The shekinah, which I have used in the past to denote the astronomical phenomena of Venus conjunctions with Mercury, deserves a brief treatment, both historical and contemporaneous. The following is a deeper dive into the idea. (I may add content to this post in the future.)

There are so many bizarre and strange avenues in the grid of this metropolis we call “the occult” that it seems like being able to get anywhere is nearly impossible. That may be part of the fun for the truth-seeker-adventurer, because nothing of value can come to us without the long game, but at some point we deserve to have some kind of confidence in our knowledge.

There are out-and-out frauds in the occult community, and there are also people who have the utmost respect for the truth. And, then, there are many who fall in between those ideals. Many of those are professional solipsists, who think they have figured stuff out through osmosis. Many are intermediate practitioners of various occult practices and have a high level of confidence. And then there are agents.

An agent is a person who isn’t a true occultist but who infiltrates the community to steer and manipulate the minds and attitudes of New-Agey types. These aren’t necessarily CIA or FBI agents, but usually they are tasked by higher echelons (secret societies, for instance) to control sentiments and misdirect. Some of these people are “limited hangout” specialists – people who dole out some factual information, but woven within a narrative that also leads us out into the desert with wild theses.

One such agent, it seems, is the author Christopher Knight. Over the years I’ve purchased some of his books, which are usually co-authored, and dove into them periodically. In 2007, he published a book called “Solomon’s Power Brokers.” Within the pages are, once again, some startling new claims mixed in with the usual vague narratives. But, one such claim caught the eye of my old pal John, and it is basically that the Temple periods of the Holy Land are based on the “shekinah,” which he defines as particular conjunctions of Mercury and Venus that occur near the winter solstice. Here are the pages (8 – 10) that explain this:

There’s quite a bit to unpack there, and we will, but first, compare all of that to the definitions compiled by the Jewish Encyclopedia, none of which mention Venus at all:

More generalized explanations of the shekinah are here, here, here, and here.

So, what’s going on here? Why are the Hebrew scholars making no specific mention of Venus? Has Knight and his co-author discovered something amazing – so amazing that the Hebrew Encyclopedia didn’t know? Or are they just revealing some kind of long-held info from the inner sanctum of Freemasonry? Or, are they just making shit up? The is the problem with agents – it’s always a muddle. But, sometimes life imitates art.

Firstly, Knight comes off as quite the amateur astronomer and astro-mathematician. He is correct, of course, that Venus has a well-known eight-year “return” cycle – If you want to know approximately where Venus will be in eight years from today, simply look up today’s Venus position and you’ll be close. He is also correct that Venus spends half its time as a morning star, and the other half as an evening star, with brief periods of invisibility in between as it moves within the Sun’s inner aura. This cycle of conjunctions with the Sun makes a nice pentagram shape in the zodiac, and thus the pentagram has long been associated with the planet Venus. So, let’s go back to the Venus paragraph:

• “…the background stars are now different…” No, they would not be, if Venus is in the same “point in the sky.” 
• “… astronomically speaking, Venus has moved one fifth of the way through the zodiac.” Well, the conjunction of Venus and the Sun will retrogress about one fifth of the zodiac (~72°, give or take 5°) every ~9 months. I explain this with more detail here, but the graphics are reproduced below:

• This means that there are actually five “morning star” apparitions and five “evening star” apparitions in the eight-year cycle.
• “…every 40 years, Venus completes one full lap of the zodiac…” No! As is shown above, every eight years, the pentagram retrogresses about 2°, which means that it will take about 120 years for the shape to shift about 30°, or one zodiac sign. Given that there are 12 signs, 12 × 120 years does equal 1,440 years. But, after 40 years, the shift moves about one decan, or a span of 10°. (Decans were the sectors of heaven in ancient Egyptian astronomy.)
• “…this movement is accurate to a second or so…” Again, no. It is accurate to maybe 2° of arc, which is 120 seconds of arc.
• “…provided a wonderful clock and calendar for astronomer-priests…” Well, it was one part of the whole heavenly clockwork, and given that Venus is such a magnificent star, it was surely revered.
• “…the pentangle has always held mystical importance for humans from all cultures.” That’s probably a bit of an exaggeration.

Knight’s paragraph on this topic is atrocious. But, he at least is on to something, because he states later:

What we know from my math above is that every 480 years, the Venusian pentangle shifts about 1/3 of the zodiac, which is 12 decans. But, then he claims that the Shekinah is the result of Venus and Mercury “…rising in conjunction — meaning that, viewed from Earth, they overlap and look like a single, extremely bright star.” Again, this is quite untrue, and anyone with some basic astronomy software and 6 hours to kill can prove that this is not factual. There are instances of Mercury and Venus making conjunctions so close together that they may appear to be just one star, but those instances are very rare, and certainly do not have a cycle of 480 years. 

But, I will say that what makes Mercury/Venus conjunctions special is that they tend to last for many days, up to two weeks, depending on where the two planets are in their own cycles. Mercury is very close to the Sun, and from the Earth, it can only achieve an elongation of 28° from the Sun. When it is at the extreme of elongation, it tends to stay there for a bit. With Venus, its elongation can only reach a maximum of 48° from the Sun; Venus spends more than half of its time at or near that extreme.

In other words, for a Mercury/Venus conjunction to happen, Venus has to be 28° or less from the Sun, and then it has to conjoin Mercury while it is also on the same “side” of the Sun. Also, because Mercury’s orbit is so eccentric, and Venus’ varies so much in ecliptic latitude, the chances of these two making such a close conjunction that they “appear as one star” is rare that almost never happens. 

However, they can make conjunctions that are close, an those are much more frequent. And, if we only look at ecliptic longitude, the conjunctions will of course occur more frequently. This is where I want to jump off with some examples, and the first one is, of course, with Israel.

The Netanyahu Government of 2022

I’m not sure if the oaths were taken at precisely this time of day, but the fact is clear that the Knesset scheduled the oaths for the day of a Mercury/Venus shekinah conjunction in the 25th degree of Capricorn, fitting the special circumstance offered by Knight as happening “near the winter solstice”:

And not only that, we can see that the Moon and Jupiter are straggling the vernal point, and rising. Sun and Lunar Nodes are in a trine/sextile. It’s a brilliant elective chart in that sense alone, as the hope is for good feelings among the people. However, it is another warring chart as Mars is conjunct Aldebaran, and also in a sesquisquare (135° aspect) to the shekinah, while the Sun is in a semi-square to Saturn, and Pluto is opposite Black Moon and sextile the ascendant. Warring charts are determined by the situation with Mars, Saturn, and Pluto.

The wildcard here was the Moon/Jupiter conjunction semi-square to Uranus, the planet of unexpected events. Of course, we all know that the Netanyahu/Likud government soon fell afoul of the populous once citizens realized that Likud wanted to take powers away from the Israeli Supreme Court. The move by the Likud Party was definitely one big step toward a fascist dictatorship as a major check and balance was being removed from the system. Bibi’s governing coalition saw mass protests unlike anything in Israel’s past, and that too is Moon/Jupiter energy, but with Uranus, there was strong reaction.

With the WZO chart, we again see an item at the top conjunct the Venus/MC, but this time it is the Black Moon (hidden agenda):

Also, the Swearing-in Neptune is square to WZO Neptune, which easily promotes confusion and strong obsessions. Sun is trine to Sun. As for the shekinah, it is in a sextile to the WZO’s tradition-warping Saturn/Uranus conjunction.

Knight and the Mythic Solomon’s First Temple

The astrology of prime interest here, however, relates back to Knight and Solomon’s Power Brokers. Knight (again on page 9) speaks of a shekinah appearing in the morning at the winter solstice:

A quick look at heavens for the winter solstice of that year shows a Mercury/Venus conjunction that would have been visible (~15° elongated from the Sun), but at sunset, not sunrise:

This particular radix features an in-mundo T-square of Moon/Ascendant, Jupiter/Midheaven, and shekinah/descendant. Certainly a positive arrangement, even by ancient standards. When we match this up with the Netanyahu Regime chart, not only do we find that the shekinahs are sunset-visible, but also that Jupiter has returned to within one degree of the Temple chart, but also that the Moon in conjunction with Jupiter is in a mundo-square to the Temple Moon:

I find these planetary alignments to be nothing short of astonishing. Given the vast collection of obvious elective astrology that has gone into the planning and formation of the modern Israeli state, we can surely speculate that this is no different.

This is also the reason I suspect Christopher Knight to be a limited-hangout agent. His careless (purposely?) astronomy aside, the dots were waiting to be connected some 16 years after his book was published. The inner sanctum, indeed!

War and Charges of Genocide

In October of 2023, 282 days after the commencement of the Netanyahu regime, disaster struck with Operation Al Aqsa Storm.

So, what went wrong, and how could this magical “divine presence” have been so wrong? Or, was this the intended result? I have no idea. My guess is that Jewish feminists would be a bit upset with knowing that the very brutal Likud party was waving the divine feminine around like this, and then going about lurching Israel toward blatant fascism. The resistance to Bibi in the early part of 2023 was almost immediate, loud and hardened, filling the streets night after night – unprecedented for the small nation.

Concurrent with the left-leaning protests, there were plenty of right-wing provocations against Muslims and the peoples of the occupied territories. Days prior to Hamas’ breach, fundamentalist occupying settlers stormed Al Aqsa Mosque, and this gave way to the namesake of the Oct 7 operation. All across the occupied territories, the brutality was at epidemic levels. Consider this report from Human Rights Watch on October 3, 2023, just days before Hamas’ military operation:

As I am completing this blog entry, a renewed round of citizen protests of Netanyahu have taken place. This is a few weeks after the US Senate’s Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer, the first Jewish majority leader in the Senate and the highest-ranking Jewish official in the U.S., called for new elections to oust Bibi once and for all. I have no idea what’s in store, but I will take to my Facebook page to outline the astrological situation.

After all, there have been calls for this war with Hamas to be the pretext for Israel finally, once and for all, simply subsuming all occupied territories, displacing Palestinians, and eliminating any self-governance of Palestinians – a one-state solution. The effort is basically underway in the West Bank, it was well before Al Aqsa Storm, and there is little that the world community is doing to stop it. At this point I have no interest in speculating about what will happen, but my hunch is that it’s basically over for the occupied territories. The shekinah was astrologically elected for this very thing, it seems.

The Third Temple of Solomon isn’t an edifice. It is instead a new technocratic and theocratic kingdom, replete with nuclear weapons and an entrenched fascistic ruling party that has nearly unlimited backing from the USA. Getting rid of Netanyahu will not stop, or probably even slow down, Israel’s ferocious goal of total domination of all of Palestine.

-Ed

• astrology
• Israel
• mundane affairs
• Shekinah
• Solomon's Temple
• Zionism