Sacred Garden Publications

09/03/2026

✨ BEFORE YOU FEAR THE STARS, READ YOUR BIBLE.

The heavens are woven throughout scripture. Genesis 1:14 says the heavenly lights were appointed “for signs, and for seasons.” Job 38:31-32 names the Pleiades, Orion, and Mazzaroth. Matthew 2 tells of wise men who recognized a heavenly sign announcing Jesus’ birth. They followed a star.

These passages connect the heavens with earthly seasons, divine order, and sacred events. Celestial symbolism is part of the Bible itself. Studying that symbolism does not mean worshiping the stars, and recognizing its connections with astrology does not mean surrendering your life to a horoscope.

You do not have to fear a subject to respect scripture. You can study it, examine its history, and understand what its symbols meant to the people who used them. Before repeating that everything associated with the zodiac is evil, open the book and investigate the heavens it describes.

Let knowledge replace fear. 🌟 Explore the hidden language of scripture through my books and blog.

09/03/2026

I Am Light ✨

“The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light” (Matthew 6:22).

Read spiritually, the “single eye” can represent undivided awareness: seeing clearly, examining inherited beliefs, and seeking truth with an open mind. Light becomes a symbol of knowledge and enlightenment, illuminating what fear and ignorance leave hidden.

“God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). In a contemplative understanding, this light speaks to divine wisdom and an awakening consciousness. To walk in that light is to keep learning, deepen understanding, and express that awareness through compassion.

Enlightenment finds its expression in how we live. Knowledge becomes wisdom when it shapes our actions, and the light we nurture can help others see more clearly.

“Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven” (Matthew 5:16).

09/03/2026

Why Is October the Tenth Month When Its Name Means Eight?

Because people changed the calendar, and the old names survived.

October comes from the Latin octo, meaning “eight.” September comes from seven, November from nine, and December from ten. These names preserve an older Roman arrangement in which the year began in March.

The calendar on your wall carries the fingerprints of political power, religious authority, and centuries of revision.

Roman tradition credits King Numa Pompilius with adding January and February to an earlier ten-month calendar, although the earliest history comes through later accounts. A firmer historical milestone came in 153 BCE, when Roman consuls began taking office on January 1. Government business helped establish the January-first civil year.

Even the names became monuments to power. Quintilis, originally the fifth month, was renamed July in honor of Julius Caesar. Sextilis, originally the sixth, became August in honor of Augustus. Every time you name those months, you repeat the honors given to Roman rulers.

Caesar’s calendar reform took effect in 45 BCE, establishing a solar calendar with a regular leap-year system. Its calculation was slightly too long, allowing calendar dates to drift gradually against the seasons.

In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII introduced another reform. The first adopting countries went from October 4 directly to October 15, skipping ten calendar dates to correct the accumulated drift. The reform also changed the leap-year rules. Keeping the calculation of Easter aligned with the intended seasonal framework was a central concern.

Think about that: rulers and religious authorities changed month names, regulated the year, and directed communities to skip dates. These were deliberate decisions about how society would organize time.

Other societies organized it differently. Some Anishinaabe teachings connect turtle-shell patterns with thirteen moons. The Maya developed interlocking sacred and solar calendars. Different systems emphasized different relationships among ceremony, community, and the natural world.

Nature supplies the cycles. People decide how to count and name them. The lunar phase cycle averages about 29.5 days, and it does not divide evenly into the solar year. Every calendar must make choices about how to reconcile those rhythms.

Our calendar was constructed, revised, renamed, and enforced through institutions with the authority to make their decisions stick.

The same scrutiny belongs to the Bible: human hands copied its manuscripts, selected its books, and translated its words, shaping what later generations received as sacred authority.

October still means eight. Its place as month ten is a reminder that what we inherit as normal has been shaped by human hands.

09/03/2026

Written Decades Later. Declared Infallible. Where Is the Proof?

A historical Jesus and an infallible Bible are two different claims. Evidence for one does not establish the other.

No surviving Roman trial record documents Jesus’s proceedings before Pilate. No known contemporary Roman report independently verifies his miracles or resurrection. Rome’s surviving records are incomplete, so that absence does not prove Jesus never existed. But missing records cannot verify supernatural claims either.

“But Josephus! Tacitus!”

Those historians matter. They provide evidence historians assess when studying Jesus and early Christianity. But they wrote after his lifetime. Tacitus mentions his ex*****on under Pontius Pilate. That is not an eyewitness account of a resurrection, and it does not authenticate every Gospel story. Josephus’s longer passage about Jesus also contains wording widely recognized as Christian alteration, although scholars debate how much of the passage is original. Historical sources

The Gospels were written decades after the events they describe. Their authorship is disputed, and their narratives reflect the selection, arrangement, and interpretation of traditions about Jesus. We do not possess recordings against which we can check his exact words. Calling a passage “the words of Jesus” does not independently establish that every sentence reproduces what he said. Gospel authorship

Paul’s letters are earlier. He reports knowing Peter and James and passes on resurrection beliefs. That is significant evidence about the early movement. But evidence that people believed Jesus rose is not automatically proof that a supernatural resurrection occurred.

This is where the argument keeps changing. Ask for proof of miracles, and someone offers evidence that Jesus existed. Ask why every biblical statement must be error-free, and someone quotes the Bible declaring scripture inspired.

Neither response establishes the claim being challenged.

A real person can become the subject of embellished stories. Sincere believers can be mistaken. An ancient text can preserve historical information without being infallible.

If another religion offered later sacred narratives and devoted followers as proof of its miracles, would you accept that? Then apply the same standard to your own.

You may believe the Gospels are divinely inspired. But that belief is not an independently demonstrated historical conclusion.

The evidence supports studying these writings as human documents. Declaring every word the perfect expression of God requires an additional argument. The texts’ existence, age, and influence do not supply it.

Faith is not the same thing as proof. Calling the Bible infallible does not make it so.

09/03/2026

Ten Plagues. Ancient Parallels. Where Is the Evidence?

A river turned to blood. Frogs, lice, flies, livestock disease, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and the death of the firstborn. Then an army destroyed at sea and an enormous population wandering the wilderness for forty years.

These are extraordinary claims about an actual civilization. Where is the independent confirmation?

No known contemporary Egyptian record confirms the biblical sequence of ten plagues. No verified archaeological finding establishes that the Nile literally became blood, that Egypt’s firstborn died together in one night, or that Pharaoh’s army was destroyed in a miraculously divided sea.

Tel Aviv University archaeologist Ze’ev Herzog addressed this problem in his 1999 essay “Deconstructing the Walls of Jericho.” He wrote that surviving Egyptian documents “make no mention of the Israelites’ presence in Egypt and are also silent about the events of the Exodus.” He also challenged the archaeological basis of the wilderness narrative. Herzog’s essay

What we do find are literary parallels.

The Egyptian Admonitions of Ipuwer describes a society in catastrophe and includes the image of a river becoming blood. Scholar Gary Rendsburg argues that Exodus draws on this older Egyptian literary image. He explicitly distinguishes that parallel from evidence confirming the biblical plague. A similar story is not an independent record of the same event. Rendsburg’s analysis

Moses’s infancy also resembles the birth legend of Sargon: a mother places her baby in a waterproofed basket in a river, someone rescues and raises him, and the child becomes a powerful leader. Sargon lived long before the period traditionally assigned to Moses, although the surviving birth-legend manuscripts are much later than Sargon himself. The literary relationship is debated, but the resemblance deserves examination. Moses and Sargon

The divine victory at the sea also belongs to a wider ancient world of stories about gods overcoming the sea and watery chaos. Scholars identify that mythological imagery in biblical depictions of the Exodus. The sea myth and Exodus

These parallels do not establish that the entire Exodus was copied from one earlier story. They show why we must examine its literary construction instead of treating every scene as an eyewitness report.

Dead fish would not prove that a river became blood. An ancient epidemic would not prove the selective death of the firstborn. Locusts, disease, and darkness would not establish ten divinely commanded plagues occurring in the biblical sequence.

The specific claims require specific evidence.

“The records were lost” does not supply them. “Egypt covered it up” does not demonstrate a cover-up. “You have to believe” asks for faith, not historical verification.

If another religion told you these stories, would you demand evidence? Then apply the same standard to your own.

The ten plagues remain an unverified religious narrative. Their familiarity does not make them established history.

🌱 Question what you inherited. Explore the history and hidden meanings of scripture with me in the Garden.

09/03/2026

Before You Mock Joseph Smith, Explain Your Own Bible.

Some Christians ridicule Joseph Smith for introducing another book of scripture, then act as though their own Bible arrived with its table of contents signed by God.

“He added to God’s Word!”

Then explain why you accept a New Testament alongside the Jewish scriptures. Calling one addition divine and another fraudulent does not settle the question. What evidence makes yours different?

The Bible you carry took shape through human hands. People wrote its texts, copied manuscripts, gathered collections, and argued over which writings should carry divine authority. Christian communities circulated gospels and letters long before they agreed on a complete New Testament. Church leaders inherited those traditions, defended certain books, disputed others, and established boundaries around acceptable scripture.

In 367, Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, listed the same 27 books found in today’s New Testament. He declared them sources of salvation and warned against adding or subtracting. He also distinguished between other books suitable for instruction and writings he condemned as inventions of heretics.

Read that again: a church leader identified which books people should receive as divine and which they should reject.

That letter did not settle everything everywhere. Different churches continued to disagree, and Christian Bibles still differ in which books they include. The collection became established through generations of religious practice, debate, and institutional decisions.

You do not have to accept the Book of Mormon to confront the question. Christianity accepts additional scriptures that Judaism does not recognize as scripture. Why is accepting later revelation evidence of deception when someone else does it, but evidence of faith when you do?

Who gets to decide when God has finished speaking? What makes their judgment binding on everyone else? Would you accept the same reasoning from a religion you were taught to reject?

If your answer is “the Bible says so,” you still have to explain why those particular writings belong in the Bible. Quoting the collection does not independently establish the authority of the decisions that defined it.

Joseph Smith and the early church are different historical stories. But mocking someone else’s claim to revelation while refusing to examine your own is a double standard.

Your certainty is not evidence. Neither is theirs.

Before you laugh at someone else’s scripture, investigate how yours became scripture.

09/02/2026

What if the deeper meaning of the Last Supper reaches beyond the table and into the heavens?

This painting captivates me. In Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, twelve apostles surround Jesus in four groups of three. Read through an astrological lens, the twelve can represent the signs of the zodiac, the four groups can evoke the seasons, and Jesus at the center can symbolize the sun. This is a symbolic interpretation, rather than a documented explanation from Leonardo, but it opens a fascinating path of exploration.

Through that lens, the story becomes a meditation on light, darkness, betrayal, and renewal. The sun’s yearly journey offers a powerful image of apparent decline followed by returning light. At the winter solstice, daylight begins its gradual increase in the Northern Hemisphere. That turning point can serve as a metaphor for death and rebirth, for the light that seems lost but begins to rise again.

The Gospel accounts place the Last Supper around Passover, and the twelve apostles also connect to the twelve tribes of Israel. Those connections give us a foundation from which to explore additional layers of meaning. A symbolic parallel can deepen our understanding without proving where a story originated.

The question is what these stories awaken within us. What happens when we examine the bread, the wine, the darkness, and the returning light as symbols? What might they reveal about transformation, consciousness, and the cycles we experience in our own lives?

Scripture itself invites us to search: “It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter” (Proverbs 25:2). That invitation leaves room for questions, exploration, and meanings that unfold beneath the surface.

✨ Step into Sacred Garden Publications. Explore my books and blog as we investigate biblical symbolism, ancient traditions, and the deeper questions these stories raise.

09/02/2026