Eliphas Lévi’s Saturnian Ram and the Lamb of God: Babylonian Mysteries Disguised as Christianity

Éliphas Lévi

Éliphas Lévi, born Alphonse Louis Constant in 1810, began his life within the Roman Catholic Church. He studied in seminary, was ordained a deacon, and appeared on track to become a priest. Yet he abandoned the clerical state in his twenties and devoted himself to the occult. Unlike many esoteric writers who rejected Christianity outright, Lévi never really left his Catholic framework. Instead, he fused Catholic theology with the symbolic systems of the ancient mysteries. His writings, such as Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie and The History of Magic, reveal this unusual blend of Catholic piety and pagan esotericism. To Lévi, the mysteries of Babylon, Egypt, Greece, and Rome were not demonic counterfeits but dim shadows of Catholic truth waiting to be “fulfilled” in Christ. He taught that Christianity was the consummation of all religions, a universal synthesis where every pagan rite found its hidden meaning in the Church. This way of thinking sounds strikingly familiar today, echoing pope Francis’s pursuit of interfaith and ecumenical dialogue, where all religions are treated as different paths leading toward the same divine truth. In both cases, the outcome is syncretism. For Lévi, this syncretism produced one of his most troubling paradoxes: the merging of Saturn, the sacrificial Ram of the equinox, and Christ the Lamb of God.

In the ancient mysteries, the Ram of Aries ruled the spring equinox. As the sun entered Aries, the equinox was marked by immolating the celestial ram, symbolizing the death of the old year and the rebirth of the new. Lévi himself wrote: “The equinox of spring was under Aries, the celestial Ram, which was immolated in the ancient sacrifices, as time devours all things, offering them to death.” Here the ram is Saturnian. Saturn, as lord of time and death, presides over sacrifice, restriction, and immolation. In astrology, Saturn is exalted in Libra at the autumn equinox, but his scythe extends over Aries as well, since the spring sacrifice falls under the same devouring law of time. The ram therefore became the emblem of sacrifice and severity. Pagan cosmologies were cyclical: life, death, and renewal repeated endlessly. “Life is preserved by perpetual sacrifice, and death itself is the condition of resurrection,” Lévi wrote. But this was not the resurrection of eternal life. It was the eternal recycling of forms under the dominion of Saturn, the devourer of time.

As a Catholic magus, however, Lévi reinterpreted this Saturnian ram as a prophecy of Christ. He wrote: “This immolation of the ram was the type of that more divine immolation, when the Lamb of God was offered for the salvation of the world.” In his hermeneutic, the adversary’s symbol is not destroyed but transfigured. What the ancients offered to Saturn, Lévi said, was a shadow pointing forward to Calvary. The ram of Aries, immolated at the spring equinox, became for him the type of the Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God, sacrificed at Passover near the same season. In his system, paganism did not oppose Christianity but anticipated it. The old mysteries were baptized and fulfilled in Christ. In the same way that Friday, once Venus’s day, became holy through the Passion, so the Ram of Aries became the Lamb whose blood takes away the sin of the world.

Here lies the fatal confusion. In the mysteries of Babylon, the ram was Saturn’s sacrifice, demanded by necessity, consumed by time, a death that fed the cycle of nature. It was a sacrifice to devils, not to God. Yet Lévi equates this sacrifice with Christ, as if the worship of Saturn were an innocent prophecy of the cross. Scripture, however, forbids such syncretism. Paul wrote: “The things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God: and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils. Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils” (1 Corinthians 10:20–21). The Bible does not treat pagan sacrifices as types of Christ but as offerings to demons (fallen angels/Nephilim). To identify the ram of Saturn with the Lamb of God is to confuse Christ with Belial, light with darkness. John’s vision describes this very confusion as “Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the earth” (Revelation 17:5).

Lévi himself makes the Babylonian connection clear. In The History of Magic he venerates Nimrod, Belus, and Semiramis, the founders of Babel and Chaldean sorcery, as “mighty royalties” of antiquity. He praises the wisdom of Egypt, Greece, and Babylon and claims the Catholic Church has preserved their mysteries in sanctified form. He calls Rome the “great Thebes of the new initiation,” declaring that the Catholic priesthood carries forward the power of the ancient magi. In this view, Catholicism does not abolish the mysteries but enfolds them under Christian names. The equinox and solstice festivals were not erased but renamed: Easter tied to the spring equinox, Christmas to the winter solstice, Sunday to the sun itself. These are not biblical ordinances but cosmic festivals inherited from Babylon and rebranded by Rome.

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The contrast with the Bible is stark. Passover, the true feast of Christ’s death, was appointed by God on the fourteenth day of the first month, Nisan (Exodus 12:2–6), not on the pagan equinox. God’s calendar begins in the spring with redemption, not in January as Rome later decreed. By shifting holy days to equinoxes and solstices, the Catholic system aligned worship with astral cycles rather than with the divinely revealed order of Scripture. Christ, the Lamb of God, fulfilled Passover by His once-for-all sacrifice. As Hebrews declares: “This man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God” (Hebrews 10:12). His cross is not another round of Saturn’s cycle but the decisive break with it, conquering death once and for all. The Babylonian ram was a sacrifice to devils, but Christ’s death is the final victory over them. To merge the two is to profane the holy with the unholy.

Lévi’s vision is therefore not Christianity but Babylonian mystery religion disguised in Catholic symbols. His ram belongs to Saturn, the devourer of time. His Christ is the Christ of the mysteries, not the Christ of the Bible.

Jesus forewarned in the Gospels, “For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect” (Matthew 24:24, KJB). By merging Saturn’s Ram with the Lamb of God, and by tying Christ’s sacrifice to pagan equinox cycles instead of to the Passover commanded by God, Lévi’s system presents not the Christ of Scripture but a false Christ born of the mysteries.

He confuses perpetual sacrifice with the once-for-all offering of Calvary. He praises Nimrod, Semiramis, and the magi as precursors of the Catholic priesthood. He claims Rome is the heir of Babylon. In truth, what he describes is exactly what Scripture condemns: the harlotry of Mystery Babylon, dressing the worship of the heavens in Christian garments.

The question at the heart of his work is whether Christianity fulfills pagan mysteries or abolishes them. Lévi insists that all symbols, even those of the adversary, can be baptized and redeemed. But the Bible proclaims a clean break. The Lamb of God is not Saturn’s ram. His blood was shed once for all, outside the gate, not as a cycle of death feeding time, but as the eternal victory that shatters death. Lévi’s fusion of the two is the essence of Babylonian religion—ancient astral worship veiled in Catholic rites.

The Catholic Mass and the Perpetual Sacrifice

At the very center of Roman Catholic worship is the Mass, called by the Church a “re-presentation” of Christ’s sacrifice. According to Catholic dogma, every time the priest consecrates the bread and wine, the one sacrifice of Christ is made present again, and Christ is offered anew upon the altar. The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes the Eucharist as “a sacrifice because it re-presents (makes present) the sacrifice of the cross” and calls it “an unbloody offering” that is nevertheless the same sacrifice as Calvary. This is why Catholics speak of the “perpetual sacrifice of the Mass.”

Éliphas Lévi perfectly explains the theology underlying this idea. In The History of Magic, he writes: “Life is preserved by perpetual sacrifice, and death itself is the condition of resurrection.” For Lévi, sacrifice is not a single finished act, but an eternal law of the cosmos. Everything must be immolated, given up, returned to the devourer of time (Saturn), so that life may continue. The ancient mysteries expressed this law through endless sacrificial cycles: the ram at the equinox, the bull in spring, the victim upon the altar year after year. For Lévi, Christianity did not abolish this cycle; it perfected it. He claimed that the Mass is the eternal continuation of sacrifice, the perpetual immolation that sustains life.

This is not biblical Christianity. The Bible is emphatic that Christ’s sacrifice was once for all, never to be repeated. Hebrews declares:

“This man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God” (Hebrews 10:12).

And again:

“Nor yet that he should offer himself often, as the high priest entereth into the holy place every year with blood of others; for then must he often have suffered since the foundation of the world: but now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself” (Hebrews 9:25-26).

The inspired writer directly rejects the very principle upon which the Mass is built. Christ does not offer Himself often. He does not return to the altar day after day. He suffered once, at the end of the age, and His sacrifice is finished. To claim otherwise is to deny the finality of the cross.

The doctrine of the perpetual sacrifice is not derived from Scripture but from the mysteries of Babylon. In those ancient religions, the gods demanded ongoing sacrifices to sustain the cycle of life and death. The ram of Saturn was immolated at the equinox to renew the year. The bull of Mithras was slain to regenerate the earth. Life was preserved only by endless immolation. Lévi himself linked the Mass to this same principle, describing it as the universal law of perpetual sacrifice sanctified under Catholic symbols.

This is why Protestant reformers consistently identified the Mass with the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel and Jesus Christ. Daniel repeatedly prophesies that in the last days the “daily sacrifice” would be taken away and replaced by abomination:

“And arms shall stand on his part, and they shall pollute the sanctuary of strength, and shall take away the daily sacrifice, and they shall place the abomination that maketh desolate” (Daniel 11:31).

“And from the time that the daily sacrifice shall be taken away, and the abomination that maketh desolate set up, there shall be a thousand two hundred and ninety days” (Daniel 12:11).

In its original setting, the “daily sacrifice” referred to the temple offerings commanded by God. But in the New Testament Christ’s finished sacrifice replaced them once for all. There is now no daily sacrifice because the Lamb has already been slain. To restore a perpetual sacrifice is not to honor Christ but to deny His sufficiency. This is why reformers like Wycliffe, Tyndale, Luther, Calvin, and countless Puritans identified the Mass as the abomination foretold by Daniel. It takes away the true sacrifice of Calvary, replacing it with the pagan principle of continual immolation under Catholic ritual.

Christ Himself warned:

“When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place, (whoso readeth, let him understand:)” (Matthew 24:15).

That holy place in Christian history is not a rebuilt Jewish temple, but the sanctuary of the church itself. And there, at the very center of Catholicism, stands the Mass; the perpetual sacrifice of Babylon clothed in Christian garments.

Thus, the Mass is not the preservation of the gospel but its corruption. It enacts Lévi’s doctrine of perpetual sacrifice rather than the Bible’s declaration of a finished redemption. Where Christ cried, “It is finished” (John 19:30), Rome insists, “It continues.” Where Hebrews proclaims, “once for all,” the Catechism asserts “perpetual.” The altar of the Mass is therefore the altar of Mystery Babylon, perpetuating the law of Saturn under the name of Christ.

Catholic Feasts or Babylonian Cycles?

The principle of perpetual sacrifice in the Mass is not the only Babylonian survival within Roman Catholicism. Its entire liturgical calendar is woven around the movements of the heavens; the sun, the moon, the solstices, and the equinoxes. What Éliphas Lévi celebrated as the baptism of pagan mysteries into Christianity is, in fact, nothing more than the continuation of astral religion under Christian names.

Easter, the most important Catholic feast, is not tied to a fixed historical date but to the heavens. The Council of Nicaea in AD 325 decreed that Easter would fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox. This is pure astral reckoning: sun, moon, and zodiac cycle together determine the central feast of Catholic worship. The Bible records that Christ was crucified at Passover, which is indeed near the spring equinox, but nowhere does Scripture command Christians to fix a yearly feast by astronomical calculation. This is a continuation of the equinox rituals of Babylon, where the Ram of Aries was immolated to mark the death of the old cycle and the rebirth of the new. Lévi himself pointed to this, writing that “the equinox of spring was under Aries, the celestial Ram, which was immolated in the ancient sacrifices.” The Catholic Easter simply sanctifies this same cycle, claiming it as the resurrection of Christ, when in truth it is the old pagan rite clothed in Christian garments.

Christmas, celebrated on December 25, corresponds not to the actual birth of Christ but to the Roman feast of Sol Invictus, the “Unconquered Sun,” at the winter solstice. Ancient sun worshippers marked this turning point of the year when the days began to lengthen again. The Babylonians, Egyptians, Persians, and Romans alike worshipped the rebirth of the sun god at this season. Rome simply baptized the solstice festival as the birth of Jesus, though Scripture nowhere reveals the date of His birth. Jeremiah warned against those who “worship the host of heaven” (Jeremiah 8:2), and yet the Catholic feast calendar enshrines the solstice as a sacred Christian day.

From the earliest centuries, the Church of Rome exalted Sunday, the day of the sun, above the Sabbath of Scripture. Constantine, even after his supposed conversion, still honored the sun god Sol Invictus. In AD 321 he decreed that the “venerable day of the sun” would be the day of rest across the empire. Rome baptized this solar day as the “Lord’s Day,” claiming it commemorated the resurrection. Yet God had already commanded, “the seventh day is the sabbath [Saturday] of the Lord thy God” (Exodus 20:10). To substitute the day of the sun for the Sabbath of the Lord is to exchange the Creator for the creation, just as Paul warned in Romans 1:25.

Catholic holy days are further tied to cosmic alignments. The feast of St. John the Baptist falls on June 24, at midsummer, near the summer solstice. The feast of St. Michael the Archangel (Michaelmas) is on September 29, near the autumn equinox. Marian feasts are often placed at dates echoing lunar cycles. Church architecture, too, reflects this astral order: domes painted with stars, meridian lines marking solstices, and obelisks standing in church plazas all testify to the worship of the heavens embedded in Catholic ritual space.

The Bible speaks plainly against this. Moses warned Israel:

“And 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” (Deuteronomy 4:19).

The Catholic liturgical system, however, is built upon this very principle. Easter depends on the equinox and the moon. Christmas sanctifies the solstice. Sunday is the day of the sun. Saints’ feasts align with zodiacal cycles. The Church calendar is not the calendar of Scripture but of Babylon.

When we set the Mass alongside the calendar, the pattern becomes clear. The Mass perpetuates the principle of perpetual sacrifice, the law of Saturn and the Babylonian mysteries. The calendar sanctifies the cycles of the heavens, binding worship to equinox, solstice, sun, and moon. Together they form the system John saw in Revelation:

“And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH” (Revelation 17:5).

This is why true biblical Christianity must separate from Rome. Christ’s death was once for all, not perpetual. His resurrection broke the cycle of time, it was not another turn of the zodiac. His worship is “in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24), not in the sanctified solstices and equinoxes of Babylon.

The Priesthood of the Magi

Éliphas Lévi, in his History of Magic and Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, makes an admission few Catholics dare to voice out loud: the Roman priesthood is not built upon the apostles, but upon the Chaldean magi. He calls Catholic priests the “true successors of the magi of old,” heirs of Babylonian astrologer-priests who read the stars and officiated sacrificial rites. Where the Bible insists that Christ ended all priesthood by offering Himself once for all, Lévi celebrates a counterfeit order that carries forward the very mysteries God condemned.

In his telling, incense, vestments, holy water, processions, and candles: all of which God never commanded His church; are praised by Lévi as perpetuations of Egypt and Chaldea under Catholic forms. He delights that Rome has become “the great Thebes of the new initiation,” just as ancient Thebes and Babylon once housed their priesthoods.

But here lies the question every honest heart must ask: what right has a church to put on a Christian facade while secretly perpetuating pagan mysteries? If Christ declared from the cross, “It is finished” (John 19:30), what justification does any church have to return His people to priestly mediators, sacrifices, and rituals lifted straight from the magi of Babylon? To pretend this is Christianity is not only deception; it is blasphemy.

The Bible’s answer is clear: “For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ. And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:13–14). A church that clothes itself in Christian language while dressing its altars in Babylonian rites is not the Bride of Christ but the Whore of Babylon. It has no right to call itself Christian while lying to its followers, binding them to rituals God never gave, and leading them into fellowship with devils.

Rome may parade itself as eternal and holy, but Lévi himself lets the mask slip. The priesthood that blesses the Mass is not the priesthood of Christ, but the priesthood of Babylon, carried forward in Christian costume. The call of Scripture is urgent and simple: “Come out of her, my people” (Revelation 18:4).

Rituals of Egypt in Catholic Vestments

When Éliphas Lévi spoke of Catholic liturgy, he did not try to hide its origins. He praised it as the survival of Egypt and Babylon under Christian names. The vestments of the priest, the clouds of incense, the chants and processions, the candles and holy water; all of it, he said, is not new but ancient. The Church of Rome, in his own words, has perpetuated the “high traditions of Egypt and Chaldea under the Catholic form.”

Think of that for a moment. The very things God denounced in Israel; burning incense to the “queen of heaven” (Jeremiah 44:17), pouring out drink offerings to false gods, worshipping Him with inventions He never commanded; are the very things Lévi rejoices to see alive in Catholic ritual. He does not blush to compare the Mass with the mysteries of Isis and Osiris, or with the sacrificial rites of Chaldean magi.

The Bible is not silent about this. When Israel adopted the rites of the nations, God rebuked them: “Thus saith the Lord, Learn not the way of the heathen” (Jeremiah 10:2). Again He warns, “What thing soever I command you, observe to do it: thou shalt not add thereto, nor diminish from it” (Deuteronomy 12:32). Yet Rome has added entire systems of ritual not once commanded by Christ. Instead of the simplicity of the Lord’s Supper, we see altars, vestments, candles, bells, chants, and an endless calendar of festivals tied to the stars and seasons.

If God calls these things abominations, how can they be paraded as holy? To dress up Egyptian rites in Christian clothing is not to redeem them, but to deceive. It is to bring the mysteries of Babylon into the house of God and pretend they belong there.

Paul’s words stand as a timeless rebuke: “Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils: ye cannot be partakers of the Lord’s table, and of the table of devils” (1 Corinthians 10:21). Rome, in adopting the rites of the nations, has invited its people to the table of devils under the name of Christ. It has no right to deceive the world into thinking such things are Christian worship.

fresco from Palazzo Farnese (Villa Farnese at Caprarola)

The Cross of Christ or the Cross of the Zodiac?

In Scripture, the cross is the very center of redemption. It is the place where Christ “bare our sins in his own body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24). The cross is not a symbol of cosmic cycles or planetary alignments. It is the once-for-all sacrifice of the Lamb of God, finished at Calvary (John 19:30, Hebrews 10:12). Yet in the writings of Éliphas Lévi, and in the Catholic tradition he glorifies, the cross takes on a very different meaning.

Lévi openly connected the cross not merely with Christ, but with the zodiac itself. To him, the cross represented the cosmic intersection of the equinoxes and solstices; the eternal cycle of time by which the ancients read the heavens. In this scheme, the crucifixion of Jesus was not a unique atonement for sin but the fulfillment of an astral mystery that had existed from the beginning of pagan religion. The cross became a zodiacal cross, a blending of Christ with cosmic astrology.

This interpretation aligns perfectly with Rome’s use of astral cycles in its festivals. The equinox, the solstice, the feast days set by the turning of the sun and moon; all of these, Lévi argued, found their “Christian meaning” in the cross. But the Bible declares something far different. The cross is not a cycle of time; it is the end of the cycle. “For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18). He did not die as one more offering in a cosmic rhythm of life and death, but to break the power of sin and death forever.

By turning the cross into a cosmic symbol, Rome has stripped it of its true meaning. The Catholic crucifix, lifted high in its churches, becomes less about the finished work of Calvary and more about the eternal cycle of sacrifice. Lévi even declared that “life is preserved by perpetual sacrifice,” proving that his theology is not biblical but Babylonian. In the mysteries, sacrifice is endless, the wheel never stops turning. But the gospel declares the opposite: “By one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified” (Hebrews 10:14).

Mary or Isis? The Queen of Heaven Revived

The Word of God is unambiguous about the worship of the “queen of heaven.” In the days of Jeremiah, the people of Judah provoked the Lord to anger by burning incense, pouring out drink offerings, and baking cakes to the queen of heaven, a pagan goddess who was nothing more than a demon behind a title of majesty (Jeremiah 7:18; 44:17–19). This was not worship of the true God but rebellion against Him. Yet Éliphas Lévi, reflecting the Catholic system, openly compared the Virgin Mary to this very figure. In his writings he equated the Catholic veneration of Mary with the ancient cults of Isis, Astarte, and Venus. He praised her as the “universal mother,” borrowing language used for goddesses of fertility and the stars.

Rome itself encourages this continuity. Its Marian feasts are tied to cosmic patterns, and its titles for Mary mirror those of Isis and Astarte: Star of the Sea, Queen of Heaven, Mother of God. Lévi did not see this as corruption; he saw it as fulfillment, as if Mary was the perfected form of Isis. But the Bible makes no such allowance. Nowhere in Scripture is Mary worshipped, exalted, or prayed to. She herself confessed her need for a Savior: “My spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour” (Luke 1:47).

By transforming Mary into the Queen of Heaven, Catholicism has revived the very worship condemned by the prophets. It is Babylon dressed in Christian garments. Just as Isis carried Horus, Mary is portrayed eternally carrying the Christ-child, not as a humble servant of the Lord but as a cosmic mother enthroned above the stars. This is not the Mary of the Bible but the Isis of Egypt, the Astarte of Canaan, and the Semiramis of Babylon under a Christian name.

And what right has a church to place such a burden of deception on its people; to turn a humble Jewish maiden into a pagan goddess and demand the faithful bow before her images? The Lord Jesus Christ declared, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). There is no co-mediatrix, no queen of heaven, no rival to His glory. To give His worship to another, even under the pretense of honoring His mother, is idolatry. It is nothing less than the revival of the Babylonian mysteries in Catholic dress.

The Sacraments as Magic

In his History of Magic, Éliphas Lévi strips away the veil and says aloud what most Catholics never hear: the sacraments of Rome are nothing more than the perfected forms of ancient magical rites. He calls them “the seven great magical operations,” directly tying baptism, the Eucharist, confirmation, ordination, marriage, penance, and extreme unction to the mysteries of Babylon, Egypt, and Greece. To Lévi, Catholicism did not destroy pagan ritual; it absorbed and sanctified it.

Consider the Mass. To the faithful it is preached as a holy memorial of Christ’s sacrifice, but Rome insists that at every altar the bread and wine are literally transformed into the body and blood of Christ. Lévi rejoiced in this, not as an act of faith, but as the highest act of ritual magic: a priest speaking words of power to change the substance of matter. This is not biblical worship. It is sorcery, the very thing condemned when Pharaoh’s magicians mimicked Moses’ miracles in Egypt. Scripture warns, “For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry” (1 Samuel 15:23).

Holy water, incense, candles, vestments, and chants; all these Rome parades before the eyes of her followers as holy symbols, but Lévi saw them for what they are: the survival of Chaldean, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman rites. Priests become magicians, the altar becomes a stage, the sacraments become spells. Instead of the once-for-all sacrifice of Calvary, the people are given endless cycles of ritual magic to keep them bound. This is not Christianity; it is Mystery Babylon, dressed in Christian vocabulary but working the same enchantments as the sorcerers of old.

And again the question must be asked: what right does a church have to wear the mask of Christ while feeding its people the rites of Babylon? When Christ declared “It is finished” (John 19:30), He ended the need for sacrifices, mysteries, and rites. Hebrews testifies that “by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified” (Hebrews 10:14). Yet Catholicism keeps its followers under the dominion of ritual, convincing them that salvation is dispensed through magical sacraments instead of the once-for-all blood of Christ.

This is not the gospel. It is the same ancient sorcery that Scripture warns will one day deceive the nations. Revelation speaks of Babylon, “for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived” (Revelation 18:23). The sacraments of Rome, seen in the light of Lévi’s testimony, are not the gospel of Christ; they are the sorceries of Babylon disguised as Christianity.

Cosmic Symbols in Catholic Art: Zodiac, Solar Mandalas, and the All-Seeing Eye

Step inside the great cathedrals and chapels of Rome, and you may think you have entered not just a church, but a temple of the cosmos. Alongside the crucifix and the saints, you will find zodiac wheels, planetary gods disguised as angels, solar mandalas in rose windows, and the mysterious all-seeing eye watching from above. Why are these symbols; rooted in the mysteries of Babylon and the astrology of the Chaldeans; carved into the very bones of Catholic sacred space?

Lévi provides an unsettling answer. The zodiac, he said, is the hidden skeleton of Christian time. The ancients measured their feasts by the sun and stars, and the Church, in his eyes, preserved the same pattern:

The architecture and artwork proclaim this syncretism.

In works like Raphael’s Chigi Chapel dome in Rome, the Catholic Church preserved and displayed the full cosmic theater of the ancient mysteries. The dome mosaic does not merely depict angels and saints; it portrays the Sun, the Moon, and the five classical planets visible to the naked eye (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn), each accompanied by zodiacal signs. Together they form the sevenfold cosmos that the ancients revered as the governing powers of time and fate. Surrounding them are the twelve signs of the zodiac, binding the Christian chapel to the same astral cycles celebrated in Babylon, Egypt, and Rome. Yet Scripture gives a clear warning against such imagery: “And 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, which the LORD thy God hath divided unto all nations under the whole heaven” (Deuteronomy 4:19).

At Chartres Cathedral in France, the famous north rose window radiates outward like a solar mandala. Christ is placed at the center, while zodiac signs and seasonal labors orbit Him in a cosmic wheel. To the casual eye, it is Christian stained glass. But structurally it repeats the ancient solar cults: God in the hub, zodiac in the rim.

The Jesuit churches of the Baroque era added a further layer with the All-Seeing Eye. In the Church of the Gesù in Rome, and later in countless Catholic chapels, a glowing eye set within a triangle shines from the altar or dome. Officially it is called the “eye of Providence,” symbolizing the Father. Yet this image predates Christianity. It is Saturn’s eye, the “hidden watcher,” the soul of Kronos who devours time. To clothe Saturn’s symbol in the name of God is to merge darkness with light, as Lévi himself admitted when he called the Catholic Church “the great Thebes of the new initiation.”

Even St. Peter’s Square itself is centered on a pagan obelisk from Heliopolis, dedicated originally to the sun. Bernini’s colonnades curve around it in an elliptical embrace, forming what many scholars have called a cosmic clock. At noon the shadow of the obelisk points toward bronze markers in the pavement engraved with zodiac signs. The heart of Vatican City is literally a solar-zodiac dial.

Could this explain why so much Catholic sacred art resembles astral symbolism rather than biblical worship? The zodiac wheels, the cosmic domes, the solar mandalas, the planetary figures renamed as angels, the obelisks aligned with shadows, the all-seeing eye of Saturn dressed as God; these are not accidental. They are deliberate carryovers of the old mystery religion.

The Scriptures warned against this: “Take ye therefore good heed unto yourselves… 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” (Deuteronomy 4:15, 19). The prophets rebuked Israel for making “cakes to the queen of heaven” (Jeremiah 7:18). The apostle Paul declared that “the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God” (1 Corinthians 10:20).

In the ancient world, the priesthood of Babylon and the Chaldean magi operated with one primary goal: to bind people under the yoke of the mysteries. The very word mystery meant hidden knowledge, accessible only through the priestly class. Ordinary people were taught that they could not approach the gods (fallen angels, and their Titan offspring) directly, but must rely on astrologers, omen-readers, and sacrificers to interpret fate. This dependency created bondage, for the priesthood made itself the only mediator between man and the divine. At the heart of this system stood Saturn, the devourer of time. Human destiny was said to be bound by the stars and the planets, with Saturn ruling over death and limitation. Each year, at equinoxes and solstices, new sacrifices were demanded to appease him. Thus, people lived under the constant fear that time itself would consume them unless the priest interceded.

This system was not only spiritual but political. Babylonian priests sanctioned kings, controlled calendars, and tied the rhythms of empire to the cycles of heaven. Religion became a tool of government, and worshippers became slaves to empire. It was spiritual deception, economic exploitation, and political domination all wrapped into one.

Revelation identifies the system itself as “Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots” (Revelation 17:5), a counterfeit religion intoxifying the nations. In contrast, the gospel proclaims that “there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). Christ is the end of the cycle, Jesus declared: “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” (John 8:36).

In the end, the difference is clear: the Babylonian mysteries produce bondage, but the gospel of Christ gives liberty.

Revelation 18:13 — the merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all thyine wood, and all manner vessels of ivory, and all manner vessels of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble, and cinnamon, and odours, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men.

Revelation 18:23 — and the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee; and the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee: for thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived.