David Meade, Revelation 12 and the Sky of 23 September 2017

David Meade's date was 23 September 2017. In a 2016 book called Planet X - The 2017 Arrival, and in interviews that ran across the world in the weeks before the day, Meade, whom National Geographic described as a self-published author from Wisconsin, tied a planet called Nibiru to a picture in the sky taken from the twelfth chapter of the Book of Revelation, and to a number.

The picture is old. "And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars." That is Revelation 12:1 in the King James Version. In 1498 Albrecht Durer cut it in wood for his Apocalypse: a woman with a crown of stars standing on a crescent moon, rays of the sun pouring out behind her, a dragon with seven crowned heads beside her, and above, angels carrying her child up to God.

In September 2017 that picture was laid over the real sky. The sun stood in the constellation Virgo, the maiden. The moon sat below her. Jupiter, the largest planet, had spent most of a year inside her outline. Three bright planets lay beside the stars of Leo at her head.

A woman clothed with the sun. A crown of stars. A date.

Thirty-three days

The date came from a count. On 21 August 2017 a total eclipse of the sun crossed the United States from Oregon to South Carolina. Meade counted forward thirty-three days and arrived at 23 September. He told the Washington Post that the number mattered: Jesus lived for thirty-three years, and the name Elohim, by his count, appears thirty-three times.

He was not the only one reading that sky. Through 2017 a set of evangelical videos had been working out what came to be called the Revelation 12 sign, and one of them, a film called Unsealed, had been viewed 2,762,163 times by the morning of 19 September, according to Jim Denison of the Denison Forum. In its reading the woman is the constellation Virgo and Jupiter, after months inside Virgo, is the child about to be born. The crown, as the astronomer Christopher Graney summarised the sign, is the stars of Leo with the planets Mercury, Venus and Mars. Its makers had retitled it: "Date Setting A Sign, NOT The Rapture."

Meade's book added the planet. Nibiru, the world that Zecharia Sitchin read into Sumerian tablets in 1976 and that Nancy Lieder's ZetaTalk put on a course for Earth in the 1990s, and that had already been tied once to the Maya date of December 2012, would show itself in the sky around the day of the sign.

The press took it from there. National Geographic, the Washington Post, Fox News and the British tabloids ran the date in the week before it. The Washington Post called him a Christian numerologist. He said he had never called himself one.

The sign, read whole

Read as its proponents read it, the September sky was not a coincidence of orbits but a message written on the only page every person on Earth can see.

Every element of Revelation 12:1 is there, they argued, in its order. The woman: Virgo. Clothed with the sun: the sun inside her outline. The moon under her feet: the moon below her, on the night of the sign. The crown of twelve stars: nine in Leo and three planets, gathered at her head. And the next verse, "she being with child", answered by Jupiter, which in the Unsealed reading represents Christ and his church. On that reading Jupiter had entered Virgo, wandered within her through the months of a pregnancy, and was leaving.

The planet's real path gave the reading its shape. Jupiter passed behind the sun in September 2016 and came out inside Virgo's outline. Between February and June 2017 it seemed to stop and run backwards, as the outer planets do when the Earth overtakes them, and on 7 April it stood opposite the sun, at its brightest. Through the summer of 2017 it was still there, inside her outline, as the day of the sign came on.

It is a reading with a long shadow. Artists had been drawing the woman of Revelation for centuries: Durer in 1498, the engraver Jean Duvet between 1546 and 1556, William Blake around 1805. The 2017 version did something those pictures could not. It gave her a day.

Meade's part was to hang Nibiru on that day, and to say that the world, as people knew it, was about to change. He did not say it would end. "The world is not ending, but the world as we know it is ending," he told the Washington Post. "A major part of the world will not be the same the beginning of October."

If the sky meant it

Set aside, for a moment, whether it is true. Ask the larger question. What kind of universe is it, if it is?

It would mean the sky is a text. Not a clock of orbits that happens to repeat, but a page written to be read, its letters arranged in advance for one particular September. On that reading the arrangement of the planets is authored, and the author chose a date.

It would mean the old prophetic books knew the future positions of the planets. The writer of Revelation would have been describing an arrangement nearly two thousand years ahead, and the reader in 2017 would hold the key that every earlier reader lacked.

It would mean that the people who wrote the book and the people who drew the constellations were working on one design. Virgo is a figure of the old star maps; Revelation is a vision in scripture. If the sign is real, the maiden of the star maps and the woman of the vision were always the same woman, waiting for the sky to bring them together.

It would mean something about us. The species that had spent the centuries since Kepler learning to predict where Jupiter will be in any given week would have been predicting, without knowing it, the hour of its own history turning. Every astronomer who computed the sky of 23 September 2017 would have been doing the work of a prophet.

And it would leave one question in front of us, still. A sign, on this reading, is not the event. It points. If the September sky was a sign, the thing it pointed to is something nobody has yet agreed on having seen.

The sky astronomers charted

The standard account comes from astronomers, and some of the plainest of them were Christians.

Christopher Graney, a physics and astronomy professor at Jefferson Community and Technical College in Louisville, wrote it up for the Vatican Observatory in January 2017, eight months before the day. "The sun is in Virgo every September," he wrote. The moon passes Virgo's feet for a day or two most years. Jupiter comes back to Virgo about every twelve years. And "there are many more than 9 stars in the constellation Leo." Graney then searched the sky backwards, as far as the year 1017, for the whole arrangement and found it in September 1827, 1483, 1293 and 1056.

The astronomer Phil Plait added a detail from the official map. Under the International Astronomical Union's constellation boundaries, "Jupiter doesn't leave the constellation on the 23rd." Danny Faulkner, the astronomer of the creationist ministry Answers in Genesis, told the Christian Post he expected "nothing unusual".

On the planet, NASA was blunter. "The planet in question, Niburu, doesn't exist, so there will be no collision," its website said that week, misspelling the name, as quoted by IFLScience. David Morrison, a NASA senior scientist, gave the Post the reason: a planet that close "would be bright. It would be easily visible to the naked eye."

The biblical scholar Michael Heiser had written in June that "Revelation 12 is HINDSIGHT with respect to the messiah's birth, not foresight." Ed Stetzer of Wheaton College's Billy Graham Center answered the label the Post had given Meade: "There's no such thing as a Christian numerologist."

What the charts do not reach

23 September 2017 came, and the sky did what Graney's tables said it would. No planet appeared.

Not on the day, and not on any of the dates that followed.

What the charts do not touch is why the date carried. The astronomy was public in January. The arrangement Graney found in 1827 had passed with nobody filming it. In 2017 the same sky reached millions in a few weeks, and the reason is not in any ephemeris. The eclipse a month earlier, the anchor of Meade's count, had crossed the whole country.

Nor do the charts reach the deeper part of the reading. Graney's tables say where the planets stood, and how often; they stop, by his own account, at the year 1017, and how many times the sign stood in the sky before that nobody has counted. And an astronomer can say that Jupiter was in Virgo. Whether that position was meant to be read, and by whom, is not a question a planetarium program can answer.

And the date did not die. It moved. Soon after, Meade's website called 15 October 2017 "the most important date of this century or millennium", the start of a seven-year tribulation. "Hold on and watch," he told the Post. National Geographic tracked the dates that followed: October, then November, then 23 April 2018 for Nibiru's appearance and October 2018 for its pass.

The first person to draw it

Where it stands now: the sky of 23 September 2017 is in every planetarium program on Earth, and anyone can run it back. Jupiter sits in Virgo, the sun beside it, the moon low at her feet, three planets with Leo. The arrangement is real and it is recurrent, and both of those are true at once.

The Vatican Observatory still runs Graney's piece. In April 2024 it put it up again, calling the woman clothed with the sun, in the sky, "as common in September as is the U.S.'s Labor Day". The answer did not end the asking.

What is left is a smaller question, and it has no answer in any source Official X could open. The Revelation 12 sign has makers. Somebody first laid the twelve stars of the crown over Leo and the planets, counted Jupiter's months in Virgo, and wrote it down. That person is not named in the press of 2017, in the Vatican Observatory's reply, or in the scholars' blogs that answered it.

The sky has an author on one reading and none on the other. The sign, on every reading, has one. Official X found no published account that does.

Questions This Leaves You With

Is there anything a person actually does with this?

Nothing that follows for your own week. The sky of September 2017 came and went, and the arrangements Graney found in 1827, 1483, 1293 and 1056 came and went too. The planets will set up a woman clothed with the sun again, because the sun goes through Virgo every September and Jupiter returns about every twelve years. The larger question is not about a date at all: what a culture does when a sign it reads goes by without the event it expected. Anyone selling a date is selling something.

Does this sit against a religious account of the world?

It cuts both ways, and serious people have argued both. Some of the sharpest answers in 2017 came from inside the faith: Heiser read Revelation 12 as looking back to the birth of the Messiah, and Stetzer quoted the line that no one knows the day or the hour. Others read the sky as an invitation to watch. Astronomy can say where Jupiter was; it cannot say what Jupiter means, if it means anything. Which way that falls is not a question this site will answer for you.

Does this change what a human life is?

Put your own lifetime against the cycles in this story. Jupiter goes around the sun in about twelve years, so a long life sees it pass through Virgo perhaps seven times. In Graney's tables the full arrangement of 2017 came round four times in the nine and a half centuries before it. On one reading that makes a person small, a spectator of machinery much older than any prophecy. On another it makes the person rare: one of a handful of generations who happened to stand under that particular sky. Which one did you feel?

What would change your mind, in either direction?

It helps to decide now. Toward the sign meaning something: a prediction made in advance, from the sky alone, of a specific event that then happened, recorded somewhere it cannot be edited later. Toward an ordinary sky: the sign drawn for an earlier September by its own makers, and quietly redrawn for 2017, or a source showing the reading was built backward from the eclipse. On Nibiru the question is plainer: a planet that close would be found by its light and its pull. Neither has been recorded.

Who drew the Revelation 12 sign first?

This is the real gap. The reading circulated in videos and on websites through 2017, and was answered by an observatory, a creationist ministry and a biblical scholar, but no source opened for this article names the person who first matched the crown of twelve stars to Leo and three planets, or says when. It matters, because a reading has an origin even when a sky does not. The first version of the idea, with its first date, may be on an old web page or in an old video. No account found for this article names it.