Join us Under One Sky—and rediscover how the sky shaped, guided, and was contested by the ancient world.

Week 1, Monday 25th August
The Sky as Divine – Ancient Egypt
The Soul and the Stars, drawing divine revelations from the sky.

Week 2 Monday 1st September
 Earthing the Sky – Ancient Britain and Ireland.
Cosmology in stone – the Sun and Stonehenge, the Moon and Callanish, and the great building Newgrange.

Week 3 Monday 8th September
The Sky as Fate – Ancient Mesopotamia
Reading the sky, the Akkadian Letters to the King and the annual diaries.

Week 4 Monday 15th September 
The Sky as a Question – Ancient Greece.
The secularisation of the sky. The Antikythera mechanism and Claudius Ptolemy’s work, the Almagest.

Week 5 Thursday 25th September
 The Sky and the Emperor – Ancient Rome. 
The sky as a source of authority and power, solar emperors, the Pantheon and the Tauroctony of the Mithras Cult.  

Week 6 Monday 29th September  The Sky Overruled –Christianity.
Who owns the sky? The role of the Star of Bethlehem in the power struggle of Christianity to dismiss the power of the sky. Breaking the link between the soul and the stars.   

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This six-week course is a journey into cultural astronomy, focusing on how different ancient civilisations interpreted and engaged with the sky.   We begin with Ancient Egypt, where the heavens provided the foundation of their theology, linking the Egyptian soul to the stars. Meanwhile, across the globe in Ancient Britain, the megalithic builders were earthing their cosmology by building structures that drew the sky to the earth, embedding its rhythms in stone and landscape. 

In contrast, by the late Bronze Age, the Akkadian people of Mesopotamia developed a different approach: the sky was used as the ‘Book of Fate’. Stars and planets were read as part of a continuous celestial narrative directly linked to life on Earth—a legacy that survives today in astrology. The Greek world, in turn, secularised the heavens, shifting focus from divine purpose to intellectual inquiry. Questions such as “Why is it so?” and “How does it work?” led to the development of the Antikythera mechanism and the work of Claudius Ptolemy, a second-century CE librarian at the Library of Alexandria.   

Later, the Romans reasserted the divine authority of the sky, claiming it as a symbol of imperial power. Emperors sought celestial legitimacy through auspicious birth signs and solar symbolism. This union of heaven and ruler was embodied in the Pantheon—an architectural homage to the Emperor, gods and the Sun. Into this established cosmic order, Christianity emerged with a different theological stance. The early Church sought to centralise divine authority in Christ alone, challenging older sky-based cosmologies. This challenge was aided by Saint Ignatius, who retold the story of the Star of Bethlehem, and it culminated, a thousand years later, in the work of Saint Thomas Aquinas, who severed the soul from the heavens —a union first articulated in the theology of Ancient Egypt.

* Please note that all live sessions are held on a Monday evening, with the exception of week 5, which will be Thursday 25th September.