There is a teaching, old and persistent, that says the entire drama of Christ was never meant to be read as history alone. It was meant to be read in the body. In this view the word *Christos* — Greek for "the anointed one" — points to an anointing oil, and the cathedral it moves through is you: your spine, your brain, your nervous system. This is the astrotheological reading of scripture, and whatever you make of it, its central instruction is one worth hearing clearly: conserve your energy, and learn to raise it.
Let us be honest from the start. What follows is an interpretive tradition, not a finding of anatomy or chemistry. The structures named below are real. The meanings layered onto them are a way of reading, carried down through Gnostic, Hermetic and esoteric Christian lines. Hold the two apart, and the teaching becomes useful rather than merely strange.
Christos Means "Anointed"
The plain fact is linguistic. *Christos* translates the Hebrew *Mashiach*, "messiah" — both meaning "anointed with oil." To be the Christ is, by the word's own root, to be the one covered in oil.
In the symbolic reading, this oil is not poured from a flask onto a king's head. It is something the body itself produces — a fine secretion, sometimes called the "sacred oil" or "chrism," said to be generated in the brain and to descend through the spinal column. The anointed one, then, is not a single man two thousand years ago. It is a *process* available to anyone who learns to let the oil rise rather than burn it off.
This is the move that defines the whole tradition: it takes an outer story and turns it inward.
The Spine as the River Jordan
Once you read the body as the setting, the geography of the gospels starts to map onto your own frame:
- The spine, carrying its current upward, becomes the River Jordan — the river you must cross, the water in which you are baptised.
- The 33 vertebrae of the human spinal column are matched to the 33 years of Christ's life. Each vertebra, in this reading, is a step on the climb.
- The pineal gland and pituitary gland, the two small structures deep in the brain, are cast as the two pillars, or as the meeting place where the ascending energy is "crowned." Some call this region Golgotha, "the place of the skull."
- The journey from the sacrum — a bone whose name literally means "sacred" — up to the skull becomes the path of the soul.
> The crucifixion, in this teaching, is not an execution. It is the moment energy reaches the top, crosses, and transforms. The cross is your own crossing point.
None of this is anatomy. The pineal gland regulates melatonin; the sacrum is named "sacred" for reasons historians still debate. But as a *map for attention* — a way of locating where your energy sits and where it could go — the symbolism does real work.
Born Again, From the Inside
The phrase "you must be born again" lands very differently in this frame. It is not about a single declaration of belief. It is about a second birth that happens *within* the body when the energy that usually drains outward is instead conserved, refined and lifted.
The "born again" person, on this reading, is someone who has stopped leaking their life-force and started circulating it. The oil that normally descends and dissipates is, with discipline, preserved and allowed to ascend. This is the inner resurrection — not a one-time event but a practice repeated, like the sun returning each morning.
You can see why the astrotheological tradition ties Christ to the sun. The "death" of the light at midwinter and its "rebirth" three days after the solstice is the same pattern written across the sky: descent, stillness, ascent. The body, the scripture and the heavens are read as one story told three ways.
The Real Discipline
Strip away the symbolism and a hard, practical core remains, and this is the part worth keeping no matter what you believe about the rest:
- Conserve. Most people spend their vital energy almost as fast as they make it — through stimulation, distraction, indulgence, and the slow leak of attention given to everything and nothing. The first discipline is simply to stop wasting it.
- Refine. Energy that is held does not just sit there. Through breath, stillness, attention and restraint, it changes quality. The "oil" is energy that has been allowed to settle and clarify.
- Raise. What is conserved and refined can then be directed upward — toward focus, creative work, clarity of mind, and the felt sense of being more awake in your own life.
This is the empowering centre of the whole teaching. Whether or not there is a literal chrism descending your spine, the instruction holds: the people who do anything remarkable are the ones who stop spilling their energy and learn to point it somewhere. The anointing was never something done to you by a priest. It is something you do, daily, by how you spend your attention and your force.
The astrotheologians read the gospels and saw a manual hidden inside a story. You do not have to accept their every claim to take the manual seriously. Conserve your energy. Raise it. Let the inner sun come back up. That is the discipline beneath the symbol — and it asks nothing of your beliefs, only of your practice.
