The Venus of Laussel, as it is known today, is a bas-relief that was crafted in the Upper Paleolithic approximately 22,000 years ago, and discovered on the wall of a cave in southwestern France in 1911. This stylized rendering of the Goddess is the first archaeological evidence we know of that human beings are becoming astrologically aware.
However, if the discoveries of the geologist Dr. Daniel Natawidjaja reported on by Graham Hancock are verified (see http://www.grahamhancock.com/forum/HancockG9-Mystery-Lost-Civilization.php), this date may turn out to be way too conservative. But for now, we can call the artisan (or artisans) who created the Venus of Laussel the West’s first astrological practitioner(s).
If we were to assume then that there have been approximately five generations of practitioners per century since then, it would mean that you and I are members of the 1100th or so generation of astrological practitioners in the current cycle of humanity.
Now 1100 generations certainly does comprise a substantial tradition! However, the kind of astrological practice that you and I today might recognize only began to emerge about 2200 years, or 110 generations, ago - which is a mere 10% of the entire tradition. What then were the first 990 generations, including the artisans of Laussel, doing as their practice for the 90% of the time that astrologically-interested persons have been contributing to the development of human culture?
THE PAST IS ANOTHER WORLD
According to our astrological historians, they were generating ‘omens’ and ‘portents’. Now it is certainly true that the oldest material in the literate astrological record consists of pithy aphorisms such as: ‘When Mars rises in the east at dawn, and the Moon is dark, the king should watch his back’. But come on! Isn’t this so-called 'omen material' merely the first generation of literate astrologers’ memory of what the 90% were doing? It's it what was left when all was said and done; more akin, therefore, to a desiccated husk rather than the living kernel?
To try and distill 20,000 years of human astrological awareness down to two enigmatic words is hardly an acceptable answer to my question. It’s roughly equivalent to those hapless monks in Walter M Miller’s science-fiction classic A Canticle For Leibowitz who, in the aftermath of nuclear holocaust, find what they believe to be a valuable relic of the incinerated civilization. It’s a scrap of paper that says: “2 lbs. bagels, 1 lb. lox.”
Gloria Steinam once observed that the reason we call the time of our earliest ancestors ‘pre-history’ is so that we don’t feel like we really have to give it serious attention. Such bias is understandable, however, because a formidable barrier of sorts really does stand between us and the First People. It’s a consciousness barrier of sorts. We’ll call it: the ‘Literacy Divide’. The invention of the Semitic alphabet around 1600 B.C.E., and its gradual but relentless dissemination, changed the paradigm of astrological consciousness and practice, by changing the paradigm of human consciousness.
For the purposes of this posting, the word ‘consciousness’ means: an individual’s, or a group’s, qualitative manner of being-in-the-world. Human consciousness and mass communications technology co-evolve in complex symbiosis, with technology determining the cultural matrix or environment of consciousness. When the Literacy Revolution created a new environment, consciousness adapted its form.
So if the 10% of us on this side of the Literacy Divide are one kind of human being and astrologer, and the 90% on the earlier side another, why should the 90%’s manner of practice be of any more than historical interest to us? Because those of us alive today find ourselves at a second great divide: the Digital Divide; and there’s good reason to suspect that the form consciousness will take as it adapts to the inclusive, electronic environment of the emerging global techno-culture will be more structurally congruent with the original pre-literate form than with the more recent literate.
Perhaps this is why techno-culture finds the indigenous world so fascinating; and if this formal alignment of the pre-literate and post-literate forms of human consciousness is news to you, perhaps you should visit (or re-visit) the communications theorist Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964), and the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter’s They Became What They Beheld (1970).
So where am I going with all this? When astrologers today discuss the ‘history’ of our practice, generally what they mean is our literate history. After all, the first significant astrologers of record are all the authors of books. In other words: ‘history’ is pretty much what the literate 10% have done. So if we’re going to try and integrate what the pre-literate 90% were doing into our definition of astrological practice, we’re going to need to look at history in some way other than the conventional narrative of ideas, events, and personalities we’re accustomed to. We need a much grander vision that we currently have.
So let’s try looking at the situation in a different way. The history of Western astrology as we’ve know it to date, our literate history, is contained within a larger and more inclusive history of Western consciousness. This overarching pageant of consciousness began with a long but very stable pre-literate phase, passed through a much shorter and more volatile literate phase, and is just now entering an as-yet-unknown post-literate phase. So here's an analogy to help you put this all together...
BACK TO THE FUTURE
Imagine for a moment that the collective consciousness of all 1100 generations of astrological practitioners – what we might call the ‘long body’ of astrological awareness - is a rambling old house. The main floor has many rooms, each attractively furnished in the style of a recognizable historical period. These rooms represent all the diverse schools of Western (i.e., literate) astrology – from its beginning some 2200 years ago, right up to the present day.
The current residents of the main floor are well aware that their whole domicile sits on the foundation of an old stone cellar - which symbolizes our pre-Western, or pre-literate, origins. But they’re not at all sure what’s really down there because a profound perceptual gulf separates the contemporary astrologers of the book from their most distant ancestors. Their conditioning is so deep that they’ve come to assume that the literate form of human consciousness has been a constant throughout astrology’s long history. If any of them even make the effort to peer down the dimly lit stairway, which they rarely do, all they see staring back are primitive reflections of their own selves – youthful, naive Western astrologers in face paint and feathers, if you will.
For exactly the same reason, it’s difficult for the current residents to appreciate the emerging post-Western paradigm of astrological practice, symbolized by a new second-story addition to the house that’s still under construction. This unfortunate situation is further exacerbated by the fact that the house has a rather odd architectural detail. The stairway to the new upper-story addition doesn’t begin on the main floor, where one might expect it would, but in the cellar. So if anyone wishes to visit the new addition, they can only do so by first passing through the old cellar.
In other words: the only way to appreciate the emerging post-Western paradigm of astrological consciousness and practice is to understand its pre-Western roots. Why? Because the forms of consciousness associated with the old cellar and the new addition are more structurally congruent with each other than either is with the form that currently defines the main floor.
FIRST ASTROLOGER
Just as the Western tradition of astrological practice is an expression of the literate paradigm of human consciousness, the pre-Western practice was an expression of an earlier ‘archaic’ paradigm - the core feature of which was an instinctual at-one-ment with the natural world.
Like ourselves, the First People were aware of their world and each other; but we suspect that they were not self-aware in the same highly individualistic way that we are today. In both the Iliad and the Odyssey, for example, Homer makes it quite clear that the pre-Classical (think: pre-literate) Greeks neither experienced their own bodies as integrated units, nor themselves as the source of their own decisions.
The tribe itself was the matrix of thought, emotion, and consciousness, rather than the individual. Obviously there were unique human beings with singular capabilities and talents. But one’s personal sense of identity wasn’t as much based on these distinguishing qualities as on experiences of community. Prior to the change in human psychology precipitated by the Literacy Revolution, the basis of individuality in our modern sense - the carefully cultivated private point-of-view - simply didn’t exist. The grammatical architectures of many traditional indigenous languages don’t even support this possibility. For example: in Tzutujil Mayan, there is no verb ‘to be’. So the only way someone can say “I am” or “I exist” is to describe to whom, or to what, they belong.
The First People translated their experience of at-one-ment into a cultural context that earlier we termed ‘shamanist’, meaning: constructed around the institution of shamanism. 22,000 years ago, when First Astrologer was falling in love with the Moon, the affair took place in the shadow of an unprecedented burst of extraordinary shamanist creativity. 13,000 years earlier, cave artists had suddenly stopped drawing simple geometric shapes and had started producing more sophisticated animal and human figures. No one is quite sure what precipitated this change, or why First Shaman was probably the driving force behind it; but as Graham Hancock argues so skillfully in his book Supernatural, the discovery of psycho-integrative plants may have been the prime factor.
It would seem likely then that First Shaman was already there and waiting for First Astrologer to arrive, and that the two paths became intimately entwined quite early on. In Shamanism: The Neural Ecology of Healing and Consciousness, the anthropologist Michael Winkelman argues that the worldwide distribution of shamanism is not simply a result of cultural diffusion, but an indication that shamanic awareness is an adaptive biological response hardwired into the human brain. Perhaps the same could be said for astrological awareness, since First Shaman may not always have been First Astrologer, but First Astrologer was always and everywhere First Shaman.
The mythical image of Chiron - Greece’s enigmatic half-human, half-horse King of the Centaurs - gives us further insight into the nature of this ancient at-the-roots bond between astrology and shamanism. For the indigenous tribes of archaic Greece, as for shamanist peoples everywhere, humans were but one small evolutionary step away from their animal origins. Animals, in effect, were their spiritual teachers. When the paleo-anthropologist Birute Mary Galdikas was asked what she had learned from a lifetime spent living amongst the native orangutan population of Borneo, she smiled and said: “Serenity.” First Astrologer and First Shaman both would probably have agreed with her, since the animal at-one-ment was obviously the existential prototype for the human at-one-ment.
Half-animal, the First People were totally immersed in sensory experience or, as the historian Giambattista Vico puts it in The New Science of History (1725): “buried in the body.” There is no reason to suspect that their senses reported anything significantly different to the brain than ours do today; but anthropologist Edmund Carpenter thinks that the archaic brain processed the report quite differently. No one sense dominated all others in the way that - primarily because of literacy - the sense of sight does today. In Carpenter’s terminology, our senses are currently ‘synchronized’ to sight, whereas the First People’s were ‘harmonically orchestrated’. (See Edmund Carpenter, They Became What They Beheld.)
It’s not exactly the same, but our closest equivalent to orchestration would probably be the sensory synesthesia that can sometimes occur under the influence of psychoactive agents - which, as anyone who has experienced it knows, produces a very different experience of sensory awareness.
WITH HALF OUR BEINGS IN THE SPIRIT WORLD
Buried in the body, the First People thought as all animals think: in images, impressions, sounds, and smells, rather than in the concepts and language-conditioned abstractions that we are accustomed to. When Venus rises as the morning star, astrologers today rarely take the time to enjoy the visual opportunity it presents, much less attend to any associated sounds, smells, or tactile impressions. For us, it’s predominantly an intellectual exercise, mediated by an ephemeris and filtered through habituated linguistic frames. But First Astrologer did attend to the actual event, and then used the information gleaned from her or his bodily awareness to organize the First People’s experience as effectively as we today use the conceptual information we’re interested in to organize ours.
First Astrologer’s neo-cortex — the thought and higher-function area of the brain — was probably fully developed; but she or he lived more consistently in the paleo-mammalian emotional and the reptilian instinctual centers. The preponderance of sensation and emotion this probably was responsible for is why Vico argues that the First People were more like passionate poets than wise philosophers, and why First Astrologer’s emerging skills of pattern-awareness consisted more of ‘participation in’ rather than ‘observation of’. And because the reptilian brain is the seat of ritualistic behavior, First Astrologer channeled all this participatory sensuality and emotion into shamanist ceremony rather than intellectual system.
There is one more way that the haunting image of Chiron can help us to understand First Astrologer’s unique psychology. In the shamanist worldview, the Human-world communes with the Spirit-world through the Animal-world. So, a creature half-human and half-animal is a being in intimate contact with the Spirit-world. The Spirit-world is a possibility that is very difficult for anyone steeped in the divided psychology of literate culture to even entertain. Everything that the First People attributed to spirit, we today attribute to mind or energy. Perhaps these three words are operationally more similar than they may initially appear. The First People knew the spirits through their effects. Isn’t it exactly the same true for the terms we prefer since , to the best of my knowledge no one has actually energy or mind either?
Any of us today can learn to visit the Spirit-world in the same way First Shaman did by educating (from the Latin educare: ‘to lead out’) the imaginative faculty. Anthropologists call this spirited, imaginal way of being-in-the-world: ‘animism’. Perhaps Chiron’s discovery in 1977 heralds a time of reconciliation with the spirits as the post-literate paradigm of consciousness becomes increasingly dominant. It’s already happening in some quarters.
Commenting on his own work, The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram writes: “In contrast to a long-standing tendency of Western social science, this work has not attempted to provide a rational explanation of animistic beliefs and practices. On the contrary, it has presented an animistic or participatory account of rationality.”
In a somewhat similar vein, the psychologist Arnold Mindell confesses in The Shaman’s Body: “Until now, my identity as a psychotherapist has made me hesitate at the point of the spirit world...for fear of being misunderstood. However, my inner and outer lives can no longer tolerate such one-sidedness. I must drop my personal history and reputation to write this book.”
And in a recent conversation, a neuroscientist friend recounted bringing up the topic during a discussion with a young, highly-trained physicist. “Spirits?,” the young man queried. “Oh! You mean independent entities in the topological field!”
As the term ’animism’ denotes, the First People experienced the spirits as the animating principles of everyday life rather than in any way associated with notions of transcendent experience, or ideas pointing away from the sensory world. The origins of our word ‘mystic’ is a perfect illustration of how the psychology of literacy changed things.
The word comes from the Greek mystes, a term used to denote initiates of the Eleusinian Mysteries, who are depicted in surviving frescoes making their inward journeys at the culmination of the annual pan-Hellenic rite with their heads covered by scarves.
The world-famous rite survived until 400 AD, when Alaric and a contingent of elite Roman troops sacked the 2000 year-old shrine. So even beyond the Classical era, when literacy was becoming more and more common, Greece’s ‘mystics’ too were still buried in their bodies. In Aristophanes’ play, The Frogs, for example, the ‘mystical aura’ is the odor of a burning torch. “It is this atmosphere, the sensuous quality of a nocturnal festival, that this word ‘mystical’ here evokes for the Athenian of the 5th century: his ‘mystical’ experience is a specific festive rite.” (Caroly Kerenyi, Eleusis.)
The historian of consciousness Owen Barfield calls this at-one, embodied, and communal way of being-in-the-world: ‘the Original Participation’. The form of astrological awareness and practice birthed by the OP remained remarkably stable for thousands and thousands of years; and then everything changed. Why?
THE LITERAL INTERPRETATION
The alphabet was invented by Semitic scribes in 1600 B.C.E., and carried to Greece by Phoenician traders in 800 B.C.E. Just three centuries later, Greek culture exploded in the flowering of intellectual creativity that it’s long been famous for.
The dissemination of alphabetic literacy fundamentally altered traditional patterns of human brain activity. Earlier forms of literate expression - such as the hieroglyphs native to dynastic Egypt – tended to engage the holistic and imagistic capacities of the brain. The sequential nature of the alphabet, however, began to utilize the brain’s more linear proclivities. Such a significant change in habitual brain function, a re-molding of its plasticity, was the physical platform for a change in the form of human consciousness.
Alphabetic literacy undermined the archaic paradigm of human consciousness by conditioning a new paradigm. Martin Heidegger calls its defining characteristic ‘the subject/object split’: a polarizing of human experience into a ‘subjective’ perceiving self and a perceived ‘objective’ reality. Learning to stand back from the letters on the page helped humans learn how to stand back from the rest of the world.
The Literacy Revolution transformed the practice of astrology, but not in the slow evolutionary way one might expect. The new form of practice appeared quite suddenly, as if something had jump-started it - and something definitely had. Traditional Egyptian astrology coming up from the south had collided head-on with the Greek alphabet, brought down from the north by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C.E.. The result was ‘Hellenistic' astrology, the world’s first literate form of astrological practice.
“Within the short span of a hundred years or so, the rather minimal legacy from Babylonia and Egypt was totally transformed, and an entirely new body of astrological doctrine came to light. This fervent period of intense astrological concentration resulted in a veritable cornucopia of new astrological concepts and practices. These included such basic matters as aspects, the concept of rulership, the meanings of the houses, transits to the natal chart, and synastry…. We can assert that Hellenistic astrology effectively constitutes the birth of Western astrology.” (Robert Schmidt, “The System of Hermes: A Report From Project Hindsight,” The Mountain Astrologer, June/July 2004, emphasis mine.)
In his manuscript entitled On The Mysteries, the Neoplatonist Iamblichus tells us that the astrologers who first translated the traditional Egyptian understanding into Greek were all trained in Athenian philosophy. The literacy-based education they received in the academies left in the wake of Alexander’s conquest dramatically transformed the way these astrologers thought, languaged, and practiced their ancient art. The Greek alphabet was ultimately responsible for the destruction of the ancient astrological ritual, and laid the cornerstone for the prototypical modern astrologer: the astrologer of the book.
Today the subject/object split has become so pervasive, and its psychology so deeply ingrained, that we tend to equate it with consciousness itself. The phenomenologist Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) argued that it’s no longer possible for anyone educated in the Western manner to think in any other way. And since most contemporary practitioners of Jyotish (Vedic astrology) have also been ‘educated in the Western manner’, the literate paradigm is now firmly entrenched in this and most other forms of Eastern practice as well. Vedic techniques may have the thousands of years of undisrupted continuity that Western astrology sadly lacks; but it's not accurate to say the same for the consciousness of its practitioners.
When we think objectively we formulate concepts and create representational systems. In other words: we re-present our experience to ourselves in an orchestrated construct of ideas, and then assemble those ideas into ‘systems’: conceptual integrations of specific parts into functional wholes. We think conceptually and systematically about the physical world when, for example, we propose a scientific hypothesis. We conceptualize or systematize meta-physically when we devise esoteric, philosophical, or astrological explanations of the world, or when we articulate psychological typologies.
The content of physical and meta-physical systems may differ profoundly; but the objectifying manner in which each is thought is exactly the same. Thus when we today think astrologically, we do so by fashioning objective models of reality. Whether we’re presenting a portrait of a client, a profile of a business, or making generalized predictions for the coming year, we all think, language, and practice our astrology in the manner determined by the subject/object split.
THE DIGITAL ASTROLOGER
Whenever I discuss the psychology of literate practice with other astrologers, the most common reaction I get is: well, what else is there? As long as we stay within the literate paradigm, there is nothing else. And if our history were confined to the literate paradigm, there would be nothing else. But as our discussion so far should have offered ample evidence of, there’s so much more to our past than we currently understand or know how to appreciate!
The Literacy Revolution transformed the practice of astrology by transforming the astrologers themselves. ‘Homo sapiens’ became ‘Homo literatus’. This remarkable mutation would be of no more than historical interest if it were not for the fact that the Digital Revolution is right now changing us as profoundly as the Literacy Revolution changed our ancestors. ‘Homo literatus’ may still not get it; but she or he is already in the process of becoming ‘Homo technologicus’.
Information technologies functionally extend the human brain, and interact with its plasticity, in ways that reconfigure both personal and collective consciousness. Exactly as the Literacy Revolution was responsible for the demise of the archaic paradigm, the technology of the Digital Revolution is, right now, undermining the literate paradigm.
"The computer and the Internet will once again reconfigure the brains of those that use them. Typing is a two-handed activity that requires input from both sides of the brain. Writing requires only the dominant hand. The use of a mouse by the right hand necessitates the activation of right-hemispheric visual-spatial skills. The World Wide Web and the Internet are not linear, they are holistic. All ancient deities associated with webs and nets were goddesses. Many of the processes we use to operate a computer are inherently feminine." (Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess.)
The subject/object split is rapidly breaking down because the perceptually-entangled nature of our digital environment no longer supports it. Philosophy is completed; and science is being forced to move beyond objective thinking in order to deal with the paradoxes of quantum reality. Teachers are stretched beyond their resources dealing with students who read poorly, can barely write a coherent sentence, and could care less. The sequential, in-depth thinking characteristic of literacy is giving way to multi-dimensional, associative hyper-linking. In a New York Times op-ed, the humorist Garrison Keillor observed that young minds today range across the info-sphere: “like a hummingbird in an endless meadow of flowers.”
Many today see nothing but disaster in literacy’s awkward demise. But not everyone applauded its debut either! Socrates, for example, feared that the written word would stifle his students’ ability to internalize his oral teachings. So given the radical implications of the Digital Revolution, might not a new understanding of astrological practice be called for once again – a post-literate understanding that’s as different from the literate as the literate was from the original pre-literate?
THE RE-FORM-ATION BEGINS
It's become increasingly clear that, for all its gifts, the subject/object split is directly responsible for our mushrooming ecological crisis, our incessant commodification of the natural world, and our societal sanctioning of predatory capitalism. What really is global climate change except a message that there will be increasingly serious consequences if we don’t re-learn to experience our selves and our world as a unified field?
This doesn’t mean that we have to abandon our hard-won ability to think objectively; only that we train ourselves to step in or out of the split at will. Ever since his death in 1977, philosophers in the West have been discussing Heidegger’s urgent call to ‘overcome’ the split by learning to think without objectifying. But this requires a practical vehicle; and few have comprehended how to actually do it for lack of an appropriate one. The practice of astrology, however, is a natural. Because it was done in a unified way once before, why couldn't we use it to learn how to practice in this way once again?
Therefore, to antidote the toxic side effects of the split the digital astrologer thinks, languages, and practices in a way that's consciously designed to re-member the unconscious at-one-ment of the Original Participation. Barfield calls such an intentionally undertaken effort at reunification: ‘the Final Participation’. This is largely a matter of new form, rather than new content. As our own history demonstrates, any new form of practice uses the form it’s replacing as it’s content. Just as the literate form employed the archaic practice, the digital form uses the literate practice as its content.
A new form of practice means a new way of encoding and communicating astrological information. This is why the emergence of experiential astrology - which is exactly that: a new way of communicating - in the past 30 years has been so important and so prescient. And because we still have such an unconscious and vested interest in our accustomed literate forms, the reason why it's also been so very misunderstood, and more often treated as entertainment. Experiential astrology is multi-sensory; literate astrology is all about the eye. Anthropologists have long recognized that different cultures often encourage different sensory balances; and that when members of cultures with different sensory orientations come into contact, they will be inclined to be suspicious of each other.
In response to a question posed to him personally as to why humans always seem to resist new paradigms, the neuroscientist Karl Pribram pointed out that survival requires that we protect our accustomed operational frames. But then, in a sort of ‘let-him-who-has-eyes-see’ aside, he adapted a quotation from the physicist Max Planck: “No one convinces anybody of a new paradigm,” he said. “The old generation dies, and the new generation takes over.”
