NOVEMBER 2019 33
A
ccording to a story that lies some-
where between truth and legend,
on October 28, 312 AD (Julian
Calendar), just before an important battle
he was to fight near the Milvian Bridge
over the Tiber River in Rome, Constan-
tine the Great had a vision in which he
saw a large symbol on which was writ-
ten, “by this sign conquer.” Constantine
was victorious, and the next day he
entered Rome as the most powerful of the
Tetrachs in the system of shared power
that governed the Roman Empire at that
time. The Christian symbol (known as
the Chi Rho) soon became a fixture on
the shields of the troops he led, and not
only did that vision give him confidence
for that particular battle, but it may also
have inspired him some time afterward to
order the end of ongoing persecution of
the Christians.
Looking at the planets on the date of
Constantine’s vision (using local noon and
a 0° Aries chart), we find that the Sun is
conjunct Mercury in Scorpio. The Sun is
the astrological symbol that specifies how
we define our identity, and Mercury is the
planet that rules our minds and imagina-
tions, our thought processes, and how we
express our thoughts to others. There are
various versions of Constantine’s vision,
as well as modern scientific theories meant
to explain it away, but there is no doubt
that in Constantine’s rise to become the
ruler of the Empire, something very pow-
erful must have happened to first make
him tolerant of Christianity, then lead him
to adopt it, and finally inspire him to found
a city that became the center of the Chris-
tian world at that time.
One of the questions that people wres-
tle with in regard to such visions is just
how to tell the difference between an
actual vision, by which we mean one that
comes from some unknown and mysteri-
ous source, or what skeptics would call
a hallucination, a fiction generated from
inside a person’s own mind. As Dickens’
Ebeneezer Scrooge put it when faced
with the sight of his dead, chain-rattling
business partner Jacob Marley: “You may
be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of
mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment
of underdone potato. There’s more of
gravy than of grave about you, whatever
you are!”Astrology and Visions
Did Abraham, one of the patriarchs of
the Jewish faith, really hear the voice of
Yahweh telling him to sacrifice his son
Isaac, or did he just imagine it? Did Paul
of Tarsus truly hear and see the person
of Jesus Christ when he was on the road
to Damascus, or did he just imagine that
he did? Can astrology answer such ques-
tions? Probably not in any definitive way,
but astrology does have something to say
about such phenomena. In the chart for
Constantine’s vision, the Sun and Mercu-
ry are sextile a conjunction of Jupiter and
Saturn in Capricorn. This harmonious
aspect involving two outer planets that
are often connected with transitions of
political power tells us that astrologically
something was in the air, as does Venus
and Uranus in square to the lunar nodes.
These contacts boost confidence, at the
very least, for a man with the mission of
defeating a rival and increasing his own
power, though we can’t say more than
that, at least in terms of visions.
Constantine had been a worshiper of
the Sun, a fact which played a part in his
vision in some versions of the story, and
some historians believe he never fully