431 - Joshua Sturgill & Dcn Seraphim Rohlin - The Art of Imitating Heaven: Structure and Meaning in Ancient Cosmology
The Symbolic World
Jonathan Pageau
4.8 • 933 Ratings
🗓️ 20 January 2026
⏱️ 69 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today's podcast is a bit different. Deacon Seraphim Rohlin is here to introduce you to our new Symbolic World Course presenter, Joshua Sturgill. Together they discuss ancient cosmology, symbolism, and the meaning, power, and dangers of observing the night sky. They discuss pagan views on this, Biblical astronomy, the reservations of the church fathers, and modernity's determinism on the one hand, and confusion on the other hand. I hope you enjoy this conversation and will join us for Joshua's course.
YouTube version: https://youtu.be/fQY6AyE1n1c
NEW COURSE: The Art of Imitating Heaven: Structure and Meaning in Ancient Cosmology By Joshua Sturgill
What is heaven? Where is it? For ancient people, the answer was obvious: simply look up at the night sky. For them, to see the stars and planets was to see the face of the divine. Christianity, too, understood the visible sky as the realm of unfallen creation. What does this belief mean, and why was it lost?
🗓 Live classes are on Sundays at 5-6:30pm Eastern Time, starting February 1st through March 8th, 2026.
💰 Price: $150 USD
⏰🐥 DON'T MISS OUT! UNTIL FEBRUARY 1ST YOU CAN GET THE EARLY BIRD SPECIAL OF 15% OFF! Discount automatically applied at checkout.
Register now: https://www.thesymbolicworld.com/courses/the-art-of-imitating-heaven
Timestamps:
00:00 - Coming up
01:00 - Intro music
01:24 - Introduction
04:15 - Recover cosmology
08:32 - Symbolism and cosmology
12:43 - The Greeks: Pythagoras and Plato
14:39 - Other traditions
16:07 - Criticisms against astronomy
21:28 - How astrology worked
25:24 - A concrete example
26:57 - What does spring mean?
30:47 - Christmas
33:43 - The Orthodox position
37:22 - Governed by natural laws
45:55 - For the ancients
59:30 - Architectural astronomy
01:01:43 - Technology and teaching
01:05:41 - Course info
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My intro was arranged and recorded by Matthew Wilkinson: https://matthewwilkinson.net/
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | all throughout ancient literature, whether it's Greek, Hebrew, wherever, there's a constant |
| 0:07.8 | reiteration that the inner life of man and the exterior appearance or world of the stars and |
| 0:18.0 | planets are connected to each other, like the hourglass, and we're |
| 0:23.2 | kind of at the center, and then there's this interior life that we have that echoes the movements |
| 0:28.6 | of the stars. And all of these ancient sources say, if you want to order your inner life, |
| 0:36.3 | your mental, emotional, even the deepest, most spiritual |
| 0:40.3 | and intangible parts of yourself, |
| 0:42.3 | if you want to order those, |
| 0:44.3 | you have to be observing the movements of the heavens. |
| 0:48.3 | Yeah. |
| 0:49.3 | Because this interior part of me |
| 0:51.3 | is modeled on this exterior part of me. |
| 0:55.0 | And as a human being, I'm joining all of these things together. |
| 0:59.0 | This is Jonathan Pejot. Welcome to the symbolic world. |
| 1:13.8 | Hello, everyone. Hello, everyone. This is Deacon Serafam, Roland, and I'm here with Joshua Sturchill. |
| 1:30.1 | And we're not in a studio. We're sitting outside under the heavens. |
| 1:35.6 | I actually hate sitting inside if sitting outside is an option, Josh. And so very often I just work out here when the weather is good. |
| 1:43.0 | You know, just take my laptop out here |
| 1:44.6 | and sit behind the yield barn of podcasting and, um, and, uh, do some work. So Josh is a bookseller, |
| 1:54.5 | world traveler, poet. Um, and also you teach at a, at, uh, your local, is it an Orthodox school? |
| 2:01.4 | No, I teach at two small private classical schools in Wichita. |
| 2:06.3 | Neither of them are Orthodox, but I'm kind of infiltrating. |
... |
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