PSI Annual Journal 2000

Astrology, as we well-educated, scientifically literate, rational people know, is nonsense. For some of us it is harmless nonsense, entertainment even. We read our daily "horoscopes" in the tabloid newspapers and try to perceive a correlation between these brief, ambiguous statements and the ephemeral content of our life. If we do, we smile. If we don' t, we pass on to the television listings. At some point in our life, we may find ourselves reading the horoscope of a loved one in an attempt to divine the tendencies of their affections – indeed, someone recently wrote that when we stop looking at the horoscopes of current, former or potential lovers we know that we have lost interest in them. We may not build our lives or our hopes around any of this, but the phenomenon itself is interesting. Horoscope columns are everywhere, and although the daily broadsheets – The Times, Guardian and Telegraph – continue to eschew them, the quality Sundays seem to have capitulated, and the Observer now runs a very entertaining and well-written astrology feature in its colour magazine. Not too long ago I, along with most people who take astrology seriously, would have perceived this as yet another example of profiteering at the expense of a gullible, alienated and superstitious public, but I am less inclined to think this now. While not wishing to endorse the validity of these columns, I think that the demand for them may not so much indicate that the majority of human beings are hopelessly foolish – a very elitist point of view – but that, as Goethe said, in defence of astrology, many people have an uninformed premonition that there is more order in the universe than is generally apparent, a sentiment which has been educated out of the disparagers and the pooh-poohers, in which group most Unitarians would find themselves.

But there are many people within the scientific and religious communities for whom astrology is not just harmless fun but dangerous delusion. This is the position of Pope John Paul II who only recently reiterated his condemnation of those who place their trust in, and spend their time studying, "occult" phenomena. His attitude reflects the traditional Catholic view, expressed in the Penny Catechism, which warned faithful about the grave consequences which could ensue from a preoccupation with "signs, omens, and such like fooleries". I said this is the traditional Catholic view, but, of course, it is not the most traditional Catholic view. St. Thomas Aquinas, Catholicism' s greatest theologian, had an interest in and a knowledge of astrology, as did his mentor, Albertus Magnus, but Catholicism has been affected by the Enlightenment along with most areas of human thought, and its current, official disapproval of astrology betrays, I think, a real misunderstanding of its own intellectual roots.

I must say, however, that, regardless of the official view, I have found less concern expressed about my own interest in astrology by Catholics than by Unitarians (perhaps this is because Catholics have less trouble with symbolic thought systems than most Unitarians do). Two prominent Unitarians have taken me to task over my astrological studies, one of them implying in a letter that my acceptance for ministerial training would possibly have been reconsidered if my interest in astrology had been known to the selection panel. Ironically, this letter was written on notepaper bearing the motto:

Ubi Spiritus Domini, Ibi Libertas
(where the spirit of God is, there is liberty).

Such an attitude puts Unitarians in unwitting alliance with those Christian fundamentalist groups which see astrology as a weapon in the devil' s armoury – along with necromancy and spiritualism – to lead the unsuspecting down the superstitious path to eternal perdition. Unitarians wouldn' t use this kind of language, but they would certainly see an interest in astrology as the sign of a weak mind.

And so would scientists. It is interesting to observe the ways in which the media will, whenever astrology is being discussed, bring out some scientific pundit, often an astronomer, usually Patrick Moore (who, as far as I know, has no real scientific credentials), to tell us sententiously that there is absolutely no scientific basis to astrology, and that the general public is being duped and fleeced by charlatans. Such "experts" will invariably demonstrate that they have not the slightest idea what astrology is. They are operating from a self-constructed definition, which is loaded with what Dennis Elwell calls "antecedent improbability", and which they then go on to demolish with great aplomb. If, just once, I saw any evidence that they had actually read the first few pages of even the most rudimentary astrological text, I would accord their comments more respect. Sadly, however, I have yet to have such an experience.

What is this self-constructed definition? The actual wording may vary, of course, but the main elements will all feature. The 1985 declaration signed by 192 distinguished scientists – some of them Nobel prize winners – that astrology had no scientific basis, contained the following statement: "It is simply a mistake to imagine that the forces exerted by the stars and planets at the moment of birth can in any way shape our future".

What is interesting about this statement is that I, and everybody else who takes astrology seriously, would wholeheartedly endorse it. It is based upon an implied understanding of astrology which no astrological thinker worth listening to holds. No astrologer believes in influences or forces – gravitational or otherwise- emanating from the stars and planets. In fact, the stars themselves play little or no part in astrology at all. We can agree with Patrick Moore when he tells us – as he always does – that the gravitational pull of the midwife, or of a passing bus, upon the newborn child is greater by far than that exerted by any celestial body. And while we obviously do accept that the sun and moon have physical influences upon the earth and its inhabitants, we consider such influences to be a matter for physics and not for astrology. Astrology is not based on influences.

What, then, is it based upon? It is based, simply and fundamentally, upon a notion which has been lost to us for centuries, but which was known to our ancestors, and which certain branches of science are now beginning to rediscover: the notion that the universe is just that, a unity, and that its constituent parts are connected with each other as are limbs of the same body. Francis Thompson, the English mystical poet, expressed exactly this idea when he wrote:

All things, near or far,
To each other, linked are.

Charles Carter, the great English astrologer who died in 1968, called it Zusammenhang, a German term meaning, "the hanging-togetherness of things", a discerning of an underlying unity which is not based upon mechanistic or causal principles. Emerson, the American literary giant and one-time Unitarian minister, expressed it thus:

Substances at base divided
In their summits are united;
There the holy essence rolls
One through separated souls.

So, the One, God, the Ultimate, is essentially a unity, but in manifestation becomes multiple, and the discrete, apparently separate parts of this great unity are joined in ways which we intuit but which defy the explanations of Newtonian push-pull mechanics.

But such ideas are not entirely foreign to modern thought and seem to be surfacing in rather unlikely places. Physicists, for example, are discovering that at the quantum level particles behave in very strange ways. David Bohm in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, argues that at the most fundamental level of the universe, everything – space, matter, time energy – is all one, and human illusions to the contrary are created by the nature of our senses and our measuring apparatus. Another leading physicist, E.C.G. Sudarshan in his 1977 Nehru Memorial Lecture described the new view of the universe as surrealistic, "a world in which one entity is in many configurations at the same time, and the notions of separateness and individuality are merely projections of a structure which is indescribably richer" (Elwell, Cosmic Loom, page 7). And Fritjof Capra's book, The Tao of Physics, sees in the world of sub-atomic particles a paradigm of the interrelatedness of all things which reflects the ancient Taoist notion that the Tao is essentially one but becomes manifold in successive emanations. This is not unlike the ideas which inform a good deal of gnostic thinking.

Astrology postulates that this underlying unity manifests itself in very unusual ways – unusual, that is, from the standpoint of our traditionally held assumptions about the nature of the universe, although not unusual when considered in the light of our everyday experience. For example, we are all familiar with and have experienced amazing coincidences which seem to defy the laws of probability. Here' s one taken from a recent edition of the Guardian. It concerns the cricketing twins Alex and Eric Bedser:

There are many remarkable stories concerning twins, but listen to this. In 1957, to mark yet another championship, Surrey awarded each player 15 1 £ Premium Savings Bonds. Some 35 years later, two brown envelopes dropped through the Woking postbox on the same day. They had each won £ 50 with completely different numbers. A statistician was approached and returned from his computer scratching his head:

"The odds on that are incalculable. But let' s start with 20 billion to one".
(Paul Weaver, The Guardian, June 17th, 1998)

When we operate in common-sense mode we tend to dispose of such things in a big mental container labeled "randomness". It may seem strange, we think, but when you consider that millions of things are happening all the time, it shouldn' t surprise us that two things happen together in this way. We can work out the statistical probability and sleep easy in our beds, our scientific rational paradigm about how the world works still intact.

But what if this principle of unity within the cosmos is actually operating to bring things together, to form other unities from apparent diversities? What if the saying "like attracts like" were not merely a comment on how people of a certain type always seem to find each other, but an operating principle within the universe?

This is what Goethe says:

What people may commonly say of misfortunes, that they never come alone, may be with almost as much truth be said also of good fortune, and indeed of other circumstances which often cluster around us in a harmonious way; whether it be by a kind of fatality, or whether it be that man has the power of attracting to himself all mutually related things
(The Autobiography of Goethe, Vol. II, 1849)

Emerson, who was heavily influence by Goethe, opted for the notion of mutual attraction, a type of magnetism, by which related entities see unity with each other. "The things that are really for thee gravitate to thee."

O, believe, as thou livest, that every sound that is spoken over the round world, which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear! Every proverb, every book, every byword that belongs to thee for aid or comfort, shall surely come home through open or winding passages. Every friend whom not thy fantastic will but the great and tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his embrace. And this because the heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly an endless circulation through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one. (Emerson, The Over-Soul)

Astrology only makes sense in a universe that operates on these kinds of principles and the fact that it "works" seems to imply that the universe does operate on such principles; and the Gaia principle which seems to be gaining favour these days, and which postulates a living universe of mutually interrelated wholes adds some contemporary weight to the theory.

What kind of unities, what kind of mutual attractions are we talking about here? Consider the following table.

MERCURY

QUICKSILVER

COMMUNICATION

CHILDHOOD

NERVES

VENUS

COPPER

FEELINGS

YOUTH

THROAT

MARS

IRON

ACTION

MATURITY

GENITALS

SATURN

LEAD

DISCIPLINE

OLD AGE

BONES

Reading horizontally, we can readily detect five distinct groups: planets, metals, stages of life, and so on. But there is another way of grouping these things which is quite foreign to us, but which is basic to astrological thinking. By reading vertically we perceive a completely different set of relationships with four groups instead of five. Each group containing the name of a planet, a metal, a body part etc. The relationships that exist among the members of these new groupings are not so immediately apparent, and some imagination may be required to discern them, but the individual elements which compose each group are not so disparate as they may at first sight appear. Mercury, for example, as the fastest moving planet, is associated with the lightning responses of the body' s nervous system, and by analogy, with the individual' s need for communication. Quicksilver, or mercury, is the only "mobile" metal, and early childhood is the time of initial explorations, when we learn language and start to make contact with our surroundings. (A recent television programme informed us that yellow cars are the safest because the eye registers yellow more quickly than it registers any other colour. Yellow is traditionally the colour of Mercury.)

These lists can be extended indefinitely to incorporate animals, flowers, birds, planets, insects, jewels, countries, colours, and so on. In each case, some feature or function of the creature or object will indicate its planetary or zodiacal signature. Each extended list would constitute what Dennis Elwell calls a "holon".

Such thinking, which is very old indeed, has given rise to the doctrine of correspondences, or sympathy, according to which things are related because they share a common property: the lion, the sun, gold, the heart, and the king all seem to belong together, to reflect each other, to display a commonality of essence or function which links them in spite of the fact that they belong to radically different categories of being. The presence in our language of words like mercurial, veneral, martial, jovial, saturnine, applied to people, points to the fact that such ideas enjoyed wider currency in former times than they do today.

Such thinking was, in the ancient world, the basis of both magic and medicine. If someone wanted to be healed of a bone ailment, for example, he would administer a herb associated with Saturn at a time when Saturn was considered to be in a favourable position. But what is important to understand is that the planet Saturn, the huge conglomeration of rock and gas in the sky, is not the initiator of the Saturn holon, it is part of it. What Saturn, or Aries, or Mercury represent exists within me and within the natural world as much as it does within the celestial realm. In the heavens we can detect the holons in an observable, chartable form; the position of Saturn in the sky will give us some insight into the condition of the Saturn principle elsewhere, but there is no causal link, just a "sympathetic" one. It is this principle which underlies the belief that the "macrocosm", the great world, is somehow connected with the "microcosm", the little world, and which gave rise to the axiom "as above, so below" and it is this, not the notion of planetary causality, which is the basis of the astrological world-view.

George Herbert' s great poem Man expresses this beautifully:

Man is all symmetry
Full of proportions, one limb to another,
And all to all the world besides;
Each part may call the farthest, brother;
For head with foot hath private amity,
And both with moons and tides.

Nothing hath got so far,
But man hath caught and kept it, as his prey
His eyes dismount the highest star:
He is in little all the sphere.
Herbs gladly cure our flesh; because that they
Find their acquaintance there.

I have quoted from George Herbert here but I could have quoted from any of the great mystics, from any of the great religious traditions – William Law, St. John of the Cross, Wordsworth, Rumi from the Islamic tradition, and numerous Hindu and Buddhist mystics who intuit and express almost identical sentiments concerning the ultimate oneness of things, the "private amity" which exists between human beings and the cosmos, that "something far more subtly interfused that rolls through all things" as Wordsworth has it, which astrology proclaims and which takes us closer to the nature of reality and therefore to the mind of God than anything else. Astrology affirms that each individual soul has a unique and special role to play in the unfolding drama of the universe, that nothing and no one "worthless is or base" and, in the words of Emerson, that "the indwelling necessity plants the rose of beauty on the brow of chaos, and discloses the central intention of Nature to be harmony and joy".

This is why astrology is, indeed, the divine science.

Bill Darlison is the minister at Dublin Unitarian Church.

PSI Symposium Annual Journal 2000