Astrology: The only introduction you’ll ever need. Charles Harvey

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СКАЧАТЬ 1 The top diagram shows a top-down view of the solar system with the planets orbiting the Sun in the centre. This is the helio-centric view. The lower diagram shows how these same positions appear when seen from the earth as centre, the geocentric view.

      PHYSICAL THEORIES ABOUT ASTROLOGY

      All that said, there are still some astrologers who can only feel comfortable with material causes. And there is a range of theories that have been elaborated to explain how astrology might work. The analogy of the Moon and ocean tides is often invoked. The human body is over 90 per cent water. Do the planets have minute tidal effects within our bodies?

      Related to this theory is Dr Percy Seymour’s eloquent resonance theory, which points out that resonance can give wave forms power out of all proportion to their inherent energy. Classic examples of this are the singer who can break a glass at a distance by singing the glass’s ‘note’ so that it vibrates itself to pieces. Likewise an army marching over a bridge has to break step so as not to set the bridge vibrating to its own natural frequency and make it fall apart. In this model, the planets in their movements are setting up wave forms with which the child resonates and ‘tunes in’, thereby establishing certain types of behaviour.

      Endocrinologist Dr Frank MacGillion has put forward endocrine secretions from the pineal gland as a possible mechanism, pointing out numerous studies which highlight the importance of the state of the day-night cycle at the time of birth and its effects on melatonin secretions. Dr Michel Gauquelin, the French psychologist and statistician, whose work is cited above, postulated a genetic predisposition, whereby a baby with a martial genetic make-up would be tuned to Mars orbit.

      Such theories may perhaps explain certain very limited astrological phenomena. However elegant some of these theories are, though, they simply cannot explain how it is that a chart set for the moment of the formation of a company can provide detailed information about its likely company style, its development and the kind of people that it will attract to it.

      In the next chapter we look at the central philosophical principles upon which astrology is traditionally based. Even if you are someone who would prefer a neat physical cause-and-effect model, you will find that if you engage with these ideas they will provide a framework within which to think about astrology.

      THE ANCIENTS SAID IT ALL

      The philosophy of the astrological world-view, which assumes an intimate, meaningful connection between the above and the below, has never been more eloquently expressed than by the writings attributed to the wise Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus. In this passage, the relationship of the Cosmic Principles to their Source is being explained to Hermes by the great Pymander: (from The Divine Pymander of Hermes Trismegistus, ed. The Shrine of Wisdom, 1970.)

      1 Hermes Trismegistus: Many men have affirmed many and diverse things concerning the Cosmos and God, but I have not learned Truth; therefore, O Lord, make plain these things to me.

      2 Pymander: Hear, then, my Son, how these things are of God and the Cosmos.

      3 God; Eternity; the Cosmos; Time; Generation.

      4 God maketh Eternity;Eternity maketh the Cosmos;The Cosmos maketh Time;Time maketh Generation.

      5 The Substance, or Essence, as it were, of God, is the Good, the Beautiful, Blessedness, and Wisdom;of Eternity, is Identity and Sameness;of the Cosmos, is Order;of Time, is Change;of Generation, is Life and Death.

      6 The Operation, Energy, or Activityof God, is in Nous and Soul;of Eternity, is in Permanence and Immortality;of the Cosmos, is in Integration and Re-integration;of Time, is in Augmentation and Diminution;of Generation, is in Qualities.

      7 Therefore, Eternity is in God;The Cosmos is in Eternity;Time is in the Cosmos;Generation is in Time.

      8 Eternity abides with God;The Cosmos is moved in Eternity;Time is accomplished (i.e. has its limit) in the Cosmos;Generation takes place in Time.

      9 Therefore, the Source and Foundation of All is God, but the Essence of Substance is Eternity; and the Matter is the Cosmos.

      10 The Power of God is Eternity; the Work of Eternity is the Cosmos, which is unmanifest and also ever being made manifest by Eternity.

      11 Therefore the Cosmos shall never be destroyed, nor the things in it perish, for Eternity is indestructible, and the Cosmos is contained and encompassed by Eternity.

      A CONTEMPORARY SYNTHESIS

      At the end of the 20th century, the re-emergence of astrology challenges the Western mind once again to find a framework of thought that can resolve the tension that has existed since the Greeks – between Platonic idealism with its emphasis on consciousness and Aristotelian empiricism with its emphasis on matter. For, of all studies, astrology demands a philosophy and framework of thought that embraces both physics and metaphysics, the temporal and the eternal, the manifest and the unmanifest, the observed and the intuited, the material and the formal. The phenomena of astrology demand a model of the universe that is inclusive of quantity and qualities, matter and consciousness. Hermes Trismegistus’s perspective, above, with its emphasis on the relation of the temporal to the eternal, offers such a resolution in principle. The problem, then, is to translate these insights into a form and language that is intelligible to contemporary thought.

      One contemporary thinker who has embraced this challenge is Will Keepin, a nuclear physicist, whose mother and father were both nuclear physicists, who is also a practising astrologer. Keepin has been obliged by the reality of his astrological experience to engage with the resoltion of these worldviews. He finds a meeting place in the work of the late David Bohm, a student of Einstein, who was until recently Professor of Theoretical Physics at London University. In his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Bohm pictures the universe as having both an implicate, eternal, ‘enfolded’ order which is unfolded in the explicate order of space-time. Bohm sees each moment of space-time as both an explicit manifestation of a particular part of that implicate order and a point of access and linkage to that Wholeness. This evokes the holographic image of reality that we see reflected in the relationship between cells in a body and the body as a whole. In an interview in The Mountain Astrologer, February/March 1997, Keepin sums up the implications of Bohm’s work and his own thinking as follows:

      Any natural science from physics to biology to astrology is basically an enterprise of pattern recognition, which utilizes a naturally existing order to discern replicable truths. So astrology is a science of the order in meaning, and the correlation between the subtle order and the Cartesian order in the physical motion of the planets.

      For each point in space-time there is a unique astrological chart. I see the astrological chart as a kind of cosmic indexing of the unfolding cosmos. In this grand evolutionary process, each point in the emergent space-time is characterized by a unique astrological chart. It is almost as if the chart is an index for the creative process of cosmic evolution. And when one is born with a particular chart, one becomes an ambassador of sorts to the rest of the cosmos, representing a unique moment in the cosmic space-time to the rest of the cosmos as it continues to unfold.

      Each one of us is expressing a particular aspect of the mystery and bringing it into fluid relationship with the rest of the unfolding mystery. Now in terms of astrology and the implicate order, I see the implicate order as a vast realm of meaning and purpose and all of the invisible and intangibles, including, at its deepest levels, the creative process of love itself.

      The СКАЧАТЬ