Daniel 1

       3 "And the king spake unto Ashpenaz the master of his eunuchs, that he should bring certain of the children of Israel, and of the king's seed, and of the princes;

      4 Children in whom was no blemish, but well favoured, and skilful in all wisdom, and cunning in knowledge, and understanding science, and such as had ability in them to stand in the king's palace, and whom they might teach the learning and the tongue of the Chaldeans."

      20 "And in all matters of wisdom and understanding, that the king enquired of them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and astrologers that were in his realm."

      2 "Then the king commanded to call the magicians, and the astrologers, and the sorcerers, and the Chaldeans, for to shew the king his dreams.  So they came and stood before the king."

      10 "The Chaldeans answered before the king, and said, There is not a man upon the earth that can shew the king's matter: therefore there is no king, lord, nor ruler, that asked such things at any magician, or astrologer, or Chaldean."

      48 "Then the king made Daniel a great man, and gave him many gifts, and made him ruler over the whole province of Babylon, and chief of the governors over all the wise men of Babylon."

      5 "In the same hour came forth fingers of a man's hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaister of the wall of the king's palace: and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote. 6 Then the king's countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote one against another."

       7 "The king cried aloud to bring in the astrologers, the Chaldeans, and the soothsayers."

       10 'Now the queen by reason of the words of the king and his lords came into the banquet house: and the queen spake ad said, O king, live for ever: let not thy thoughts trouble thee, nor let thy countenance be changed: 11 There is a man in thy kingdom, in whom is the spirit of the holy gods; and in the days of thy father light and understanding and wisdom, like the wisdom of the gods, was found in him; whom the king Nebuchadnezzar thy father, made master of the magicians, astrologers, Chaldeans, and soothsayers; --"

      28 "So this Daniel prospered in the reign of Darias, and in the reign of Cyrus the Persian."

       It is not until Daniel chapter 7 that Daniel demonstrates his great ability as an Astrologer, and later Bible editors have disguised that these are, in reality, constellations of the stars that Daniel is seeing in his supposed dream, and that the "sea" in this "dream" is really the night sky.   This is obvious, of course, to any real astrologer, ancient or modern, but is quite invisible to modern Christian Bible readers, trained by their teachers and ministers to ignore astrology, and consider such things to be tools of the Devil.

      A great amount of regulations, laws, and opinions has accumulated over the centuries before the Biblical canon was closed to further additions, and various Biblical authors of high prestige and authority credited with this mass of extraneous material, much of which they never saw or read, never mind wrote.   Modern scholarship has separated a lot of this "stuff" credited to "Moses" and scholars have labeled some of these other authors by the letters "j", "e", "d", "p", and "r", but as yet the additions made to other "prophets" such as Isaiah and Daniel have not been analyzed to the same extent as the works of "Moses".

      For my readers here who are looking for the small "Astrology Book" composed by the original "Daniel" of Babylon, you will find it mostly hidden in Daniel chapter 7, quite disguised by later Bible "regulators of thought" who wished to make Astrology anathema. (forbidden knowledge, heresy).

     ALL OF THE "BEASTS" OF DANIEL SEVEN ARE CONSTELLATIONS. HOWEVER, SOME ARE NOT ZODIAC CONSTELLATIONS, AND THEY ARE NOT IN THE USUAL ZODIAC REPRESENTATION OF THE ORDER OF THE AGES.

    This is Daniel's great contribution to the "Art of Astrology" and why he was honored in Babylon and Persia above all his contemporary Astrologers, Magicians, and Dream-interpreters.

    In the Book of Daniel, as it has been later edited and changed, the great metal image of chapter 2, the supposed dream of Nebuchadnezzar, precedes the line-up of "beasts out of the sea" of chapter 7, but it is my proposal here that originally the astrology, the line-up of the "beasts out of sea", preceded the metal image, whose sequence most likely is derived from the constellations, which can be demonstrated to be in the same order today.   Constellations change very slowly, being composed of stars many millions of miles apart in the night sky. And stars stay in the sky with about their same brightness almost forever.  So I will be able to show you today what Daniel "the ASTROLOGER" saw 2612 years ago (more or less).

       Daniel starts his "dream" with a LION for several very good reasons.   One being that there were colored and rock-carved murals of lions (and dragons) all over Babylon in the days of Daniel.   The other is that LEO the Lion is a Zodiac constellation. And the Zodiac is the mainstay of Astrology as usually practiced. If you or I went to sleep in ancient Babylon we would probably dream of lions also.   If not every night, at least occasionally.

      Daniel 7:2 "Daniel spake and said, I saw in my vision by night, and, behold, the four winds of the heaven strove upon the great sea.  3 And four great beasts came up from the sea, diverse one from another."

      4 The first was like a lion, and had eagle's wings: ---"

Such winged lions were also a frequently used theme on Babylon's walls and also in her statues and sculptures.

     4b "I beheld till the wings thereof were plucked, and it was lifted up from the earth, and made stand upon the feet as a man, and a man's heart was given to it."

         The above sculpture is typical of many such carvings and pictures found by archaeologists in the ruins of ancient Babylon.  It's difficult to identify this as a lion also unless you look at the feet that are definitely lions' claws.  But the head and face is that of a man, a man with wings!  Obviously Daniel 7:4b is also something that Daniel would be seeing somewhere in the ancient city of Babylon repeatedly, and to dream about it would not be unusual at all.

      Daniel 7:5 "And behold another beast, a second, like to a bear, and it raised up itself on one side, and it had three ribs in the mouth of it between the teeth of it: and they said thus unto it, Arise, devour much flesh."

     Now if there are any sculptures or pictures of bears in Babylon they are a lot less common than those of lions, but live bears are more common in Persia because Persia is more mountainous and wooded.   But all Daniel needed to do to see a lion-bear sequence was to look up into the night sky where Leo the Lion of the Zodiac is next to not one but two bears, Ursa major the "BIG BEAR" and Ursa minor the "LITTLE BEAR."

    When I was a teenager in Maine, I belonged for a while to the Boy Scouts of America, and we were taught to look for Polaris, the "North Star" at night by looking for the "Big Dipper" and sighting along the two bright stars at the far end of the dipper to find the very bright "North Star" at the end of the handle of the "Little Dipper".    But we also knew that the "Big Dipper" was the constellation Ursa major, the "Big Bear" and the "Little Dipper" was Ursa Minor, the "Little Bear".    Having located the "North Star" we could look at our map with our flashlight or a lit match and hopefully find our trail without a compass. 

        Another picture of the "Little Bear" or Ursa Minor.   The "Little Dipper" is the four stars that make up the tail, plus the three more stars that form almost a square in the bear's rump area.  The "North Star" is at the tip of the bear's tail.   Now if a group of boy scouts in Maine can find these things, and we did rather easily, then a Jewish "Astrologer" in Babylon, whose prestige and power depended on such knowledge, most certainly knew what we easily learned, usually in one evening, in Maine.

       Either Daniel, or his later "editors" used a bit more imagination, and converted the two bears into one bear that raised up with one side higher than the other, and also imagined he had three ribs in it's mouth.    So now we're ready to see what's next if we head in the same direction across the night sky past the two bears, and soon we're in the constellation Pegasus, the flying horse.

     Note the 4 very bright stars in an almost perfect square that make up the body of the horse under the wing.  One is at the base of the neck, one at the base of the horse's left leg here nearest to us, and the other two back towards where the horse's tail will be forming the side of a square box.   These 4 stars, which are very important to recognizing the constellation Pegasus the flying horse are also very important to realizing why either Daniel or some later observer of the night sky was able to see, not a horse with two wings, but a leopard with 4 heads and 4 wings! 

       Here's the entire imaginary picture of the flying horse named Pegasus, which was, I believe what Daniel described originally, not a leopard, because Alexander loved his horse, named Bucephalus, and some say this horse was originally divine, belonging to Poseidon .   In the story of Josephus regarding the high priest showing a copy of "Daniel" to Alexander, he was able to convince Alexander that he, Alexander, would overcome the Persian Darius, and this "flying horse" would be much more convincing to the horse-loving Alexander than any four-headed leopard.

Alexander the Great of Macedonia and

his horse Bucephalus

    The 4 heads and 4 wings of the third beast that came out of the sea in Daniel's night vision only become important at the death of Alexander when his empire was divided up into 4 sections, Egypt, Syria, Thrace, and Macedonia, in another vision in Daniel 8 seen as one horn dividing into 4 horns.   Neither of these were in the description of Daniel's visions and dreams shown to Alexander by the Jewish high priest according to my own assessment of what really occurred.  If indeed Daniel saw such a leopard, it does not seem to have survived on the astrology and astronomy charts and so I'm willing to say some severe editing was done not on the charts but in the accounts of Daniel's visions.   With a third beast that now looks like this.

     Having begun his night vision with a Zodiac constellation, that of Leo the Lion, Daniel can be expected to end it with a Zodiac constellation.   And living, as he was, in the Age of Aries the Ram he knew that the next Age would be that of Pisces, the Fishes.  But to say that he saw two fishes in the great sea would have made him the laughing-stock of readers both then and now, so he chose to describe a non-Zodiac constellation in the same area of the sky as Pisces, the constellation named Cetus.   Sometimes called "the Whale", and sometimes " the sea-monster", Cetus is pictured thus on sky-charts.

       This appears to be an imaginary creature made up of the parts of various other creatures but may have been inspired by real Narwhales that look like this.

     Narwhales do have, in real life, one very large horn in the middle of their foreheads with which they can sink a small boat, or fight other Narwhales.    Now for Daniel's description of the fourth beast he saw coming up out of the "great sea".

     Daniel 7:7 "After this I saw in the night visions, (note that this is plural, indicating this might be a composite of many visions, many dreams), and behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth: it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it: and it was diverse from all the beasts that were before it; and it had ten horns.  8 I considered the horns, and, behold, there came up among them another little horn (like that of the Cetus imaginary sea monster I showed first), before whom there were three of the first horns plucked up by the roots; and behold, in this horn were eyes like the eyes of a man, and a mouth speaking great things."

    As finally edited, we're not looking at a constellation, but something no one has ever seen, but have imagined to look like this.

      And Protestant religious artists have imagined the "little horn" to look like this, with the "little horn" wearing a papal hat.

      But it's fully possible, at least in my opinion, that the real Daniel, as a real astrologer in king Nebuchadnezzar's court, thought up a very original way to avoid the 2000+ year time lapse between ordinary "Astrological Age" predictions by taking a short-cut across the night sky.   Beginning with Leo the Lion, he first encountered the two bears, then the flying horse, and finally the sea-monster with that pitiful "little horn", or was it a Narwhale with a single long horn capable of sinking a boat?   Anyway, such a vision would have set him apart and made him different from other astrologers then and now.   And with some creative editing his "little book" became a much larger book, a book that is still stirring up the imaginations of would-be prophets 2612 years later.