Before Mystery Babylon ever mentions the Freemasons, the Templars, or Skull and Bones, it spends its opening episodes building a single foundational claim: that the world’s religions, including Christianity, all descend from an ancient astronomical religion centered on the sun. This thesis, sometimes called astro-theology or solar mythology, is the load-bearing idea underneath everything the series argues about secret societies later on. It appears first in MB01 and returns as the explicit subject of MB16, with solar symbolism referenced throughout the episodes on Egypt, the Osirian cycle, and Masonic ritual in between. This hub traces the thesis across those episodes, names the writers Cooper leaned on, and sets the claims beside what historians of comparative religion actually say. As on every page of this site, the framing is documentary. For the full series, start with the complete episode guide.
How the Series Frames Astro-Theology
Cooper’s argument, laid out most fully in MB01: Intro to Mysteries (The Sun of God), runs as follows: early humans feared darkness and depended on the sun’s return each day and each spring, so ancient priesthoods built a religion around solar observation, personifying the sun as a dying and rising god. Egypt’s Horus, the newborn sun whose name Cooper connects to the word “horizon,” is treated as the archetype. From there, the argument extends into a set of claimed parallels between solar mythology and Christian language and imagery: the sun as “the light of the world,” a savior figure who “rises” each morning, a birth date near the winter solstice, twelve zodiac houses echoed in twelve disciples, and Easter’s springtime timing echoing the sun’s seasonal return. Cooper repeats throughout that he is reporting what he calls the Mystery Schools’ own doctrine, not endorsing it, and that in the material’s own framing no ancient people literally worshiped the physical sun disk; the sun served as a visible stand-in for an unseen creator.
Episodes Where the Thesis Appears
MB01: Intro to Mysteries (The Sun of God) (aired February 12, 1993)
The episode’s second and longest reading comes from Jordan Maxwell’s That Old-Time Religion, walking through the parallels between solar religion and Christian symbolism sign by sign: the twelve zodiac houses matched to biblical figures (Aries the lamb, Virgo the virgin, Pisces the two fishes of the current age), Horus as an infant savior predating Christianity by millennia, and the Age of Pisces giving way to the Age of Aquarius, which Cooper connects to the New Age movement’s name.
MB02: Antiquities and MB03/MB04: Osiris and Isis (aired February 15-17, 1993)
These three episodes ground the thesis in the specific Egyptian myth cycle Cooper treats as the template for everything that follows: Osiris, Isis, and Horus, and the death-and-rebirth pattern he reads as the origin of secret-society initiation ritual.
MB16: Sun Worship (aired March 30, 1993)
The series’ most concentrated treatment of the thesis, built on a reading from A. Ralph Epperson’s The New World Order that quotes Albert Pike, Albert Mackey, Manly P. Hall, and other Masonic writers arguing that solar ritual survives intact inside modern Freemasonry as a concealed reference to Lucifer. This episode is covered in full detail on the Freemasonry hub and the Mystery Schools hub; this page focuses on the astro-theology thesis itself rather than its specifically Masonic application.
Key Figures the Series Draws On
Jordan Maxwell (1940-2020)
An independent researcher and lecturer on comparative religion, symbolism, and what he called astro-theology, whose material forms the backbone of MB01’s core argument. Maxwell was not a credentialed academic historian or religious scholar; his work circulated primarily through independent lectures, self-published texts, and later video appearances rather than peer-reviewed publication. He appeared on the Mystery Babylon series in person in MB23.
Albert Pike and Albert Mackey
Both nineteenth-century Masonic authors, already documented on the Freemasonry hub, whose writings on solar symbolism in Masonic ritual (Pike’s Morals and Dogma, Mackey’s Encyclopedia of Freemasonry and Manual of the Lodge) supply MB16’s documentary evidence that solar imagery appears throughout the fraternity’s own literature.
Key Concepts
The dying-and-rising sun god
The pattern Cooper treats as the thesis’s core proof: a solar or savior deity who symbolically dies (at sunset, or at the winter solstice when daylight is shortest) and is reborn (at sunrise, or as days lengthen after the solstice). The series reads this pattern into Osiris, into the astrological year, and into Christian resurrection theology.
Astro-theology as a term
The word predates the twentieth-century researchers who popularized it in this context; it was used in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theology and comparative-mythology writing to describe arguments that ancient religions encoded astronomical observation in religious symbolism. Modern popularizers like Maxwell and, later, other independent researchers adopted the term for a broader claim that most or all major religions, including Christianity, derive from one underlying solar cult.
Sabaism
The term Mackey uses, cited in MB16, for the worship of the sun, moon, and stars historically associated with ancient Persia, Chaldea, and India. Cooper reads Mackey’s use of the term as an admission that Masonic ritual (specifically the rite of circumambulation, walking a ceremonial circuit around the lodge) preserves this ancient astral religion.
Primary Sources Cited Across These Episodes
- Jordan Maxwell, That Old-Time Religion — Under copyright; quoted only. Main text for MB01’s solar-Christian parallels argument.
- A. Ralph Epperson, The New World Order (1990) — Under copyright; quoted only. Main text for MB16.
- Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma (1871) — Public domain. Scans on archive.org.
- Albert G. Mackey, Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (1873) and Manual of the Lodge (1862) — Public domain. Scans on archive.org.
- Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928) — Copyright status uncertain; quoted via Epperson in MB16.
The full cross-reference of every source to every episode is in the sources and bibliography hub.
The Historians’ View
Solar and astral imagery in ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Greco-Roman religion is genuine and well documented; Egyptologists and historians of religion do not dispute that the sun held major symbolic and ritual importance across the ancient Near East, or that later Masonic writers like Pike drew consciously on that imagery. Where mainstream scholarship departs sharply from the series is on the specific one-to-one parallels drawn between pre-Christian solar myths and the Christian gospel narrative, a genre of argument closely associated with nineteenth-century writers like Kersey Graves, whose comparative lists of “virgin-born, crucified saviors” are widely regarded by biblical scholars and historians of religion as overstated, sourced unevenly, and in some cases fabricated or anachronistically read back onto older material. Popularizers in the Maxwell tradition largely repeat these older comparative lists rather than working from primary ancient texts. The claim that the Christian Easter and Christmas dates were deliberately set to appropriate pre-existing solar festivals is a minority position among historians of the early church; the more widely supported scholarly view is that fourth-century Christian date-setting overlapped with existing Roman festivals for practical and political reasons, a different claim than the series’ assertion of doctrinal descent from a single ancient solar religion.
Where This Hub Connects
Astro-theology is the foundation the rest of the series builds on. The Mystery Schools hub covers how the series extends this thesis into a claimed institutional lineage, and the Freemasonry hub covers MB16’s specifically Masonic application of solar symbolism in detail. For the biblical passage the series takes its name from, see Mystery Babylon in Revelation.
Listen to the Episodes
All surviving audio is preserved at the Internet Archive: Mystery Babylon audio collection on archive.org. This site embeds and links the archive.org copies and never hosts or distributes the recordings.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is astro-theology, as the series uses the term?
Cooper’s claim, drawn mainly from Jordan Maxwell’s material in MB01 and A. Ralph Epperson’s material in MB16, that the world’s major religions, including Christianity, descend from a single ancient religion centered on sun worship, with later institutions like Freemasonry preserving its symbolism in disguised form.
Which episodes cover this thesis?
MB01 introduces it, MB02 through MB04 ground it in the Osiris myth, and MB16 is the series’ dedicated deep dive, focused on its Masonic application.
Do historians accept the parallels between solar myths and the Christian gospel story?
Not as presented in this literature. Ancient solar and astral symbolism is real and documented, but the specific point-by-point parallel lists popularized by writers like Kersey Graves and repeated by later researchers including Jordan Maxwell are generally regarded by biblical scholars and historians of religion as overstated or unevenly sourced, not as an accepted account of Christianity’s origins.
