The awareness of a correspondence between celestial and terrestrial rhythms has long been the cornerstone of one of humanity's oldest psycho-spiritual practices. A 25,000-year-old bas-relief of the Goddess from Upper Paleolithic Europe is the first archaeological evidence we have confirming it. The ritualistic form of practice that grew out of this celestial/terrestrial awareness developed in a very stable evolutionary symbiosis with shamanism, changing quantitatively for some 23,000 years as its practitioners learned from their experience, but never really changing qualitatively.
Then, 2200 years ago, in the final two centuries Before the Common Era, a huge qualitative change took place quite suddenly when the traditional Egyptian form of the old ritual ran head-on into a revolutionary new communications technology - the Greek alphabet. It took less than a century for the changes in brain function and psychology brought about by one of the major weapons of the Literacy Revolution to trans-form the original practice into the one we in the West today call 'astrology' - from the Greek words astron, meaning: 'heavenly body', and logos, meaning: 'to be present with in a meditative way'.
In turn, the astrology of the book had a period of relative stability that lasted until the second half of the 20th century when the technological environment of the Digital Revolution began to seriously erode the literate paradigm of human consciousness and, along with it, all its cultural institutions. Now the form of human celestial/terrestrial awareness is changing once again.
So how does one ride the leading edge of this change? By remembering what humans have being doing for a long, long time now - aligning their life-energies with the qualitative aspects of time as revealed by the ever-changing relationships of the heavens and the symbolism associated with them.
When we invite the movements of heaven to become the organizing principle of our awareness, the structural frame of our consciousness, we discover a sense of right relationship to the world that results from living in a 'participation mystique' with the cosmos. As the British essayist Thomas Traherne once wrote: "You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars."
LIFE ON THE EDGE
Humanity is in great peril. Any organism that destroys its environment inevitably destroys itself. Many of us today understand this; and because we do, we're making a conscious effort to reconnect with nature, and teaching our children to do the same. Because the practice of astrology could help with this, you would think that it might at least be tolerated, perhaps even appreciated. But this is hardly the case. So why does even the mention of the word 'astrology' instantly raise the blood pressure of almost every philosopher, scientist, and general thought-policeman within hearing distance?
The real answer to this question is not the one that usually gets trotted out: that astrology is simply bad science, pseudoscience; and to give it any credence whatsoever is delusional at best. In other words: we're expected to reject it on the grounds that it's clearly unscientific. When the National Science Foundation released its 2014 list of Science & Engineering Indicators, and stated that "fewer Americans rejected astrology in 2012 than in recent years", the response published by Mother Jones became just the latest example of the quasi-religious belief that the kind of 'knowing' perfected by science is the only valid way. The truth, however, is that the scientific critique of astrology completely misses the point.
Science, along with every other form of institutionalized inquiry preferred by Westerners, is a by-product of the invention of the alphabet, and an expression of the particular form of consciousness that alphabetic literacy effectively conditions. In the 20,000+ years of its existence, astrology never has been what our culture understands by the word 'science'. Rather it's something much older, and therefore entirely other than science.
Astrology is really a time-capsule of sorts, handed down from a different paradigm of human consciousness and a different style of human cognition. And because of this, astrology's pre-literate, analogical, participatory way of thinking remains forever a baffling anomaly to the objectifying, analytical, conceptual thinking of the Western-educated scientific and philosophical mind.
Over the course of the last 3000 years the psychology that accompanies the acquisition of alphabetic skills has systematically obliterated the pre-alphabetic psychology from which astrological awareness originally emerged. As a consequence, the practice of astrology has been thoroughly colonized by the the thought-habits that have become synonymous with thinking during the literate phase of the history of Western consciousness. Few astrologers today seem to understand the implications of this hostile takeover since we too share the same thought-habits, and because we never stop to consider how the Literacy Revolution influenced our current understanding of astrological practice.
ALL HER EMPIRES ARE FALLING DOWN
Enter the Digital Revolution. All the empires of literacy, all its time-honored cultural institutions - including the literate interpretation of astrological practice - are rapidly disintegrating as, one-by-one, each slides back down into the dark, roiling waters of the Racial Unconscious. The world built in the image of the literate mind is coming apart at the seams. In the sparse words of the novelist Louise Erdrich: "Everything familiar dissolves into strangeness."
Then, 2200 years ago, in the final two centuries Before the Common Era, a huge qualitative change took place quite suddenly when the traditional Egyptian form of the old ritual ran head-on into a revolutionary new communications technology - the Greek alphabet. It took less than a century for the changes in brain function and psychology brought about by one of the major weapons of the Literacy Revolution to trans-form the original practice into the one we in the West today call 'astrology' - from the Greek words astron, meaning: 'heavenly body', and logos, meaning: 'to be present with in a meditative way'.
In turn, the astrology of the book had a period of relative stability that lasted until the second half of the 20th century when the technological environment of the Digital Revolution began to seriously erode the literate paradigm of human consciousness and, along with it, all its cultural institutions. Now the form of human celestial/terrestrial awareness is changing once again.
So how does one ride the leading edge of this change? By remembering what humans have being doing for a long, long time now - aligning their life-energies with the qualitative aspects of time as revealed by the ever-changing relationships of the heavens and the symbolism associated with them.
When we invite the movements of heaven to become the organizing principle of our awareness, the structural frame of our consciousness, we discover a sense of right relationship to the world that results from living in a 'participation mystique' with the cosmos. As the British essayist Thomas Traherne once wrote: "You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars."
LIFE ON THE EDGE
Humanity is in great peril. Any organism that destroys its environment inevitably destroys itself. Many of us today understand this; and because we do, we're making a conscious effort to reconnect with nature, and teaching our children to do the same. Because the practice of astrology could help with this, you would think that it might at least be tolerated, perhaps even appreciated. But this is hardly the case. So why does even the mention of the word 'astrology' instantly raise the blood pressure of almost every philosopher, scientist, and general thought-policeman within hearing distance?
The real answer to this question is not the one that usually gets trotted out: that astrology is simply bad science, pseudoscience; and to give it any credence whatsoever is delusional at best. In other words: we're expected to reject it on the grounds that it's clearly unscientific. When the National Science Foundation released its 2014 list of Science & Engineering Indicators, and stated that "fewer Americans rejected astrology in 2012 than in recent years", the response published by Mother Jones became just the latest example of the quasi-religious belief that the kind of 'knowing' perfected by science is the only valid way. The truth, however, is that the scientific critique of astrology completely misses the point.
Science, along with every other form of institutionalized inquiry preferred by Westerners, is a by-product of the invention of the alphabet, and an expression of the particular form of consciousness that alphabetic literacy effectively conditions. In the 20,000+ years of its existence, astrology never has been what our culture understands by the word 'science'. Rather it's something much older, and therefore entirely other than science.
Astrology is really a time-capsule of sorts, handed down from a different paradigm of human consciousness and a different style of human cognition. And because of this, astrology's pre-literate, analogical, participatory way of thinking remains forever a baffling anomaly to the objectifying, analytical, conceptual thinking of the Western-educated scientific and philosophical mind.
Over the course of the last 3000 years the psychology that accompanies the acquisition of alphabetic skills has systematically obliterated the pre-alphabetic psychology from which astrological awareness originally emerged. As a consequence, the practice of astrology has been thoroughly colonized by the the thought-habits that have become synonymous with thinking during the literate phase of the history of Western consciousness. Few astrologers today seem to understand the implications of this hostile takeover since we too share the same thought-habits, and because we never stop to consider how the Literacy Revolution influenced our current understanding of astrological practice.
ALL HER EMPIRES ARE FALLING DOWN
Enter the Digital Revolution. All the empires of literacy, all its time-honored cultural institutions - including the literate interpretation of astrological practice - are rapidly disintegrating as, one-by-one, each slides back down into the dark, roiling waters of the Racial Unconscious. The world built in the image of the literate mind is coming apart at the seams. In the sparse words of the novelist Louise Erdrich: "Everything familiar dissolves into strangeness."
These same astrologers had another phrase to describe how a disappeared planet once again becomes visible as it leaves conjunction. I've borrowed this description for the title of my blog because it so aptly sums up the change in astrology's situation as we better learn to distinguish its unique reason for being from that of Apollo's gifts. And so, liberated from the objectifying constraints of philosophy, and from any need whatsoever to prove itself a science, a new post-literate paradigm of astrological practice is ‘emerging from the beams of the Sun’.
Everything that follows then explains my conviction that the key to our common post-literate future - both as astrologers and as humans - lies not in the history of our literate entrainment, but in the mystery of our pre-literate origins. Therefore all these postings reflect a spirit that’s quite different from the one informing mainstream astrological practice today - both West and East. So be forewarned. Leaving 'the reservation' may prove hazardous to your literacy-conditioned understanding of this time-honored celebration of participatory human consciousness.
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