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THE MAGIC OF HEMISPHERES
At the very beginning of things, according to the Biblical account of creation, God began His labors by a series of divisions. There is a word in the Greek for this. It has come down into the English, where it is very useful although not particularly familiar. It is dichotomy, which means cutting in two. Because it is a convenient term, it will be put to work rather often in the following pages.
As a start, a little attention to the dichotomies described in Genesis may be of considerable help in seeing just what astrology is, how it works, and what it is able to do.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said. Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
(Genesis. 1:1-8)
The point here is not that Cod is the giver of astrology, in any literal fashion. Neither is there any reason for believing that the scholarly Hebrew priests, who worked out this opening section of the Pentateuch, were at all interested in the science of the stars. They had the job of explaining existence and life. The astrologer has exactly the same task. What to a degree was inevitable in the one case is real light upon an equal inevitability in the other. In other words, there is only one possible way for getting at things, as far as the human mind is concerned. The universe must be divided — more and more of it screened off, pushed aside and removed from consideration — until what is left can be grasped, or made the basis of judgment. This dividing, when it becomes an intellectual analysis under rigorous conditions of control and record, is the method of science.
The connection between these Biblical verses and the venerable art of astrology is remote indeed, amounting to little more than the fact that they illustrate conveniently, rather, the psychological method which has had an effective refinement in the horoscope. The dichotomies of Genesis begin with a distinction between heaven and earth, and then move on at once to a second division between light and darkness. Irrespective of any other implications, the start of analysis is obviously an orientation in space and time. What is immediately at hand is earth, and what is distant or outside ordinary experience is heaven. The here of it, as distinguished from the there, takes its tangible form in a pattern of progress, or becomes day and night. This distinction in its turn is a realization of the now in events, as against what was and what will be.
A very natural question arises at this point. Are the foregoing observations a correct interpretation of the Bible, in the sense that the original author of the passage sought to make things clear in this way? The matter is unimportant. The basic orientation reveals itself to the investigator because it is a necessity in any thinking about origins, whether this be the beginning of the universe as a whole or, as an example, of Mr. Theosophilus Smith of Plymouth, Massachusetts. Astrology capitalizes on the necessity. It is not likely that the learned rabbis struggling with their cabbalistic sentences somewhere around the time of Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon, were conscious of these psychological factors. It is even less probable that the creators of the astrological techniques, through the centuries, have been aware of the scientific elements entering into the perfection of their procedures. Men made bread and alloyed metals long before the advent of chemistry and physics. Understanding always follows experience, even if it happens to contribute to some new experience which, in its turn, can lead to further understanding.
How does astrology build upon the fact that the human mind operates, in general, in a certain inevitable way? The dichotomies at the opening of Genesis seem to afford the best of possible clues. God next makes a division between the waters and the waters. This almost makes a matter of tweedledum and tweedledee, but in reality it makes good scientific sense. What appears now is the firmament, to effect the division. There has been endless speculation over the cosmological concepts of ancient Israel, but everything of the sort is beside the point here. The Hebrew word translated "firmament,"
, means an extended surface, since it comes from the verb to "beat out" as applied to malleable metals, and the simple idea is a solid dome separating the waters of space above and below, thus:
Any over-literal notion of a fixed ceiling in the heavens, however, results from a focusing of attention at the wrong place. What God accomplished, so to speak, by arching away the crude substance of creation, was to provide elbowroom for experience upon the flat expanse of everyday reality. It was then possible for dry land to appear — according to this symbolical description of beginnings — and for living creatures to start their functioning upon it. Hence the dichotomy is not dramatized half so well by the vaulted firmament as by the surface made available to man, this is, the ground of personal identity. A more serviceable diagram, adapted to the modern reader's acquaintance with Mother Earth as a globe, and with a universe reaching in all directions, would be like this:
What has been captured in diagrammatic form now is the fundamental concept of the horoscope. (1) The horizontal line of these diagrams — which, it is necessary to remember always, is a flat surface as seen sidewise — is the ordinary horizon, with every symbolical as well as literal implication to be explained through the chapters to come. In order to permit the representation also, in the most convenient form for analysis, of the relation of the whole heavenly vault around the earth, horoscopic practice conventionalizes the figure. The astrological horizon is shown passing through the center of the globe, in parallel to the true horizon on the surface. The terrestrial ball is placed within the celestial sphere, in the following fashion:
Present-day convention then proceeds to insert axial lines to represent the twelve HOUSES of the heavens. These lines are eliminated as they pass through the smaller circle, purely as a matter of optical clarity, so that the normal horoscopic map, before the insertion of the astrological characters and figures, appears this way:
A great deal will be said, in later pages, about the naive symbolism of astrology. No mastery of the stellar science is possible without understanding the degree to which nature herself has dramatized the essential relations among things in general. (2) It is here that a real horoscopy has its foundations since, from one point of view, astrological judgment might be defined as a scientific naivete at work. It is an orderly analysis of various relationships through their most simple significance. Indeed, the best of life's insights may be of this primitive sort, even when instinctive and without the blessing of science. Because experience takes place in nature, natural and unconditioned factors supply not only the substance of the experience as such, but also the means for its conscious realization. Hence the real heart of Charles Darwin's contribution to nineteenth- century thinking was his demonstration that man is an organic part of the world, not a prisoner within it. Nature and men mutually reveal each other.Here is an idea which must be expanded, and clarified. Symbolism must be seen to be revealing because it is natural. What is pleasant to touch is, by and large, beautiful to the eye. Whatever satisfies the palate will, generally, offer a seductive perfume to the nostrils. The norms and values of the mind are grounded of necessity in the gratification of the senses, since these are the individual's link with his world of experience. However, a person who is ugly by abstract standards, but who proves a benefactor in some given circumstance, can radiate a genuine beauty, so that the subjective side of life is no less a part of nature. Man may divide up his universe in everyday living, but he cannot cancel out the relationships of any one part of it with every other part. The whole remains total or complete. The conscious anchorage of astrology in this one all-important fact is the principal secret of its effectiveness at its best.
The work of the statisticians shows that, all considerations being equal, desirable traits have a positive correlation with each other. This is a mathematical way of saying that the smartest person tends to be the healthiest, the most prosperous, and so on. No one need quarrel with the proposition, even on a first encounter, if he will remember that these qualities are identified through the manifestation of them by the so-called fortunate people of life, i.e., they present a statistical pattern of desirability. Nothing is attractive intrinsically. Its attractiveness, rather, is a symbolization of its meaning in experience. The Greeks well understood this when they made such qualities no more than attributes, or elements put into experience by the meaning which various acts or reactions will have for the individual. The qualities at root result from choices, or natural selection, and are to be charted as distinctions of the mind.
Practical astrology originates in this charting. The zodiacal sign Libra, which describes the sun's location as seen from the earth for an approximate thirty days following the autumnal equinox, is the scales or balance in the astrological symbolism. (3) This is a way of capturing the functional idea of a transition from growth and outreach to harvest and ingathering. A Libra person, in the language of horoscopy, is an affable one, inclined to be pleasant and ever prone to go along in feeling and opinion with whoever is closest at hand for the moment. The symbol emphasizes the instability of this teeter-tottering, which is one point of view, and also the valuable quality of enthusiasm arising out of the capacity for quick alignment to other people and circumstances.
The question suggested at once is, what possibly can be the relation between the fall equinox and a Libra person? The answer in any usual sense is, none. The correspondence is all a matter of what can now be identified as a statistical ordering. The new mathematical technique of statistics -- developed in the past generation by science, business and government -- measures, in precise detail, a phenomenon eternally evident in nature, namely, that like things not only have relationship in their likeness, but that they tend to increase it. The one constant principle in all knowable reality is that anything which has any existence attempts, as it were, to be more of what it is. Not exactly expressed in such a way, this oversimplification -- which is convenient for the present analysis -- underlies the newly dominant concepts in physics, psychology and the others sciences.
Astrology is an organization of the divisions and distinctions in life on a definitely statistical pattern. Exactly as the best-looking young people are apt to be the most competent, so Libra individuals tend to disclose what will be found to be autumnal-equinox factors in the astrological charting. What are autumnal-equinox factors? Why, naturally, characteristics proving to be constant under a Libra emphasis. Astrology does not create anything. By the same token it reveals nothing that is hidden. Instead, it facilitates the measure and judgment of what is actually encountered in experience. Its method is a controlled exaggeration of some things, for the better recognition and understanding of others, on the pattern of all psychological analysis.
The astrologer starts out by assuming that every individual who is created in the image of God must establish the world of his own experience in the same way that God does. He sets up a firmament, by the very act of being, and so delineates his own personal hemispheres. The fact that the horoscope technique employs an actual heavenly sphere, to measure as well as symbolize them -- thereby providing for an outlining of events in certain predictive potentials -- is merely item one in the uncompromising naivete of astrological analysis. It is as though the baby were able to go outdoors at the exact moment of his delivery, to stand there with arms out-stretched, and to turn around slowly and actually define an astronomical horizon in the celestial vault. It is in this way, by being born, that the infant symbolically identifies his own or private universe of reality, and charts the psychological ground of his being as a foundation on which, for him, all experience must rest.
The magic of hemispheres, as astrologically established, lies in the illimitability of their capacity to symbolize things. There is not only a basic set given to character at birth, but also a continuous reconstruction of personality throughout life. The individual, for the total of his years — and as often in the course of events as he desires — may project a special firmament through the whole of manifest existence, and thereby create a particular horizon for himself in some one or another pattern of relations. Here is where choice and free will become power, and where horoscopy can help man to become the director of his fate in a very true sense.
(1) In its representation of a ground for experience upon the earth, the plane of dichotomy belongs on the surface of the sphere, where it would resemble the position of the embryonic layer developed by a chick, on top of the yolk in the egg, thus:
(2) The researches of embryology disclose the close relationship between individual and universal patterns in an especially interesting fashion, since all cell divisions and junctions, including the first intracellular operations by which highly complex higher creatures develop out of the simple protoplasmic structures, show a preliminary establishment of dichotomizing horizons and hemispheres. Slightly oversimplified, for diagrammatic purposes, these processes involve a sorting, distribution and division of nucleus elements, on the fibers of a spindle, in stages which, directly or in reverse, are approximately as follows:
(3)All consideration is of northern-hemisphere ideas. Actually man in the antipodes seems to show little correspondence to the reversed relations there, tending to remain a creature of the north even though he may have settled down under the equator long ago.
Astrology, How and Why it Works
