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THE END OF AN EPOCH: THE CURRENT JUPITER-SATURN OPPOSITION THE ASTROLOGICAL ARCHETYPES - THE LORDS OF TIME WE LIVE IN DANGEROUS TIMES: THE SATURN-PLUTO SQUARE THE TRIPLE CONJUNCTION OF JUPITER, NEPTUNE AND CHIRON THE ARCHETYPES AND THE ORIGINS OF ASTROLOGY AN ARCHETYPAL VIEW OF THE HOUSES TIME, ASTROLOGY AND PREDICTION LADDERS TO HEAVEN: TRINES IN THE BIRTH CHART
THE NEPTUNE-CHIRON CONJUNCTION IN PISCES The present conjunction of Neptune and Chiron began when the two planets first moved into orb early in 2009 and will continue through until 2013. This makes it a longer, more powerful conjunction than the previous one (1945 in Libra) lasting only a year. This can be explained by Chiron's elliptical orbit – he progresses three times more slowly through Pisces than through Libra. Also, for the record, Neptune was last in Pisces between 1848 and 1861, and Chiron between 1960 and 1968. One full cycle of Neptune has been completed since his discovery in 1846, and this is the first Neptune-Chiron conjunction since Chiron's discovery in 1977. Even more dramatic, this is the first Neptune-Chiron conjunction in Pisces within living memory, which makes it very special. However, the present long drawn-out conjunction has only one exactitude, which occurred on 17th February 2010, though both planets are remaining very close. As I see it, acquiring an in-depth knowledge of the astrological archetypes and their fields of meaning is basic to working with astrology[i]. So I'll start by putting the Neptune-Chiron conjunction in the context of the Pisces archetypal field.
The twelve astrological archetypes can be represented as magnetic nodes that each attract and hold a field of themes. These are latently inherent in the field but have a potential for manifestation. As archetypes express on all levels, their scope spans the chain of being from human to animal, vegetable and mineral, creating correspondences between the realms. For example, affinities between planets, plants, gemstones and the organs of the human body have been recognised since ancient times and used in medical practice. In the human sphere the archetypes manifest as personality types, and also give rise to our outer circumstances and life issues. There are twelve astrological archetypes or organising principles within the universal psyche. These give the signs, their ruling planets and the horoscope houses the characteristics that have been observed and noted by astrologers down the ages. Individual archetypes increase and decline in prominence within time cycles. For example during the diurnal cycle an archetype gains prominence as its sign crosses the Ascendant or the MC, and its affairs are then more likely to manifest. It also gains prominence when it is highlighted annually by the sun, or by the transits of powerful planets. Pisces is increasing in prominence at present, now Chiron and Neptune are entering it in conjunction. The vast, deep and unbounded ocean is a primary Pisces symbol. Imagine you're in a boat on the sea, looking over the side into the water. A lot of surface waves and ripples are visible, standing for the feelings and thoughts we're aware of. But below the surface the water is murky and opaque, symbolising the subconscious – the level of mind we enter when we're asleep and dreaming. Even deeper down lie the invisible depths, which stand for what Jung termed the collective unconscious. Coincidentally an exhibition titled The Deep has been showing at the natural history museum, South Kensington. The advertising blurb promised 'to plunge visitors into the abyss, revealing a deep sea environment less explored than the surface of the moon.' It could act as a timely reminder that our oceans are in crisis. With fish stocks dangerously depleted through over fishing and pollution, thousands of ocean species are going extinct. Perhaps, now Chiron is entering Pisces, we may recognise how sick our oceans are, and finally take steps to heal them. Oil is another major Pisces theme. Its commercial exploitation started around the time of Neptune's discovery in 1846, and his cycle since then has coincided with the rise of the oil industry, now in crisis. Oil production has peaked and is on the decline. The catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last April tolled its death knell. And, as most of the remaining oil fields lie in deep water, governments may now be forced to rethink their energy policies, which is a good thing. So the Deepwater Horizon disaster can be seen as an example of Neptune and Chiron manifesting together in a concrete situation. Characteristic of the Pisces archetype is the overwhelming enormity of the catastrophe and the chaos it caused. Also the initial helplessness of those responsible, and those whose livelihoods were lost, is typical of Pisces. The ensuing pollution caused a wounding of marine life and on-shore human and wild life habitats that point to Chiron's involvement. Chiron, with Neptune close behind, entered Pisces in April 2010, a month that will remain memorable not only for the Gulf oil spill, but also for the eruption of the Iceland volcano. Thousands of travellers were stranded at airports through the resulting flight ban, and suffered a Piscean experience of chaos and helplessness in the face of an implacable force of nature. These events were followed in August by the Pakistan flood, which the UN Secretary called the worst disaster he had ever seen, unprecedented in scale and magnitude. Chiron and Neptune had retrograded into Aquarius, though still conjunct the Pisces cusp, and Uranus had retrograded into Pisces accompanied by Jupiter. This triggered a great surge of water along the Indus valley inundating in a landmass the size of England, and leaving six million homeless and in need of aid. Pitiful footage of emaciated, starving Pakistani children continued to touch hearts and rouse our compassion long after the water receded, but our powerlessness when faced with the vast numbers needing assistance also paralysed humanitarian action. August 2010 also saw severe flooding in China, which was less publicised although thousands died, and in South-east Australia. When the Pisces archetype comes into prominence, deep collective fears of an apocalypse by water are triggered. The myth of the deluge and Noah's arc surfaces. Folk memories of the eruption of Santorini 3400 years ago, when tsunamis wiped out civilisations around the Mediterranean, may lie behind the Genesis legend. Thus, when in 1524 astrologers foresaw a giant stellium of all the then-known planets in Pisces, they predicted a Biblical flood. There was also a Neptune-Chiron conjunction at the time (though they were unaware of this) magnifying on an unconscious level their fear of a watery apocalypse. Masses of people fled to mountain tops, and a boat builder in Germany built an ark. When it was finished there were stampedes with fatalities amongst the masses of people trying to scramble on board. But otherwise the fateful day passed uneventfully, proving just how wrong astrologers can be! Piscean energy makes porous the barrier between the conscious and the unconscious levels of our mind, so our dreams become more vivid and memorable. And there's a Piscean element of helplessness in the experience of dreaming, as we usually have no control over what befalls us. It's like drifting rudderless at the mercy of the ocean currents. So, to get into a deeper insight into the Pisces archetype, it would be good to read Coleridge's poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner2. It tells of a curse put on a sailor who shot an albatross – the sailors' good luck omen. This resulted in all his shipmates dying leaving him alone on the ship which drifted around the world's oceans for years. Coleridge wrote this poem in 1798 when Neptune and Chiron were conjunct in Scorpio, and besides the Piscean elements in it, the obsessive intensity of Scorpio also can be felt. That the Ancient Mariner has become one of the most memorable poems in English literature is due to its power to evoke images from the deep-water archetypal level of the collective unconscious, and so speak to everyman. This feat is easier for writers and artists to achieve when the Pisces archetype is prominent. For example, Hermann Melville wrote Moby Dick, a novel drawing strongly on Neptunian subject matter, when Neptune entered Pisces in 1848. It became a world-wide best seller during the 1850's, demonstrating the reading public's unconscious attraction to Piscean themes. Also during the 1850's Wagner wrote some of his greatest operas based on the archetypal symbols of Nordic mythology. The passion of his music has deep oceanic power. |In the art world the entry of Neptune into Pisces in 1848 coincided with the founding of the pre-Raphealite movement by a group of young painters, led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who strove to revive the spiritual beauty of medieval art in their paintings. And it was in 1848 that Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a poetess with sun in Pisces, who suffered from a mysterious physical complaint that left her bed-ridden (very Piscean!), met Robert Browning. Their famous love affair coincided with Neptune's transit of Pisces, and inspired some very great love poetry. Also 1848 was the year when spiritualism took off in a big way, and the 1850's saw a spate of séances being held in Victorian drawing rooms. So we can conclude that, when the Pisces archetype is prominent, the human imagination is more deeply stimulated, and we become more emotionally and intuitively aware, which means great art, music and poetry can be born. And during the last two thousand years of the great age of Pisces some amazing spiritually inspired works have been achieved – the paintings of Michelangelo for example, and Shakespeare's poetry, or the music of J.S. Bach. I'm afraid their like will not be seen again during the coming age of Aquarius! Therefore, during the transit of Neptune through Pisces, we may enjoy an emotional expansion, acquire imaginative power, and our psychic abilities may increase. Also, as a great spiritual longing arises when Neptune is in Pisces, we could become more religious, though not necessarily in a conventional sense. The barriers that normally limit the range of our perceptions will become more porous, so we could catch glimpses of other dimensions lying beyond consensus reality, and we may be given transformative mystical experiences. But mist, marshes and mirages also belong to the Pisces field, and deception, delusion, and disappointment are likely. We should remember that 1848 marked the beginning of the Californian gold rush, with gold fever reaching fever pitch in the 1850's. It brought riches to few and ruin to many. For those who are ungrounded, Neptune and Chiron's transit of Pisces could manifest in confusion, irrational fears and mental instability. Drugs and alcohol beckon, and they could end up on the slippery slope leading to addiction and a wasted life. It is all too easy to give up with Pisces prominent, and passively surrender to destructive forces in and around us. Or we could see ourselves as martyrs, and take on the role of scapegoats suffering for others' sins – positions which are spiritual dead-end alleys. And now to Chiron:
For my version of Chiron's field I owe much to Melanie Reinhart's book Chiron and the Healing Journey, now republished in a new edition3. Chiron has proved to be a powerful astrological significator, and I believe Melanie was the first to associate him with the archetype of the wounded healer. Let's remind ourselves of the myth: Chiron is wounded in the leg by one of Hercules' arrows, and the wound won't heal. So he undertakes a healing journey, visiting many healers in search of a cure – in vain. At last he meets Prometheus, who had been chained to a rock by Zeus, while his liver was daily eaten by eagles. Moved by compassion, Chiron offers to change places with him, and this act of love magically releases Prometheus from his suffering, and heals Chiron's wound at the same time. Chiron manifesting as a shamanic wounded healer can open up liminal spaces for us that lead into alternative realities. With Pisces allowing an easier lifting of the veil, we are then able to enter states of consciousness in which we can access healing powers, or receive teaching and guidance from spiritual beings. When Chiron was last in Pisces in the 1960's, Carlos Castaneda was apprenticed to the shaman Don Juan in the deserts of New Mexico, and received the experiences he describes in his best-selling books.4 Don Juan was a shaman with a knowledge of plants that have healing and mind-altering properties. Castaneda's concept of reality is severely challenged when he experiences the desert as alive with powerful and often terrifying spirits. With the help of a little peyote, Don Juan proves to him that multiple realities are present to us every moment, and teaches him how to 'stop the world' by changing the way his mind normally projects reality. Much pain and discomfort must be suffered during this apprenticeship. And we learn that a wounding, sometimes in the form of a life-threatening illness or epileptic fits, belongs to the initiation of a shaman, and is a prerequisite for the acquisition of psychic powers. When Chiron becomes prominent, we can expect to suffer from our wounds being opened up and exposed. And situations will arise in which we'll be offered a choice of three roles: the wounded victim, the wounder or perpetrator, and the healer with the maturity to transcend the wounder-wounded dichotomy. And the miracle is that, when we choose the latter, and, like Chiron, perform acts of healing out of love and compassion, our own wounds will be healed in the process. As Pisces is a water sign, and Chiron is conjunct Neptune, our healing this time will be less on the physical and more on the emotional or spiritual levels. To be human is to be wounded, and all of us are carrying emotional wounds. These are the sensitive, aching places remaining from our past experiences of rejection, cruelty and general lack of love. We've buried them deep in our unconscious, and closed our hearts to protect ourselves from getting hurt again. But before wounds can be healed they must be exposed, and Chiron, cruel in order to be kind, will prise them open. Then, if we can accept our pain without blaming others and playing the victim, and if we can understand and forgive, this will shift our perspective. We'll pass through pain and suffering into a change of heart and a change of consciousness. Neptune tunes us into other people by heightening our empathy with them. So, when Pisces is prominent, healing happens through the empathetic imagination. When we are able to identify with others, we become more understanding and more able to forgive. Increased powers of empathy also help us to transcend the belief that we're separate –cut off from others and from Nature. And this illusion can be seen as humanity's primal metaphysical wound that's in need of healing. I see the coming transit of Neptune through Pisces as the culmination of the Age of Pisces, and suggest that the extreme sufferings of the human species during the last 2000 years have been necessary to open the human heart chakra wider. As Pisces is the final stage in the precessional cycle, it seems all human karma from the previous ages has had to be paid during this period. Consequently the last 2000 years have witnessed terrible wars and atrocities. Take 1945 for example – the year of the last Neptune-Chiron conjunction. World War II ended in May in terrible carnage, the extermination camps were opened up, confronting the world with images of their living and dead. There were thousands of refugees homeless on European highways. Then in August the first atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the world had to face up to the horrors of atomic war. So can such harrowing human experience be put into a spiritual context? The predominant icon of the age of Pisces has been the image of Christ on the cross. And during the centuries after his death thousands of martyrs, seeking a passport to heaven, followed his example. In a gallery in Venice there hangs a painting of the crucifixion of 10,000 martyrs at once in gory detail. It was painted to hang in a church to act as spiritual inspiration! As a child, I was taken every Sunday to a church where a life-sized statue of Jesus on the cross hung over the transept. I would gaze at it fascinated – the beauty of the young man's body, naked except for a loin cloth, the realistic blood dripping from his wounds, the face expressing ecstatic suffering. Later in my atheist phase I condemned such images of the crucifixion as sado-masochistic and psychologically sick. But astrology has revealed their deeper meaning to me. I now see Jesus as a Chiron-Neptune figure – the ultimate wounded healer – who was motivated by love and compassion to sacrifice himself for humanity. Like other wounded healers he was rejected, despised and killed, but not in vain because for two thousand years his agony on the cross served to heal Christians spiritually. The devout Christian today is 'saved' by being ritually crucified with Jesus through an empathetic identification with him every Good Friday. He suffers the same wounding, and rises again with Jesus on Easter Sunday with his wounds healed. So an experience of the ancient pagan Spring ritual of death and rebirth is still available every Easter in Christian churches. What Jesus offers through his crucifixion and resurrection is a deep spiritual healing. Partaking vicariously in his death and resurrection can heal us of our nihilistic despair at the prospect of death and meaningless dissolution. A zen master, when asked how to avoid pain, replied, 'Escape – but into the midst of the boiling waters, into the midst of the burning coal!' Unlike the ego, which tries to avoid pain and seek pleasure, the soul in its deeper wisdom surrenders to suffering as a bitter but necessary medicine. Because in the end the suffering is not the point; it's the experience of the compassionate love underlying it. A deep Piscean surrender is, however, required, and the ultimate surrender is to offer up the self as a vehicle for the divine. 'Not my will but thy will be done!' By following a path of spiritual development during the transit of Neptune and Chiron through Pisces, we may attain this ultimate form of surrender. But it's scary, because on the way we risk losing our security structures. The reward is great however, as this path leads to the ecstatic experience of boundlessness and all-inclusiveness when the water drop finally returns to Neptune's ocean of bliss. Phoebe Wyss, July 2010
THE END OF AN EPOCH: THE CURRENT JUPITER-SATURN OPPOSITION What is this fluttering expectation in the air, this breathlessness? Is it rampant 2012 fever or the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, predicted by the Golden Dawn to actually happen in 2010?1 Or is it because we are experiencing the final opposition between Jupiter and Saturn before the grand conjunction shifts elements from earth to air? Or may be all of these things, because we live in momentous times. The Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions, that occur every twenty years, have always been seen by astrologers as events of great magnitude initiating dynastic change. Modern history confirms this view: Napoleon died under the 1821 conjunction, Abraham Lincoln took office in 1861, Queen Victoria died under the 1901 conjunction, Hitler became leader of the national socialist party in 1921, Kennedy became president under the 1961 conjunction, Reagan and Thatcher took office in 1981, and George Bush became president in 2000, the year of the grand conjunction in Taurus. When mapped, the progress of the grand conjunctions through the zodiac describes a series of equilateral triangles (Fig 1). Every sixty years a triangle is completed, and the conjunction returns to start, shifting however nine degrees anticlockwise in respect to its predecessors, thus creating a cycle of 800 years (Fig 2). Every two hundred years the triangles change element. From 1226-1425 they occurred in air signs, 1425-1603 in water, 1603-1802 in fire and from 1802 to 2000 in earth. If we add the oppositions to the geometry of the conjunctions, a six-pointed star or hexagram is formed (Fig. 3). In May 2010 the final opposition stage in the current sixty-year cycle will be reached with Jupiter in Pisces opposing Saturn in Virgo, and the last line in the current hexagram will be drawn. So the series of Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions in earth, which began in 1802 (interspersed with oppositions between Saturn in earth and Jupiter in water), is nearing its end, and we stand on the brink of a mutation. In March 2011 a second exactitude of the current opposition will occur with Jupiter in Aries and Saturn in Libra, heralding the coming shift into air and fire – the elements that will determine the quality of the Jupiter-Saturn cycle over the next 200 years. (In 1980-1 we were given a foretaste of the new air quality when a maverick conjunction occurred in airy Libra, out of line with the other earth conjunctions of the series). An element shift in the Jupiter-Saturn sky geometry marks the beginning of a new epoch with a new time quality. Saturn could be known as Father Time because his orbit, like a scythe, cuts up the sky into sections. In his book The Matrix of Creation2 Richard Heath makes a case for the numerical factors of Saturn’s cycle being used as the basis for ancient calendars. He points out that Saturn undergoes 28 retrograde loops during his 29-year cycle, so 28 is a Saturn number, and reflected in the 28 mansions of the moon - the Nashastras - as well as in the 56 Aubrey holes at Stonehenge, which Heath believes measure two 28-year Saturn cycles, calibrating with intervals of two months. He suggests that the myth of Jupiter deposing Saturn refers to the replacement of Saturn based calendars by calendars derived from the Jupiter numbers of 12 and 60. Ancient measuring units such as the megalithic yard are also derived from the numerical factors of Jupiter’s orbit, thus in a very concrete sense Saturn and Jupiter are lords of time and space.3 So I suggest that, when every two hundred years an element shift occurs, we gain a new perspective on time and space, and the way human consciousness perceives reality changes. Johannes Kepler, who made a detailed study of the moving geometry of the sky, represented the periods of the planets by geometric figures with values based on the fundamental divisions of the circle into four, six and twelve sections measuring 90º, 60º and 30º. He created a model that relateed the five Platonic solids to the planetary orbits (Fig. 4) whereby the cube occupied the space between the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter, and the tetrahedron between Jupiter and Mars. Since then many mind-boggling mathematical relationships have been discovered between the planets’ cycles, sizes and distances from each other as well as their speed and axis inclinations, and even their rates of spin. These findings point to the presence of intelligent design in the universe. They prove that, rather than evolving randomly, the sun together with the planets and their moons form one unified, living system of the greatest order and elegance4. That numbers and shapes have a qualitative as well as a quantitative dimension is neglected in modern times. But for Plato the five solids (Fig. 5) corresponded to the elements earth, water, air, fire and ether, which, as Jung pointed out5 have psychological significance and refer to our experience of our physical body, our feelings and our mental and intuitive powers. The tetrahedron or pyramid – the three dimensional form of the two-dimensional triangle, which is basic to the Saturn-Jupiter cycle – corresponds to fire and stands for human aspiration towards higher consciousness. In occult circles the three points of the triangle are related to perception, knowledge and higher understanding, and seen as corresponding to our two physical eyes and the intuitive third eye above them. All six points of the hexagram or star tetrahedron can be enclosed by a circle or globe (Fig. 6). Thus there is an easy flow of energy between the points, which explains the harmonious quality of the trine and sextile aspects in astrology aspects that point to ways in which we can evolve our consciousness. The hexagram is a powerful magical symbol, and was used together with the pentagram by Aleister Crowley for example. In magical practices geometrical shapes are employed to evoke and then acquire the power of the energies they represent. A simple example is sitting in a circle, which evokes the power of the circle, serving to unify and harmonise a group of people. In a similar way a pyramid or triangle can be used to increase the power of the third eye, schooling the intuitive faculty to tune into transcendent states of consciousness. There is an ancient spiritual practice, popularly revived in our times by Drunvalo Melchizedek, which involves visualising revolving a star tetrahedron (to acquire the powers of Jupiter and Saturn?) And meditators at the White Eagle Lodge also use the six-pointed star as a meditation aid. It is a basic shape in Tibetan mandalas such as the Shri Yantra (Fig. 6). Meditating on the balanced symmetry of the upwards and downwards pointing triangles in this figure harmonises the hemispheres of the brain, and creates subtle alignments that order our internal atoms and molecules. So what has all this to do with the Jupiter-Saturn cycle? Well, I suggest that the power we attribute to the planets may derive not from the planets themselves but from the geometrical shapes created by their cycles. Also when Jupiter and Saturn draw the magic sky hexagon, a shape of great power, this is a sign that the ancient gods Zeus and Chronos are alive, well and still doing their thing. It confirms that divine harmony and order lie behind the surface crudity and disjointedness of human life. We remember that in Mesopotamia Saturn/Chronos presided over creation, and was thereafter responsible for keeping order in the universe. So we can say he is the source of the intelligent design that created a cosmos out of primeval chaos through numerical order.
Chaos is a concept describing the universe before number, when existence consisted of a soup of particles and waves. Then with the creation of matter Saturn/Chronos brought time as well as space into existence, because time can only exist where there is something material that moves and changes. It is therefore fitting that Saturn, as prime organiser and director, is associated in astrology with regulation, structure and necessity. Saturn restricts through setting boundaries – the laws of nature for example, and the laws of society necessary for stability and security. In unison Jupiter and Saturn create the balancing of the opposite principles as a necessary condition for life. As physical planets they balance our climate via the gravitational effects of their alignments on the sunspot cycle. Also Jupiter has been earth’s protector over aeons of evolution, deflecting away harmful comets and asteroids that would otherwise have collided with us. On the level of the body, where Jupiter and Saturn correspond to the posterior and anterior pituitary glands, which have directing, and protecting functions, they work together to regulate our hormone levels. In astrology they rule over the last four transpersonal signs in the zodiac – Sagittarius to Pisces – which are relevant to our collective life in society. Jupiter represents hope, faith, optimism, and Saturn fear, doubt and pessimism, thus they stand for opposite attitudes. The time quality during their cycles oscillates between the extremes of enthusiastic expansion and grasping opportunity (full speed ahead), and sober acceptance of restrictions and control dictated by necessity (batten down the hatches). When they are in conjunction their opposing attitudes merge, and Jupiter can provide a counterbalance to the narrow security consciousness of Saturn, while Saturn can sanely ground Jupiter’s visions. Then we are able to plan realistically for a future of measured growth. During their opposition, however, the two attitudes split apart. Opposite camps are formed and horns are locked, blocking progress. Then big ideas are shipwrecked on the rocks of hard facts, and optimistic plans for the betterment of life end in stalemate on the conference table. Thus, under the present opposition, we are advised to ratchet down our hopes in many areas and bide our time till well into 2011. So how will the quality of the times change as we move away from two hundred years of conjunctions in earth into the new epoch of conjunctions in air? In general element earth is more congenial to Saturn than Jupiter, as it’s solid, stable, functional and easily formed and ordered. So in the past two centuries our main concerns have been material. We have learned to use earth’s resources to create material prosperity on a scale never known before. The last two hundred years have seen the rise and predominance of capitalism, whose roots go back to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, written shortly before the first conjunction of the earth series in Taurus in 1802. At this time the modern banking system was also established, and Dalton proposed the atomic theory of matter, creating a philosophical basis for 19th and 20th century scientific materialism.. By the time of the grand conjunction in 1842 in Capricorn, we were well into the machine era. This period saw the rapid growth of industry and the expansion of the collieries to provide coal to fuel the new machines. Then during the next grand conjunction in Capricorn in 1901 oil was then discovered in Texas which has provided the basis of 20th century wealth and prosperity. But the US stock market also crashed in that year. After the conjunction in Taurus in 1941, a time of insane material destruction resulting from the greed of nations competing for territory and resources, sixty years of peace in Europe and prosperity followed. Capitalism finally triumphed over communism – an earthy materialist political philosophy – and the Berlin wall came down during the last Jupiter-Saturn opposition in 1989-90. Finally, following the last conjunction in earth in Taurus in May 2000, capitalism reached its peak with the banks enjoying untrammelled power and global markets expanding. But then came the crash, global recession and capitalism is now in dire crisis. Perhaps the shift from earth to air will witness its demise. And what happened eight hundred years ago when the grand conjunction last mutated from earth into air? A conjunction in 1206 in Taurus was followed by one in 1226 in Aquarius, and the shift was accompanied by a rapid growth in trade and an expansion of urban life. The Hanseatic League was formed, and at the first opposition in 1215 the Magna Carta was signed. At this time the building of the great cathedrals started, which brought people together and favoured community life with the guilds being formed. The Templars were active creating institutions for the poor and elderly, and founding schools and hospitals. They believed in social equality, and the rights of women were observed in their communities. Also the first universities were being founded at this time in Paris, Oxford and Cambridge, and learning was being furthered in the monasteries throughout Europe – all of which demonstrates an emphasis on air values rather than on earthy materialism. As a male element, air is more in tune with Jupiter than Saturn, who has had the edge on Jupiter for the last two hundred years. Air is a light, fast element that rises and expands away from the physical plane, but in earth as gravity kicks in Jupiter is slowed down. So may be Jupiter will now have the edge on Saturn. I suggest that in the coming two centuries the human mind will focus less on the material world and more on the realm of ideas. We will seek to master the world through understanding it rather than through trying to possess it. This trend is already observable. Our minds are linking up via the internet and the mobile phone. A vast amount of information is now instantly available, which will affect the expression of human creativity, as the power of air is the power to convert experience into information and information into creative ideas. Air is also a leveller, just as the law is a leveller, and an ideal of balanced one to one relationships, and balanced relationships in society as well as between nations, could lead to more equality in the world and a greater emphasis on community values. With the age of Aquarius also dawning, we could become inspired by the highest expression of the grand conjunction in air, and work towards establishing the cosmic laws of justice, balance and harmony in human relationships and in our social structures. Then justice, human rights and equality before the law would manifest more boldly. The world is waiting to change, the tipping point is approaching, and our breathlessness at this moment in time could be due to the realisation that everything hangs in the balance. 1 The Astrological Journal Vol. 52 Number 2 The Golden Dawn’s Esoteric Zodiac by Ed Gillam Phoebe Wyss THE ASTROLOGICAL ARCHETYPES - THE LORDS OF TIME
These days when our civilisation has reached a crisis point, and our economic and ecological systems are veering out of control, it’s good to be reminded that the universe is a cosmos, and that eternal spiritual principles govern the cycles of time, and structure our personalities and daily lives. Astrology gives us insight into them. It teaches that all time cycles have three phases: the cardinal when the new is created; the fixed when what has been achieved is held and maintained; and the mutable when it all falls apart and the old is swept away. We are in the final stages of the mutable phase of the Age of Pisces – a great time cycle that has lasted more than two thousand years. No wonder we’re feeling insecure! We have also reached a crisis point in the cycle of Saturn to Uranus – the opposition that signifies a violent clash between the forces in the collective that want to hold on to the old because it’s known and feels safe, and powers that want to raze everything to the ground and start afresh. The first exact opposition of these two planetary giants was on 4th November – the day of the American election! The third dramatic happening is that Pluto is changing signs, which in the past has always been a time of crisis, and is moving from Sagittarius into Capricorn. No wonder the global financial and economic institutions have been shaken to their foundations by toxic debts! Capricorn’s themes centre round the management of material life, and our custodianship of the planet. Knowing that Pluto will remain in Capricorn until 2024, we can expect multiple breakdowns and breakthroughs in the systems that sustain life on earth in the years to come. The ancient Egyptians’ understanding of the archetypes that determine the quality of the times enabled their civilisation to endure through cardinal, fixed and mutable phases for over four thousand years. It was the task of the astrologers in the ancient cultures to prescribe the right actions, and the appropriate rituals and religious ceremonies, to keep the human sphere in harmony with the celestial. It was about going with the flow instead of swimming against the current as we try to do, and it was about trust – trust that whatever happens, even though it’s beyond our control, is right if it accords with the cosmic energies of the moment. Mainstream society today derides astrology and disregards the ancient wisdom at a cost. However, without learning the complicated techniques needed to become an astrologer, we can all gain knowledge of the twelve archetypes that govern our lives, and learn to live in harmony with them. They were called the ‘Archai’ in ancient Greece and the ‘Neters’ in Egypt, where they were personified as gods and goddesses and worshipped as constellations of stars. C.G.Jung saw what he called archetypes as much more than projections of the human mind. He spoke of them as innate structures within the cosmic psyche. Jung saw the universe as a living being rather than dead matter. He revived the ancient view of the universe as the macrocosm corresponding to the human microcosm – God in the image of man. And like the human individual, the universe possesses not only a body but also a mind and a feeling soul. Thus we can speak of the psyche, or the inner life, of the universe of which our personal inner life is a part. The twelve astrological archetypes are like twelve rays, each resonating with a different colour, whose essences manifest on all levels of creation. This is the wisdom behind the ancient system of correspondences called the Great Chain of Being. Thus, for example, the Aries archetype appears in Nature in iron, in the planet Mars, in rubies, in tigers and wolves and in the thistle and cactus. In the human sphere it rules a particular psychological type that’s impatient and aggressive, but also daring and pioneering. It is associated with health problems such as fevers and headaches, and it faces us, when this is our main archetype, with a certain set of issues and challenges - for example how to assert ourselves without harming others. It also sets us on the Aries spiritual path. Many people only know their sun sign, and some cannot identify with it, the reason being that most of us are a mixture of three or four main archetypes. Your rising sign and moon sign are also important and in some cases can eclipse your sun sign. So a personal birth chart is needed to determine your particular archetypal mix, and this can be obtained today free on the internet. In my book mentioned below I give instructions on how to get your chart from an internet site and use it to find your main archetypes. The mixture of archetypes in our chart will not only describe our personality but also the kind of life we lead. As the outer world and the inner world mirror each other, we always attract conditions and people to us that match our inner patterns. So who our parents were is no coincidence, nor is the kind of childhood we had. The work we do, our pattern in relationships, the subjects we are passionate about, and our goals in life are all contained in seed in the particular archetypal mix of our birth chart, which then unfolds during our lifetime in time cycles. Being able to recognise the signatures of the twelve archetypes as they emerge in our lives allows us to make sense of our experience by seeing it in the context of wider cosmic patterns of meaning. I wrote my new book Virtual Lives: the Animated Zodiac* to show how the astrological archetypes express in our personalities and lives. Instead of telling you about the signs, as other astrology books do, I give you a direct experience of them. You find out what it’s like to be in the skin of a Virgo, a Capricorn or a Gemini etc. and see life through their eyes. That makes you realise how very different other people’s viewpoints are to your own, and helps you understand them better. The book is also written in an easy-to-read, entertaining style, combining a lightness of touch with a depth of content. The story starts in the interlife (the life between lives) where a group of twelve characters are getting last minute instructions from their life coach. Then they are conceived and born, and each character narrates in turn his or her experiences from birth to death. Nothing in the stories is random, and each character demonstrates the typical traits of his or her archetype. The Taurus, for example, is a pure example of a Taurus, without other archetypes mixed in, as is the case in real life. Their life circumstances, and what happens to them and the kind of decisions they make are all archetypical, and in this way the reader becomes familiarised with the fields of potential experience to be expected with each archetype. The characters are accompanied by their life coach, an invisible companion throughout their lives, who dialogues with them as an inner voice. He reminds them to do their self-inquiry and stay aware, and helps them understand their life lessons. So they learn and grow through their experiences, and die wiser than they were. The stories in the book also have dramatised versions as radio plays, and a selection of them can be downloaded free on my website (see below). In this day and age, as life becomes wild and chaotic, we urgently need to become aware of the structuring presence of the archetypes. Then, if the mutable phase we are going through brings a loss of coherence, we can rest assured this is only on the surface. Beneath the frenetic music of our twenty-first century lives deeper harmonies are resounding – harmonies that our forefathers knew and loved, and that echo the music of the spheres. Listening to them can renew our faith in the universe in which we are all embedded. It is not only alive and intelligent but it has a feeling heart, and whatever happens is ultimately an act of love. As Dante wrote, it is divine love that moves the stars. * Phoebe Wyss Virtual Lives: the Animated Zodiac (Tree Tongue 2008, £12.95) Available from Amazon.com or from Phoebe Wyss Tel 01273-417997, email astrophoebe@btinternet.com For more information please visit www.astrophoebe.com WE LIVE IN DANGEROUS TIMES: THE SATURN-PLUTO SQUARE Talk given by Phoebe Wyss to the Brighton and Hove Astrology Circle The summer of 2010 is marked by an unusual number of dramatic outer planet aspects - Saturn opposite Uranus, Saturn squaring Pluto and Jupiter/Uranus squaring Pluto and opposing Saturn. The outer planets are always on the verge of veering out of control, whether they manifest collectively as a mob carrying out a massacre, or as telluric forces splitting the earth open during a quake Or within us as powerful surges from the unconscious, that drive us to act irrationally. In vain we may struggle to keep control, as Gordon Brown is struggling to keep the runaway train of the economy on the track, while Pluto, soon in league with Uranus and Jupiter, is threatening to derail it.! This summer one of those Jeckyl and Hyde times when we are being forced to give our Hyde space and come to terms with him. The present Saturn-Pluto aspect is the waning square of a cycle that started in 1982.
This square has three exactitudes which fall on 16.11.2009, 31.1.2010 and 21.8.2010. Altogether it is in orb from Oct 09 to September 10, with the exception of mid April to mid July this year. And all three exactitudes fall in the cardinal signs Libra and Capricorn, though during the summer Saturn will move back into Virgo and oppose Uranus in Pisces. I will concentrate on Saturn and Pluto, keeping, however, an eye on Uranus, who is part of the picture. The energy of this Saturn/Pluto square is cardinal. Now the early degrees of the cardinal signs correspond to the cardinal compass directions, and the solstice and equinox points as well to sunrise, midday, sunset and midnight. These points are like anchors in time and space, and they are also turning points of change. Therefore these major aspects close to the cardinal points mean there will be a strong impetus to take action for change this summer, because cardinal energy has to move and be used for projects and exertion, or when there’s opposition, for fight. It’s like a head of steam is built up at cardinal times that needs to be discharged. But this natural letting off steam is being blocked by the square between Pluto and Saturn, which is soon to become a cardinal T-square when joined by Uranus and Jupiter later in the summer. So the strong impulse towards taking action is dammed up and an explosive tension results. And now Saturn is retrograding out of cardinal Libra into mutable Virgo. It’s as if the first green shoots of spring that were about to break through are delayed by a return to winter. What will happen to those proclamations of change, those new ways of thinking and new values of the politicians? As Saturn is our builder- the ruler of Capricorn - he must be enlisted to get all building works off the ground, but as he is retrograde now his attention is on the unfinished business of the past rather than new projects. So the cardinal thrust of change is being capped. In mutable signs the energy instead of being concentrated ready for action is dispersed so things crumble and disintegrate ready to be cleared away - a process accentuated by Saturn’s opposition next month to Uranus in mutable Pisces. Uranus brings the unexpected and sudden revolt, so the best laid plans and strategies of the politicians can go awry this summer. Breakdown and breakthrough is on Uranus’ agenda, which is all grist to Pluto’s mill. He’s waiting there in Capricorn rubbing his hands. So when Saturn returns to cardinal Libra and the last exactitude with Pluto in August, he will have been chastened and weakened by Uranus. I see the planets as representatives of the sign archetypes in which they rule. Thus Saturn carries the Capricorn and Pluto the Scorpio archetype. The twelve astrological archetypes are fields of meaning that contain clusters of ideas, associations, images, behaviour patterns and life themes. As, in the course of their time cycles, they become prominent, their subject matter manifests in us and around us on all levels, and it is fascinating to observe the forms their expression takes in daily life. The words in the fields in the diagram below are pointers to the essences of Saturn and Pluto, which are beyond language mind and feeling. But taken together they give an impression and can define the quality of Saturn/Pluto times in life.
The merging of the two fields shown in the diagram explains why from last autumn onwards there’s been an escalation of violence in the world – massacres, increased suicide bombings, daily army funerals in Wootton Bassett. And the home news has been full of murders, rapes, incest and cases of cruel abuse, because Saturn/ Pluto leads our repressed urges to erupt, and people can live out their worst fantasies – it’s a time of catharsis. It’s also a time of fear and threat. For example there have been news items about sex offenders on the loose, and psychopaths who perform psychotic killings at large in the community, because there are not are not enough prison places for them. The tense Pluto/Saturn square, and the explosive Saturn/Uranus opposition falling together have resulted in three terrible earthquakes in the last two months in Haiti, Chile and now in Turkey, which I believe is unprecedented. The solid surface of the earth (Saturn) is cracking under the stress of these powerful cosmic forces, so the magma (Pluto) wells up from below The quakes are necessary to relieve telluric pressure, and their aftermath is giving thousands of people an extreme Saturn/Pluto hard time. Their experience of suffering from injuries, bereavement, homelessness, hunger and disease is within the human collective and thus felt on a deeper level by all of us. We are lucky in this country to get away with a hard winter – which is also no coincidence, because when Saturn and Pluto combine as at present, hard winters can be expected, bringing extra heating costs that many can’t afford, and ice and snow hindering travel and mobility. It is also typical of the Saturn-Pluto square that we should be at war. We are committed to a hopeless war in Afghanistan we cannot win, with heavy loss of life, and our leaders see no way out. Gordon Brown may talk about moral reasons being in Afghanistan but the truth is his hands (and feet) are tied by agreements with Americans and thus he is bound with chains of necessity. Another manifestation of Saturn/Pluto is the corruption and fraud that is being uncovered in the corridors of power. Scandal in high places is one of the themes of Pluto in Capricorn, which, by the way, reinforces the Saturn/Pluto square as the same archetypes are involved, making it especially powerful this time. If something is rotten in the state, it will be exposed. So we have had the expenses scandal, the Lord Ashcroft scandal, the bank bonuses scandal. We discover that top ministers in the government have been complicit in the torture of terror suspects (torture and sexual abuse being the most unpleasant faces of Saturn/Pluto.) But, if there has been a cover up on any level, now is the time when the truth will out. So beware - your dark secrets could be revealed! The waning square of Saturn and Pluto is also about retribution - old crimes of the past are exposed and perpetrators are punished. Thus murderers are being arrested now decades after committing their crimes. We heard before Christmas that a Nazi war criminal, who has been pursued all these years, is now going on trial (By the way, the war tribunal in which the leading Nazis were tried and sentenced after World War II happened during the 1947 conjunction of Saturn and Pluto.) Our government has apologised under it the Barnado children who were exported to Australia and the colonies where they suffered a harsh life of labour and abuse, deprived of family love. The Australian government has also apologised recently to the hundreds of half-caste children who they separated from their aborigine families during this time. Saturn /Pluto suits totalitarian states. It gives great power to the few and who can use it cruelly for their victims’ disempowerment and exploitation. Under the first exactitude of the present square last autumn, far right neo-Nazi groups were in the news. They were clashing in street battles with anti-fascist and Muslim protestors. Racial and homophobic attacks are rife at this time. Issues of race are revived that were in the foreground, for example, during the rise of Nazism when Pluto was in Cancer in the 1930’s. Our state, if not totalitarian like the communist countries of the past, is a harsh social system that is on track to become harsher as public services such as the National Health will be cut by 30% in the next two years, in spite of what the politicians are saying. This is insider information! We find ourselves locked into a society controlled by greedy self-interested bankers and corporate entrepreneurs who have insidious powers over our politicians that are invisible. Today people are driven to work inhumanly long hours, out of fear of losing their jobs, for the profit of the rich, to support an unsustainable society built on their illusion of continuous growth. Pluto is utterly amoral and is also associated with great power and great riches. Let’s review the events accompanying the major stages in Saturn’s 34-year cycle to Pluto through 20th century history. 1. The 1914-1915 conjunction was exact in the summer and autumn of 1914 when war was declared, and heralded the horrors of trench warfare. A 34-year cycle began in which the nations struggled for supremacy and the lions’ share of trade and world resources. 2. The 1922-23 waxing square: Stalin seized power and began exterminating his enemies and creating slave camps in Siberia. 3. The 1931-33 opposition: The great stockmarket crash, the pressures of unemployment, people starve in America and Germany. 7 million Ukranians starve under Stalin. Hitler seizes power and the rise of the Nazis begins. Japan invades Manchuria. Totalitarian regimes prosper. 4. The 1939-41 waning square was exact in August-September 1939 when World War II was declared. It favoured the Nazis who triumphed at the beginning of the war. A time of fear (gas masks) and financial austerity (ration books). The extermination of the Jews was conceived and the development of atomic bombs began. The waning square brought the nemesis of a cycle of competition and conquest. 5. The conjunction of 1947-48: The world faces the grim aftermath of war, suffering exceptionally severe winters, with ruined cities to rebuild, and the facts of the concentration camps and the nuclear holocaust in Japan to be faced. The iron curtain comes down; there is the Berlin blockade. And India is partitioned to create Pakistan, resulting in the death of thousands of refugees, and the state of Israel is created. The new cycle of Saturn to Pluto will be marked by cold war, and escalating violence in the middle East due to the events under the conjunction. 6. The 1955-56 waxing square: the cold war, Kruschev’s threats, the nuclear threat is strong, the CND marches. Russian totalitarianism dominates the east European block. The 1955 the Hungarian revolt is put down by force and all dissent crushed. 7. The 1965-66 opposition saw Israel’s six days’ war, and events that would lead to the Vietnam war. Otherwise, as Uranus was part of the equation it was about social revolution, the pill, and sex, drugs and rock ’n roll. 8. The 1973-75 waning square saw the Americans defeated in Vietnam, the Watergate scandal, the oil embargo by OPEC and the resulting global economic recession. 9. By the 1982-83 conjunction in Libra the tensions of the cold war had escalated with the nuclear arms race. Reagan’s star war technology was envisioned. We narrowly escaped nuclear Armageddon when a Soviet military officer averted world war. It was a time of border tension and hostilities – (Saturn and Pluto in Libra were trying to balance hostilities and threat), Israel invaded Lebanon. There was Greenham common, the Falklands war, the rise of the Republican right wing in the US, and of the conservatives under Thatcher in the UK. (Thatcher with Saturn in Scorpio on her AC was Pluto-Saturn person!) But also the reality of a nuclear winter scenario was brought home to the politicians when the fuel rods failed in a nuclear power plant in the USSR, and there was a nuclear power disaster in Argentina. A new cycle of Saturn to Pluto begins in which the big financial institutions, the world trade organisation, and concerns like Lockheed Martin extend their power globally. 10. With the 1992-93 square the global economy teeters and we go into recession. There is war in the Balkans, and dangerous tensions between India and Pakistan. 11. The 2001-03 opposition between Saturn in Gemini and Pluto in Sagittarius brings the twin towers atrocity. (Gemini the twin towers, Sagittarius the highjacked aircraft bringing death). George Bush (born under 1946 conjunction) comes to power in the US and Tony Blair in the UK and begin their sinister association. Following 9/11 there is limitation of civil liberties, and security is stepped up on flights, the oppressive power of the establishment is more strongly felt with increased control and surveillance. It is reported that on the same day that the news of the attack on the twin towers was received Donald Rumsfeld gave orders to his aides to set about planning the invasion of Iraq. Saturn-Pluto times as we have seen can bring large-scale violence and destruction. And they are also times when populations are brainwashed to think in terms of black and white, good and evil, friend and foe. Bush’s axis of evil speech which I believe was written in readiness for 9/11 used the human weakness of projecting our repressed negative traits onto those we see as our enemies – the communists, the Muslim terrorists etc - for a manipulative political purpose. 12. And now during the waning square of 2009-10: We are engaged in a hopeless resources and morale sapping war in Afghanistan, with a surge of troops taking place this Spring – not a good time astrologically, proving that Obama unlike Reagan does not have a pet astrologer! Meanwhile Iran and North Korea have become nuclear threats (Pluto). Iran, we hear, will not tolerate the US missile shield (Saturn) in the Gulf to protect oil installations and deter an attack on Israel. The summer months of 2010 could see increased suicide bomb attacks – maybe a terrorist dirty bomb, as Iran could now be in a position to supply terrorists with nuclear materials. Or a cyber attack could paralyse the internet, which would cause our social infrastructure to collapse. We can expect flare-ups in hotspots such as the India/Pakistan border, Gaza, and Northern Ireland. Or perhaps the violence will merely play out in the human collective fantasy through the millions of violent computer games people are playing all over the word, which in a Saturn/Pluto way are addictive because they give the player a semblance of control in a brutal, illogical, chaotic world. Whichever way the election in May turns out for us in the UK, the next government, elected under the Saturn-Pluto square will face enormous pressure. Pluto has magnified our national debt into a bottomless black hole in the economy. And countries can go bankrupt not just banks - for example Greece is teetering. But perhaps the biggest pressure for radical change is the climate crisis. A recent statement by the Met office said, ‘The world has just 10 years to bring greenhouse gas emissions under control before the damage they cause becomes irreversible.’ But the Copenhagen talks, held shortly after the first exactitude of the Saturn/Pluto square failed miserably. We all realise we need to act and to act now to reduce emissions, but it seems our hands are tied - by Saturn and Pluto of course. So where is the brightness in this picture of gloom and doom? And what helpful advice can astrology give for the coming summer of crisis? As Saturn moves in June into orb with Uranus and Jupiter who then enter Aries, and an explosively tense T-square is formed, it will be important in public life and in our personal life to keep our cool. We must disengage from our passions when frustration and anger is triggered in our relationships, and find a place in ourselves from where we can dispassionately observe the manifestations of this very powerful configuration of archetypes. Perhaps, instead of ‘We Live in Dangerous Times’ this talk should be called ‘We Live in Interesting Times’ as the Chinese say. As there will be tremendous pressure for change and tremendous resistance, our attempts to get things done will be blocked and then we must be patient and not freak out as the odds will be against us. Instead of getting drawn into conflict because things are not moving, we should maintain our integrity, and quietly pursue our path whether we make progress or not. And if extreme things happen we will have to get ourselves back into balance first before we deal with the situation. People with personal planets in the early degrees of the cardinal signs are in the pressure cooker. So if they are clinging to some security structure and it’s not working out, things will come to a head this summer. There may be pressure to make impossible decisions. Uranus will be pushing them to break radically with the past, and change their situation dramatically, while Saturn will bring circumstances that make this very difficult to carry out. And Pluto will put them under psychological pressure, forcing them to look inside and deal with what is coming up. Someone said, ‘There is no misery like being trapped in your own brain. The more I think about my problems the more tied up in knots I become.’ So if their mental or physical health is affected, they will be put under pressure to look inside and do some inner work in order to find the inner strength and certainty needed to deal with this hard test. Because basically this is a metaphysical crisis. Like our planet, we individually are being put under pressure to become more sustainable. This requires us to expand our sense of self to accept and integrate our rejected shadow side instead of projecting it on the people we hate. Pluto, when strong, brings to the fore the human habit of projecting the ‘evil’ in us onto those we see as our enemies, and fighting it in others (the Jews, the commies, the Muslims) instead of dealing with the darkness in our own psyche. So Saturn-Pluto times can bring out the worst in human nature, but these times, so austere, are when we see the human spirit rising to the challenge, and showing great courage, stamina, determination and moral courage, as well as the will to sacrifice, and the power to make a titanic effort as is being shown by the hundreds of rescue and aid workers struggling at present to deal with the aftermath of the earthquakes. Melanie Reinhart has called Pluto the planet of void, depth and uncompromising necessity, and Saturn the power of manifestation, the planet of hard conditions and hard bargains. During a Saturn/Pluto time new forms emerge from the underworld of the collective unconscious and old forms get broken down on a deep psychic level. So Melanie sees these times as times for re-centering ourselves as there is a powerful pulling together of energy inwards. And in times of acute stress in the outer world this inner centering becomes even more urgent. Perhaps that’s the higher soul purpose of dangerous times – to put us under so much pressure in the pressure cooker that we wake up and move up spiritually to a new level. And then we must prepare ourselves for the arrival of Uranus to create a T-square with Saturn and Pluto. Uranus is the planet of awakening; it frees us by unlocking or severing a stuck situation, but it does this by removing one of the main props so our security edifices become shaky or collapse. So we can, for example, expect the social stress this summer of many more people losing their jobs, as drastic cuts will have to be made in institutions and businesses, bringing a further collapse of old ways of living and old ways of thinking. But there will also be the flash of new ideas and alternative perspectives coming through, though we will need to be alert in order to catch. When Uranus arrives on the spring equinox point of 0 degrees Aries at the end of May and remains stationary there until mid August we can access an invigorating current of pure fresh energy that can inspire us and return our zest for life’. Although this summer could be painful and frustrating on the material and personality levels, on the soul level it is a very valuable time of purification, of cleaning out and aligning with the purposes of the life force. This applies to the human race as a whole. The world this summer will be under an intense pressure for change. And it is good so. Economic expansion and the greedy grabbing the world’s resources cannot continue to be the programme for the rich countries at the expense of the poor. We cannot afford to go on in our nationalistic self-serving ways. A revolution in our values must occur for us to move away from the dominator culture of winners over losers, and power over weakness, and finally recognise that we are one planet and one species, and we sink or swim together. I am going to claim in this talk that time has a qualitative as well as a quantitative dimension, and present astrology as the ancient art of determining and interpreting the quality of time. First my distinction between astronomy and astrology: Astronomy and astrology were one discipline in past cultures where intuition was valued equally with reason. Maths, as taught by Pythagoras, was about quality as well as quantity. Plato said to learn geometry was to learn about the gods and the ethics of the cosmos. And the principles of symmetry and equilibrium that appear in Nature on all levels of scale were morally meaningful to the Greeks. But quality which goes together with meaning has been stripped away from our science and maths. Left-brained reason is over valued in our culture and right-brained imagination is devalued. However this is now changing. A paradigm shift is occurring. For example, the new biology, views evolution as an emergent process in which the organism’s perception of quality plays a key role. And the images of deep space delivered by the Hubble space telescope are leading to a revision of the way we see our place in the universe. Those awe-inspiring pictures of distant galaxies seem to prove Aristotle right when he described the universe as ‘adorned’ with order (notice his use of a quality word – adorned). Order manifests in the natural world in the geometry of water crystals and flower petals. It determines the spiral shape based on the golden section structuring the nautilus’ shell as well as the great spiral galaxies. We find the same geometric patterns repeated on all levels of scale – an example of the very large being the hexagon that has appeared in the gas clouds surrounding Saturn’s north pole. Its straight lines and equal-lengthed are an example of random molecules self organising geometrically. And Alexander Lauterwasser has published some fascinating photos of the geometry that appears when water is oscillated at different rates – shapes emerging from randomness. As Aristotle said ‘Matter yearns for its own perfection’, and ‘yearns’ like ‘adorned’ is also a quality word, proving there was no split between perceptions of quality and quantity in the human mind in the 5th century BC.
From my understanding of the work of David Bohm, I have drawn this diagram of a model of reality that unites quantity and quality, reason and imagination, astronomy and astrology. When we’re awake we live in two realities – A, an outer world of other people and material objects, and B, an inner world of thoughts, emotions and mental images. When we’re asleep Level A disappears, and we wander about in our imaginings on Level B. A is measurable by our scientific parameters; B is not, as the subjective is not available to scientific study. Both A and B emerge from a common ground – C– which Bohm calls the ‘implicate order’. This is the subatomic level of the quantum flow in which patterns are contained in an ‘enfolded’ latent state. From here they ‘unfold’ and become ‘explicate’ as packets of particles that maintain their form over time. His concept of enfolded patterns reminds me of Plato’s Ideas – the forms of things dwelling in an ideal, transcendent realm from where they precondition all material manifestation. The above diagram presents a universe in which forms unfold out of a ground (Level C) to become explicate on levels B or A. There they sustain themselves for longer or shorter lengths of time before dying back into C. On B they become ideas and images: on A they become material objects. C feeds into A and B, B also feeds into A Wolfgang Pauli, another quantum physicist, saw the fluid way quantum wave patterns interpenetrate as similar to the way ideas associate and merge in the mind, which led him to conclude that the quantum level is more like mind than matter. So we need to distinguish here between different levels of mind. We could say B represents both our individual mind, and the collective human mind. Thinking in a Rupert Sheldrake way in terms of fields, we can see the collective human mind as a larger field containing the smaller fields of our personal minds within it. And then they are embedded in the all-encompassing field of the universal mind, which is level C, like Russian dolls within dolls. Pythagoras believed there is a universal mind present and active throughout the whole of creation in which our individual minds partake. So perhaps the universal mind, or mind of God, is what I have called Level C. My diagram can also explain the phenomenon of synchronicity upon which astrology rests. Jung defined synchronicity as: ‘the coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events which have the same or similar meaning’. One event can occur on level B – you think about your sister - the other event on level A –the telephone rings at that moment and it’s her. Or two causally unconnected events that share a wider meaning can both occur on Level A –for example two members of your family have the same birthday – a phenomenon that occurs in many more families than non-astrologers realise! Synchronicity happens when a pattern emerges from Level C in two places at once. The occurrence of the common birthday, for example, is a sign that an astrological family pattern is in the process of unfolding. As an astrologer I encounter synchronicity on a daily basis when I interpret birth charts. I rely in my work on the synchronicity between the patterns made by the sun, moon and planets at the time of birth (Level A because material fact), and the psychological patterns of the person born at that moment (Level B). As above so below! And it functions because, as Jung wrote, “Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure of the universe and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the most subjective reaches of the psyche.” which is what astrologers have always known! So astrologers use level A, which is visible, to derive information about level B, which is invisible, and this works because Level A (outer life) and Level B (inner life) correspond. The mystic Jakob Boehme knew this too when he wrote, ‘If you want to know yourself, look at the world, and if you want to know the world, look within.’ Synchronicity is also at work between planetary movements and the unfolding of events on the world stage. Richard Tarnas in his book Cosmos and Psyche traces synchronicities between the cycles of the outer planets and historical events over many centuries. I feel he successfully proves that what happens in human affairs is not random but an expression of archetypal patterns unfolding. For example Saturn and Pluto are now at a stage in their current cycle where they relate to each other at an angle of 90 degrees, known in astrology as a square. This is a measurable astronomical fact on level A, and astrologers, using their level B qualitative knowledge, interpret this aspect as a tense, discordant stage in the cycle of two planets’ relating.
Astrology also puts events into larger frameworks of meaning by making us aware of diachronic time patterning. Diachronic means we can look back to the time when Saturn and Pluto last formed a tense aspect and see what was happening then and what is happening now as a continuous narrative. It was their opposition whose first exactitude occurred in 2001 just weeks before 9/11. So it’s no coincidence that the perpetrators of the atrocity are now being brought to trial, which will bring up the pain and horror into public awareness again, contributing to the sombre mood of the present Saturn-Pluto aspect. So how do astrologers know what meaning to give to planetary combinations? Well, according to my approach, it’s not about the planets themselves - Pluto’s not even a planet now - but about the archetypes behind them. To refer back to my diagram, the planets are on Level A and the archetypes on Level C. So the planets are the material representatives of the immaterial cosmic archetypes. Down the ages they’ve been personified and worshipped as gods and goddesses, and they still bear the names of Roman divinities. Gods and goddesses are on Level B. So what are archetypes exactly? Jung had a lot to say about them. He saw them as the foundational principles of order in the cosmos, dwelling in the collective unconscious – which is his name for Level C – from where they precondition our perceptions, and affect our thoughts, feelings and actions. In his younger years Jung saw them as projections of the human mind, but later he claimed they were living presences out there in the cosmos, with an independent reality. Astrologers work with twelve archetypes that carry the names of the signs of the zodiac and include the Jungian archetypes within them. We experience them as different qualities of time which we register on level B – the personal and collective human psyche. Each archetype has a field of probable expression. Here is a diagram of the fields of Saturn and Pluto, which are represented as overlapping because of the present square between them.
A planet’s field of meaning can be understood as a cluster of ideas, associations and emotional patterns on Level B which then can emerge – but must not – as events on Level A. The present connection between the two fields explains why we’ve experienced an escalation of violence this autumn – massacres in the US, increased suicide bombings in the Middle East, daily army funerals in Wootton Bassett. Also the news at home has been full of murders, rapes and cases of cruel abuse. It’s because when Saturn and Pluto merge the heat is turned up, and emotions that have been repressed can erupt. People act out of desperation as it’s also about being in a dire situation where there seems no way out. Radical change is needed, but human nature being what it is the suffering must reach a critical point before that change can happen. However, criminals are also being brought to justice. A Nazi war criminal, pursued for thirty years, is now going on trial, the south London rapist has finally been arrested and is in custody. It’s because the waning Saturn-Pluto square is a time when old crimes are exposed and retribution is demanded. The twelve archetypal energies that astrologers work with manifest not only in human life but throughout the whole of creation. All realms of nature have Level C - the universal psyche - as their common ground. So we can see a thing or phenomenon as having a particular quality because it participates in a certain archetype. This is the received wisdom behind the medieval chain of being and its system of correspondences. For example a sunflower in the realm of plants and a lion in the realm of animals both participate in the Leo archetype of which the sun is the planetary representative. So it’s no coincidence that both the sunflower and the lion are golden like the sun, and have a ruffle of petals and a mane respectively like the sun’s rays. They have an affinity (in the medieval sense of the word) with the sun and its metal, gold. Therefore the system of sympathies and affinities between the planets, metals and plants, which was used in ancient medicine and alchemy, can be explained by their archetype participation. The archetypes are not static but in flux. However there is an order to their dance. They become explicate from within the stream of consciousness of the universal mind with a timing that is patterned geometrically. The ancients were aware of this; Plato used the expression ‘the choreography of the gods’ implying that meaning is not found in the positions of the stars and planets themselves, but in their patterns over time that is like a grand dance. Plotinus described how ‘the figures of the heavenly circuit’ move in harmony, ‘All serve the dance and help make it more perfect.’ And this patterning gives coherence to the system as a whole in the sense of a long-range order.
To take an example of geometric patterning creating time quality: there are four peaks in the cycles of the sun and moon, each having a different quality and field of interpretation. These peaks were celebrated in ancient cultures with ceremonies and rituals. People then were more sensitive to quality than we are today, and valued those moments when cosmic energy becomes available for empowerment and transformation. New moon has the quality of seed time – it’s when we should begin new projects which will then culminate two weeks later at full moon which is the time of fulfilment. The waning moon is the time when we harvest what we have sown and face the consequences of our earlier decisions. So if we want to grow something (a business venture, for example) we should time this to the waxing moon, and if we want to diminish something (aches and pains for example) we should time their treatment to the waning moon. Alignments to the four directions are found in ancient earthworks and monuments where the squared circle appears as a basic pattern. The squared circle is also a foundational element in mandalas, which use geometry for the spiritual purpose of ordering consciousness. On its qualitative level the square stands for the cross of earthly life creating the bounds of time and space within the circle of eternity. The diagram above of the cycle of Saturn to Pluto depicts a cross being formed over a period of thirty-eight years by the series of conjunction, square, opposition, square and conjunction within the circle of the zodiac. So we can understand why, when two planets make a square aspect to each other, as they do at present, this is a loaded period of time, as they are temporarily positioned on the points where the corners of the square touch the circle.
Besides challenging squares, harmonious triangles also form in the sky, for example through the cycle of Jupiter to Saturn. Over a period of sixty years their conjunctions map out a great triangle, which is a harmonious geometric figure standing for progress and spiritual growth. If we include their three oppositions during the same period, then a giant hexagram is formed as in the diagram above. The hexagram also appears in the shri yantra mandala, which depicts upward pointing yang triangles in perfect equlibrium with downward pointing yin triangles - an image of the unio mystica, or the divine union of male and female energy. If we could freeze time we would get the complex image of sky geometry in the next diagram, which shows how the twelve archetypes relate to each other geometrically within the zodiac. These relationships are absolute and eternal.
But in time we experience each geometrical figure forming and dissolving again. The quality of any moment is determined by the dominant archetypal combination. Thus we can see the present moment as coloured by the qualities of the merging Capricorn and Scorpio archetypes – Saturn and Pluto being in a strong aspect to each other (Saturn is the representative or carrier of the Capricorn archetype, and Pluto of Scorpio). Also Pluto is presently in Saturn’s sign, Capricorn. To conclude, to diagnose the quality of the times astrologers use both their knowledge of the planetary cycles (level A - astronomical knowledge) and their knowledge of the fields of significance of the archetypes (level B- intuitive, imaginative knowledge). Having taught astrology for nearly 30 years, I see it as basic for students to become acquainted in depth with the qualities and subject matter of the twelve archetypal fields. And it was in order to teach this in an entertaining way that I wrote my book ‘Virtual Lives: the Animated Zodiac’ which brings the signs of the zodiac to life as twelve characters who narrate their life stories from birth to death. The events in their lives and the issues they have to confront, as well as their personality patterns, are all typical of the archetypes they represent. The student of astrology also needs knowledge of the qualities of the twelve phases of time cycles in order to determine what will emerge when in his life. My second book ‘Hercules Labours: the Evolutionary Path round the Zodiac’ was written to demonstrate the archetypal patterns emerging during a time cycle – in this case the 29-year cycle of Saturn. I use the myths of Hercules’ labours to describe the qualities of the twelve time phases, translating them into the kinds of challenges we meet in modern life. Conclusions: Phoebe Wyss November 2009 THE TRIPLE CONJUNCTION OF JUPITER, NEPTUNE AND CHIRON With the triple conjunction of Jupiter, Neptune and Chiron at present squaring my natal moon in Taurus, I’ve had a strong personal interest in investigating its significance. A breakthrough came when I attended the Astrology and Healing seminar at the Astrological Lodge of London in June, where Melanie Reinhart was speaking. She had checked the frequency of this conjunction over the last thousand years, and to her surprise discovered it had only happened three times – 1115 in Virgo, 1881 in Taurus and 1945 in Libra - and concluded that the extreme elliptical orbit of Chiron must be the explanation. I was then more keen than ever to unravel its themes, its rarity making it a very special event. So I went to bed mulling over what the dates 1115, 1881 and 1945 had in common, and in my sleep the answer came – the re-emergence of ancient wisdom! In 1099 the Norman knight Hugh de Payens, together with eight other knights who had just returned from the first crusade, requested the right to create a base at the Temple in Jerusalem to protect Christian pilgrims. This was granted by the Pope, however the knights had a hidden agenda. They were interested in the treasure rumoured to lie buried beneath the Temple, and, as soon as they’d moved in, began excavating beneath their quarters. This was around the year 1115. And it seems they were successful. What they found was not gold and jewels but something far more precious – a cache of ancient scrolls that scholars today presume was buried there shortly before the temple was destroyed by the Romans in AD 66. The manuscripts included a number of apocryphal gospels not contained in the New Testament deriving from the Essenes, as well as scrolls containing ancient mathematical and geometrical knowledge, sea maps of the Phoenicians, and works by Plato and Hermes Trismegistus. The scrolls were taken to a priest named Lambert of St Omer to be translated. We know this happened before 1120 because a drawing survives, dating from that year, showing information contained in the Heavenly Jerusalem Scroll that was couched in symbols later to be used by the Freemasons. Robert Lomas and Christopher Knight, who investigated the links between the Templars and Freemasonry, have no doubt that this scroll was found under the temple in Jerusalem.[i] Another copy of the Heavenly Jerusalem manuscript was discovered eight hundred years later in that famous cave beside the Dead Sea. Hugh de Payens and his knights soon realised they were in possession of highly inflammable material that threatened the theological edifice of the Church. Because the scrolls contained Gnostic teachings that contradicted the central tenet of Christianity - that Jesus died on the cross to save our souls. They even suggested he was not a historical figure at all, but a mythical, sacrificial god-man like Osiris or Mithras, or the fertility gods of the nature religions.[ii] The scrolls were political dynamite! The Dead Sea scrolls were discovered in 1945 in a cave near the Essene town of Qumran on the Dead Sea. (In some places April 1947 is given for their discovery, but this is when they fell into the hands of the authorities.) Being now familiar with some of the contents of these manuscripts, we can guess the contents of that first cache discovered by the Templars. Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy believe that the Essenes, a Jewish Gnostic sect, active between 134 BCE and the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE, hid the manuscripts at both sites. Their book Jesus and the Goddess [iii] makes a case for Christianity deriving from Gnostic beliefs and practices as late as the third century, whereas the Church has taught that Gnosticism was an aberrant, heretical branch of early Christianity. So the triple conjunction of 1115 could have coincided with the first re-emergence of what is known as ‘the perennial philosophy’, and the conjunction of 1945 with a second re-emergence following the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls. What the knights found beneath the temple profoundly changed their lives, and produced in many a spiritual awakening. As a result they formed the Templar brotherhood in 1119. Many started living in monastic communities with strict ascetic rules, reminiscent of the ancient Pythagorean communities, and they founded churches and hospitals. The Hospitallers were a branch of their order, the first Hospitaller infirmary having been established near the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem to care for sick and injured pilgrims. (Chiron, we remember, is part of the equation.) And the brotherhood also became very rich very suddenly, suggesting that they may have used their secret knowledge to blackmail the Pope and the Church. However, although at first they prospered, they were playing a dangerous game. Their rituals diverged from official Christian forms of worship, and their beliefs were blasphemous. For example they practised rituals involving the death and resurrection of initiates, and are said to have worshipped the Earth Goddess and Nature’s fertility gods, as in the ancient mystery schools of Egypt and Greece. So did they manage to keep their heresies secret, or were these goings-on tolerated by the Church out of a fear that the Templars would divulge the secrets of the scrolls? By the end of the 13th century, however, their knowledge had became powerless to protect them, and Philip of France banded together with Pope Clement V to wipe them them. The massacre occurred in 1305. Their properties were confiscated and their Grand Master, Jaques Moloy, was crucified. But the perennial wisdom of the Gnostics lived on to re-emerge in the 17th century, and inspire the formation of the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross and the Freemasons - both groups appropriated Templar symbols. In 1615, under a Jupiter-Neptune conjunction in Virgo, trine Chiron in Capricorn, a pamphlet was published calling on people to join the Rosicrucians., which was followed by The Chemical Wedding’ – a 17th century bestseller. A Rosicrucian fever broke out all over Europe, and hundreds joined the movement (the Jupiter-Neptune conjunction signifies religious euphoria). Like the Templars 500 years earlier, many experienced spiritual conversion and renewal. The Freemason brotherhood began to gain popularity later in the 1640’s, and they also required their initiates to experience rituals of death and rebirth in Gnostic fashion. And so we come to the triple conjunction of 1881, which again brought an expansion of spiritual experience. Knowledge of Hinduism and Buddhism, and mystical Eastern philosophy, was being publicised in the West by the theosophists. The date of the triple conjunction, 1881, lies between the publication of Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled in 1877, and her The Secret Doctrine in 1888, in which she describes an ancient wisdom tradition underlying all the world religions – in other words Gnosticism. Incidentally in 1881 the first Vatican archives were opened to scholars for the first time. The triple conjunction of 1945, as we have seen, manifested in the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls, which was as threatening to the Vatican as the Templar’s earlier find. In The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception [iv], Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh claim the Vatican held back 75% of the manuscripts from the cache for over forty years, and called this ‘the academic scandal par excellence of the twentieth century’ . It also manifested in the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library – a third cache of ancient writings, which was uncovered in a cave in Lower Egypt. The period around 1945 also coincided with C.G. Jung’s promotion of Gnosticism through his publications on alchemy. He had been interested in the Gnostics since 1916, when he channelled his Seven Sermons to the Dead[v]. from the 2nd century Gnostic Basilides – or so he claims. It was his prediction that the feminine form of Gnostic wisdom, called Sophia, would re-enter modern Western culture by way of depth-psychology. In 1944, he published his major work Psychology and Alchemy[vi] in which he describes the transmutational process by which the impure soul (lead) becomes the perfected soul (gold), and presents it as a metaphor for individuation. Following in the Gnostic tradition, Jung saw spirituality as a process of inner transformation - a journey to meet the Self and at the same time to meet the Divine. As in Buddhism the goal of spiritual practices was therefore not to be ‘saved’ and to go to heaven, but to become a Buddha or Christ. So what can we say about the 2009 triple conjunction? The powerful teachings of conventional Christianity, that have moulded the spiritual life of the West for 2000 years, seem to be losing their hold on the collective psyche. Churches are being sold off, and congregations are falling in Britain and Western Europe at a rate unimaginable in 1945. And as the narrow, intolerant form of Christianity declines, its Gnostic roots are revealed, and we see the perennial wisdom re-emerging. It informs the teaching of the Indian mystic Osho (1931-1989) which has brought experiences of spiritual transformation to thousands of people in countries all over the world.[vii] And it is found in the teaching of Eckart Tolle, which is very close to that of Osho. He was invited onto Oprah Winfrey’s TV show in 2008, and in a series of broadcasts explained his teachings, and gave viewers a taste of meditation. Several million people all over the world tuned into this series via skype. In the last ten years there has been a spate of popular books and TV programmes that challenge conventional Christianity. For example Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code,[viii] which contains the heretical view that Jesus did not die on the cross but fled to France with his bride Mary Magdalene, sold 60.5 million copies. It has provoked wide interest in the feminine side of Christianity - the Gnostic Sophia - as well as in Templar churches such as Rosslyn, and the mystical dimension of geometry as evidenced in the pentagram layout of the landscape around Rennes-le-Chateau. Most of the books I reference at the end of this article have been written since 1990 for a mass readership. They are sold at stations and on airport book stalls, and have created a fascination in the wider population for heretical religious ideas and theories about ancient mysteries. So the collective spiritual revisioning is happening again in 2009. However, there is a darker side to the conjunction of Jupiter, Neptune and Chiron, as revelation and awakening seems to go hand in hand with wide-scale human suffering. The Peasant’s Crusade, that preceded the 1115 conjunction, was triggered by an epidemic of religious fervour that led 80,000 people to leave their homes mostly ill prepared, to march to the Holy Land. Most of them were massacred by the Turks, or died by the roadside of starvation and exposure. And the spiritual awakening of the Templars led to their cruel extermination. It was in 1881, after most of the native American population had been massacred, that Chief Sitting Bull finally surrendered to the American forces. At the same time the First Boer War was raging in South Africa. And then the year 1945 was a time of immense suffering in Europe. The second world war came to an end with the destruction of all the major German cities, leaving huge refugee problems that continued long after the cessation of hostilities. And in 1945 the Nazi concentration camps were opened up, and the world was presented with the first horrific images of the terrible suffering of their inmates. When we think of our present triple conjunction in connection with mass suffering, we note that it was preceded by 9:11 and the war in Iraq which has taken an enormous death toll. And at present there are huge refugee problems in Pakistan, and in Somalia where a human tragedy is unfolding. Hundreds are dying of starvation in makeshift refugee camps, and the supplies sent by relief organisations are being siphoned off and sold by unscrupulous traders. Thus mass suffering, which is Neptune subject matter, can be magnified by Jupiter to national disaster scale. However, when Chiron, the wounded healer, joins them in a triple conjunction, a well of compassion opens up. Chiron inspired the building of the Hospitaller infirmaries following the 1115 conjunction, and in 1881 the American Red Cross was founded to offer disaster relief to populations in urgent need of medical care and supplies. This was the forerunner of the British Red Cross, founded in 1905. In 1945 when Labour won the general election, Atlee was voted into power on the promise of the creation of a National Health Service, free to all. This was consequently established in 1948. However, in 2009 we are facing a major crisis in the National Health system, and a revisioning is urgently needed. So under the present triple conjunction we see a dramatic shift taking place in collective spiritual attitudes, and the re-emergence of ancient spiritual wisdom. This, however, is accompanied by the suffering caused by the threatened collapse of the world economy, and our loss of confidence in major institutions and in the integrity of those who govern us. What will the aftermath of the 2009 triple conjunction bring? These are momentous times indeed. Phoebe Wyss [i] Robert Lomas and Christopher Knight The Hiram Key 1996 THE ARCHETYPES AND THE ORIGINS OF ASTROLOGY Synopsis: This article makes a case for a collective awareness of the twelve archetypes, and of their qualities and meanings, preceding both the drawing up of the tropical zodiac, and the naming of the set of twelve constellations that lie along the ecliptic, thus suggesting an alternative view of the origins of astrology. We can take either a quantitative or a qualitative approach to the earth and sky. The former, left-brained and male, is analytical and proceeds via reason and measurement. The latter is right-brained, female and synthetic. It ascertains the quality of phenomena within their wider contexts of meaning through the use of imagination and intuition. Astronomy, which employs mathematics as a calculation tool, is an example of the quantitative approach, while astrology - the art of determining the quality of time - shows the qualitative. In their role as astronomers, the priests of the ancient cultures measured the cycles of the sun and moon and created calendars to organise daily life more efficiently. However, when they were wearing their astrologers’ hats, their task was a more momentous one. It was nothing less than striving to maintain on earth the divine order they saw in the sky. And this involved diagnosing the quality of the times, so that the appropriate rituals and religious ceremonies could be performed at the right moment to harmonise the human sphere with the celestial. The construction of the Cairo calendar (1), which consists of a listing of all the days of the Egyptian year, required both astronomical and astrological skills. Each day within it carries a three-part entry: first, the type of day, whether favourable or unfavourable, is noted. Secondly the appropriate rituals for the day are prescribed, and, thirdly, a mythological event is cited that encapsulates its quality. The Cairo calendar is thought to derive from the second millennium BCE. Perhaps our ability to distinguish time quality goes back to beyond the beginnings of the human race and is shared with the animals. But let’s begin in the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods when the moon was represented by different goddesses depending on her phase, showing that the different phases of her cycle were distinguished qualitatively. And the sun in Egypt had three different names depending on its position in the sky. ‘Lo! I am Khepera at dawn, Ra at high noon, and Tum at eventide,’ reads an inscription below a carving of the sun disk (2). Also in some cultures Venus bore different names depending on whether she was a morning or an evening star, which does not necessarily prove that people then were unaware that they referred to the same planet! Venus was personified as different goddesses at two discrete phases of her cycle, because, like the sun and moon, she was a ‘carrier’ of more than one archetype. In mythologies the world over we find the cardinal directions of north, south, east and west ruled by gods and goddesses whose different characters express the qualities associated in past cultures with these directions. The cardinal directions are also structurally decisive in the layout of ancient temples, which often have four gates in their outer walls, as well as in the ground plans of stone circles and ancient earthworks. The square bases of the Giza pyramids are perfectly aligned to them. Moreover alignments were created within the temples and circles to the solstice and equinox points - the four peaks of the sun’s annual cycle. These were celebrated with major religious festivals as times when the power of the divine cardinal archetypes could be tuned into. Our understanding of Aries, Libra, Cancer and Capricorn is derived from the collective experience of these high points in time and cardinal directions in space. And I suggest that they are cardinal in an absolute sense, irrespective of shifts in the solsticial and equinoctial points within the precessional cycle, being primarily associated with twelve divisions of the surrounding landscape and the horizon (3). The astronomers, who followed the sunrise points and measured the sun’s declination, also noted the mid-seasons when the sun’s progress along the horizon slows, which correspond to the south-east, south-west, north-west and north-east directions. These times of year were celebrated by the Celts with the festivals - Beltain, Lugnasadh, Samhain and Imbolc. And our understanding of the archetypes we call Taurus, Leo, Scorpio and Aquarius is rooted in the collective experience of the cosmic energies that were tuned into during these festivals. Together the cardinal and the fixed points create two crosses or squares within the circle of the horizon (Fig. 1). Thus the squared circle, a basic form in sacred geometry, shines through in our experience of the qualities of these different periods of time.
When we add the four mutable sectors to these eight, the circle of twelve unchanging archetypes is complete. Fig. 2 shows a cross section of sky and earth, demonstrating how they relate to the local landscape and are extended above the circular horizon into the sky to become twelve celestial mansions.
To understand how the archetypes are related to the qualitative dimension of maths and geometry we must turn to Egypt and Greece. For the Pythagoreans, as for the Egyptians, geometry was considered sacred because it offered knowledge of the gods. In Egypt, where Pythagoras went to study maths, the archetypes were called the Neters, and worshipped as the mathematical principles governing the universe. The sacred tetractys (Fig 3) represents them as digits arranged in a pyramid form revealing their inter-relationships. I owe the following interpretation of the tetractys to John Anthony West, whose account is based on the research of the deceased Egyptologist Schwaller de Lubicz (4). It demonstrates how the Egyptians saw numbers as more than a system of quantities, intuiting their qualitative, mystical dimension. Thus the ten digits of the tetractys do not symbolise the Neters, they are the Neters, and therefore powerful, intelligent and purposeful cosmic forces in their own right.
1) Starting at the top, in the beginning is One, which is the Absolute, the All, represented by a point or circle. 2) Then One becomes Two, which is the primordial duality separating heaven and earth, represented in geometry by a line. 3) Then Two becomes Three, which adds a third transcendent point uniting the Two, represented by a triangle. Three stands for the passage of time with its cardinal, fixed and mutable phases. 4) Then Three becomes Four when matter is created. Four stands for material manifestation, the cross of earthly life, and is expressed in the four elements. Together the digits add up to ten, which then reduces back to one (1 + 0= 1). Within the pyramid the numbers also relate to each other through addition and multiplication. Thus 3 x 4 =12, which is the total number of the archetypes ruling earthly life, and twelve is also the number behind all the phenomena that make up reality. Also 3 + 4 = 7, representing the union of spirit and matter. Seven stands for progression within time. Just as there are seven notes in the harmonic scale so all phenomena develop in seven stages. The seven planets ruling the seven spheres also represent seven steps back to the One. So the twelve astrological archetypes derive from the four Neters forming the base line of the tetractys, which are the only Neters to manifest in substance. They correspond to the fixed archetypes we call Leo (fire) Aquarius (air) Scorpio (water) and Taurus (earth), which are known as the four corners of the material world. Their animal symbols are amalgamated in the mythological image of the winged sphinx that inspired Ezekiel’s vision of ‘the four living creatures’. “They four had the face of a man, and the face of a lion, on the right side: and they four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the face of an eagle.” (5). (The eagle is an alternative animal symbol for the Scorpio archetype.) We should note that this passage derives from the period of the Jewish exile in Babylon, which predates by a century the time when historians claim the zodiac was created. When the four Neters on the base line of the tetractys are multiplied by the three Neters of the line above, representing the cardinal, fixed and mutable modes, twelve qualitatively differentiated archetypes result. These we refer to as the astrological archetypes. Twelve is the number of the sides of a dodecahedron – the twelve-sided solid, said by Plato to be the ultimate shape of the universe (and some of today’s scientists agree with him!). When flattened into two-dimensions, the dodecahedron becomes the circle divided into twelve equal parts familiar to astrologers (Fig 4). “The wheel of time formed with twelve spokes spins in the heavens maintaining order,” to quote the Rigveda (6). I see the circle divided into twelve equal parts as one of the structure-giving geometric forms eternally present in the universal mind.
In my previous article in The Astrological Journal (7), I described the absolute geometric relationships between the twelve archetypes that govern the different sections of the wheel, which are the alpha and omega states of the multitude of inter-relationships coming and going within time cycles. I also claimed that in any circle, whether a stone circle, a fairy ring, the ecliptic, or the circle of constellations behind it, the twelve archetypal energies align in the same order and with the same internal geometry. This archetypal geometry is responsible for the qualitative differences between the twelve sections of a circle manifesting in space, and the twelve phases of any time cycle. The tetractys demonstrates how One becomes Twelve, which is expressed in the myth of the divine child killed and eaten by twelve Titans. Afterwards, as we are told, Zeus blasted the Titans and created mankind from their ashes, implying that the twelve archetypes are scattered in all of us. This idea is also echoed in the myths of Osiris and Dionysius who were dismembered, and their parts were dispersed throughout the universe. Therefore the twelve archetypes are present in everything that exists, a truth that lies behind the system of correspondences known as the Great Chain of Being. Medicine in ancient Egypt, as in the European Middle Ages, was based on the correspondences between the organs of the body and the archetypes represented by the planets. And alchemy rested on the correspondences between the seven metals and the planets. This lost vision of an analogous universe can explain the passage in Exodus where Moses is instructed to make a breastplate set with twelve gemstones. The majority of the stones the Bible mentions are still listed today under their zodiac signs in popular astrology books. Moses, it should be noted, lived in the twelfth century BCE. That was eight hundred years before historians say the zodiac was invented (8). And then there is the story of Joshua who, after leading the Israelites across the river Jordan, was ordered by God to build a circle of twelve stones, one for each of the twelve tribes of Israel at a place called Gilgal (the name means wheel or circle) (9). In cultures the world over the number of the astrological archetypes has always been twelve, although the animal symbols used to represent them vary. They have had different carriers over the ages. For example, the fixed archetypes that we call Taurus, Leo, Scorpio and Aquarius were once carried by the four stars Aldebaran, Regulus, Antares and Formalhaut (today assigned to Pisces) - which form a cross in the sky and were called ‘the four supports of heaven’. That may have been before the constellations they belong to were delineated and named. John Anthony West, drawing on the research of Schwaller de Lubicz, shows that the art and architecture of the Egyptians expressed the archetypes from pre-dynastic times onwards. In contradiction to orthodox opinion, he proves they had knowledge of the precession, and consciously employed symbols of duality during the age of Gemini, of bulls and cows during the age of Taurus and of rams during the age of Aries. He proves how they went to the lengths of dismantling and rebuilding their temples and monuments every two thousand years so that their architecture and symbolic art would accord with the new archetype coming in (10). I suggest that, when the age of Aries began around 2000 BCE, the Aries archetype, whose qualities the Egyptians were already familiar with, became identified with the small triangle of stars we know as the constellation of Aries the ram, then the heliacal rising stars. My thesis - that the twelve astrological archetypes were recognised and qualitatively distinguished from each other from very ancient times - requires us to adjust our ideas concerning the history of astrology. Our minds are steeped in four hundred years of scientific materialism, and stamped with the Darwinian concept of evolution. This influences the language in which our history books are written, and has resulted in the history of astrology becoming an account of a development from primitive beginnings to the state-of-the-art astrology we believe we have today. However it is primarily the left-brained side of the work, expressing in the invention of techniques and new methods of calculation, that has become more sophisticated, rather than astrology itself. I believe the art of the interpretation of the quality of time, deriving from an in-depth understanding of the twelve archetypes, was more advanced in ancient civilisations. So when the tropical zodiac was drawn up in the 5th century BCE - an astronomical work that enabled the tabulation of planets and stars according to degrees of the ecliptic - the twelve archetypes and their qualities were already part of Babylonian culture. Nick Campion in The Dawn of Astrology writes, “Marduk’s creation of the constellations and 12 months in the Enuma Elish points to an Old Babylonian recognition that twelveness is important for space and time” (11). The fifth century BCE astronomers created the signs by measuring the ecliptic and dividing it into twelve equal sections, which were then given the names of the archetypes, because time was already seen as patterned into twelve qualitatively different phases. The circle of the tropical zodiac thus became a carrier for the archetypes. I also suggest it was around that time that the full set of twelve constellations lying along the ecliptic were finally delineated and named, although a number of them (Leo, Taurus and Scorpio, for example) had been long associated with their respective animals and used as carriers of their archetypes. However it so happened that that phase in the precessional cycle was reached in the middle of the first millennium BCE when the sections of the ecliptic and the twelve constellations behind them coincided. Thus it was natural for those living then to see the sections of the ecliptic and the constellations as one and the same thing, which is why they share the same names. So perhaps the constellations were named after the signs instead of vice versa. They were certainly named after the archetypes. Robert Powell in his book The History of the Zodiac makes a case for the sidereal zodiac being earlier than the tropical and therefore being the true zodiac. I argue, however, that both the tropical and the sidereal zodiacs were drawn up at roughly the same time. The earliest surviving representation of a zodiac is on a tablet dated to 475 BCE. And as I see it the priests who created them had their astronomers’ rather than their astrologers’ hats on. I feel it is particularly important in these times, when our civilisation is approaching a crisis point during a mutable phase of a precessional cycle, to become aware once more of the twelve eternal archetypes that govern the cycles of time and invisibly structure our everyday lives (13). The Egyptians’ awareness of them enabled their civilisation to endure through cardinal, fixed and mutable phases for over four thousand years. Today the period of stability that enabled our culture to flourish is coming to an end. Our economic and ecological systems are veering out of control and chaos looms. We urgently need the calm acceptance that arises from the understanding that mutable phases always bring loss of coherence and the disintegration of systems, which is necessary within a cycle of renewal. And we need to revive the faith of our forefathers that the universe in which we are embedded is alive and intelligent and has a feeling soul. Also that whatever happens within it is ultimately an act of love. Divine love moves the stars, as Dante put it. ‘This one universe is all bound together in shared experience and is like one living creature, that which is far is really near….and nothing is so distant in space that it is not close enough to the nature of the one living thing.’ Plotinus (14) (1) A Bakir The Cairo Calendar (La Caire, 1966) Phoebe Wyss “From the summit of the sky the stars speak. They know everything but compel no one. The wheel of time, formed with twelve spokes spins in the heavens maintaining order. Built into this wheel are 360 pairs” Rigveda 1 The Anomaly of the Dendera Zodiac One day, while looking at a drawing of the Dendera zodiac, I noticed that the signs run clockwise round the wheel. Being used to signs running anticlockwise, I was puzzled. Had the nineteenth century artist who made the copy been careless? I checked his version against photos of the original zodiac, which confirmed that the signs indeed run clockwise, which means that the zodiac wheel is depicted as turning anticlockwise. My curiosity roused, I went on to investigate
a sample of graphic zodiac representations from different centuries and
different cultures and discovered the following: A list of the clockwise zodiacs found is given in the appendix at the end of this article. Presuming that the direction in which a zodiac is drawn corresponds to current astrological practice, and is not the error of an astrology-ignorant artisan or artist, these results have interesting implications. For example clockwise zodiacs are drawn facing north, with the east and the Ascendant on the right instead of on the left ((Fig. 1). This affects the geographical orientation of the houses and could also affect their signification. Secondly the greater antiquity of clockwise zodiacs implies that this was the consensus direction at a time in the past. If this is the case, it is likely that a switchover occurred in the late Hellenistic period when Greek horoscopes begin to be drawn anticlockwise. An exception to my claim that the clockwise zodiacs are older is the Glastonbury zodiac whose anticlockwise direction reflects the order of the signs as moving across the sky from the latitude of Glastonbury.
The Turning Wheel In the ancient quotation heading this article the zodiac is pictured as a spinning wheel. Now there is another image of a turning wheel, whose earliest extant representations date back to the same culture that produced the Rigveda– the swastika. The swastika has come to be associated with the Arians, the ancient inhabitants of north-eastern Europe who migrated eastwards through the Middle East to north India around 4000 BCE. However, older representations of swastikas have been found pre-dating the Arian migration, for example on boundary stones excavated from the sites of the Indus valley cities. Wikipedia dates the earliest Indus valley settlements of the first Mehrgarh period at around 5300 BCE and claims 3.500 - 1.500 BCE to be the period when this culture flowered2. Hinduism, the oldest world religion still practised today, could have roots that go back to the Indus Valley civilisation. It was therefore to Hinduism that I looked for the meaning of the swastika symbol, where I found that its equilateral cross symbolises the four directions of the sky - north, east, south and west - and is said to create order and stability.3 Astrologers will immediately associate it with the central cross in the horoscope, formed by the horizon and meridian. With the four arms of the swastika bent at right angles, pointing either right or left, the impression is created of a turning wheel, like the celestial “wheel of time” in the above quote which is also said to maintain order. Representations of both clockwise and anticlockwise pointing swastikas can be found throughout India, although clockwise is the most common. To Hindus the two directions stand for complementary forms of the creator god Brahma - right-facing representing the evolution of the universe and left-facing representing its devolution. The right-facing swastika also represents Surya, the sun god, which explains why the origins of its name have to do with good fortune and well-being, whereas the left-facing swastika has an evil reputation, presumably because it represents the destructive side of Brahma. The zodiac wheel is like the swastika in that it can be represented as turning in either direction. It revolves anticlockwise when north-facing, and clockwise when south-facing. If the zodiac wheel has come down to us from a civilisation living near the equator, where a low latitude minimised the difference between the two orientations, then the direction chosen in a graphic representation could have symbolic importance. I began to consider the associations with right and left that are deeply engrained in such ancient cultures as the Hindu, the Egyptian and the Pythagorean. East was associated with the right, with light, day, life and masculine qualities, while West was associated with the left, with darkness, night, death and the feminine. A similar signification of right and left crops up in the Mesopotamian divination technique using the liver of a sacrificed animal. The liver was divided into four quarters by a central cross. East, on the right, had a friendly and good signification, while West on the left was seen as hostile and associated with enemies. “What is right is mine, what is left is of the enemy” was the saying,4 which echoes the meanings given to the Ascendant in the east and Descendant in present-day western astrology. The seventh house on the western side of the chart is still the place of open enemies. In the liver map printed by Deborah Houlding in her book The Houses: Temples of the Sky.5 The parallel between the areas on the map and the astrological quadrants and houses is obvious. If the map given here is typical, then liver maps were orientated northwards, which also gave the correct east/right, west/left correspondences. These are lost when a map is orientated southwards as in present-day horoscopes. Houlding comments that the Mesopotamians believed different gods ruled over the compass directions, and accordingly different subject matter was associated with each of them. She also states that these people possessed a strongly developed system of heaven-earth correspondences, which was the basis of their astrology. The gods of earth and nature were associated with the south, and the infernal gods with the north, whereby the direction north-west was seen as the most inauspicious direction of all”6. Could this be the origin of our dark and sinister 8th house associations? Note that the eighth house that lies northwest in a north-facing horoscope moves to the southwest when we draw the chart facing south (Fig 3).
What are the Houses? Although there are no extant records of houses being graphically entered in horoscope diagrams before the late Hellenistic period, at least the angles must have been taken into account and used before then. Astrology evolved as a divinatory method based on reading signs in the sky, and interpreting the stars and planets in relation to horizon and meridian has always been integral to it. It is therefore highly likely that horoscope readings down the ages have been informed by an awareness of the directions and the different gods ruling them. I considered charts drawn in the south Indian manner in which only one wheel is depicted, represented in the form of a square – the wheel of the signs- and yet the houses are also implicitly present. In these charts there seems to be no orientation to the compass directions7 as the Ascendant appears randomly in any one of the boxes of the square. However, although the houses are not entered in the diagram, they are central to the interpretation of the chart, because signs are also houses. They are identical. Once the rising sign has been identified this functions as the first house. Then using whole-sign houses the other houses are counted round the square in a clockwise direction as the chart is turned to answer questions. I suggest that this type of map could have been prevalent in the ancient world with whole-sign houses being used. In fact the form may have originally spread from south India to Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece, where astrologers also adopted the clockwise zodiac that came with it. When a chart is drawn in this way, the impression is given that the houses revolve with the signs– in other words that they are part of the spinning wheel of time. This view even creeps into Houlding’s description of the houses in one place in her book, creating a contradiction in her argument. She explains succedent houses as follows: ‘(They are) so called because they are rising up and therefore succeeding to the positions of the angular houses by the diurnal revolution of the heavenly sphere.’8 However, in other places she seems to agree with Manilius, the Roman stoic who clearly saw the houses as static in the way we see them today. She quotes him as saying, ‘Mark the power of the temples: through them revolves the entire procession of the zodiac, which draws from them their laws and lends to them its own; the planets too, modify the various influences of the temples whenever they occupy realms not their own and sojourn in an alien place’. 9 So do the houses revolve or are they static? If horoscope diagrams were still being drawn in the late Hellenistic period in the style we have identified as south Indian, then both views could have existed side by side. The richness of our house symbolism has grown out of the custom in such ancient cultures such as the Hindu, the Egyptian and the Mesopotamian of associating different gods and myths with the different directions of the sky. In Egypt, for example, where the diurnal cycle of the sun was imagined as the voyage of the bark of the sun god, the different energies at the cardinal points of the sun’s journey were expressed through the sun’s changing names. As Khepri at dawn, Ra at noon and Atum at sunset, the sun died each evening and entered the underworld where, at the midnight nadir, he was transformed into an infant ready to be born as Khepri again at sunrise. The Egyptian association of areas of the sky with time periods was rooted in the custom of their astronomers of keeping two-hourly watches, from which the meaning of the word “horo-scope”– watcher of the hour– is said to derive. Therefore myths associated with the times of the day and year, as well as with the corresponding geographical directions, all contributed to what became the astrological symbolism of the houses. The Switch-Over During the centuries spanning the millennium around Christ’s birth a massive paradigm shift occurred as the rational Greek mind increasingly imposed its way of seeing the world on philosophy, science, religion and astrology. As a result the devotional and divinational astrology practised in the ancient cultures gave way to a more ‘scientific’ approach. Therefore it is likely that, as astrologers became more geo-physically and astronomically informed they switched over to erecting south-facing charts during this era. However, it is feasible that there was a transition period during which both chart orientations, northwards and southwards, were in use. In fact, as both clockwise and anticlockwise zodiacs can be found in the west up to the Renaissance, the switch-over period lasted a long time. In India today both orientations co-exist side by side - south Indian charts being drawn clockwise, and the zodiacs in north Indian charts, also square in form, being drawn anticlockwise. No doubt this can result in some confusion. Some examples of Hellenistic Greek horoscopes have come down to us, roughly drawn show the wheel of the zodiac with the cross of the horizon and meridian and the four quadrants indicated (Fig. 2). Unlike the south Indian charts these diagrams ground the zodiac in reference to the horizon, meridian and the areas of the sky seen from a particular locality, and we can presume that the meanings traditionally associated with these areas flowed into the chart interpretation. In these charts the zodiacs run anticlockwise, so they are drawn facing south. They therefore, reflect the new practice, although zodiacs found engraved on Greek coins of this period still runs clockwise. Is it possible that when astrologers, exhorted by Ptolemy, changed to south-facing, anticlockwise zodiacs they kept unchanged the signification of the quadrants and areas of the sky they were accustomed to use, and simply switched the zodiac wheel round to the opposite direction? Old habits die hard, and it is likely that most astrologers were not scientifically well versed enough to understand the implications of the change of direction for house signification. So they could have clung to the meanings assigned to the areas of the sky seen from their accustomed locality after they had switched to drawing their wheels anticlockwise. In other words they may have kept a northerly orientation for their houses after changing to a southerly orientation for their wheel of signs. In Fig. 3 we see the effect this would then have on the signification of the houses. The third and fourth and the ninth and tenth houses exchange places, which could lead to a confusion of their natural rulers and a possible merging of their meaning. This also applies to the following pairs of houses: 1st and 6th, 2nd and 5th, 3rd and 4th, 7th and 12th, 11th and 8th, 9th and 10th. To prove the feasibility of what I am suggesting, I would like to take the case of the “planetary joys” as described by Houlding10. The seven visible planets were traditionally linked to certain houses in which they were said to rejoice and therefore were strong. The allocation of the joys has been incorporated into Fig. 3 with the planets entered in their allocated houses in a south-facing chart. I am going on to suggest that this system of signification, which is behind some of the more puzzling meanings assigned to the houses in traditional astrology, could have been passed down uncritically from the time when charts were drawn north-facing. According to the ancient system of planetary joys the moon rejoices in the 3rd. This would have been the 4th in a north-facing chart, and would have corresponded to Cancer where the moon is dignified. Mars rejoices in the 6th, which would have been the 1st, corresponding to Aries, in a north-facing chart - the sign of his rulership. Mercury rejoices in the 1st, which was the 6th, corresponding to Virgo, where Mercury is indeed ruler. Venus rejoices in the 5th, which would have been the 2nd where Venus is strong as ruler of Taurus. Also, it should be pointed out that in Hindu astrology Venus rules in the south-east, which applies when the chart is orientated northwards and the 2nd house lies south-east. Thus the joys of the four planets entered below the horizon in Fig. 3 can be explained if a north-facing chart direction is taken. Above the horizon we find Saturn rejoicing in the 12th house. This would have been the 7th in a north-facing chart, which also makes more sense as Saturn is the ruler of the West in Hindu astrology (which is where I am suggesting Greek astrology originated) and is traditionally exalted in Libra– the sign corresponding to the 7th. The Sun rejoices in the 9th, which would have been the angular 10th house previously. Capricorn is not the sign of the Sun’s dignity, but when in the 10th he is in his full mid-day strength. That leaves only Jupiter, and I admit I can find no reason for Jupiter rejoicing in the 11th. So, although Deborah Houlding makes a strong case for the houses developing their meanings separately from the signs, if we accept the hypothesis that there was a switch-over from north-facing to south-facing charts in the Hellenistic period which confused house signification, a case can be made for a closer parallel between sign and house meanings than classical astrology admits. At least then the planetary joys would make sense to astrologers like myself who work with a close correspondence between the signs and the houses, a correspondence advocated with some authority by Howard Sasportas in his book The Twelve Houses11. It also explains some of the puzzling house rulerships that have been passed down from the ancients to present-day horary astrology. For example, older sources note an influence of the 1st house on intellect, the way the mind works and on speech - all Mercury matters that must have landed in the 1st at the time of the switch-over when Mercury was assigned to the 1st house in the system of planetary joys. When the chart is drawn facing north there is greater symmetry between signs and houses, because both the signs and the houses then progress in the same clockwise direction (Fig. 2). This means that in their cycles Sun, Moon and planets run through the same series of energies on both the levels - that of the signs and that of the houses, which strengthens the correspondences between them. This, I believe, lay behind the close identification of houses with signs in the practice of south Indian astrology. However, this correspondence is lost when the zodiac is oriented southwards. Then the houses progress in clockwise and the signs in anticlockwise order. The Relevance to the History of Astrology I believe these findings can be used as part of a proof that Greek and Mesopotamian astrology derived from India, which contradicts the accepted view in the west. We have been taught that it was the Babylonians who ‘invented’ astrology and taught it to the Greeks, who rationalised it and passed it on to the Egyptians and Indians, who until then had had no astrology of their own. The Indians themselves, however, have always disagreed with this view, maintaining that their astrology is more ancient than the Greek, and goes back to the great astrologer Parasara who lived more than 5000 years ago12. This would place him in the Vedic period, but it is possible that Indian astrology is even older than that. The earliest Neolithic settlements of the Indus Valley civilisation go back beyond 7000 BCE, and the sophisticated knowledge of geometry and alignments with the heavens possessed by this ancient culture is proved by the lay-out of their cities. The artefacts so far found prove that long-distance trade routes existed even at this earliest period, linking south India to north India and running westwards through Mesopotamia to Egypt. On their boundary stones animal figures are carved that we can link with the constellations, such as the scorpion, and the gods portrayed on their seals are represented with stars above their heads suggesting the practice of a devotional form of astronomy13. More knowledge about this will be obtained when their script has been deciphered. Seeing this civilisation as a focal point, I suggest that astrology passed to the Indus Valley from south India, and spread to Mesopotamia and Egypt along the ancient trade routes before the birth of the Mesopotamian and Greek civilisations. I am now going to mention a theory that supports this view but which may sound far-fetched. However, it could have a bearing on the question of why the oldest zodiacs are drawn north-facing. Using geomagnetic and carbon-dating evidence, John Hapgood in his book The Earth’s Shifting Crust proved that before the last polar shift the equator ran through Egypt. This means that the whole of the Indian subcontinent lay in the southern hemisphere14. In his view this last polar shift, which thank heavens was gradual and took place over several thousand years, was completed at the end of the Pleistocene age - the epoch before our own - by around 12.000 BCE. So, if there had been a civilisation living in India before that date, and if they had practised astrology, their southern latitude would have required them to erect their horoscopes north-facing. To conclude, I see the Dendera zodiac as a relic of the ancient way of drawing the zodiac running clockwise, which could have derived from south India where it is still drawn in this manner today. A search for the origins of astrology therefore leads us back along the ancient trade routes south-eastwards to the Indian subcontinent where a lost civilisation, living in what was then the southern hemisphere, could have preserved its wisdom for us throughout the last polar shift. There is no proof that this is the case, but there is also no proof that it is not. Phoebe Wyss
September 2006
1 Rigveda quoted by Linda
Johnsen ‘Twelve Ancient Houses’, The Mountain Astrologer April/May
2003
‘Everything breathes together’ (Plotinus) The paradigm shift, announced by the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of 1992-3, and emerging strongly during the present Uranus-Neptune mutual reception, is bringing in a new way of seeing reality. James Lovelock’s Gaia theory1 that presents the earth as an alive and conscious organism is gaining in popularity, and changing not only how we see the planet but how we see the universe. Also, systems science has revealed fractal correspondence on different levels of scale in both the material and non-material worlds, and the findings of quantum physics support a vision of existence as one interconnected whole, with all things arising from the common ground of the quantum flow. It has also discovered that particles, even when separate and at a distance from each other, remain connected and in communication. So we are beginning to entertain the notion of the universe as an alive and conscious organism. If this were the case, correspondences between the movements of stars and planets in the macrocosm and events in the human microcosm would be feasible, as these are then simply two levels on which the whole expresses an intention. This perspective brings a fresh understanding of the maxim ‘as above so below‘ on which astrology is based, and provides a context in which the phenomenon of synchronicity may be explained. C.G.Jung was the first to systematically investigate synchronicity, defining it as “a coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events, which have the same or a similar meaning”2. His work in this field, together with his exposition of the archetypes, has been seminal to the new paradigm. In his later writings Jung went beyond seeing archetypes as projections of the human psyche to describe them as formative ideas within the collective mind. He saw them as the foundational principles of order in the cosmos, similar to the Greek ‘divine archai’ underlying flux and diversity. As such they govern both our inner life and events in the outer world, thus linking these two levels. “Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the most subjective reaches of the psyche.”3 In his groundbreaking book Cosmos and Psyche4, Richard Tarnas uses data from thirty years of research to demonstrate how the archetypes unfold across the centuries to mould human history. He speaks of an ‘ensouled’ universe, indicating that his experience of astrology has led him to see the universe not only as intelligent and rational, but also as having a soul in the sense of an inner life, imagination and creative purpose. The archetypes are presented in Cosmos and Psyche as nodal centres in the universal or collective psyche around which complexes of themes cluster as if held by a magnet. For example the archetype we call Aries is the centre of a constellation of ideas and behaviour patterns as shown in Fig. 1.
Twelve Rays of the Infinite In esoteric teaching the twelve archetypes represented by the zodiac are described as rays of the infinite, cosmic energies that manifest throughout the whole of creation. They express in astrology on three levels – the level of the signs, the level of the planets and the level of the houses. This third level of expression has not been generally recognised by astrologers, which this article seeks to rectify by proving that both houses and signs derive from the same sacred geometry, and are expressions of the same twelve archetypes. The archetypes are numinous, ineffable essences symbolised by the glyphs of the zodiac. Therefore, although they manifest in the signs, they are not the same thing as the 30-degree sections of the ecliptic of the tropical zodiac, or the twelve constellations of stars bearing the same names. Many astrologers, including Richard Tarnas, speak of the planets as archetypes, but a distinction should be made here. Just as Plato would distinguish between the Idea of beauty and its personification as Aphrodite, so we should distinguish between the twelve foundational essences and the planets that are their spokesmen or representatives. Several planets can carry different facets of the same archetype- for example Saturn and Uranus both represent facets of the archetype Aquarius - and planets can also incorporate facets of more than one archetype together. For example, Chiron who is believed to have come in to the middle reaches of the solar system from the outer Kuiper belt, crossing in turn the paths of Pluto, Neptune and Uranus, seems to have incorporated facets of the archetypes corresponding to these planets, namely Scorpio, Pisces and Aquarius. When the relationship between planets and archetypes is seen in this way, new planets can be included in the astrological system without the need to find new archetypes for them. The Sacred Geometry of the Zodiac Zodiacs appear in diverse cultures all over the world, and, although different animal symbols are used on different continents, their number is always twelve as this is the number of the primary archetypes. The circle of the zodiac presents the archetypes in their ideal, eternal relationship. Its geometry is absolute in the sense that it is the alpha and omega state of the patterns that form and dissolve in the flux of time. Studying its structure helps us understand how the archetypes relate to one another on the levels of the houses and the planets. The archetypes are polarised in the wheel in pairs of opposite principles, and the signs lying opposite each other, such as Cancer and Capricorn, are like the positive and negative poles of a magnet, linked by a strong current of energy flowing between them. Each polarised pair is at energetic loggerheads with the pair of archetypes lying at 90 degrees angle to it. Thus Cancer and Capricorn are linked in this strained way with Aries and Libra to form a cardinal square. Single archetypes are also connected energetically with those lying 120 degrees away from them round the circle to form equilateral triangles - for example Taurus is in a triangular relationship with Virgo and Capricorn, forming the earth trine. They also connect with those archetypes lying 60 degrees away on either side to form smaller isosceles triangles. For example Taurus, Cancer and Pisces are connected in this way. When the angles they make with each other are of 120 and 60 degrees, the energy along their lines of connection flows easily and harmoniously. Thus the circle of the zodiac contains three central squares, four central triangles and twelve smaller triangles round its periphery. We call the lines linking the sections of the zodiac to form these geometric figures ‘aspects’. Fig. 2, showing the geometry of the main aspects, is also an image of the absolute relationships of the archetypes within the universe. The geometric patterns it contains manifest in the geometry of natural forms such as flowers and crystals, and permeate the individual psyche as well as structuring the cycles of time.
To study astrology is to study geometry in motion. While the archetypes remain in the absolute order shown in the zodiac circle, a succession of varying relationships form between them and dissolve again through the motion of their carriers - the planets. These move round the wheel in cycles, linking the archetypes represented by the signs and houses in different ways and for different lengths of time, to produce new compounded fields of meaning. For example, as Mars carries the spark of the Aries archetype when he enters a house or sign the meanings and associations of Aries (as in Fig 1) meld with the associations of the archetypes governing that house or sign. For example, if Mars is in Cancer and in the sixth house, the fields of meaning of Aries, Cancer and Virgo merge to produce a combined significance. Where Earth meets Sky Time and space are brought together in the modern western method of drawing a horoscope with two wheels. If it is a birth chart, it is the time and place of the native’s birth that determines the alignment of the wheels. The figure of the squared circle is fundamental to the horoscope diagram. The circle stands for the eternal sky - the home of the gods - while the square stands for incarnation and earthly life. Producing the calculations needed to exactly square a circle was the mathematical challenge for ancient geometers, and seen as tantamount to discovering the sacred mystery of the relationship between earth and heaven. In Tibetan mandalas, used in meditation to induce exalted states of consciousness, the squared circle appears as a basic figure, and it also appears in the ground plans of ancient temples and Neolithic sacred sites such as Stonehenge.6
Fig. 3 shows the geometric pattern of squared circles and circled squares on which a horoscope map is based. The central cross with its perpendicular and horizontal arms corresponds to the angles and the cardinal directions. They cut the outer circle at the points where circle and outer square meet. These are mystical points that symbolise the sacred union of earth and heaven, which explains why we experience the cusps of the cardinal houses as power points. When ASC, MC, DES and IC are joined to form a square, it touches the inner circle at four more points lying on the diagonal cross. The lines of this cross, that run through the middle of the four fixed houses, end in the corners of the outer square that act like tent pegs, anchoring the fixed energy. These points, as we will see, are also power points. The modern western method of drawing a horoscope uses two wheels, which correspond to the outer and inner circles in Fig. 3. Each quadrant of each wheel is further divided into three sections. On the outer circle the twelve sections stands for twelve different areas of the sky. On the inner circle of the earth the sections represents different compass directions and times of day. The wheels mirror each other in that they are governed by same the twelve primary archetypes. Thus the inner wheel brings the energies of the outer wheel literally down to earth, to ground them in local space and time, and to provide a setting in which the circulating planets express. Horoscopes can also be drawn as squares, thus emphasising the earth, or as single circles that emphasise the sky, but the two-wheeled diagram is superior to both, as it mirrors our experience of a static earth with a circular horizon, surrounded by a sky that, like a wheel, turns once around us in twenty-four hours. Only when the inner wheel is drawn with equal houses measured from the ascendant, or using whole sign houses, do both wheels manifest the same archetypal geometry. When unequal house systems are used, the essential equality of the archetypes and their symmetry within the wheel is lost. Like the tropical zodiac, the equal house and whole sign house systems are based on the perfect and absolute archetypal geometry underlying all variations. However, this is not to claim that only these house systems are valid. Unequal houses are true representations of ephemeral geophysical and temporal conditions that come into being as stages within the diurnal cycle. And therefore charts that are erected, for example with Placidus houses, can be seen as ‘stills’ in the film of time, and as such they also have validity. Fig. 4 shows the natural zodiac - the ideal alignment of the wheels, which is only reached once in twenty-four hours, when 0-degrees Aries on the ecliptic aligns with the first degree of the first house. Then the archetypes represented on both wheels correspond and the absolute state is reached. At all other times there is disparity. But the changing alignment of the wheels allows a variety of archetypal combinations to form, providing the diversity that becomes the basis for different personality types. And just as the perfection of the natural zodiac is only reached at one moment in twenty-four hours, so once in 24,000 plus years perfection is attained in the precessional cycle. Then the constellations are aligned with the sections of the ecliptic whose names they bear, and the tropical and sidereal zodiacs coincide. These examples show that there is an absolute state that reflects the geometric patterns behind temporal phenomena in their perfection, and ephemeral versions that come and go, and these are our normal experience in the world of time.
The Gods of the North, South, East and West Our ancestors who built the pyramids and Stonehenge had a sense of the qualitative differences of the directions, inherited from their hunter-gatherer forbears, and their cultures were embedded in mythologies in which each direction had a different significance. In ancient China the southwest city gate was called the gate of man, the southeast the gate of earth, the northwest the gate of heaven, and the northeast the gate of ghosts and the ancestors. These quarter-directions are associated symbolically with the sunrise and sunset positions of the sun at the winter and summer solstices. In contrast, the west where the sun sets is associated in many cultures with death. In Thebes the necropolis together with the Valley of the Kings is situated on the west bank of the Nile. In Hindu mythology the west was ruled by Varuna, the god of water, who would seize wrongdoers and pluck them from the world of the living into his death-kingdom – a possible personification of the Scorpio archetype. In the wheel of the houses this archetype rules the eighth house, which lies to the northwest when a horoscope is drawn facing north instead of south - which has historical feasibility7. When the horoscope is erected facing north, the northeast coincides with the eleventh house, governed by the Aquarius archetype and traditionally the house of the ‘good spirits’, which could be interpreted as friendly ancestors. The northeast orientation of the main entrance to the Stonehenge circle has been seen as proving that feasts of the dead involving ancestor worship were celebrated there. But the north was viewed by the Chinese as a source of unfavourable influences, and in many countries north-south routes are seen as ghost paths. In the Middle Ages the north doors of Christian churches were bricked up to prevent evil spirits from entering. These examples show how the archetypes have been personified as the gods of the different directions, and have influenced the meanings ascribed to the directions in different cultures. It is also possible that these meanings have passed down into the signification of the astrological houses. Power Points in Time In ancient Egyptian mythology, sky and earth were represented as the lovers Nut and Geb, who had been torn apart and were seeking to reunite. The realm of Nut is the sky, represented by the outer wheel of the horoscope, and that of Geb is the earth, represented by the inner wheel. Where heaven and earth meet (the intersection points of the squared circle that correspond to the solstices and equinoxes) Nut and Geb symbolically copulate, and there is an energy exchange between earth and sky. In ancient cultures these points in the year were known as seasons of efficacy and marked with festivals, so that the whole community could benefit from them. In its early history, the Delphic oracle was believed to be active only once a year, when streams of magnetic current flowed accompanied by manifestations of spirit. Similarly all sacred sites had their times when they were ‘live’, and it was the work of the astrologer-priests to calculate when they would be ‘plugged in’. These used their knowledge of astronomy to create calendars, the simplest of which were solar based. The astrologer would note the points where the sun rose and set on specific days of the year, and landscape features along the local horizon were used to mark these points, or standing stones were erected so alignments could be created to them.
The Celts celebrated eight festivals during the year - at the solstices and equinoxes, when outer square and circle align - and also at the mid-season quarter-days, when the inner circle and square align (Fig. 5). These festivals were integrated into the Christian calendar as the eight high points of the year. Thus the horoscope can be seen as a calendar marking the seasons of efficacy as well as map showing the directions radiating from a central site within a landscape. Behind each pagan festival lies the respective archetype that is activated at that season. Also, the traditional meanings of the feast days, like the meanings associated with the compass directions, have fed into our signification of the astrological houses. Conclusion Archetypes are the divine absolutes ordering the cosmos and underlying the flux and diversity of life. Like geometric forms they are transcendent to empirical reality yet give it form and meaning. They pattern time and space, and their order and fields of meaning extend through every level of the universe, permeating both the microcosm of the human psyche as well as the macrocosm around us. Astrology presents a beautiful, lucid, 3-D geometry of archetypal forms and forces in motion, showing how they meet and merge to create patterns of meaning within great interlocking time cycles. There is, however, nothing mechanical about this archetypal interaction, as the universe is not a machine but a living organism. Because our consciousness is part of its consciousness, and our will contributes to the will of the whole, we are able to affect what comes to pass. For this reason astrology should not be seen as concretely predictive but, as Richard Tarnas puts it, as archetypally predictive. And we should never forget our role as co-creators in the great evolutionary process of creation.
Phoebe Wyss
March 2007
Synopsis In this article I question the consensual view of time as linear, running from past to future, and discuss other conceptions, for example that time is cyclic. The movement of stars and planets in regular cycles enables astrologers to determine time quality and predict the future. Sub-atomic physics has discovered that time can move backwards on the quantum level, and a teleological view of time presents a case for reverse causality- the pull of the future producing present events. In dreams we move freely forwards or backwards in time, and in meditation we can jump out of time completely and rest in a timeless state. The edifice of modern science is built on the law of cause and effect, which rests on the concept of linear time moving from past to future, so any alternative concept of time meaning a change in paradigm threatens its foundations. Time is the concept we use to explain our experience of change. We perceive movement in the world around us and movement in our inner world- the rise and fall of our breath, the shifting thoughts in our minds- and two big questions arise: if there was no movement would there still be time, and if there was no observer to register movement would there be time then? In other words, does time have objective existence? Until recently, most people believed it did. The sun marks time as it circles the sky, alternating day with night. The seasons follow each other in a predictable round. We watch the waxing and waning of the moon and follow the longer time-cycles of the planets. In ancient cultures these were plotted against the background of stars, which were seen as fixed- the eternal home of the gods. Time was measured against a background of eternity, but now we know the stars are not fixed. They also move. Knowledge of the cycles of the heavenly bodies enables the astronomer-astrologer to span time and obtain information about the past or envisage the future. Up to the 17th century the two roles were united. Newton and Kepler were both astronomers and astrologers- their left-brained logical and mathematical skills working together with their right-brained intuition. Today astrologers still study astronomy, but most astronomers reject astrology. They have settled for the left-brained approach to reality and focused on a yang form of time. The astrologer’s cyclic view of time is female or yin. When they scan the night sky with their telescopes, astronomers look into the past. The super nova of 1987 took 170,000 light years to reach us though, for the astronomers viewing it, it was happening now. They were seeing the past in the present moment. Astrologers see the future in the present when they make predictions. We can say the difference between them is that the astrologer is interested in time quality, and the astronomer deals with time quantatively. Although orthodox archaeologists are reluctant to recognise this because it disagrees with their evolutionary paradigm, the pyramids, stone circles and vast earth works scattered across the globe point to the existence of an ancient global civilisation with a very advanced knowledge of astronomy. The mathematics embodied in these edifices proves they could not only measure the cycles of sun, moon and planets, but also the 25.000 year precessional cycle of the stars. (Due to a wobble in the earth’s axis, the equinoxes and solstices appear to move backwards through the twelve constellations that give their names to the zodiac, completing a full circle in roughly 25.000 years, which is known as the precession). An unsolved question is why the people who built these massive edifices went to such immense cost and effort? It has been calculated that eighteen million man-hours went into the construction of Silbury Hill- part of the Avebury complex in Wiltshire. It was started around 2660BC and is the largest man-made mound in Europe. Was Avebury built as an observatory, or as a huge clock of earth and stone to measure time, or did it have another purpose? Time keeping was certainly more important to the early agricultural communities of the 4th and 3rd millennia BC than to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them. The times of sowing and reaping needed to be established, but, just as important, the times of the religious festivals accompanying the seasons. The nature gods who they believed had power to grant good or bad harvests needed to be placated, and rituals performed for the well-being of the people and the land. For this purpose the times of the equinoxes, solstices and new moons had to be established. The oldest calendar known dates from the city of Akkad, and was created around 3.800 BC. Based on the combined cycles of sun and moon, it divides the year into twelve months of three hundred and fifty-four days, starting at the spring equinox and the month of Nisan (Aries). When required a 13th month was intercalated called “the month of dark sowing”. Indian calendars also began with Aries, who is still seen as an initiator in modern astrology. According to Indian legend, the world began at a date in the distant past when all seven planets were conjunct in Aries. From around 4000 BC measurements of time and space were being structured systematically. The 12:60 system evolved, whereby days in the year corresponded to the 360 degrees of the circle, and became the foundation of our time-space based consensual reality. That astrological myth was already bound up with time keeping in Akkad, can be seen in the names of the Akkadian months. For example, the second month- Kharsidi- means “the propitious bull”. 6000 years ago the time qualities of the twelve divisions of the sun’s annual passage through the ecliptic that are recognised today were already determined. The summer solstice, when the sun is at its height, had special significance for the Egyptian Pharaoh, who was seen as the earthly embodiment of the sun, and alignments were made accordingly in temple architecture. The avenue of ram-headed sphinxes at Karnac, for example, is oriented to the setting sun at the summer solstice. Ramses II’s great temple at Abu Simbel, however, honours the rising sun in Aries. When it was built, the sun in the precessional cycle was passing through the constellation of Aries at the spring equinox. Since then, however, the precession has moved it on, and the “miracle of the sun” in Abu Simbel no longer coincides with the equinox but takes place in February. Due to its alignment twice a year the first ray of the rising sun penetrates the length of the temple to reach the inner sanctuary, illuminating the statues of three gods placed there. For the crowd of worshippers, gathered in ancient times to witness this spectacle, it must have represented an experience of spiritual rebirth and renewal. In order to appreciate the significance of such alignments, we need to understand how the Egyptians saw the relationship between heaven and earth. In contrast to our present allocation of gender, Nut the sky was female, and Geb the earth was male. They were depicted as a pair of lovers. The ancient Egyptians saw sky and earth as two parts of a whole that had been torn apart. At certain stages in the cycles of time, however, alignments would come into place between them, which represented copulation and insemination. Then an energy exchange occurred in which earth energy was relayed to the sky, and sky energy to the earth. I believe the key to the puzzle of why the pyramids and sacred sites are located where they are lies in the myth of Nut and Geb. They could have been so placed to create alignments between earth and sky. It was Robert Bauval who first pointed out that the Giza pyramids are constructed in the form of a flat isosceles triangle, mirroring the isosceles triangle formed by the three stars in Orion’s belt. The Egyptians, who had a devotional attitude to the stars, worshiped Orion as the stellar form of their god Osiris. Mark Vidler in his book The Star Mirror carries Bauval’s findings further. In the geometry of the great pyramid he discovers altogether eleven alignments with eleven major stars, which were exact during the period around 2450 BC. If my conclusion from the myth of Nut and Geb is correct, the Egyptians would have experienced these alignments as a channelling of energy from sky to earth and from earth to sky. Thus in building the pyramids they were spiritually exploiting the potential of the time quality at certain epochs in the precessional cycle of the stars. Alignments only remain in place for about fifty years and are then lost. Over the centuries since 2400 BC alignments from the pyramid with single stars have come into being, but it seems that for an epoch to be significant an exceptional number of them need to occur at once. Vidler discovers this applies to our present age. At the beginning of the 21st century, the eleven pointers of the great pyramid were again all aligned to some of the brightest stars in the sky. He interprets this as meaning we are living at a crucial time in human history, and believes our epoch was foreseen and pointed to by the designers of the pyramid. As if to give literal meaning to the myth of the lovers Nut and Geb, Vidler goes on to discover alignments between the brightest stars and the tallest mountains on earth as well as sacred sites. Comparing their earthly coordinates with the celestial longitude and latitude of significant stars, he not only discovers alignments but also that isosceles triangles are formed when the sites are connected by straight lines. Synchronicity has it that isosceles triangles are also created in the sky when aligned stars are connected. The chances that three stars or three mountains should form exact isosceles triangles are so remote that his findings are mind-boggling. For example, after discovering an isosceles triangle between Ben Nevis, Silbury Hill and Mt Brandon, he then discovers that three stars forming an isosceles triangle in the head of the constellation Draco are at present vertically aligned to these landmarks- the star Eltanim, the eye of the dragon, being exactly above Silbury. I suggest that the leys, avenues or cursors, extending across the countryside from sacred sites such as Avebury, reflect the straight lines of this celestial geometry, and that they were constructed to channel the energy received from the sky to other sites or places of habitation. So, to conclude this section, a knowledge of planetary and stellar cycles enabled the astrologers or priests of ancient cultures to predict times when their temples and sacred sites would be ‘plugged in’, and the current would flow, and plan their religious festivals accordingly. I also go along with the theory that the Egyptians mummified their dead to preserve their etheric bodies, which are the templates for their physical bodies, until the time came round when the key alignments were formed within the 25.00 year precessional cycle that would allow their resurrection and ascension to the stars, their true home. As we have seen, for the people living between 4000 and 500 BC time was cyclic- a wheel of eternal occurrence. But since then, from the ancient Greeks onwards, time has become consensually linear, at least in the west. Christianity, unlike the more ancient Hindu religion with its cycles of reincarnation, rests on linear time. It is needed for the doctrine of a fall in the past and redemption in the future to take place. Christian theologians taught that time is absolute and God-ordained, that it began at the creation 4000 years ago, and runs in a continuous line until the end of time at the last judgement. Over the centuries people have become more time conscious. The first mechanical clocks appeared in 12th century in European monasteries to summon the brothers to prayer. Then, after the industrial revolution, clocks became of paramount important to coordinate the shifts in the factories. In the 19th century factory owners would present their workers with pocket watches to ensure that they arrived punctually. The great edifice of knowledge that science has erected since the 17th century rests on linear time. Without it there could be no law of cause and effect, so crucial to scientific proof. Without it there could also be no Darwinian evolution or Marxian concept of social and economic progress. Thus by the 20th century not only did we all accept unquestioningly that time was external, but we had become slaves to it. However, a seed of dissent had been sown back in the 18th century when the philosopher Emmanuel Kant suggested that time was psychological. He saw it as an innate sense that moulded our perceptions, and, when in the late 20th century neuroscientists came to investigate the brain, they found they agreed with him. It is now proved that our brains regulate how we experience time- the part responsible being a loop of dopamine generated neural activity with its centre in the frontal cortex just behind the eyes. Incoming impressions are collected in packets in a present tense window. Then, like a film editor cutting a film, the brain rearranges the separate impressions contained within it into a time line, backdating some in the process. Scientists have also found that the way
we experience time depends on our dopamine levels, which explains subjective
differences. Time, as we all know, crawls slowly for the child during
a boring lesson at school, but flies for the pensioner. Einstein also made us aware of how time depends on location. For example, from a theoretical viewpoint in outer space all the planetary cycles in our solar system could be viewed at any given moment in their totality. And everything that has ever happened on our planet could theoretically be experienced in the present tense by observers at different points in deep space observing us through telescopes. The way we experience time also has to do with the speed of change. Here I suggest a mental experiment:
If we speeded time p so that the sun’s cycle lasted one hundredth of a second, we would hear the music of the spheres, as the planets create resonances according to the pitch of their orbits. Mars, for example would be heard as a deep bass. Mercury, so often retrograde, would give forth a chirping note, and Venus a harmonious chord. Shortening the sun’s cycle further to a thousandth of a second would make the outer planets audible, and then the whole solar system, heard from the sun, would play a grand regular chord, or a varying melody when heard from the earth. When a year is shortened to a hundred thousandth of a second, sounds disappear into the supersonic, and we enter the range of heat radiation. Then the paths of the sun, moon and planets would appear as solid lines each glowing with one of the colours of the rainbow. Movement therefore, and with it time, is transcended at this speed, and our solar system becomes a solid geometrical figure composed of light and colour. A philosopher may surmise, as speeding up time transforms matter into sound and then light waves, that the higher oscillations correspond to higher dimensions of consciousness, and that matter and time only appear when the speed of oscillation is slowed to a lower pitch. Is life eternity in slow motion? By the end of the 20th century, Steven Hawking was questioning Einstein’s theory of relativity and proclaiming there is no time without matter, and that time, space and matter, which are interdependent, began with the big bang. Quantum physicists began observing how time disintegrates on the quantum level. They saw particles exiting from a tube at one end before they had entered it at the other, proving time can also move backwards. The weirdness with which time is experienced on the quantum level is similar to how it is experienced in dreams. Here it is rarely linear. It can contract or extend, and we can transcend it by reliving the past or dreaming the future. It is as if time has an extra dimension in dream consciousness. Instead of being a line it becomes a field- a flat surface around which our attention jumps from one impression to another, which are all present together. Therefore, although time when bound up with space and matter in normal waking consciousness seems to run linearly from past to future, this is not the case in other states of consciousness. I believe that prophets, mediums, clairvoyants and intuitive astrologers can enter the state of consciousness where time has an extra dimension while remaining in the normal waking state. They can thus stand both outside and inside time. The techniques taught in spiritual schools to raise consciousness through meditation and prayer can also lead us to experience a state where time is transcended. Teachers in the zen tradition speak of the power of the now- a heightened clarity of vision in the present moment in which both past and future are contained. In meditation we move from the periphery of the wheel of time, where we continuously and inexorably turn on the time line, to the still, silent hub of the wheel where time is no more. We have reached a point in our evolution where the paradigm of a forward-moving cause and effect time line is weakening. If, as quantum physics has proved, time can also run backwards, then so can cause and effect. The teleological view of history emphasises the pull of the future. For example, a couple get married and this event requires them to meet, which they do at university two years earlier. But this event requires them to choose to go to the same university, which they do three years earlier, and so on until finally their marriage requires them to be born. In this case the wedding stands for the pull of the future. Perhaps those astrologers who have a talent for predicting future events are tapping into teleological causes. Astrologers possess an overview of time cycles, and know how to interpret time quality. This allows them to predict events that are likely to occur because they correspond to the quality. They also erect charts accordingly to the rule that a cycle unfolds the potential contained in its birth moment. For example, your life as described in your birth-chart is an expression of the time quality of your moment of birth. Yet at the same time, paradoxically, nothing is predetermined. The time quality of a particular moment is a precondition, but what we do with it is up to us. At every point there is always more than one alternative, and our choices help to create the future. In conclusion, reality on a higher plane beyond time and change can be compared to a geometric shape of great complexity, eternally complete and perfect. However, we find ourselves on a lower and slower plane of consciousness on the time line, moving round it as in a dance. We dance the geometry of time according to the patterns created by the cycles of sun, moon, planets and stars. Time is needed for our dance to unfold, its shape to become evident, and its meaning to be clear. It is a sacred dance, a sacrament, in which the whole is felt as truth and perceived as beauty. Phoebe Wyss
April 2006
According to Plato triangles are the basic building blocks of the universe because they are the most stable of forms. The Egyptian pyramid, built to last for all eternity, is composed of four triangles which together create an ideal balance and stability. Pythagoras, the Greek mystic who united mathematics, astronomy and music into an ordered whole, coined the word ‘kosmos’ to describe the universe. He found beauty and structural perfection in nature, seeing the mathematics behind natural forms as evidence of a spiritual intelligence at work. The heavens also bear witness to a grand design, presenting an awe-inspiring spectacle of geometry in motion. Planets move in time in and out of significant alignments, creating geometrical relationships with the horizon and with their fellow planets. The birth chart is a moment of frozen time, a snapshot of the geometrical patterns of the moment. When we find a grand trine of three or more planets in a chart, this mirrors a phase in the complex dance of the planets when a great triangle had formed in the sky. In sacred geometry the triangle stands for transcendent harmony, and is special because it is said to contain the golden ratio. It represents perfect equlibrium, God resting within his/herself as the trinity- the one in three and three in one. In numerology one stands for unity, and is represented by the point. Two stands for division and duality and is represented by the line joining two points, and three represents a third transcendent point above the line and equidistant to the first two points, which resolves their conflict and carries their meaning onto a higher level. Therefore the triangle is a symbol of spiritual development. The planets involved in a trine work together and support each other, as energy flows freely round a trine without blockage, conflict or stress. However if transpersonal planets* are involved, there will be karmic problems to work through before the positive manifestation of the planetary archetypes can be accessed. Seen from the viewpoint of karmic astrology, our lives upon lives provide us with situations and opportunities for spiritual growth as we gradually become masters of the elements within us. Earth, water, air and fire stand for four different spiritual paths on which we refine and perfect our physical body (earth), our emotional/astral body (water), our mental body(air) and our etheric/energy body (fire). In order to understand our specific karmic tasks in the present life, we can look at which elements are accentuated in our charts by planetary placements. Each element is represented by three signs of the zodiac (Fig.1) in a horoscope. Trines connecting planets in the same element are like the rungs of a `ladder to heaven´ enabling us to climb upwards through using the resources of that element. However, before we can climb a ladder we need to make sure the rungs are safe, and we must always start at the bottom. FIG
1 An order of priority in our karmic work is indicated by the order of the signs. Thus Aries, Taurus, Gemini and Cancer represent the first-rung level of the four ladders, Leo through to Scorpio the second rung, and Sagittarius through to Pisces the third. We have come into the present life with some rungs in place and with some rungs missing. Transpersonal planets* in our trines indicate that the respective rungs are unsafe, and karmic issues need to be resolved before we can use them to climb. Habits of feeling (water), thinking (air), acting(fire) and relating to the material world(earth), formed in past lives, cause problems until we change them. A ladder is only complete if a grand trine has formed. A grand trine, for example in earth, shows we have mastered earth skills in our past lives, and developed our physical body to be a fit container for our spirit. The presence of one or two sides of an incomplete triangle indicates that we can already access many of the resources of this element, but we still need to add the dimension symbolised by the missing rung. The wheel of the houses is conventionally divided into four `quadrants´ each consisting of three houses. A study of trines requires us to divide the wheel up into three groups of four houses which I call `trigants´(Fig. 2). These are valid both for the wheel of the houses and for the wheel of the signs. The first trigant is cardinal, the second is fixed and the third is mutable in its energy. FIG.
2 I have set the wheels in Fig. 2 so that the houses match their corresponding signs. You will see that the points of the triangles shown in Fig. 1 are each anchored in a different trigant (Fig 2). The order of the trigants indicates an evolution as we pass round the wheel. Aries to Cancer (houses 1-4) is concerned with personal empowerment. Here we individuate by developing our personal resources in the elements fire, earth, air and water. We are developing a secure sense of self to act as a firm foundation from which we can relate to others and play a role in the world. In the second trigant, Leo to Scorpio (houses 5-8), the energy is fixed and concentrated. This is the trigant of crisis, where are mirrored back through our relationships with others, and where our ego clashes with other egos. The third mutable trigant, Sagittarius to Pisces (houses 9-12), is the field of ego transcendence and transpersonal involvement. Depending on how far we can let go of personal desires, we can be creative here with the transpersonal levels of fire, earth, air and water by identifying with dimensions greater than ourselves. THE FIRE LADDER A personal planet in Aries trining one in Leo means that the first two rungs of the fiery ladder are in place. In past lives we have learned to trust our energy and to move with it, thus linking Aries vitality and drive with Leo´s centredness and creativity. We can be aflame with enthusiasm and gusto, able to act spontaneously and effectively to make things happen with the right timing through our willpower and intuition. Our confident and expansive energy gives us the power to command. Learning the art of living totally we can become afire with the joy of creation and can ignite others. When a personal planet in Leo trines one in Sagittarius it means that our fire has become a torch to light the way. The spiritual fire of the third trigant gives us an overall view and higher understanding. We are able to set goals for our creativity and, powered by Leonine force, fly straight as an arrow to our target. Through letting go of personal ambition we open a channel for the cosmic creative force. The higher a flame mounts the more transparent it becomes until at its tip it completely disappears. A trine from Sagittarius to Aries links the top of the fiery ladder with the bottom rung again. Not progress in linear form, as the ladder symbol seems to indicate, but a vision of life as spiralling cycles lies behind astrology. Thus, after mounting onto the highest rung, we return to climb again. However the experience of Sagittarius then gives the innocence of Aries a new flavour. Pushy, opaque ram fire is made luminous in this trine by the far-sighted wisdom of the archer. Filled with the fire of aspiration we now radiate more light than heat. THE EARTH LADDER Trines between personal planets in earth show that in past lives we have learned to ground ourselves. For example, Taurus linked to Virgo indicates an ability to value and utilise the physical plane. As a karmic benefit we may be blessed with a healthy, graceful body, and a comfortable, well functioning environment. We are learning to be alchemists and turn stones into gold, working to refine and beautify the mundane, and to create quality through touch. A trine from Virgo to Capricorn means we can contribute our personal skills to projects of transpersonal scope. For example, using our business acumen to manage collective resources, we find fulfilment in both in serving those we know personally, and being of service to the community in general. On the transcendent point of the earth trine sits the occultist, whose wisdom can subdue nature to divine purposes. His task is to spiritualise matter, refining it to make the earth a temple for the human spirit. In a trine from Capricorn to Taurus, the management skills of the former are combined with the talent for attracting abundance of the latter. We are hedonists enjoying what we have, but are also able to use our resources wisely for the good of others. Serious dedication to making a contribution to society is tempered here with an awareness that personal needs must first be met. Like an apple tree nourished by its own deep roots in the earth, we can then yield harvest upon harvest of rich fruit. THE AIR LADDER Trines between personal planets in air indicate that we have learned to use our minds. A rung between Gemini and Libra shows personal empowerment through clarity of thought and knowing our own truth. We have developed rhetorical skills in past lives and can express our ideas convincingly but, more important, we have also learned to listen. Dialogue with the other is possible and with it mutual understanding, partnership and love. A trine from Libra to Aquarius shows that we can harmonise with others in groups as well as in one to one relationships. Our mind is less occupied with personal concerns than with issues relating to the collective and we are inspired by a humanitarian vision. The mental ego drops when we understand that intelligence is a function of the whole. Like snowflakes falling into a pot of water, touching the surface and disappearing, so true knowledge dissolves in us, becomes us and changes us. That we have learned to be with others without losing ourselves is shown by a trine from Aquarius to Gemini. We can play a role in the world without compromising our own truth. Seeing the interconnectedness of all life, and understanding that we do not own our thoughts but that they come and go, we can relax our busy minds. Then all words lead to silence and all thought to the peace that passes understanding. THE WATER LADDER Personal planets in the water trine show we are becoming masters of our emotional body. The first stage of Cancer to Scorpio indicates the ability to access our imaginative and psychic powers. We have found emotional security, a home in ourselves, and can thus allow closeness in our relationships and be vulnerable without feeling threatened. We can encounter the dark side of the psyche in ourselves and in others with psychological understanding, nourished by our deep sources of love and trust. The trine from Scorpio to Pisces indicates that we have made progress in overcoming the exploiting ego that blocks love. Understanding that the other is a glass mirroring aspects of ourselves increases our compassion and leads to altruistic commitment. Beyond the ego lies the ocean of the collective soul. Becoming porous, letting go and letting be, we are carried by the current and reach a state of equanimity beyond joy and sorrow. The drop enters the ocean only to be reborn as a water drop again. In the trine from Pisces to Cancer, we experience the full range of human emotions while understanding the need to set personal boundaries. In this trine we integrate spiritual life and personal relationships, remembering that before we can truly love our need to be needed must disappear. Then we do not love, we are love. * As personal planets I count: Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter. I see as transpersonal: Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and Chiron. Phoebe Wyss
November 2006 |
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©2005
Phoebe Wyss • 22, Saxon Road • Hove
BN3 4LE • Phone: [44] (0)1273 417997 •
astrophoebe@btinternet.com |
