Table of Contents
This recording is Manly P. Hall’s May 1950 lecture on Babylonian star lore, the second of three talks at a San Francisco metaphysical library. Their science of the regular heavens had a bodily side and a soul side, and both became keys to morals that later faiths still carry without knowing it. A working chart with the earth in the middle, he says, was a tool for angles from the observer’s ground, not a denial that the planets circle the sun. Four elements, seven planetary orbits, and the belt of fixed stars become heaven, a middle soul, and an underworld. The human fall is a descent through those orbits, and the way back is a climb through seven gates, the pattern he finds in Hermes, Ishtar, John’s apocalypse, and the whirling dervish. and a birth chart is a person’s chemical formula, which later skies can only modify. Christian clerks once mapped the signs onto scripture, then dropped the key because it explained too much.
Key points
- Hall presents Chaldean star science as a moral and religious key, not as worship of the lights themselves.
- Observing tubes, ziggurats, a ringed Saturn, and the Platonic year are part of the skill he credits to them.
- A geocentric working chart is defended as practical, while Pythagoras is said to have known a sun centered system.
- Four elements, seven planetary orbits, and the zodiac become the three worlds, and the fall and the return are movements through those orbits.
- The same diagram is applied to myth, to the human aura, and to a birth chart understood as chemistry rather than as planets that care about individuals.
- He says later churches inherited the symbolism, briefly mapped it onto the Bible, and then hid the key.
Short quotes
Babylon these peoples profess to have a record and a complete report of every child born among them
Manly P. Hall, The Star Lore of Babylon
Hall passes on the claim that Chaldean astrologers kept birth records across an enormous span of time. Watch at 1:59
Saturn is always shown surrounded by this equatorial ring
Manly P. Hall, The Star Lore of Babylon
A ringed Saturn in their sacred art is his evidence that they had actually seen the planet’s rings. Watch at 6:49
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