From God’s Moedim to Rome’s Astral Calendar: Nergal, Saturn, and the Tetractys

God of war, disease and death. Nergal holding his attributes—a lion-headed mace and a sword—on a cylinder seal from Larsa

From the beginning, the God of Abraham gave His people moedim; appointed times. Leviticus 23 is explicit: “On the fourteenth day of the first month at twilight is the LORD’s Passover. And on the fifteenth day … the feast of Unleavened Bread unto the LORD.” Exodus 12 repeats the command with precision: the lamb was to be chosen on the tenth day, slaughtered on the fourteenth, and its blood applied for deliverance. These times were not tied to equinoxes, zodiacal stations, or astral calculations. They were fixed to the Hebrew lunar calendar, to the appearance of ripe barley, and to the covenant rhythm revealed directly by God.

Jesus and His disciples observed this calendar. Luke records Him sending Peter and John to prepare the Passover. John notes that He was crucified at the very hour the lambs were being killed. Paul made the theological connection unmistakable when he wrote: “For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast … with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Corinthians 5:7–8). The earliest believers continued in this path. Polycarp of Smyrna, the disciple of John, celebrated Passover on the fourteenth of Nisan. Polycrates of Ephesus defended the practice against Rome, insisting that “all these observed the fourteenth day of the Passover according to the Gospel, deviating in no respect, but following the rule of faith. And those greater than I have said, ‘We ought to obey God rather than man.’” For nearly three centuries, many Christians kept Passover exactly as God commanded: on the fourteenth of Nisan, in continuity with Torah, Christ, and the apostles. The historical name for these communities was Quartodecimans, “fourteenth-keepers.”

Yet Scripture consistently warns against the temptation to exchange God’s moedim for the worship of the heavens. Deuteronomy 4 commands Israel not to lift their eyes to the heavens and bow to the sun, moon, or stars. Deuteronomy 17 requires that whoever serves “the sun or the moon or any of the host of heaven” be put to death. Kings and prophets alike rebuked Israel for this sin. Second Kings 17 condemns them for worshiping the host of heaven and serving Baal. Second Kings 23 records Josiah’s purge of priests who burned incense to the sun, the moon, and the constellations. Jeremiah describes the bones of idolaters being spread before the heavenly lights they had served. Ezekiel sees men in the temple itself worshiping the rising sun in the east. The pattern is unambiguous: Passover is obedience, while astral feasts are idolatry.

The Bible even names these astral gods. When Assyria resettled Samaria, each imported nation brought its deities. From Cuth came Nergal, the god of war, plague, lions, and the underworld, associated with the planet Mars. From Sepharvaim came Adrammelech, a solar deity whose name means “majestic king,” worshiped through child sacrifice by fire, and Anammelech, a lunar deity; perhaps “Anu is king” or a female moon goddess; also appeased by the burning of children. Together, Adrammelech and Anammelech embodied the astral duality of fire and cycles, light and darkness, consuming life in blood and flame. Jewish tradition remembered Nergal as a rooster; Church Fathers cast him as a demon of war and pestilence; later Christian demonologies called him a prince of Hell, a chief of infernal police. In every stage, Nergal remained tied to destruction, death, and astral worship. This was the context for Israel’s fall: serving the host of heaven rather than the Creator.

Shamash, seated in his temple and facing his emblem, the solar disk, with worshipers before him, bas-relief from Sippar, about 870 BC; in the British Museum. He wears a horned crown with stacked tiers — strikingly similar to the papal tiara of later Rome. Shamash embodied the beneficent sun, law, and truth, while Nergal was his destructive counterpart, the evil side of the same solar force — plague, war, and death.

Elsewhere in the Mediterranean, the same motifs prevailed. In Punic Carthage, Baal Ḥammon was enthroned as the chief deity, worshiped with the ram as his emblem (Aries is Latin for “ram”). He was depicted as a bearded figure with curling ram’s horns, enthroned on the “two-horned hill” of Jebel Boukornine across from Carthage. Stelae show him paired with Tanit, with solar discs, crescents, and rosettes crowning the carvings. A terracotta statue portrays him enthroned with ram’s horns, flanked by sphinxes. Greek and Roman writers equated him with Cronus and thus with Saturn. His epithet “solar ram” captured the fusion: a fertility and harvest god linked to ram imagery, to the sun, and to fiery sacrifice. Archaeology has confirmed the grim reports of child offerings, with urns of cremated infants found in sanctuaries. Baal Ḥammon and Tanit embodied astral devotion: sun and moon, fire and fertility, horned ram and cyclical time.

Against this backdrop the early Church faced its own crisis. In the second century a rift opened. The Quartodecimans of Asia Minor clung to the fourteenth of Nisan. Rome pressed for a Sunday Pascha detached from the Jewish calendar. Polycarp visited Anicetus in Rome around 155 CE, and though they could not convince each other, they parted in peace. A generation later, Polycrates of Ephesus wrote to pope Victor, defending the fourteenth with apostolic authority.Victor excommunicated them, though Irenaeus rebuked his cruelty. But the cruelty only grew. In 325 CE, the Council of Nicaea, backed by Constantine, outlawed 14 Nisan observance altogether. Constantine spat on the very calendar Christ Himself honored, declaring it “unworthy” to follow the Jews and commanding Christians to have nothing in common with “the detestable Jewish crowd.” What bitter irony; men cloaked as “holy fathers,” daring to cast aside the exact days their Messiah was crucified and raised. Instead of bending the knee to God’s moedim, they bent to the sun, the equinox, and the emperor’s politics.

Easter was henceforth fixed by formula: the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox. This was no gradual drift but a deliberate rupture, driven by anti-Jewish hostility. The moedim were rejected not for lack of authority but because they were Jewish. Yet in rejecting them, the Church rejected the very commands of God.

Once Easter was severed from Passover, it was anchored not to Torah but to the heavens. By design, the Nicene formula ensured Easter would always fall after the spring equinox, in late March or April, when the sun enters Aries, the Ram. In antiquity Aries was deeply symbolic. In Babylonian astronomy it had been MUL.LU.HUN.GA, the Hired Man, a marker of the year. Later it became Dumuzi’s ram, associated with shepherds, fertility, and renewal. Egyptian priests identified Aries with Amun-Ra, the ram-headed god of fertility and creativity, called the “Indicator of the Reborn Sun” at the equinox. Statues of Amun-Ra were paraded during spring processions. Aries was thus enthroned as the constellation of rebirth. Astrologically it was ruled by Mars, and Mars was Nergal’s star. The Ram, then, was the sign of Nergal, adversary of the covenant. By tying Easter to the equinox, Nicaea placed the resurrection in the adversary’s slot, in the sign of the Ram of Mars. When pope Gregory XIII reformed the calendar in 1582, dropping ten days to restore the equinox to March 21, he was perfecting this formula. He ensured Easter would forever remain in Aries’ season. Though the precession of the equinox has shifted the sun’s position into Pisces, the symbolism remains: the resurrection overlaid onto the Ram, the adversary’s constellation.

Behind this stood Saturn. Roman Saturn, Greek Cronus, was eventually conflated with Chronos, Time itself. He was the god of sowing, harvest, death, and rebirth, the god of boundaries and cycles, remembered with feasts of role reversal at Saturnalia. His emblem was the scythe; his planet, slow Saturn, measured cycles. Philosophers depicted him as Time devouring all. Astrologers named him ruler of equinoxes, solstices, and calendars. The Julian calendar of Julius Caesar was Saturn’s device, disciplining life by equinox and solstice. The Gregorian reform was Saturnine too, restoring the equinox to its place and binding Easter permanently to cosmic time.

The Pythagorean tetractys, the triangular figure of ten formed by 1+2+3+4, embodied this same vision. It symbolized cosmic harmony: elements, seasons, planets, and music of the spheres. Neopythagoreans like Nicomachus and Theon taught that the cosmos was governed by number, by harmonic ratios, by cycles of the heavens. To fix feasts to equinoxes and lunar phases was a Saturnine act, sanctity by mathematics, worship by cosmic cycles. Rome embraced this framework. The mitre of the bishop resembled the old astral headdresses; the crozier recalled fertility cults’ crooks; the entire liturgical year became a web of sun and moon cycles.

Against this stood God’s moedim: living signs rooted in covenant and harvest, new moons and barley, Sabbaths and feasts, rhythms of relationship rather than cosmic mechanics. Scripture had warned of a power that would “think to change times and law” (Daniel 7:25). Paul had rebuked the Galatians for observing “days and months and seasons and years” (Galatians 4:10–11), enslaving themselves to elemental spirits. Yet Rome did precisely this: replacing God’s moedim with Saturn’s calendar, Christ’s Passover with Nergal’s Ram, obedience with astrology.

The verdict is clear. God appointed Passover on the fourteenth of Nisan. Jesus kept it, Paul affirmed it, Polycrates defended it. Rome rejected it. Constantine outlawed it. Gregory XIII preserved its replacement. The result is that Christ’s resurrection was fixed not by God’s moedim but by Nergal’s Ram, Baal Ḥammon’s solar ram, Saturn’s equinox, and the Pythagorean tetractys. The Church wrapped biblical names around astral worship.

Rome’s liturgical calendar is not the calendar of the God of the Bible. It is the Saturnine discipline of time cloaked in Christian terminology. To worship God on His moedim is covenant obedience. To trade them for astral feasts is idolatry, a bowing to creation instead of the Creator. The faithful remnant echoes Peter and Polycrates still: “We must obey God rather than men.”

Aries, the Ram, has been recognized as a constellation since antiquity, long before the International Astronomical Union codified it in modern terms. In Babylonian astronomy, recorded in the great MUL.APIN tablets around the twelfth to eleventh centuries BC, the constellation was originally known as MUL.LU.HUN.GA, “The Hired Man” or “The Agricultural Worker.” These tablets were not mere star charts but agricultural calendars, showing the rising and setting of stars to mark the seasons. In that early period, Aries marked the final station of the ecliptic and the Pleiades were used as the sign of the vernal equinox. Over time, however, the constellation that began as “The Hired Man” shifted in meaning. By around 1000 BC, Aries was associated with the shepherd-god Dumuzi and his ram. This shift reflects the way Mesopotamian tradition merged agrarian and pastoral imagery with astral symbolism. By the time the MUL.APIN tablets were standardized, Aries could be identified both as the Hired Man and as the Ram, a duality that tied labor, fertility, and sacrifice together in one celestial image.

In Egypt, Aries was associated with Amun-Ra, the great creator-god depicted with a ram’s head. Amun-Ra was the god of fertility, renewal, and creativity, and because the Sun at that time entered Aries at the spring equinox, Aries was called the “Indicator of the Reborn Sun.” During this season, priests processed images of Amun-Ra in triumphal rituals that celebrated the renewal of life, the resurrection of the Sun from winter darkness. Here we see how Aries, already tied to fertility and the ram, was also welded to solar rebirth. In later Persian and Greco-Roman traditions, this equinox symbolism only deepened, and Aries became one of the central markers of the zodiac. In fact, it was given the title “Lord of the Head,” both because it symbolized the head of the zodiac and because of its astrological association with the human head and temperament.

In astrology, Aries was ruled by the planet Mars, the red star of war. This connects directly to the Babylonian god Nergal, who was identified with Mars. Nergal was the god of war, plague, pestilence, and death, associated with the underworld and fiery destruction. His emblem was the lion, his force was disease and battle, and he embodied the devouring, consuming power of wrath. Ancient sources explicitly equated Nergal with Mars, and Mars was recognized as the planetary ruler of Aries. Thus, Aries was not only the ram of fertility and solar rebirth but also the sign governed by Nergal, the war-god of blood and destruction. In biblical language, this is the archetype of the adversary: the power that opposes God, embodies death, and lures men into astral worship.

“Your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.” (1 Peter 5:8)

Now, when we consider Aries’ role in ancient astronomy and religion, we see that it became the very embodiment of what God forbade. It was the constellation of the Ram, identified with fertility gods like Dumuzi, with solar rebirth in Amun-Ra, and with the destructive force of Mars, the planet of Nergal (Demonic god of the underworld). Aries was the sign of the false resurrection, the ram sacrifice that belonged to astral religion, not to the covenant of Abraham. And yet it was precisely Aries that Rome made the cornerstone of its greatest feast.

What pope Gregory did, then, was to cement the Church’s submission to the astral system that the Bible had denounced. Instead of Passover; the true moed of God, the fourteenth of Nisan, the covenant sign fulfilled in Christ; the Church exalted an equinox festival in the sign of Aries, the Ram, ruled by Nergal, Mars, the god of war and plague, equated with the adversary. This was not the calendar of the God of Abraham but the calendar of Saturn and the zodiac. It was precisely the thing Scripture warned against: turning Christ’s resurrection into a feast of the host of heaven.

Thus the connection is complete. Nergal is Mars, Mars rules Aries, Aries is the Ram, the ram is the sign of Amun-Ra and Baal Hammon, the solar ram of antiquity, and together they embody the adversarial power the Bible opposes. By fixing Easter to the equinox, Gregory ensured that the resurrection of Christ would forever be celebrated not by the covenant calendar but in the season of the Ram, the very adversary of Scripture, clothed in Christian names.

Could this history explain the murders, crusades, inquisitions, and deep-seated antisemitism that have marked the Roman Church through the centuries? During the Inquisition, Jews and conversos were tortured and killed unless they “converted”; but converted to what? If the Church truly worshiped the same God as Israel, the God revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures, why would Jews need to convert at all? If Christ is the Word made flesh, the God of Abraham clothed in humanity, then forcing Jews to abandon Torah for Rome’s rites makes no sense; unless what Rome offered was not Christ, but another power in disguise. Could it be that the Church, while claiming the name of Christ, continued to worship the adversary through the Saturnine-astral system it had enthroned?

The antisemitism is clear from the start: Constantine’s venom against “the detestable Jewish crowd” set the tone. The very calendar of Rome was renamed after astral gods: Sunday for the sun, Monday for the moon, Saturday for Saturn. Rome itself had raised its most magnificent temple not to the God of Israel but to Saturn. If the bishops of Rome truly followed Christ, why was the imperial eagle; the standard of Rome’s legions; still carried as their emblem of power? Why did that same eagle reappear as the emblem of the Third Reich, under which millions of Jews were exterminated? The Nazis themselves worshiped Saturn under the name of the Black Sun, and Vatican clergy aided their escape through the Red Cross after the war. Even the gold stolen from murdered Jews was funneled into Swiss banks, some of it alleged to have passed into the coffers of the Church. Is this the source of the Vatican’s legendary wealth; blood-gold filtered through empire, taken in the name of Christ but serving the adversary?

And strangely, many of those Nazis were smuggled to Argentina, a land whose national flag bears the emblem of the Sun with a face. What face is this? To those with eyes to see, it is the same face of Saturn; the masked adversary, the devourer, enthroned yet again in the symbols of nations. The same sun-disc of Baal Hammon, the same ram’s equinox of Aries, the same Saturnine Black Sun of the Reich; all recurring under different banners, yet always demanding blood.

The pattern is haunting. From the Council of Nicaea to the Gregorian reform, from the Inquisition to the Shoah, from Rome’s temple to Saturn to Argentina’s Sun emblem, the same thread runs through: Rome exalting its own Saturnine order while despising God’s covenant people, cloaking empire, violence, and idolatry in Christian language. The question remains: if the fruit is blood and lies, can the root truly be Christ? Or has Rome, by rejecting God’s moedim and enthroning the astral gods, revealed itself to still serve the adversary?

Was Christ also speaking about Rome?

John 8:44 (KJV)

“Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.”