The Sky as Text: Babylonian Constellations and the Return of a Living Cosmos

In this episode we explore ancient Babylonian star lore as a synchronistic “heavenly writing” that links sky and earth through meaning rather than physical causation, drawing on the work of scholars like Francesca Rochberg and Gavin White’s book Babylonian Star-lore. These works allow us to connect Babylonian ideas about constellations, portals of the dead, and ancestral sky myths with Jung’s notion of synchronicity, Marie-Louise von Franz’s insights into number and myth, and Rick Tarnas’s view of the living cosmos. The conversation ranges through cultural astronomy (including Bernadette Brady’s work), the misdating and later dismissal of the Corpus Hermeticum, and historical episodes such as George Smith’s discovery of the Babylonian flood tablets in Ashurbanipal’s library, which emerged alongside Darwin, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud in a period that shook religious certainties. We also discuss how indigenous and Babylonian sky stories encode seasonal tasks and ritual responses to planetary configurations, Along the way, we return repeatedly to the need for a living, metaphorical relationship with the cosmos, arguing that when astrology is treated as a qualitative language of time rather than a failed “science,” it restores a sense of dialogue with an ensouled universe.