, which is a national test given in different cities at different times of the year.

And that's very hard to do because you often have to travel to another city if they're not going to come to your city.

And so the Atlanta astrologers and I guess the city council decided they could set up their own board that would do the exams, you know, and certify people so people wouldn't have to do the

American Federation of Astrologers exam. So that's what they did. So basically they set up an exam and you would sign up for it and you would take it, you would go to City Hall.

I went to City Hall and I took the test in City Hall. And then the exams are mailed to the board of astrology examiners who grade the exam.

And then they tell the city council who passed and who didn't. And then the city, not the city council, but the city officials.

And then the city sends letters to the people who took the exam. So it's this very formal process that, you know, you have to go through if you want to be qualified to purchase the license, which

I wanted to do. I wanted to, you know, I wanted to have the license and I wanted to show that I really could pass the test.

The test was seven hours long. Wow. Yeah. Basically it was all day, you know, and it was an hour for lunch.

And at lunch, everyone had to go together to the same place for lunch. And we all had to eat together because you couldn't have, you know, you couldn't have it where someone could go off somewhere and get an answer from somebody or something like that, you know, call somebody up.

So they had it, it was very strict. So I remember us all walking over, you know, to this cafeteria to have lunch there near City Hall.

There was a cafeteria for the state workers and the city workers. And then, you know, we all walked back, you know, after lunch.

And everybody's in the room, you know, and there's a monitor. There's one of the people from the astrology board is there in the room.

The first part of the exam is all mathematical. You're given a set of, you're given a data, birth data.

So it could be, let's just say it's May 21st, 1969, you know, whatever,

Chicago, Illinois. So you're given that data and you have to know the math to take that data and compute the chart.

You couldn't use a calculator. We weren't even allowed to have calculators. So you had to do all of the, you had to know the formulas and you had to do them by hand.

It's kind of time -consuming. And you have to interpolate the cusp of the houses, which is this mathematical procedure.

What you're doing is you're taking the time and you do have two books there.

There's a book that shows you the position of the planets at either midnight or noon,

Greenwich time, and all astrologers have to use that. And then there's a book called The Table of Houses, which is how you calculate the 12 houses that are in the chart.

The chart is a circle and it's divided into 12 parts. So all of that's calculated based on the time and date of birth.

So you have to figure out the local time because the standard time zones that we have are not exact times.

You can say, okay, I was born at 3 .30 a .m. in Jacksonville, Florida, and somebody else in the eastern time zone, maybe 100 miles west, was maybe born at 3 .30

a .m. But actually, because they're 100 miles west of that, it's not going to be exactly the same because the local time is different.

The local time is the exact time. Of course, we don't use that because it would be very awkward. Everybody would be on different times.

And people think the time zones are bad. Just try living by local time. So you have to figure out the exact time and then you do the chart based on that.

So it's all this mathematical stuff. And that was the first part of the exam and that really took, for me, it took a good half day.

It took me half the time to do that. The second part, when you're finished that, they give you a chart.

It's a real chart of a real person. They don't tell you who it is and you have to take that chart and you write out an interpretation of it as though you were talking to the person.

So it's a test to see, first of all, your skill in interpreting the chart and then your skill in talking to somebody about it.

So, you know, they're testing that too. So that you have some kind of conscience or some kind of sensitivity to the person you're talking to and you wouldn't say something like really startling or horrible to them.

So that was it. And, I mean, I used every minute of those seven hours. I needed every minute.

I think I was there just finishing when there was like one minute left or something.

And most people were. There was only a handful of us. There was only a handful of us taking it.

And then the tests are gathered up by the astrologer who sends them or takes them to the office in the city council.

And let's see. I can't remember exactly how. No, no. I guess they take the test. Oh, I forgot to tell you.

You're assigned a number. When you sign up for the test, the city assigns a number to you. And when you do the test, you don't put your name on the test.

You put your number. So that way, the astrologers grading the exam don't know who the people are.

Gotcha. So they're not biased. So, you know, you could be number 37 or whatever.

And they don't know, you know, because in most cases, the astrologers are going to know some of the people taking the test.

So in order to keep that bias away, they do it by number. And then the astrologers, you know, meet.

I was on the astrology board later. I was on it for four years and I was chairperson for the last three of those four years.

And we would meet and we would, you know, go over the tests. I can't remember if we divided them up and went over it or if we got together.

I can't remember now, but then we would discuss it. And, you know, if anybody was clearly failing, we would have to fail them.

If it was borderline, we would discuss it, et cetera. And then we would tell the city, you know, number 39 and 37 failed and number 42 and 28 and 79 or whatever, they all passed.

And then the city sends letters out to those people because they know the numbers. They know the names for the numbers.

Yeah. So in summary, then you did, there's a lot of work you had to put in this.

And I'm sure at the time when you found out that you passed is probably a little bit of a breath of relief at the time.

It's almost anytime you have to take some sort of extravagant test. You know, I think about all the time when I was in high school or college, you know, when you have to cram last minute.

I kind of feel like that sometimes with episodes, just this last minute cram and like, ah, I hope that episode's good, you know.

But yeah, so in many ways, so would you sum up just really quickly that the Cliff Notes Wikipedia summary or in this case, your summer of astrology is that it's really, it's based, they base it off of when you're born.

It's when you're born, where the universe is at, how the universe is aligned and what the stars and planets basically say about you and your identity.

That's, that's what it is in summary. There's a lot of different aspects depending on the culture and everything else. Would that be an accurate assessment?

Very Cliff Notes version? I would say, yes. I would say it's the, it's the position of the sun, moon, and planets based on the time and place of birth.

Okay. And so that's how I, that's a simple, a basic definition. And I just want to say that because sometimes people are very confused because they get astronomy and astrology mixed up.

Right. So I want to say that it's astrology and astronomy are not the same thing. And astronomy is a scientific study of, of space and the heavenly bodies.

So they're looking at physical data. You know, they're looking at physical data. Astrology looks at some of that physical data but also gives, gives a meaning to it.

Right. Yes. And you know, it's very, it's completely different and sometimes people

I don't know, I guess because the words are similar, they get them mixed up. And also in ancient times they were the same thing.

Yeah. That's what I was, I was thinking in the terms of the test itself to legitimize the practice. I mean, we can see mathematics is brought into it that you need to go to city hall.

I find that very interesting, right? Like there's a, a pseudoscience in the sense of bringing meaning in presuppositions to mathematics in the form of measuring stars and data from where you're born talking about how a person's going to live.

But it's legitimatized trying to make legal United States system not by pointing to the ulterior motives of astrology but by trying to say that it's an actual science.

In a sense. astrologers would probably say that. Now, the city in allowing this to happen of course was going to benefit because people would have to purchase a business license every year.

Ah, yes. And the business license at that time was $100 a year. Okay. It's a lot of money and for a lot of people like me.

And so, um, I think that, I don't know because I wasn't there when all this was decided but my guess is that the city saw this as an advantage and that was one reason that they, and they also thought, okay, yeah, this is one way we can also find people who say they're doing astrology and they haven't, they don't have the license we can find them.

Right. You know, and so they would have a reason to go after people who had not taken the test and purchased the license.

So that way they could more or less regulate it in the city. By doing this it doesn't mean that the city was saying astrology was legitimate.

Okay. And this is an important point because there's a lot of people who will say they are certified such and such,

I'm a certified, um, you know, um, massage therapist or I'm a certified, um,

I don't know, I can't think of different things. Sound therapist, hypnotherapist, yeah. you could even be a certified sound therapist, yeah.

And it, all it means usually is that you have been certified by people in that field who have tested you according to the standards of that field.

Maybe it's run by a bureaucratic process like, like what I just described but that doesn't mean that the bureaucracy behind it is saying it's legitimate.

They're just saying yes, this person passed an exam that was given by people in that field to test the knowledge and according to the people in that particular field this person has the knowledge.

Right. And that's all it's saying. So being certified in something doesn't make the field you're certified in legitimate.

I think it's good for the listeners to know that because I feel like there could be a level of undue influence and trust when someone goes to someone who's an astrologer they can say well

I've got my certification in astrology they may think that they're actually doing something that's legitimate but we also have here too a clip we want to play from Walter Martin and this is him defining astrology.

Yeah, so this is a good clip because what we want to do after this is that we kind of because you mentioned about the differentiation between astrology and astronomy but that's part and parcel to the history and origins of astrology and so I want to play this clip from Walter Martin I definitely want to delve into that because within the history from the history of astrology come a lot of the terminology that we want to get into and one of the things that Walter Martin was fantastic with doing during his ministry is that he would always define terms so a lot of the words you hear that we'll mention you've probably have heard them either in movies just in every movies music different like I said all the different aspects of health food nutrition you probably have heard a lot of these personal development the personal development industry

Tony Robbins like material It's all over the place It's everywhere and so what we're going to do is we're going to play this clip from Walter Martin and then we're going to jump into Yes We're going to release the historical we're going to release the kraken right after this

Yes Here we go Here's Uncle Wally I would have to say that my reservations about astrology are based upon its origins its association with polytheism and the fact that what you're really getting is an analysis of the characteristics of the gods when they are discussing the various signs of the zodiac

This can easily be demonstrated it has been for a number of years Actually the Oxford English Dictionary gives an excellent definition of this

It says that astrology is the art of judging the occult influences of the stars upon human affairs and this is where astrology has always been coming from as far as the

Christian church is concerned and Judaism is concerned There's nothing to be said good about astrology in the

Old Testament that's connected with polytheism and paganism and I think if we're going to deal with it honestly from a

Judeo -Christian perspective and this is a country which espouses that perspective the United States then

I think it'd be a good idea for Western civilization to take a good look at the origin of it and not be misled by the fact that scientific information and other things are brought in in an attempt to establish it

Biblically speaking it's not compatible with Christianity Alright so and again that's very relevant today

I don't know how much the United States would identify too much as a Christian nation as when Walter Martin was around that has definitely changed a little bit but it still is incredibly relevant because the more secularized a culture becomes the vacuum for things like astrology and other practices become very relevant so going to the historical origins you know we have with us if you guys are watching this behind my giant vat of water this is a book called the

Kingdom of the Occult by Doctor it's an accumulation of his teachings that Jill his daughter

Jill Martin helped put together and in chapter 8 his section of astrology he goes into the origins and there's what

I'm just I just want to give the floor to you because in many ways the history of astrology it's one thing

Biblically but it's been carried out differently throughout different cultures so he mentions there's areas in which astrology grew in Mesopotamia Europe Africa India and China but can you just share with us just a little bit about what you know about the historical origins of astrology where it came from and also how it relates to the different cultures and how they carried out astrology yes

I can tell you some of that is that the book you said that's the kingdom of the occult yes by Dr.

Walter Martin yeah that that his daughter Jill Rishi put together yeah at the end of that chapter in astrology is my testimony yes yeah

I read that the other day yeah I was thinking at least in the original edition of that yeah because I have read over that chapter yes now the origin of it exactly how it started nobody really knows because when you go back into those ancient times they didn't really they either didn't keep a record of everything they were doing or we don't have the records so we don't really know exactly how it came about but the way it was practiced in the ancient world was different it was it was done only for rulers you know rulers and kings and it was done mainly to give advice to the king about you know when his enemies might attack or maybe a good time for him to make peace with another you know ruler or something like that so it wasn't done on this individual kind of basis the way we see it today and it was just done for rulers you know we see that in the book of Daniel the king wanted his wise men which included the astrologers to interpret his dream so of course wise men did more than just one thing so they interpreted dreams they knew astrology you know and they probably did other things as well and so he was the king and so he had these people so regular ordinary citizens couldn't go to an astrologer and they didn't look at the individual person like that we do today so that was how it was in the ancient world and it's almost more like looking at the position of planets as omens and of course they didn't know those were planets because the concept of planet didn't exist then so they just saw these heavenly bodies and noticed they moved faster than the stars because if you compare the way you know

Venus and Mars move to the stars like real stars way up there they're moving like 10 times faster you know like the star doesn't move all that much but here's this planet

Mars goes around the earth every two years you know and Venus goes around faster and Mercury's even faster so and then as you go outward of course they're slower and they could only see up through to Saturn they did not know about Neptune Uranus or Pluto at that time so Saturn was the limit and actually that's what

Saturn stands for in astrology it stands for limitations and structure and it's probably because it was for a long time the outermost planet until Uranus was discovered in the 18th century so you know until that time they didn't know about those three outer planets and and so it was used that way until it got to Greece and it got into Greece in the later part of Greece when

Greece was beginning to sort of disintegrate and being influenced by other cultures including the

Arabic culture and what I read is that astrology came into Greece from the

Arabs and they started adopting astrology and it was the

Greeks who first used it for individuals and this was just done by the wealthier families who could afford someone to pay someone who knew astrology and they would usually do it for like the birth of a child so they would want to know the destiny of their child and so it was done now how they interpreted it you know it was it was not exactly the same as today but I'm going to explain that okay so but it's there you have the individual and horoscope is from the

Greek that means watcher of the hour so it's comes from the two words which

I don't know I can't remember the Greek words but it's like horos and scopia or something which means watcher so it's looking at the hour of the birth and that's where horoscope comes from and that's so that's when it started becoming individual now meanwhile in in other places like China astrology was complete is a completely different system and I don't know how it got started in China I don't know anything about the history of it but I know astrology in China is like a completely different system they use these different animals each year is tied to a different animal and then different hours are tied

I think to a different animal and that you look you do it completely differently you don't do astrology

Chinese astrology the way you do Western astrology so it's a it's a totally different system the astrology in India is somewhat like the astrology done in the in what

I would say the West which and by West I mean Europe and the United States mainly it's similar to India but India has slightly different ways of interpreting things and calculating a chart isn't exactly the same so there are some differences but they're more like us than China is and then

Native Americans have their own form of astrology that's completely different and has nothing to do with Western astrology so you know

I had a book that was kind of a Native American astrology book that I used to kind of look at I wasn't trying to learn it but I was just curious and yeah it was completely different so there are different systems and you know they're all kind of using nature to get information from and astrology did start just like all the occult practices were connected with the worship of false gods because it's a form of divination right so divination is reading a hidden meaning into something natural that that doesn't have that meaning you know it doesn't have an obvious meaning just like palm reading when you look at your hand you see these lines on your hand but they don't mean anything they're just lines on your hand and if you want them to mean something you have to give them a meaning you have to read a hidden meaning into them so that's divination and also or it can be using a supernatural power to access information so that's what divination is a huge category and covers a lot of different practices but astrology falls under that practice and the reason it's good to know that is because there is no

Hebrew word for astrology gotcha which which which makes sense to like kind of thinking about it biblically

I think like origins in terms of astrology we can think about the pre -flood prior to the flood of Noah right and the world being very wicked at that time

I could see us in a sense of worshipping the creation or maybe even rulers trying to get information through astrologers and then even the post flood world after Noah and his sons and then we have

Nimrod in the Tower of Babel from there I can see how you know people would take some of these practices and go throughout the world after they're scattered and adapt them and adopt them in different ways but so you're saying essentially the origination that we can see historically is that astrology was first used by rulers and then the

Greeks adapted it and I would say Babylon specifically I don't know if it existed at the time of Nimrod or before the flood

I wouldn't speculate as to that because there's no evidence for that I think that a lot of things are ascribed to Nimrod that shouldn't be okay very very little about him in the

Bible I see that's good very little about him and there's too much speculation about Nimrod that goes into all kinds of crazy stuff that I'm always denouncing on my

Facebook page or maybe I'm not always denouncing it but I have to denounce it so I would say what we know of astrology is that it was with the

Babylonians and in fact in Daniel sometimes the term Chaldeans actually means the astrologers so it's like an equivocal word and we know that it was practiced there we know it was and in fact

Isaiah 47 is a judgment on Babylon and part of the judgment if you read that it's not a real long chapter

I think there's only like 15 verses the judgment is denouncing their occult practices and astrology is mentioned towards the end and so I wanted to explain that because when

I said there's no Hebrew word for astrology I figured some people hearing this are going to think but I've read it in the

Bible I've read it in the Old Testament I've read the word astrology and so I want to say that the reason you can put the

English word astrology there even though there's no Hebrew term for it is because the

Hebrew language described the practice of astrology differently they didn't have that word because it's a modern word but they described it differently they described it as dividing up the heavens or doing prognostication by the stars or maybe even bowing down to the stars so they described what astrology was at that time with different words and then when it's translated into English or probably any other language like French German or whatever they'll use the current word for astrology so I think it's important to explain that because that can be confusing you know that could be confusing yeah so it's it's important to know

God does denounce it even though the there's no Hebrew equivalent for the word astrology that's good yeah

Marsha yeah so anyway that's so I haven't gotten through the history yet no no that's good but no

I want to I want to say something real quick that I'm glad that you did bring that up with Nimrod as well because it does it's good to keep us level -headed even in terms of correction because like you said there is a lot of crazy rabbit holes you can go down and that's perfect and I actually have

Isaiah 47 13 through 14 pulled up I already had it pulled up so I just want to read what it says real quick says you are wearied with your many counsels let them stand forth and save you those who divide the heavens who gaze at the stars who at the new moons make known what shall come upon you behold they are like stubble the fire consumes them they cannot deliver themselves from the power of the flame no coal for warming oneself is this no fire to sit before so not even the astrologers in a sense can save you from the wrath of God right what what what translation what version was that that was the

ESV oh okay yeah that was good I like that I like the way they translated that because other other if you read other versions it'll just say astrologers but they said the divide up the heavens there so I thought that was good because that was one of the terms in Hebrew that refers to astrologers so yeah so yeah there that's that's a that's a verse

I often point people to among other things when people want to know where what does

God say about astrology does he say anything in the Bible about it and he does and so that's one of the good passages to know about and so the so astrology was for a long time then it became for rich people in Greece and then it gradually spread and we know it of course we know it got into Europe and was very used quite a bit actually in Europe it was used for medical diagnoses and they used to use astrology to diagnose you medically because they would determine your illness based on your you know your your astrology chart or you know your how you should be treated you know

I don't know the specifics but I know that astrology was used in some ways and of course that's not a legitimate way to use it's not a good way to to decide how to treat somebody but this is before you know this is like in the medieval period when they didn't they didn't have the scientific understanding of germs and illness and how to treat things and of course they didn't have a lot of good medicines you know this is when they like to treat you and things like that so so astrology was very much a part of this kind of non -scientific superstitious worldview yeah and probably you know

I'm not an expert on the history but I think that it was probably accepted by a lot of Christians at the time because it was part of the worldview you know they they considered it to be a valid way to look at things and and so that was along with a lot of other things that were not valid you know but at that time were taken to be valid so it was it was you know astrology's never gone away it's just always been and and then it develops though over time then you have the what they call the age of enlightenment and when you have what's the sciences start to become start to develop and this is when astronomy and astrology split and and and and so astronomy which became started to become have more discovery and data about it and develop as a science you know no longer it no longer fit with astrology because people could see that astrology was not scientific so they didn't you know so it was like there was a split there but of course astrology continued on and it was very fatalistic and then there was a big change in the late 1800s early 20th century with the advent of psychology and psychology was for whatever reason there was astrologers who took some of the ideas of psychology which was a new field and which i guess a lot of people found fascinating and they merged it with astrology so when they started interpreting somebody's birth chart they merged it with astrology they weren't giving it the normal fatalistic interpretations they were adding these psychological dimensions to it and that was really kind of the birth of contemporary astrology the way it's done today because astrology today but being done by most astrologers is almost like a therapy session and so you're there with the astrologer who's telling you something like you know i see from your chart you're attracted to unstable men and you know your marriages may not last or probably don't last or it's very difficult to make them last because you're attracted to these unstable partners etc.

you know or i see this influence from your childhood where your mother was very distant and so there are these psychological factors that get put in and part of that a lot of that comes just from the field of psychology in general but especially from Carl Jung so Jung had a huge influence on modern astrology a lot of astrologers when i was an astrologer a lot of astrologers whose books i read were

Jungian psychotherapists and they were Jungians and they also knew astrology because Jung Carl Jung who i guess i guess most people listening to this are going to know who he is i don't know if you want to say more about him but you know he was a psychologist who had studied with Freud and they they had a conflict and Jung left

Freud and started his own practice and became quite well known and for a while he was you know kind of famous and popular but he had all of these very kind of i think kind of strange ideas about things and he came up with ideas that were actually spiritual more than psychological like the collective unconscious this is and the collective unconscious plays a huge part in modern astrology because the outer planets that i mentioned earlier

Uranus was discovered during the industrial revolution and then

Neptune was discovered in the 1800s around the time film was discovered and developed and then

Pluto was discovered in 1930 which was around the time of nuclear power so each of those planets are connected to those things so Uranus is a planet of invention and revolution and innovation

Neptune is a planet that rules film and imagination and deception and Pluto is a planet that rules death and power secret power hidden power or that kind of thing so they're all connected to the times they were discovered and they were added to the chart and since they move so slowly in a person's chart they aren't looked at as personal planets so much as they are planets of the collective unconscious so they rule entire generations so you might say here's this whole generation they were born with Neptune you know in Aries or whatever this generation was born with Pluto and Libra etc and so you've got this kind of broader aspect to astrology you can look at them personally if they're affecting a personal planet like if your

Sun in your chart is opposite Neptune or something then there's definitely going to be an interpretation of that it's just for you but these planets were tied to the collective unconscious and this all came from Jung so actually a lot of astrologers including myself when

I was one had this kind of Jungian worldview when we were doing charts for people and this included the concept called the shadow side okay this comes from Carl Jung another concept that comes from him that's in the new age is called synchronicity that comes from Carl Jung the

Anima and Animus come from Carl Jung and these are all part of not all astrologers necessarily are using these

Jungian concepts but I can tell you that when I was an astrologer it was very widespread and that a lot of us did you know we didn't consider ourselves

Jungian psychologists unless we actually were one but we just kind of absorbed some of that Jungian worldview and used it in our chart interpretations and so you know

I had a whole book on the planet Saturn and how to interpret just the planet Saturn in the chart written by a

Jungian psychologist yeah and you know that so that kind of that's you know what

I'm trying to do is show you that astrology developed I just want to say this real quick and then because I heard

Walter Martin say on that clip you know it's the occult influence of the stars and planets on people and actually modern astrologers don't really see it that way.

They see astrology as a pattern and you are born at a certain time and place so that such that the planets and the sun and moon will be in a certain position that will reflect your path that's sort of the blueprint for your life.

Yeah that's really intriguing and fascinating and it's always good to hear different vantage points.

One thing I want to bring out because we're going to go into defining terms and because you did mention that it went to it really the modern astrology the emphasis was on psychology and so that was a they mentioned that at least in Walter Martin's book the mention in the 1930s it became that's when horoscopes became popular but then it talked about too how in many ways even became it got continually redefined into the new age movement during the 1970s and there's some clips that we'll play in the second episode that talk about when that became an aspect of astrology but one of the things

I want to bring up before we end maybe spend 10 minutes or so talking about this is you were talking earlier about how astronomy came from astrology and I think what

I wanted to emphasize real quick is that a lot of times people will look at that and say well can the new age be redeemed can the new age can the occult be redeemed because in many ways you had astronomy the foundations of it came from people who ultimately had a biblical worldview and saw god as the creator of all things not looking for some secret esoteric knowledge but in many ways

I've seen some people would look at something like that in order to justify additional practices and that's why a lot of times there'll be a lot of things that are related to the discernment realm sometimes comes in our area of discussion just because you have aspects within evangelicalism people trying to redeem different aspects of the new age but I have seen that argument used in passing in order to justify that can you speak to that real quickly because I think it's very very important yes yes and I and I don't think

I said astronomy came from astrology I said astronomy split I said astronomy and astrology split okay because I'm very careful because I'm very aware of that concept out there because I've had to confront it many times in my ministry

I've had people say well you know chemistry came from alchemy you know and astronomy came from astrology so you know there must be some truth in astrology there must be some truth in alchemy and it's just yeah people discovered some chemical

I guess truths doing alchemy but that doesn't mean they're the same thing they're very different and and the fact that people started seeing the scientific and understanding the scientific side of of the planets and the stars uh it doesn't mean they had to know astrology to do that you know they were just using the raw data right and I would never say that astronomy came from astrology personally

I would never say that so I think there's there's there's a real clear distinction and I think it's wrong when people say well astrology gave birth to astronomy that's not true what gave birth to astronomy was understanding scientific principles or discovering scientific principles and applying them you know looking at the data and actually what that did was show that astrology was false so you know if anything astronomy shed light on the falsehood of of astrology and chemistry shed light on the falsehood of alchemy so you know that to me is a better way to look at it because I'm I'm real familiar with that argument and people will use that to support occult practices or say that there's some kind of truth or something in them we can still look at them and you know discover some kind of truth in them and that's just not true they didn't really you know maybe they used some data that was true but that had to be taken out and separated from the false kind of thinking that was involved there and that had to a distinction had to be made so they're not astronomy doesn't exist because of astrology right gotcha so in other words in passing

Andrew you have something you want to jump in as we wrap up here but in other words it would be that they would split and the reason for the splitting wasn't that they're like oh let me see what we can find in astronomy in astrology to redeem it and Christianize it it was more about no let's look to the word of God let's look at the biblical world view what

God says about the world and the universe and both the physical realm and in relation to the unseen realm and all the different aspects of it and let's look at that not that they're trying to go into this pagan practice to redeem it but in fact it's more of a rejection of that pagan practice by looking at all the different physical elements you know even in chemistry look at all the different table of the elements all those things

God's spoken to existence let's have a framework in which we have an ultimate point of reference to that yeah that makes more sense so what

Andrew what did you have to say before we wrap up kind of what I was thinking piggybacks off exactly what you were saying Jerry it's kind of like they brought it back the split brought it back to the

Genesis 114 God determines the meaning of stars and this is what God says it says and God said let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to distinguish between the day and the night and let them be signs to mark the seasons and days and years so regular astronomy looking at mathematics and looking at the stars totally cool it's something that God gives us to mark certain things not to try to find a meeting meaning in a deterministic nature to how people act and why they act the way they act that's called divination astronomy is more actually in line with Genesis 114 astrology is in line with divination and condemned in Deuteronomy 18 in a sense right good any last things you want to say before we wrap up the first episode here

Marcia no I have a few things that I thought of for the second part um okay if if you want to touch on those because there are things that I have come across in my ministry that are related to astrology that I get asked by by some

Christians yeah they'll be good we'll bring up some of the questions sometimes people will have objections you know any do with that but also what we'll do is we're going to go a little further now that we've laid really a historical foundation of where it came from and also to ultimately what

God says about it we're going to explore that further but also we're going to get into defining terms because now these this is the lingo that you're going to hear as you go about your daily life whether you're in personal whether you look at something in relation to personal development health and wellness all the different things every aspect it's everywhere you can't escape it so we're going to talk about that understand what the terms mean how do we look at that from a biblical worldview and that'll be a lot of fun so Marcia thank you for coming on and having this very eye -opening discussion and I'm super excited to jump into the next episode about that so if you guys enjoyed this episode please share this episode wherever you can tell your friends about it and and yeah we just appreciate you so much for supporting us and for listening to our content every single week and as always this program cannot continue without your support so if you feel led to support the ministry please go to thecultistshow .com