The Astrotheology of Moses and Aaron: Hydrolatry, the Dog Star, and the Bible's Priesthood Lineage
What if everyone knew that religion was never about real people, but symbolized natural forces? The geopolitical ramifications of scriptural literalism have never been more evident, as our analysis of Aaron Exodus, and the Golden Calf demonstrates.
In this episode of Inner Whirled, we take another swing at exposing the symbolic framework behind mythology that masquerades as history. Drawing on the work of Rev. Robert Taylor and our own research, we demonstrate how figures like Moses and Jesus represent natural, celestial, and hydrological forces, especially the relationship between the sun and water. From the "blood of the river" to modern baptism, we show how greased up priests and their anointing oils have misconstrued metaphors for millennia, turning real world wisdom into superstitious belief systems. In Part 2 we enter the rarely explored territory of the uncomfortable connection between the golden calf, money, kingship, and a system of symbols that still plasters power structures today. Is Moses linguistically connected to the calf? Where does Taurus show up in coinage, cathedrals, and scripture? And the biggest question: was history itself constructed from this same symbolic system in the relatively recent past?
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In this episode
Core themes
The Blood of the River
Dylan Saccoccio frames the episode around Reverend Robert Taylor, jailed for blasphemy, who argued that Western literalism mistook Eastern figures of speech for history, so that wine called the blood of the grape and the Nile called the blood of the river both hardened into doctrine. Because the river was Egypt's god, those washed in it were spoken of as washed in blood, and the annual inundation became a bloodshedding for the life of the world. Chance Garton adds that the father of ecclesiastical history described the Therapeutae, the priesthood of Alexandria, as already holding the gospels almost word for word before Jesus.
Fire and Water Made One
Both hosts treat sun and water as two faces of a single animating force rather than rival symbols. Chance Garton argues that without water the sun would burn everything up, and without the sun water would sit inert, frozen and unmoving, so one figure can be the Nile and the solar principle at once. Dylan Saccoccio notes the inundation beginning near the summer solstice in the month of Thoth, running blood red with sediment before the river was dammed, and he flags Taylor's claim that the blood of the lamb encodes an inundation under Aries as something they cannot prove.
The Dog Star and Caleb
Following Diodorus Siculus, Dylan Saccoccio traces the Nile's most ancient name to Okianus, also written Ogenos, the perfect river of Hesiod and the stream in which Homer's stars bathe, then reads Taylor's parsing of Osiris as the star and the fire. Sir Drummond is cited for the observation that Sirius rose helically as the flood approached its greatest height, which is why the Indian Bacchus is drawn always accompanied by a dog. Moses wanders with Caleb, literally Hebrew for dog, who stilled the people in Numbers 13:30, and the star's forty days below the horizon shadow the wilderness wandering.
Wolf Skins and Priestly Bloodlines
The dog thread runs straight into priesthood. Kuon, the dog, is offered as a cognate of Cohen, with dog headed cynocephali posted at the equinoxes, and Chance Garton points to the Etruscan father god shown in a wolf helmet whose priests wore wolf skins and wolf belts. Dylan Saccoccio quotes Leonard Cohen telling the Village Voice in 1967 that he had a messianic childhood, told he descended from Aaron the high priest. Taylor's text makes Aaron the first of priests, the saint of the Lord in the 106th Psalm, anointed head, beard and skirts, and so the Christ, the besmeared.
The Golden Calf Today
Taylor mocks the story in which Aaron, after hearing God at Sinai and working the plagues in Egypt, abandons it all the moment his brother's back is turned and builds the golden calf. Chance Garton reads the incestuous line of Amram and Jochebed as forensic evidence of mythology, since only pantheons can inbreed without consequence, and notes that Elisheba matches Elizabeth, wife of Zacharias. Dylan Saccoccio then ties the calf to Iranian effigies of Baal, which he reads as bowl and therefore Super Bowl as above the Lord, to the season of sacrifice, and to crows flocking over Tel Aviv.
Quotes
“They've implanted archetypal hooks via symbolic systems into society's collective mind, and they pull them like levers to create and manipulate authority structures throughout the ages.”
“It doesn't matter if it's real or not. If they believe it and act upon it, it affects you.”
“When you really just read how it's written, whether it's talking about Moses or Jesus, it's clear that Moses and Jesus are a body of water to get dunked in.”
“The reason why what we're doing is valuable is we're not just repeating what we read. We're reading it, scrutinizing it, and like seeing what we can make sense of.”
“And you can see how Venice is Venus and Phoenician is Venetian.”
“I just pulled up here on the screen so you can see that Exodus 7:1 does literally say, "The Lord said to Moses, I make you God to Pharaoh."”
“Yet, they had the exact identical constellation chart that these stories are based on or at the very least contain within them symbolically.”
“It's mythology. It's not history. And some people are afraid to say that because they don't want to lose their funding because they're making too much money off the Christian Zionists.”
Dylan Saccoccio is the author of the Spirit Whirled series, The Real Universal Empire, and the Tale of Onora. After chasing language back as far as possible, he now explores other avenues to prove cultural diffusion of the ancient universal empire of priests, navigators, masons, and merchants. Find his latest of many hundreds of articles on Substack.
See all Dylan episodes→Kyle and Serena Denton are community herbalists creating wild-crafted and organic plant medicines out of Milwaukee since 2015. I have used their teas and tinctures on an almost daily basis for years now. Kyle is a great friend of InnerVerse and has appeared on the channel more times than I can count. These products work, not in the allopathic "pharma-medicine" way, but in a terrain-support, consciousness bolstering plant-teacher sort of way.
