The Emperor Julian & Alternate Realities

The Emperor Julian & Space Time

Because the geometry of space time depends on the distribution of matter, any rearrangement of matter must result in an alteration of space time.

from a description of the Theory of Relativity (from Abell, G.O., Morrison,D.,Exploration of the Universe (New York: Saunders College Publishing, 1987, pp.219-220

We now are going to focus our attention upon the end of the Neptune/Pluto cycle that began in 82 B.C. and ended in 411-412 A.D. The Roman Empire has lasted intact for centuries, but its arts and learning have decayed. Its army possesses nowhere near the skill it had at the beginning of this cycle. Western Rome is an old and weak civilization, dying from within, and besieged from the outside by barbarians—the Franks and Germans in the north, and in the east, by the Persians. Already more than a century earlier a huge barbarian horde had cut a swathe through Greece, Italy and parts of North Africa, and had only with difficulty been driven out.

This is the end of an age

from WikiPedia
Flavius Claudius Julianus, born in May or June 332 or 331 in Constantinople, was the son of Julius Constantius (consul in 335), half brother of Emperor Constantine I, and his second wife, Basilina, a woman of Greek origin.  Both were Christians. His paternal grandparents were Western Roman Emperor Constantius Chlorus and his second wife, Flavia Maximiana Theodora. His maternal grandfather was Julius Julianus, praetorian prefect of the East under emperor Licinius from 315 to 324 and consul after 325. The name of Julian’s maternal grandmother is unknown.

Julian became Emperor of the whole of the Roman Empire on November the third, 361 A.D., some fifty years before the conjunction of Pluto and Neptune became exact.

Rome, as political entity and empire, had lasted for more than two Neptune Pluto cycles. For more than five hundred years, it had dominated the Mediterranean, parts of Asia and Europe and North Africa, an area larger than any nation today. It had achieved a high level of civilization.

The army in the fourth century A.D. was extremely weak. The emperor of that era, one of Constantine’s nephews, Constantius, was afraid to trust his generals. It had been more than a century since a great general was, like a Grant or a Wellington, a trusted, honored servant of the state. To win a series of battles, to pacify a barbarian horde on the frontier, was almost certain to arouse the suspicion of the emperor and the court that surrounded him. Anyone who led a victorious army was not to be trusted. And many of the best were put to death.

Julian, “born in May or June 332 or 331 in Constantinople” was six years old when his uncle, Constantine the Great, died. Constantine had governed for thirty years, a complete Saturn cycle. The vacuum that followed the death of Constantine created a major power struggle between family members. One night Julian looked on as his most of his family were massacred. He was too small to be killed, and was placed with various Christian bishops to be raised and educated. Later he was moved to an ancient castle in the province of Cappodacia where he was steeped even further in Christian teachings.

This is probably why his birth data was lost. When the rest of his family was murdered, they probably did not think him important enough to bother with, and was placed in a monastery possibly to become a monk. All the data, all the records of his family were possibly destroyed at the time of their massacre. Also it is possible that Julian destroyed this data himself, on considerations of privacy, as he was as much a magician-astrologer-philosopher as he was a warrior and emperor. Reading just a few of his writings makes that immediately apparent.

Speculative chart for Emperor Julian

Anyway, I have included a totally speculative chart for those who desire to know what was going on in the sky around then. It is quite likely that he carried a Uranus Pluto synod opposed by Saturn

The family power struggle devolved to his uncle Constantius, who then became emperor. Constantius was a fearful man, prone to listen to the intrigues and bad advice of his courtiers. The Empire was poisoned by a huge network of informers, who all reported to Constantius. The merest scent of rumor, gossip, or hearsay was enough to ruin a person’s career, shatter his family, end his life. The slightest hint of real ability, like the ability to lead an army, or to govern a province well, led to jealousy in the Imperial court. The emperor’s mind would be turned against any individual who exhibited superiority. Often that person would receive an order from the court to commit suicide. Courtiers, eunuchs (a recently introduced practice in the custom of the court) and corrupt provincial officials governed the Empire. Things were falling apart at the center.

Julian had an older half brother, Gallus, who had also watched the massacre of his family. This event made Gallus remorseful, bitter and cruel. Gallus had never been educated or trained to rule (those in power made sure that was how he raised as a child). He was so weak that the emperor felt he could place Gallus in a high position of trust, knowing he could always get rid of such a weak person.

The emperor set Gallus in charge of the Eastern Empire. Constantius then marched off with his army to fight a usurper at in the Western Empire. After a number of Gallus’ minor rebellions and resistances to the commands of the emperor, Constantius felt it was time to remove his nephew, and Gallus was enticed away from the safety of the Eastern Empire by one of the emperor’s chief agents, Barbatio, and was executed, at age 29, during his Saturn return (354 A.D.).

The atmosphere was so fearful at court that Julian never knew if he was going to live out the day. In response, he chose to spend his hours in the study and contemplation of the great works of antiquity, especially concentrating on the Greek philosophers like Plato, Aristotle and Socrates. As a young man, he was perceived at court as a harmless student. The court joked that he was the one who preferred the groves of the Academy of Plato in Athens to the corridors of power in the palace at Constantinople. Constantius was persuaded by his wife, who he loved deeply, and who had a certain influence with him at court, that he should raise his kinsman to the rank of Caesar. (By the fourth century A.D., the title Caesar meant that its bearer was an assistant emperor. The emperor was called Augustus).

He was just a harmless student.

Julian was appointed Caesar by the Emperor Constantius and was sent to the province of Gaul (modern France) in an attempt to improve the situation there. This ancient Roman province had been overrun by a barbarian tribe called the Alamanni; cities were emptied; farms were abandoned; people were scalped; women were absorbed into the tribe and made to bear children. The whole land was slipping into a dark ages.

Julian was a student of the ancient philosophy of Roman virtue. In this practice, the ruler first had to be able to govern himself. Then, following this principle, his rule might be stern, but it must be just. Wealth and pleasure, bribery and corruption, were frowned upon by the Roman who practiced virtu. Its ideal had to do with the right exercise of power for the public good, either in war or in the peacetime administration of state.

Like his ancient Roman ancestors, Julian discovered that he had a gift for war. Like any competent general practicing the ancient Roman virtu, Julian shared his army’s fatigues and hardships. If his army was in danger, he did not expect his soldiers to die while he remained safely behind a phalanx of his own imperial guard. He placed himself squarely in the midst of the fighting. He ate the same coarse food as the lowest ranked soldier; he slept on the ground with one blanket. Wherever his army marched, one never saw this Caesar carried on a palanquin. He marched right along in the ranks with his soldiers.

He was successful in his fights against the barbarian armies. This general, though not yet thirty years old, did not order his army about impetuously. He could move it swiftly but only when necessary. For the first time in many decades a Roman general was destroying barbarian armies everywhere he fought. He restored peace to an enormous province.

Battles were seldom fought in winter. During winter, Julian lodged in winter quarters at Lutetia (Paris), where he showed himself to be an excellent provincial administrator. In peace as in war, following the practice of virtu, he trained himself to be ethical, just, and honest in all matters.

Corrupt administrators throughout the province had been appointed by the emperor, and their authority was often independent of his own. Their practices involved self-aggrandizement, greed and corruption. The young Julian strove to alleviate the population of the worst of these burdens.

The province and the army that he commanded grew to love him. He became a hero of the Empire.

His uncle, Constantius, as we have said, was a timid and weak ruler, made cruel from his fears. He grew distrustful of Julian. Taking counsel of the poisonous advice of his courtiers, he sent imperial deputation to Gaul. Its purpose was the same that had earlier gone out for Julian’s brother, Gallus: namely, to remove a royal relative, a possible rival, threatening to the emperor.

The deputation ordered the Gallic army, all the legions of Julian, to travel far to the East to assist the emperor in the war against the Persians. This plan angered the army in Gaul. These orders from a distant Constantinople broke the agreement with the barbarian soldiers who served in the Roman legions protecting France. The army’s terms of enlistment had promised that the barbarians would not be forced to leave their home in Europe.

Once Julian had been stripped of his army, the deputation had secret orders that he was to be taken in chains to Constantinople, tortured, tried and executed. The Imperial Court in Constantinople did not realize that every soldier and civilian in Gaul was suspicious of an attempt to kill Julian and destroy his reforms. People knew that once the army was removed from the European province, the barbarian invaders would return. All the provincial reforms that Julian had enacted were sure to be lost.

Julian himself, feeling it was more virtuous to obey than not, chose to follow the orders of his uncle’s emissaries. He suggested to them that the army in its departure not march through Paris.

The imperial deputation chose to ignore this advice, and the army was ordered to march through the city. In the middle of the city, it halted, and in revolt declared Julian now to be Augustus, or Emperor. For Julian there was no turning back: Once declared Augustus by an army, that’s what he was. A new civil war ensued.

The question could now only be decided on the battlefield. It is difficult to say how that war would have ended. He was by far the best general in the Empire, with the hardiest, most battle-tested army. And he was extremely popular with the people. But his uncle had the vastly larger army.

Suddenly Constantius died. This resolved the question without one battle. No one challenged Julian’s ascension as emperor of all the Romans. Julian came into power three days before his thirtieth birthday. He immediately began to apply virtu to the administration of the Empire. The palace rooms at Constantinople, with its eunuchs and courtiers, its barbers dressed like generals, its thousands of hangers-on, were emptied. The palace became a wasteland of unoccupied rooms.

Competent generals were placed in command of the legions that guarded the frontiers. Corrupt administrators of provinces were removed from office and some sent to trial. The administrators of the totalitarian state that employed thousands of informers on its own citizens were themselves imprisoned.

The Christian church, having over three centuries grown in power and in corruption, administered in numerous subtle ways the Empire, but not so well. It had been in charge of the education of the young. Julian stripped the Church of its educational prerogatives and powers. The churches were also informed that they would have to make restitution for any pagan temples they had destroyed. This decree was a huge burden on the Church and it was enforced by the officers of the Empire. Christian histories of Julian were never favorable to this emperor, and not very objective.

His purpose was to destroy the power of the Church over the state. After the massacre of his family, he had been trained in Christianity: Within the Church he was even a minor priest. The teachings of Christianity were by this time several centuries removed from the original mysticism of Christ: In place of the teaching that love should be the motivation of all activity and thought, the foundation of all human relationship, they  had changed into a belief in fear and dogma, hellfire, sin and the wrath of God. This seems to be the argument in some of his Orations (still extant) and other polemics against the Christianity of his time.

He served only a year and eight months as emperor. Even within that short time he must be ranked with Augustus and Trajan and Marcus Aurelius as one of the best emperors Rome ever had.

His reform of the Roman Empire was carried out wherever he traveled. He slept an average of three hours a night. In the endeavor to reorganize and improve affairs of state, he had several shifts of secretaries always on hand to take his dictation for the letters, orders, directives and mandates he constantly sent out to every sort of official, in every province in the Empire.

For all his reforms and victories, one huge obstacle remained to block the complete triumph of the Roman Empire. This was the neighboring Persian Empire. For centuries, the Persians had made attacks on the Empire’s eastern borders, sometimes devastating prosperous provinces, sometimes forcing the weakened Roman emperor to pay tribute, either in grain or gold. No emperor had dealt with this situation effectively since the reign of the Emperor Trajan. It was as serious a challenge to peace and prosperity as were the threats of barbarian invasion from the north.

Julian decided on the same solution to this intricate dilemma that had been chosen by Alexander the Great some six centuries previously. He would war against Persia and completely dismantle its empire, and he would do it with a relatively small army, about sixty thousand aggressive and highly trained soldiers.

As Ammianus—the best historian of the time—describes the military prowess of Julian:

His skill in military matters can be illustrated by many well-known facts, such as his sieges of towns and strongholds, his ability to draw up a complex line of battle even at moments of crisis, his cautious choice of safe places for a camp, and his well-thought-out arrangements for frontier posts and pickets in the open fields.

….Moreover …he kept his hold on his troops though they were without pay and at grips with savage tribes…

[From Ammianus Marcellinus, The Later Roman Empire, Walter Hamilton, trans. New York: Viking Penguin, 1998 ed.) p.297]

Julian often swore a solemn oath, “as I hope to restore the tottering Roman world.” His goal in the Persian campaign was to stabilize the Empire.

In the spring of 363 A.D. Julian left Antioch, where he had wintered, crossed the Euphrates river, and began his war on Persia. Taking his army on a forced march, Julian first gobbled up the provinces that were once a part of the ancient Assyrian Empire. After long forced marches, he would meet an army and defeat it in a day. He surrounded cities that resisted, always found ways to breach their defenses, and then sacked them. The Persian emperor began to understand what it was like to come up against the invincible might of an ancient Roman legion.

Julian besieged a major Persian metropolis, Maozamalcha, “a large city defended by strong walls”, a center of commerce and vast wealth. It was supposedly impregnable. He dug a tunnel under the city walls allowing his army to enter the city from the inside, and “thus a great and populous city was destroyed by the strength of Roman arms and reduced to dust and ruins.”

The effect of the loss of this city and others on the Persian Emperor, Sapor, was to throw him into the deepest despair.

As Gibbon relates it:

The pride of royalty was humbled in the dust; he took his repasts on the ground;and the disorder of his hair expressed the grief and anxiety of his mind. Perhaps he would not have refused to purchase, with one half of his kingdom, the safety of the remainder; and he would have gladly subscribed himself, in a treaty of peace, the faithful and dependant ally of the Roman conqueror.

[From Edward Gibbon, the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: Modern Library, 1984) Vol.1, p 821]

Sapor sent deputations to Julian seeking a treaty, and Julian’s response was the same as Alexander’s had been to the Emperor Darius—no deal.

It was only a matter of time before the armies of the Persian monarch would fall to one of the greatest generals in all of Roman history.

A few weeks later, Julian was leading his army through the desert. It was harassed by Persian cavalry, but continually defeated the Persians in pitched infantry battles, further eroding it. An aide-de-camp rode up and informed the Roman emperor that the army was being attacked at its rear. As a great general, he always placed himself at the center of action. But on that day he was not wearing his armor. In the heat of the moment he grabbed a shield from an attendant, and spurring his horse around, he rode swiftly into the maelstrom of war.

Arriving at the scene of battle, as Ammianus tells us:

The emperor flew from one danger spot to another, and our light-armed troops took the offensive, hacking at the backs and legs of the Persians and their monstrous beasts as they turned tail. Julian, throwing caution to the winds, thrust himself boldly into the fight, shouting and waving his arms to make it clear that the enemy had been routed and to encourage his men to a furious pursuit. His escort of guards, who had been scattered in the melee, were crying out to him from all sides to avoid the mass of fugitives…, when suddenly a cavalry spear, directed no one knows by whom, grazed his arm, pierced his ribs, and lodged in the lower part of his liver. He tried to pull it out with his right hand, but both sides of the spear were sharp and he felt his fingers cut to the bone. He fell from his horse…

[From Ammianus, P.292]

Julian lasted just a few hours, and died. He was thirty-two years old. Without his generalship, the Roman army was greatly weakened. The leader chosen to replace him made a bad treaty with the Persian emperor, giving up many provinces and cities, some of which had been a part of the Empire for centuries. The sadness of the loss of those cities and provinces is described in detail by Ammianus. The army returned home to a Roman Empire that was smaller and weaker than when it had departed. It would be only a few more years before the Western Empire and all its civilization would fall into a dark ages.

What if Julian had lived? What if he had worn his breastplate on that day?

If he had lived, the course of civilization might have traveled down a different timeline. Is such a thing possible?

If Julian had lived? While he was emperor, no single individual general was capable of challenging his power. He was a member of the family of Constantine the Great, a family that seemed to have a lock on the executive  power of state. His two great challenges were first against the power and encroachments of the Persian Empire; his other trial was with the Christians. Gibbon thought this conflict would have been the cause of a civil war. Possibly, and possibly not. Julian was well aware of the power that Christianity possessed within the workings of the Roman state: It had only achieved formal power during the rule of his uncle, Constantine. The Council of Nicea (325 A.D.) unified the Christian Church in a way that had never before happened. It was only 1 and a quarter Saturn cycles in the past, not quite long enough for beliefs to be deeply implanted in the mass human mind. Could Julian have reversed the control over peoples’ beliefs that Christianity was beginning to exert? If this last of the great Roman emperors had continued on subtly and slowly, employing no outright persecutions, no reigns of terror or inquisitions, he might have succeeded.

Even in his short reign of one year and eight months, he transformed the Roman Empire. What if he had lived to be seventy years old? He would then have governed for forty years. Forty years of Julian might have been the equivalent of an Augustus. He would have revived the tottering civilization of Rome. The army would have recovered its ancient inexorable strength. He deeply admired the ancient ideals of the Roman Republic; perhaps some form of government like this would have returned. In the third century A.D., there existed in the minds of humankind the concept of a one God who rules all. Perhaps that idea would have merged somehow with the ancient philosophy, with the ideals of freedom and creative self-expression that were born in ancient Greece and Republican Rome.

The timeline was flowing into the Neptune/Pluto synod. Even on the day that spear pierced Julian’s liver, its influence was beginning to be felt.

With the help of Julian, who encouraged all free expressions of the human spirit, who was the friend and benefactor of philosophers and artists and thinkers of all kinds, who had the desire to revive that millennia-old-spirit that was born at the triple conjunction, perhaps Roman civilization would have experienced a rebirth. Perhaps learning and science and the rule of law that promotes the freedom of the human spirit and the growth and unfolding of civilization could have been realized then, and today perhaps we would be traveling between the stars.

Maybe no accident exists in history; maybe the spear was directed by a force more potent than we understand today. As Nostradamus pointed out in his Quatrains, it is often on such seemingly minor events that the river of time is forced into a new course. At every synodic conjunction of Neptune Pluto, a chance exists for human civilization to develop into something higher than it has ever known before. The Emperor Julian embodied one such chance. These chances, if they are not taken, can also turn negative, and civilization enters a period of decay. We astrologers examine the timing mechanism. Whether the timing heralds decay or rebirth into something higher is a more difficult judgment.