Anyone raised among the scriptures knows the feeling. You look up at the night sky and see something extraordinary there: order, purpose, perhaps even meaning. Then you are told that looking for meaning in the heavens is forbidden, and curiosity begins to feel like disobedience. Yet in the Book of Enoch a holy angel spends chapter after chapter teaching Enoch the movements of the sun, the moon, and the stars, and earlier in the very same book other angels are condemned for teaching humanity about those same heavens. How can both be true?
For an Essene student the question is not idle. The desert community ordered its whole life by a calendar it believed an angel had revealed, and among the scrolls of its caves were documents that read the stars and the thunder for omens. The fellowship has had to think about this more carefully than most, and has found that the easy answers on both sides are too easy. The question has never been whether the stars mean anything. It is whose voice you are trusting when you look up.
Three Warnings
Begin with what scripture actually says. In Deuteronomy Moses warns Israel: lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be driven to worship them, and serve them. The warning is not against seeing the heavens, or even against recognizing that they have an appointed purpose. It is against taking something God created and treating it as though it were God. That is the first danger: worship.
Jeremiah puts it differently. Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them. The prophet does not say, do not observe the heavens. He says, do not be terrified by what you see there. Imagine a world in which an eclipse could throw a kingdom into panic and a comet could be taken as the announcement of a king's death, a world in which the sky was something to fear rather than something to understand. Jeremiah does not want Israel to learn that fear. That is the second danger: dread.
And Isaiah, foretelling the fall of Babylon, turns on its stargazers: let now the astrologers, the stargazers, the monthly prognosticators, stand up, and save thee. This is a real criticism of the astrologers themselves, and we should not pretend otherwise. But notice the larger charge. Babylon has wearied itself with counselors who claim to know the future, and when judgment comes, all their knowledge cannot deliver it. Babylon has made its interpreters into its security. That is the third danger: misplaced trust.
Worship, dread, and misplaced trust: three ways a human being surrenders to the heavens what belongs to God. All three concern our relationship to the sky, not the existence of knowledge about it. Christian writers from the Middle Ages onward drew the same line in their own words, between natural astrology, which reads the sky for times, seasons, tides, and weather, and judicial astrology, which claims to judge from it a person's character, fortune, and death. A reformer of Geneva wrote a whole treatise against the second. The distinction is not something modern mystics invented to excuse themselves.
The Hard Verse
There is a difficulty, and a student who knows her Bible will already have spotted it. The famous list of forbidden practices in Deuteronomy includes one called the observer of times, a single Hebrew word. Some old interpreters took it to mean one who determines lucky and unlucky times; others, a soothsayer, or one who deceives the eye. The verse does not name the stars, but there are honest traditions of reading that connect it with something very like the choosing of auspicious days by the heavens. We cannot simply wave it away.
Which means we need a better question. If some kinds of reading the heavens were forbidden, why does Genesis itself give the lights the office of signs? And why would Enoch be given such detailed instruction about them? To answer, we must meet an angel.
Uriel
On the fourth day of creation God sets lights in the firmament, and the text says what they are for: let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years. The word rendered seasons means appointed times; it is the same word used for the festivals of Israel. The lights are not decoration on the dark. They have an office. They establish an order of time that a creature can understand.
Keep those words in mind: signs, times, days, years. In the Astronomical Book of Enoch the same vocabulary returns. Enoch writes that he has recounted the signs, the times, the years, and the days that the holy angel Uriel showed him, the angel whom the Lord of glory set over all the lights of heaven. Uriel shows him the gates through which the sun rises and sets through the year, the waxing and waning of the moon, the reckoning of the months. Enoch is not presented as one who invents a system. He is a scribe. He receives what he is shown, writes it down, and hands it on to his son Methuselah.
What Uriel teaches is an ordered year of 364 days, the very calendar the desert community kept, in which every festival fell on the same day of the week every year. The page on The Book of Enoch says why that calendar mattered so much to them. Through the whole account one fact stays at the center: Uriel was appointed to teach it. He acts within an office he was given.
The Watchers' Lessons
Earlier in the book we meet the Watchers, who descend on Mount Hermon, take wives among the daughters of men, and begin to teach. Azazel teaches the making of weapons, the working of metals, and the arts of ornament. Their leader teaches enchantments and the cutting of roots. And then come the celestial lessons. In the best-known English translation, one Watcher teaches astrology, another the constellations, another the signs of the sun, another the course of the moon. The names and some of the details differ among the manuscripts, so we must not lean too hard on any single word. But the point stands: knowledge of the heavens is among the forbidden teachings.
Set that beside what Uriel taught, and the territory overlaps. Both concern the sun, the moon, and the stars. The fellowship sees three differences. The first is the source: Uriel is appointed over the lights, while the Watchers have abandoned their station. The second is the direction: Enoch receives an ordered creation and preserves it for later generations, while the Watchers pour their teaching into a story of humanity growing ever more corrupt. The third is the purpose: Uriel's instruction explains the calendar of creation, while the Watchers' lessons sit beside weapons and enchantments and the misuse of power.
A caution is in order. The Book of Enoch is a collection of ancient writings, not a treatise by one author laying out a careful argument, and it gives us no tidy rule that every reading of the heavens is permitted to those with good intentions. That would be reading into it. What it does give is a steady concern with where knowledge comes from, how it is handed on, and what it does.
In the sixteenth chapter that concern becomes unmistakable. The Watchers, having seen what they have done, ask Enoch to carry a petition for them to heaven, and the petition is refused. Then comes the word of judgment: you have been in heaven, but all the mysteries had not yet been revealed to you, and you knew worthless ones, and these in the hardness of your hearts you made known to the women, and through these mysteries women and men work much evil on earth. The Watchers were not ignorant. They had access to extraordinary knowledge. But their access was partial, and having knowledge did not entitle them to disclose it. There is a difference between receiving something within an appointed order and taking possession of it because you can. The Watchers crossed that line, as the page Asking and Commanding describes.
What the Caves Held
The Book of Jubilees, another of the community's treasured books, adds a sharp little story. A descendant of Noah named Kainan finds an inscription that the ancients had carved on a rock, containing the Watchers' teaching on the omens of the sun, the moon, and the stars. He copies it, and the text says he sinned by it, and he tells Noah nothing. The knowledge had survived in writing, but the fact that it could be read and copied did not make its use righteous. The same book says that Enoch was the first to learn writing, and that he wrote down the signs of heaven in a book so that the sons of men might know the seasons of the years. A fragment from the fourth cave near Qumran preserves a related tradition, with surviving words that speak of Enoch writing it all down so that the righteous should not go astray.
So far the picture is tidy: one tradition of celestial knowledge to keep the righteous from error, another of celestial omens that leads to sin. The caves complicate it, and the fellowship will not hide the complication. One scroll from the same cave sets out a calendar of the zodiac through the months and then gives omens of thunder: if it thunders while the moon is in such a sign, such a thing will befall. That is not the ordinary keeping of a calendar. It is divination. And another, written backward in a jumble of alphabets as if to keep it from casual eyes, describes the bodies of certain men and then the measure of their spirits: in one, six parts in the house of light and three in the pit of darkness, and the sign under which he was born. The community that taught that two spirits contend in every heart kept a document that claimed to measure them at birth.
What are we to make of this? At the least, it tells us that astrological traditions lived within the Judaism of the age, even within the library of its most devout. But notice what the same community also held. The Rule says that every member's rank was set and reviewed every year according to his understanding and the perfection of his way. Whatever proportion of light a man was born with, his standing could change, and was expected to. The pattern at birth was not the sentence.
The Wise Men
There is one more story, and almost every Christian knows it. Each year at Christmas the churches of the world celebrate the coming of the wise men, the magi: three figures in the crib scene, following a star across the heavens to find the child, though Matthew never says there were three. Think about what Matthew is telling us. These men came from the east. The Greek word for them belongs to the learned priests of Persia and Babylon, whose craft included reading the sky. They announce that they have seen a star which they understand to signify the birth of the king of the Jews. They have interpreted a sign in the heavens as news of an event on earth. Whatever we choose to call that, it is remarkably close to what we would recognize as astrological interpretation.
And Matthew does not condemn them. Quite the opposite: they follow the star, find the child, and kneel. The great churches reject astrology as a form of divination, and yet every Christmas they celebrate a gospel in which wise men read a star as a sign of the Messiah's birth.
The fellowship would rather leave a student with questions here than with a verdict. If the lights were made for signs, how do we tell a sign from a forbidden omen? What made the magi's reading different from the practices the prophets condemned? Was it their knowledge, their source, their intention, or where their search finally led them? We notice only this. The star led the magi to a child, and they worshipped. It did not lead them to a forecast. A reading of the heavens that ends on its knees before God is moving in the opposite direction from the one Moses feared.
A Clock and a Psalm
Where, then, does the fellowship stand? We read the heavens as the Essenes did: as a clock and as a psalm. We keep time by them, facing the sunrise at the Morning Watch and marking the turning of the year. And we let them speak as the nineteenth psalm says they speak: the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth his handywork; there is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. We do not cast horoscopes, and we do not teach astrology.
Some of our students do read the sky of their birth, and they tell us they read it not as a forecast but as a description: a map of how they tend to meet the world, where strength comes easily and where it takes constant effort, offered not as a destiny but as the place a path begins. Our counsel to them is simple. A mirror may help a person see. It must never be allowed to tell him who he has to be. Once a pattern becomes visible, you are no longer bound to repeat it without knowing, and that is the whole of its worth; it is the same worth the evening examination offers without any chart at all. If a reading of the stars makes a student more responsible for her own life, it is moving toward Uriel. If it makes her less, it is moving toward the Watchers.
When does interpreting a sign become surrendering one's authority to it? That is where discernment begins. The Lection puts it more briefly: the stars keep time for you; they do not keep you.