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THE MAGIC OF PATTERNS
A common insight of human thinking is that existence is action, not a mere static state of something. Thus man knows he is of consequence, or that he possesses potentialities, even when he is unable to form any clear idea of himself in his own mind. This is the proposition to which Sir Lewis Morris, the Welsh poet, gives apt statement in his remark that "life is act, and not to do is death."
Astrology is not concerned with the philosophical problems here, but with practical considerations arising in the process of act. The two preceding parts of this text have been devoted to a charting of man's everyday circumstances by the equatorial houses of the horoscope, and to a measurement of his personal characteristics by the signs of the zodiac. What remains is the astrological delineation of doing — and so, of existing — as it is found to be a continual interaction between various given situations and individual character. The two-way impact, which has been exhibited so far through each of the orientations provided by (1) the horizons and (2) the constants of experience, must now be identified in terms of (3) a pure ACTIVITY, or the final and most important of the three great horoscopic perspectives,
Activity of itself — that is, when made a primary factor in astrological analysis, and so divorced for the moment from the particular situations and characteristics involved — can only be the possibility of proceeding with reference to a definite kind of consummation, or of not doing so. Under way or accomplished, act is at once circumstantial and functional. Potentially, however, it can be a transcendence of circumstances as well as a response to them, and as much an expansion or refinement of the character as any exercise of its nature. It is, ultimately, the simple more or less of anything in question. The planets in horoscopy, added to the houses and signs, are the means of (1) determining the precise nature of the potentiality involved in every possible complex of a native's situation and character, or (2) finding how experience may be increased or decreased in particular phases of itself. The complete scheme of distribution in astrological correspondences can be given diagrammatically, as follows:
TABLE IX
The Basic Scheme of Astrological Analysis
(1) Man establishes horizons, charted by the houses.
He reveals circumstances as the co-operation of two factors: Identity, or the manifestation of freedom; Condition, or the manifestation of order.
(2) Man develops characteristics, charted by the signs.
He reveals function as the co-operation of two factors: Objectivity, or fidelity to social convenience;
Subjectivity, or fidelity to organic convenience.
(3) Man manipulates potentialities, charted by the planets.
He reveals activity as the co-operation of two factors: Momentum, or the integration of circumstances; Capacity, or the refinement of function.
The problem at this point, in any over-all exposition of the horoscope, is to provide the mind with fundamental planetary meanings, such as will permit an actual charting of act apart from the conditioning of circumstances and the compulsion of characteristics. The astrologer, to make use of his equatorial houses, must be able to understand money, as an example, in its wholly general or fundamental implication. Otherwise he cannot analyze the pertinent differentiations by which he is able to offer guidance in a given individual's case. Aries shows a head — hence an initiative, a self-sufficiency and a flair for leadership — which is not limited to any race, climate, nationality, family, sex, age in years or other purely personal adaptation. For this reason the sign at the vernal equinox provides a real measurement of individual functioning in the astrological techniques. What is needed for the planets is a correspondingly broad generalization.
The physical sciences have been able to deduce and verify the so-called laws of nature — the generalized principles on which so many great achievements have been built — by directing first attention to those classes of phenomena where all individual differences can be averaged out, in a statistical sense, as in dealing with atoms, molecules and infinite masses. The screening in this way of infinite chemical activity, or scientifically fixed potentiality, made it possible to proceed on the basis of exact prediction, and so led to every important technological advance of the modern age. This text is based on research which began its examination of planetary meanings in January, 1923, by a special study of microscopic life, using the amoeba as a convenient type of living organism. Here were infinitesimal animals, simple to the point of a near loss of themselves in the medium which sustained them, yet exhibiting all the fundamental kinds of action which seem to be necessary in organic existence. They shared these with every higher form of animate being, but disclosed them on the level where all possible individual differences were cancelled out as completely as in the case of the physicist's atoms.
What the amoeba does, every laborer or capitalist, every commoner or aristocrat, every drunkard or saint, does likewise, not only for the same reason but in precisely identical fashion at root. This utterly generalized differentiation of activity, according to kind of act, is what the planetary bodies chart in horoscopy. Men start, and they stop. They labor, and they rest. They make themselves active or passive at will. They enjoy, or they reject. These are the possibilities which now must be derived from experience, rather than theory, and which must be shown to have the same logical measurement through the planets, astrologically, as circumstances and function through the equatorial and ecliptical mansions.
The amoeba remains a hopelessly generalized creature, as far as he appears in man's perspective. He eats at any point of himself by a simple ingestion of food particles into the substance that makes him up, and he excretes by collecting waste materials anywhere within this substance in the form of vacuoles which can be ejected through the wall-less boundary of himself. Respiration takes place in the same ingenuous fashion. Locomotion is a ponderously awkward but ridiculously easy flow of self in any desired direction, and so on. This is function at its extreme in a lack of pattern, and is circumstances in their most haphazard form. As life grows in complexity, however, a relatively fixed organization becomes necessary. A head develops as a means for taking supplies into the body. Other specializations without number help to put down the foundation for a higher existence by making it possible to dismiss most organic functioning to automaticity. In human character and situation a progressive achievement of generalization, above these merely physical functions, leads to man's high and characteristic individuality. This essentially social activity is charted by the planets. They are taken not in isolation from each other, but as they establish definitely recognizable patterns, akin to life itself in its evolution of organic forms.
Men do not materially interrupt their own rhythm of existence, or vary their pattern of activity, in making their adjustments to the stream of events in which they have part. The person who finds he must wait for a train is able to get his shoes shined, or make a telephone call — desires in which he may have been thwarted only very shortly before — and the transposition of emphasis from one thing to another in this fashion is the means by which he keeps his act and choice free in a very real sense. W. J. Colville (1860-1917), a theosophical writer of importance in another generation, was fond of saying that when he brushed his hair he was in psychic rapport with everyone who was brushing his hair at that moment. The concordance of life in its activity is not a compulsion of man, except incidentally. He may leave the guild of hair-brushers to place himself in the fellowship of breakfast-eaters, and so on indefinitely. The facility with which every individual can align himself where he wills — in circumstances, function and activity — is the basis of his capacity or true incentive, exactly as the alignments which he has made already, and which persist to varying degrees, constitute the momentums that are the very substance of his being. Here is probability at work, and what must be understood is how astrology can use the planets to chart it.
Momentum as a Pattern of Self
Against a lucky man even a god has little power.
Publilius Syrus, Sententia
All things tend to run their course. A fever or a common cold goes through a regular cycle, which has to be taken into account by the physician, and the crisis in certain diseases is an important manifestation of the same phenomenon. Infection is always followed by a necessary period of gestation, which can usually be predicted. Many remedial measures have stages which show the degree of efficacy in the individual case. Plants and animals appear or reappear at set times, and the reproduction of their kind runs to schedules which hold to norm with a greater reliability than the seasons themselves. This tendency for the basic functions of organic existence to be rhythmic, or to reveal a dependable regularity of cycle, is a necessity in a universe characterized by order. Birth and death, hunger and satiety, activity and sleep, desire and self-realization, all involve that continuous reconstruction of experience by which consciousness is made possible. The rhythms as such are the foundation of circumstances, and their parallel planetary cycles are the basis of astrological charting.
The irregularities of existence are even more importantly periodic, if in a different fashion, than the familiar cycles of common experience. Every dog has his day, according to the suggestion first made by Homer, and opportunity knocks on the door at least once in each man's case, as Lewis Bates points out in his Good Luck. The whole of an individual's life has a span which seems to be more consistent with his family or genetic pattern, statistically, than with the wider standard of longevity for the country at large. Indeed, nature often seems to enter upon a conspiracy to preserve each special little status quo as a cyclic momentum in its own right. No truism seems to have more universal confirmation that the one of Jesus, put down in Mark, 4:25, "For he that hath, to him shall be given: and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath." This, of course, is what makes individuality possible. It is the integrity of activity per se.
These cycles overlap each other continually, often in a most incongruous blending of both desirable and quite unwelcome patterns. Thus a long siege of sickness may accompany a fine financial year. An individual in serious business straits may have the comfort of an ideal wife, and become the master of his lodge. Every single course of events in personal experience operates through its own convenience, perhaps revealed but in no wise initiated, terminated or controlled of necessity by any other chain of relations, either in the given case or in nature generally. Its length of duration seems to be inherent in its make-up, not in its superficial connections, and this is the phenomenon which the astrological planets dramatize most strikingly. Practically every problem arising in human experience becomes at base the need for creating favorable momentums in the act-of-self, if not for an extrication from unfavorable ones. The universe is not moving in anyone's favor, or against his interest, but he is merely making a proper or improper use of his potentialities.
Man understands this well enough, in everyday matters. When he finds his business unsatisfactory, he looks around and makes some change to effect the end he has in view. He consults a doctor, dentist, or other therapist in connection with bodily deficiencies, or a real estate broker when he finds the neighborhood of his home unsuitable for the needs of his growing children. He is only defeated, for the major part, when he is swept along in cycles for which his perspective is inadequate. Horoscopy fails him, therefore, when it seeks merely to give him a knowledge of the probabilities under which he is operating, without showing him at the same time how to engineer the shifts that will bring him under the course of an altogether different set of potentials. A patient would hardly be justified in consulting the physician if that gentleman would only report, "You are badly infected with a malignant fever, and I predict that in five days your agony will be most acute, and that in ten you will be dead."
In its portmanteau implication a POTENTIALITY is the possible duration of a definable action, or body of acts, reactions and attitudes. Seen circumstantially, any one potential in question is a momentum serving as an integrating factor in experience, and so providing the basis for any estimation of outcome. Examined functionally, the same potential is a capacity, and analysis moves on from predictive measurement of the situation — that is, a judgment upon its integration — to the shaping of events which are controlled rather than suffered. The possibility of this control, as against naive eventuality, is shown by the identical heavenly body, of course, in the same astrological chart. The planets in the horoscope are used to determine the twofold potentiality of things (1) as encountered and (2) in the light of what may be desired. They show what tendencies in a particular life are of value, and so are either to be left undisturbed or helped and strengthened, and what ones, contrariwise, are fruitless and hence require redirection. The planetary relations of an astrological wheel thus reveal themselves as patterns of expediency, entirely as the native's momentums give a varying value to his capacities.
Capacity as a Pattern of the Self
Every man has his gift, and the tools go
to him that can use them.
Charles Kingsley, Saint's Tragedy
The myth of talents as inborn, and marvelously mysterious, is helped by the exceptional appearance of the infant prodigy, or other precocious members of the human species. The average person assumes himself without hope in his own drab milieu, and decides to content himself with whatever conditions of lack have become the principal momentums in his own life. This does not mean that anyone can be a musical genius, as an example, but it is the very rare man indeed who does not have many potentialities which, with an adequate nurture, could not be advanced to a degree of unusual excellence. The extraordinary case involves over-all cycles of larger compass — some untoward emphasis of racial or group potentials — but it does not require any special factors to account for it, over and above those applicable to the less spectacular instance. Certainly it does not diminish the opportunity offered the little fellow. Times of unusual stress, such as war, show how far an abnormal culture of outstanding capacities can be brought about in the mass. The principle has long been recognized, as in the old Latin proverb that necessity is the mother of invention.
What astrology presents to every native is an outline of the chance which he may have to develop himself, or to improve the circumstances of his being, as this is scaled against the greatest rather than the merely average encouragement of his given age and set of relations. Genius which classifies as art has its special limitations, but so has a mechanical talent, a flair for politics, the psychic sense of the gambler, the muscular timing of an athlete, and so on through the endless list where even the least of men must surely find potentialities of himself in several categories. An individual always has the gift — that is, the ability to act — by which his capacities can so emphasize the more rather than the less, in the enhancement of some particular competence, as to make him superlative indeed within his own special self-chosen niche of reality.
Capacity exists because of the very important and basic fact that nature always does things in the same way, as far as possible, thereby establishing the integrity of pure doing in man and all other living creatures. An indestructibility of matter and a conservation of energy, the enduring principles which so fascinated classical physics and chemistry, are pieces of this same cloth. The preponderance of the expected event in a spread of possible instances, under the normal curve of statistics, is another manifestation of the same proposition. It is probably illustrated most dramatically, however, in the field of biology. Just as particular genius needs its special setting, so do all genera of life above a unicellular stage require the stability of the highly analogous organic pattern.
This is curiously evident in the embryological limb buds. Thus, among the Upper Jurassic fossils of geology, there is an early form of bird known as Archaeornis, distinguished by the fact that his wings had fingers as well as feathers. He was at the transition stage where he carried over reptilian characteristics into his new functioning, and the arrangement must have been altogether awkward, since hands can have little articulation when placed at the edge of arms already specialized for flight. In the statistical sorting out of the various sports in nature — the process over-literalized by Herbert Spencer as a survival of the fittest — the prehensile functions of the fingers gravitated to the mouth, in the case of all birds, and the defense mechanism was centered in flight instead of prowess with the claws, showing how a particular form of evolutionary development became a special capacity.
The point is that the gravitational interrelations of circumstances and function, as mediated by that complex of momentums and capacities which constitute the individual entity, operate together — under the recapitulatory activity of evolutionary progress — to produce more and more convenient complexes of reality on the circumstantial side, and more and more efficient organisms or living forms on the functional. Thus the bird's wings are the arms of man, and the forelegs of lower mammals. The housefly's wings, contrariwise, have their evolutionary correspondence with man's hair, since they do not arise from limb buds at all. Nature holds to her established path except when, by following another, she can accomplish what for the moment is a greater result. This suggests the extent to which doing the same thing in the same way is not limitation, but opportunity, since it can be abandoned whenever convenient.
A sport in one direction is sustained by conventionality in a thousand others. Mediocrity can always become genius within the channel of available potentials, and this is the magic of patterns in their ultimate implication. Cinderella could blossom forth as a princess, something her sister were unable to do. The ugly duckling found himself as a swan. What is everywhere evident, through all organic and psychological adaptations, is the division of labor which fundamentally distinguishes potentiality from potentiality and so gives the most important clue to the nature of the planets, each as a sort of limb bud — withal a movable and restless one — in the universal or generalized man. In other words, the patterned wholeness of self is found embryonically as well as organically in the zodiac. Each of the heavenly bodies, in practical astrology, comes to represent a special sort of self-assertion. The essential realization for the astrologer is that the horoscope, by charting the particular potentials through which existence brings circumstances and function into co-operation with each other, can guide a development of each or any embryonic limb bud of capacity, as it were, into forelegs, arms or wings, exactly as may be most convenient or pleasing.
Astrology, How and Why it Works