*
PERSPECTIVE AND REALITY
It is not impossible to claim Ralph Waldo Emerson as the first American astrologer of consequence. This does not mean he practiced horoscopy, although it is on record that he gave some thought to the art (Conduct of Life: Beauty). Rather he seems to have understood the proper implication of any relationship between a man and his stars, and to have seen that the heavens and history, alike, hold up a mirror to human nature. There is a curious observation, found in his Essays, First Series: History. "As crabs, goats, scorpions, the balance and the water-pot lose their meanness when hung as signs in the zodiac, so can I see my own vices without heat in the distant persons of Solomon, Alcibiades, and Catiline." Perspective is the basis of any enduring reality, according to the suggestion here, because the transient focus of circumstances is transcended, and individual differences are helped to refine themselves into genuine constants of character.
Astrology, of course, has no absolute way to chart the affinities between a native and those of greater prominence to whom he might be linked. Moreover, the procedure might be entirely meaningless. How many clients would remember enough about Solomon to gain any dynamic stimulus from a comparison with him, if the practitioner were able to make it? Would many of them know that Alcibiades and Catiline are not to be dismissed as mere unscrupulous politicians, that Napoleon is of least importance for the battles he fought, and that Goethe was primarily concerned with much more than Faust? The particular characteristics which became the basis of selection from great lives by the astrologer might not be obvious to the person consulting him. Human nature presents as many paradoxical blends of its elements in the perspective of history as in the individual horoscopic analysis.
When a man becomes outstanding among his fellows he may seem simple, and highly consistent, largely because attention is limited to his achievements — to the special traits brought forward by his dramatic focus in the public eye — but he will be found no different from anyone else in the fact that he continues a member of his species, both for better and worse. Human characteristics must be generalized in a much more fruitful fashion than in these broad comparisons. Any intelligent recognition of them must contribute to the conscious refinement of personality, and also to a definite control of individual destiny. An effective first step is through hanging them in the zodiac, as Emerson aptly describes the procedure.
PERSPECTIVE HUNG IN THE SKY
Nature, in her most dazzling aspects or stupendous parts, is but the
background and theatre of the tragedy of man.John Morley, Critical Miscellanies: Byron
Astrology reveals human characteristics effectively because nature provides the ground for analysis, precisely as in the case of the horizons through which a perspective in circumstances has been gained. The measurement is in the heavens because a relative simplicity of relation is thereby used to map out what would otherwise remain a hopeless interweaving of the factors in any individual's make-up. What must now be seen is just how the signs of the zodiac can chart the generalizations of human traits. Here is the major obstacle to many a brilliant mind, leading to an almost off-hand dismissal of astrology's claims. There is, actually, a close correspondence between the apparent path of the sun, created by the earth's orbit, and those conditions on the globe's surface which have been responsible, throughout the ages, for sorting out individual differences, and so making human characteristics the source of the various psychological species. What is its nature?
The correspondence rests, first of all, on certain mathematical considerations, and these will give a clue to the total pattern of relations. The connection of the ecliptic with the celestial equator, in which the houses are identified, has already been shown as follows:
Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn are established around the sphere, showing the extreme points at which the sun can be found directly overhead, from its northernmost position in midsummer to the corresponding most southern one at Christmas time. The swing of the luminary back and forth across the equator in this fashion represents, geographically, the annual journey of the earth around the zodiac, while the daily rotation of the planet carries each degree of Sol's inching sidewise crawl, up and down in terrestrial latitude as it thus marks out the seasons, all the way around the globe daily. The ecliptic in consequence, is indicated on its surface rather arbitrarily. The interception of the two great circles actually takes place in the heavens, and they are perhaps better diagrammed in this style:
The celestial equator is indicated by the dotted line, the ecliptic by the solid one, and the points of interception are at x and y. Because the astrologer employs both these circles simultaneously, he must have a means for representing their common relations, that is, for showing the factors of either in the particular ground for measurement provided by the other. His chart, in other words, must represent the signs of the zodiac as well as the houses, and usage no less than necessity has established the latter as fundamental in analysis. Since the equatorial mansions are diagrammed directly, by drawing the circle and its segments to scale, the signs are indicated by a notation at the cusp of each house in the equator, showing which one of the ecliptical mansions — and also which of the thirty degrees that comprise it — have astrological correspondence to the segment in what then becomes the basic horoscopic circle. Equal divisions of thirty degrees in diurnal motion are projected over into the ecliptic, as shown in two of the twelve instances, thus:
The notches A and B on the zodiacal circle represent the points projected from the cusps of the ascendant and second house on the plane of the equator (i.e., a and b, respectively). If this were an actual horoscope, erected for Quito, Ecuador, the ascendant would be Leo 6° 36' and the second-house cusp would lie at Virgo 7° 17'. The point of view in all horoscopic charting is from an absolute north, consequently x represents the autumnal equinox, or Libra 0°. What the layman must understand clearly at this point is the necessary distortion in relationship produced when the equal divisions in one circle are carried over into another, the plane of which has a different slanting. This is obvious to the eye if the simple angles involved are placed in a separate diagram:
The distance from A to B is obviously greater than from a to b, judged by observation alone, in this case 30° 41' against 30° 0'. As it happens, however, this is only half of a total proposition which, more than anything else, comes up to plague the young student. The equatorial mansions are equal thirty-degree divisions of the heavens in their own circle, the plane of which, parallel the equator, passes through the birthplace, and lies towards the north or south pole as the case may be. In the example just given, Quito is on the equator and so the additional complication has been avoided for the sake of an initial and more simple grasp of the matter. The equatorial houses can be defined in a common circle, the center of which is that of the earth itself, as a mathematical convenience, but the geographical situation makes an adjustment necessary when it comes to the correspondences in the zodiac.(1)
(1) All consideration in this text is on the basis of the Placidian system for determining zodiacal correspondences to the house cusps, the one of several (as those of Regiomontanus, Campanus and others) now having practically universal acceptance by astrologers, and the one justified theoretically because it really divides diurnal motion. Thus the divisions of the houses are never even thirty-degree segments in right ascension, except at the equator, due to the spherical (really spheroid) shape of the earth.
Actually what is measured in a horoscope is motion. The eastern horizon at the moment of birth, as described from the place of that event, is the ascendant in fact, no matter how it may be represented. The definition of the houses in the earth's literal equator does not alter their basic nature, since the diurnal turning of the sphere is revealed identically in both the equator and any circle parallel to it, but there is an extra distortion in the correspondence of the equatorial mansions to those of the ecliptic whenever the place of birth is located towards either pole. The simple case diagrammed for Quito at the equator can be corrected for a birth at New York City where, with Libra 0° in the same relative position before the third cusp, the ascendant would be Leo 20° 35' and the second-house cusp Virgo 12" 35'. In comparison with the preceding diagram, the angles would appear thus:
The situation first charted at Quito is greatly exaggerated at New York because, at 40° 43' north latitude, twenty-two zodiacal degrees correspond to nearly thirty-one at the equator, both representing the normal thirty in the house circle. The practicing astrologer, most fortunately, does not have to make the intricate computations involved in charting these relations between the two great systems. They are available to any degree of accuracy desired in various Tables of Houses. Similarly, all the other technical information he needs is ready for him, prepared conveniently in the form he must employ, either in an ephemeris or else in supplementary publications, such as those which give the kinds of time used in various parts of the world at certain periods. The newcomer only needs to set himself in mind for the fact that he will never encounter an instance where there is an even-degree correspondence of all signs and houses in a horoscope.
If the equinoctial points Aries 0° or Libra 0° are found on the ascendant, the distortion is at a minimum. Thus a case taken for Washington, D. C., as an example, shows the twelve equatorial cusps, as identified in their zodiacal correspondences, as follows:
As in contrast with the houses of the horoscope, which are merely numbered, and represented in the modern diagram quite simply by the actual spokes of the astrological wheel, the signs of the zodiac are named, and have their special symbols in addition. What the astronomer knows more coldly and impersonally as degrees of celestial longitude, ranging from 0° to 360", have a much more definite character in astrology through the twelve thirty-degree spans. This means that a stranger to horoscopy, wishing to proceed in his investigation, will have to stop to familiarize himself, in at least a general fashion, with a species of alphabet.
TABLE IV
The Zodiacal Alphabet
These names are little more than the Anglicized form of the Latin descriptive term given above in English.(2) It will be noted, in the horoscope for the city of Washington, that Cancer and Capricorn each occupy the cusps of two houses, and that Virgo and Pisces do not lie on any. These two latter signs are said to be intercepted, and INTERCEPTION in astrology indicates that whatever is ruled in such a case is either less strong, or else in not as outwardly manifest as normal expectation would suggest.
(2)Many mispronunciations are common in 1945. Aries is a three-syllable word, AYE-ree-eeze or AIR-ee-eeze. TAW-russ, GEM-uh-nigh, LIE-bra, Saj-ee-TAY-ree-us, and Ah-KWAIR-ee-us offer some difficulties. PISS-eeze alone is correct, as far as dictionary authority goes, but PIE-sees is almost universally preferred by astrologers. The symbols are ancient representations of the zodiacal creatures, quite obvious on the whole. The ones for Leo, Virgo and Capricorn may come from Greek initials or ligatures. Straight uprights often indicated Castor and Pollux. Aquarius is identified by waves, and Pisces by curves for the fishes.
The Evolution of Zodiacal Correspondences
Just how do the signs of the zodiac chart human characteristics? The primary factor, of course, is a statistical correlation, as has been suggested at the very beginning of this text, in Chapter One. Now it is necessary to return to the mathematical relationships through which Libra, in the zodiac, and the autumnal season, on the earth's surface north of the equator, actually come into being. The swing of the sun's meridian angle, back and forth from north to south, is the basis for the seasonal changes, as every school child knows, and the corresponding potentialities of human character — those which have statistical concordance with an astrological emphasis of the sign Libra — have their origin in a very similar possibility of deviation from norm.
Men are distinguishable from each other because it is possible for them to lean away, in either direction, from every plane of the dead average in which all distinction, or all individual existence, tends to disappear. The evolution of personal differences from the indistinctiveness of tribal life has already been sketched, in broad terms, in the preceding chapter. Elements of experience are not real because they exist, but because human individuals assimilate them to themselves, in the process which has been illustrated by the underlying transition from ascendant to descendant in Chapter Three. Here is the commonplace of human relations per se, transcending the boundaries of time and space, as well as all lines of class or situation, and so creating function as an enlarged dimension of living.
Life itself dramatizes experience as this dimensional out-reach of self, continuously and in a host of ways. Thus a group of artists were summering one year in a relatively isolated rural area. Existence in this district was hard, superficially uneventful enough to hold the farmers to a very limited norm of values. Reality for them was primitive in a true sense, that is, indistinct. They had few resources in the social or transcendental perspective which the signs of the zodiac delineate at root. One of the visiting families, with two little children, had employed a local daughter to look after them. When a number of the painters gathered on a knoll to watch, with urban ecstasy, an exceptionally spectacular setting of the sun, this nursemaid trailed along, leading her charges. After some four or five minutes, she pulled the mother of the youngsters down to earth with a timid touch. "Please, may I run and tell Ma and Pa to look?" "Why, they'll see it themselves!" "No, ma'am, we never see sunsets here."
Human nature develops only with the greatest difficulty at the equator, where a persisting sameness tends to stultify any individuality. Humanity has found and refined itself, principally, in areas ranging back towards the poles, as in temperate zones where higher life has a stimulating interaction with the four seasons, or at least on high plateaus where the contrast in day and night defeats any lush stagnation of the tropics. The variety in nature is always a prophecy of the potential distinctions in man, and these are what astrology measures in the horoscope by reduplicating, in a sense, the original excitations and co-operations of nature. Character is destiny because, while the circumstances in which a given personality is found are responsible for the distribution of its special traits across its own private ground of experience, its particular capacities are the basis of its functioning in its own unique fashion. Characteristics give a personal implication to every event in existence, and this fact is the origin of zodiacal meaning.
The equator establishes the mansions in the ecliptic, and then creates their significance in every particular case, thus measuring man's individualization. The exact geographical location of a horizon, in its tilling towards one or the other of the poles — while not in any way modifying the equatorial or ecliptical mansions of astrology in their own circles — greatly changes the zodiacal correspondences to the house cusps, and this potential of mathematical difference is the very core of horoscopy. It produces the individuality of an astrological wheel, and thus charts the particular co-operation of function and circumstances in the given native's case. The two circles are linked to each other permanently because they arise n the two fundamental motions of the same body, and so measure an experience which exists only through the interaction between an entity and its situation in a statistically parallel fashion. The actual measurement begins in both circles where they intercept each other, or at the equinoxes, and by agreement at that one of the two points which represents the spring rather than the autumnal season in the terrestrial hemisphere where man's present civilization has developed. The equator establishes the ecliptical signs mathematically because it determines these equinoxes.
The zodiac consists of the twelve mansions or segments in the ecliptic, containing thirty degrees of celestial longitude each. There is a slow clockwise movement of the equinoctial points against the pattern of the stars seen behind them, a slipping back of perhaps fifty seconds of arc a year and know as the PRECESSION OF THE EQUINOXES. This fact has encouraged a rather common criticism of horoscopy's claims, rooted in the assumption that the zodiacal signs are star-groups rather than geometrical divisions in a circle of motion. What happened, at about the time of Hipparchus, is that some unknown genius devised or arranged a mnemonic and mensural devise to help astrologers in a day when there were neither books nor tables in any modern sense. He symbolized the ecliptical mansions by arbitrary but generally rather happy patterns, such as could be fixed in the mind as well as in the heavens, and represented them by lines traced from various of the more prominent or brighter stars to to others seen as nearby from the earth's perspective. Thus Cancer, which on the whole requires the least imagination to recognize in terms of what the star-group is supposed to indicate, is put together as follows:(3)
(3)The arrangement at the left is sketched by permission from Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition, Springfield, G. & C. Merriam, 1934, 1939, and that at the right is the one adopted by William Tyler Olcott in his Field Book of the Stars, G.P. Putnam, 1907.
The Great Bear is more familiar to the average person, but it is not one of the zodiacal twelve and, moreover, it is only known commonly through a part of its whole, since most people see nothing but the Big Dipper. Symbolism of this sort is entirely artificial, of course, but it can be exceedingly useful if not permitted to become more than an aid to the eye, or a mental construct to help the imaginative faculties. These CONSTELLATIONS of the ecliptic, often termed the natural zodiac to distinguish them from the mansions defined by the equinoxes, have moved along the full span of a sign since they were established — or last realigned with the ecliptical divisions of equal thirty degrees — hence when the sun on March 21st appears at the vernal equinox in the heavens it is also, approximately, at the point dividing Pisces and Aquarius in the constellations. This leads to the definition of an Aquarian Age in popular occult writings, and permits the astrologer's critics to suppose that Aries is in Pisces, and that horoscopy is thereby invalidated.
The equinoxes are an obviously primary factor in the development of sign meanings. The points of pause to the north or south in the pendulum swing of the sun during the course of its annual pilgrimage around the earth's orbit, in contrast to the equinoctial points, are of equal significance. They represent the extreme emphases, not of personal insouciance as charted by the individualizing equator through its first definition of the zodiacal generalities at Aries and Libra, but rather of the broadest possible personal completeness of particular sort. The sharp differentiations of summer and winter in a sense, are distortion per se, or a heightening of experience in its lean away from all dependence on mean values or mere averages. Here are the solstices, identified as Cancer 0° and Capricorn 0°. Any horoscope with either of these on an ascendant at the equator, where horizontal deviation is nonexistent, will have Aries 0° or Libra 0° at the midheaven, the ninety zodiacal degrees corresponding to the same number of equatorial ones. With Cancer 0° on the ascendant at Leningrad — as an example of high northern latitude on the earth's surface — the midheaven would be Aquarius 9°. This distortion of fifty-one zodiacal degrees in equatorial correspondence supports the astrological implication given the solstitial signs. They chart the maximum possible rejection of the mean in the mass, or the largest possible amount of self-completion in human nature. They reveal the characteristics which enable man, progressively, to create his own private universe.
The thirty-degree divisions in the zodiac originate in exactly the same fashion as the equatorial houses. Two initial dichotomies create the quarters, and the process of tri-section produces the twelve. The root elements in human character are delineated by the four quarters. Each has its own emphasis, first as focal between the distinctions made by the alternative dichotomy, and then by the twofold cooperation with it, the precise relationship analyzed at length in connection with the equatorial houses.(4) The four great worlds of experience, identified fundamentally by the angles in the equatorial measure of circumstances, are paralleled by the four primitive facets of individuality in a corresponding astrological anatomy of the zodiac. These differentiations of basic character have been so obvious to man through the ages, and have had such consistent importance in his earlier attempts to understand his world of potentials, that horoscopy has long been provided with a set of terms ready-made for its purpose, namely, the so-called elements of fire, water, air and earth. In astrology they are the TRIPLICITIES. The word arose because each of them comprises three signs, but it must be remembered that there are four of such groups. They correspond to the triads in the equator. (4)Summarized diagrammatically in Chapter Two.
PERSPECTIVE ANCHORED TO EARTH
Hidden talent counts for nothing.
Suetonius, Lives: Nero
When it became time to begin the writing of this book in its present form, the problem was to find a point of attack. Experience has its rhythms, on the probabilities of which all divination is based, but just why do these operate variously in the lives of different people? Was there a hen-and-egg impasse in a necessity to find either events or characteristics the consequence of each other?
One day two kindred spirits stood at a New York window, watching a group of men and boys. "Well, it's baseball now, isn't it?" remarked the senior spectator. Of course! There it was, the needed springboard to exposition! Ball playing comes in season, so does marbles, so does everything else. Life is a game. Business is cyclic, as are romance and war, happiness and frustration. Here is no fate or destiny, but rather the flow of events in a universal gravitation. As the sun swings north or south, so to speak, a statistical sorting of life and its relations in facilitated. Man acts, and is acted upon.
This was something which had been illustrated, quite dramatically, some years before. On a high-school sand lot in a very small California town a number of adults were helping get the spring baseball practice under way. One youngster batted well out into center field, where an older man seemed much too far back for his position, at least in the light of any hitting so far. The ball in consequence took quite a few moments bounding to the individual in question. Undisturbed, and with extraordinary ease, he threw it straight home, into the catcher's glove, to put out the runner from third. The throw would have been good in professional play, and in this corner of nowhere — as far as sports were concerned — it was remarkable. Who was the chap? Some big-leaguer hanging
around?"That's Jim Bolger, rancher out south of here. Always wanted to be a ball player, but his father made him raise hogs instead. Then he got married and had to settle down, but he's still got the itch. He used to sneak off from work any time he could —"
Returning to mind, the incident became a key idea for explaining human nature. A somewhat frustrated man, a not overly successful farmer, was indulging himself on a warm spring afternoon. Circumstances had made no use of this sports-worthy characteristic, because others had proved of more immediate value. An inadequate perspective had established an inferior reality in normal channels, however. This was the way of life, disclosing the prodigal wastage which becomes the sure promise of free will and its fruits for those who wish to claim them, and the equally thorough support of defeat for all others.
The great miracle of astrology is that it can identify the traits which might otherwise be lost — and so go unused — and can encourage any native to End some better groove for those facets of himself which he may have been nurturing psychologically, if not practically. The charting of personal function by the signs of the zodiac is most valuable in everyday experience because these twelve mansions show not only how the given elements in self are oriented circumstantially, but also how the actual potentials of the functioning itself may be developed.
Every zodiacal sign must be seen in two ways. First is its rulership over definite and necessary functions of self-existence, charting the manner in which the simple act of selfhood must be carried out. Most superficially, this establishes the great zodiacal man in the sky, to which preliminary reference has been made and to which a later and more particular consideration must be given. From this initial ecliptical perspective, Aries rules the head. Everyone has a cranium, and uses it. Hence the sign must be taken into account in every natal chart. It is in such a fashion that a native's characteristics are seen most simply, or organically, in the light of their circumstantial responsibility.
The second way in which the mansions of the zodiac must be considered is through the particular emphasis given to certain ones of them, over and above the others, thus providing the general description of an individual in social terms. The sun-sign indications are an example of this, as is the insight into the nature of personality afforded by the rising sign to which preliminary reference was made on page 43. It is in this manner that a native's place among his fellows may be estimated, finding it typical of a certain character and temperament. The perspective in reality is here a zodiacal pointing which reveals each human being in the terms of his fundamental fellowship with some particular group, or as an Aries person, or a Taurus one, and so on in various stresses or combinations of character.
The twelve zodiacal types represent the perspective which is hung in the sky and then anchored to earth. The implication of each is collective, as in contrast with the distributive import of the equatorial mansions, and this is the fundamental difference between circumstances and function per se. While analysis through the houses brings everything into lines or chains of relationship in time and space, the estimation of character through the signs reveals the converging relations or togetherness of things which, in its totality, maintains a functioning selfhood. The first approach to understanding from this point of view is a recognition of character as a mode of cumulation, with its roots in a definite and really quite literal alchemy.
THE ALCHEMY OF FIRE
Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth!
James, 3:5
The three signs of the zodiac defined by the vernal equinox are Aries, or that one of them comprising the thirty degrees of celestial longitude measured counterclockwise from the equinox itself, and Sagittarius and Leo, the two mansions which express the alchemy of fire in a subordinate and solstitial distinction. The meaning of FIRE, as both an element of the ancient alchemists and a broad generalization of human character, may be summed up as pure self-sufficiency. The vernal equinox describes man's nature at that point where he is least conditioned or influenced by anything exterior to his own organism, and symbolizes a spring-like potentiality which is always an essential part of his make-up. Here an individual's self-integration is at the initial point of focus in the reaction of all existence to human characteristics. He is revealed in his ability to act wholly in and of himself, reflecting the actual development of life and culture in its geographical migration to the north and away from the mean of basic non-distinction.
The fire signs gather into a simple function of individual existence, out of the whole circle or cycle of experience, those elements of selfhood which constitute an illimitable reserve or dynamic naivete. They indicate, in every horoscope, the innermost genius of personality for being itself in, general, or for maintaining its particular distinctiveness apart from all special definition. Here is the astrologer's key to the truly basic characteristics of selfhood. Aries, Sagittarius and Leo are the source, in horoscopy, of all information concerning the well-being of identity as such.
The Fire People
The fire-sign people are the most individualistic of all. They are the best understood in close association, but the least appreciated or even noticed in casual contact. The zodiacal distinction of fire arises from that type of generality expressed by the ecliptic's positive point of greatest togetherness with the house circle, or the focus of identity in its relative absoluteness. When the characteristic is found with a particular astrological emphasis in some given case, the native tends to become engrossed in his own being above everything else, and to find his own selfhood completely adequate or satisfactory in a way that can be very annoying to others. This does not mean that the fire person is selfish, necessarily, but that he is ultimately oblivious to things outside his own private reality. He is conscious enough of the people around him, in the kaleidoscope of circumstances which the houses delineate, but he is so completely self-centered in a psychological sense that he is seldom aware of any other individuality in its own terms. He is inclined to accept his fellows in the precise superficial characterization they present to him through the immediate situation, without either realization of human struggle or appreciation for the growth that may be taking place within their own special worlds. He often seems callous because he is definitely unaware, most of the time, that anything other than himself is alive on its own account.
The dominantly fire native is an utter realist in this sense, with little interest in the possibilities of personal relations. Those who do not co-operate with him are practically nonexistent, as far as he is concerned. The ones who do so are accepted or recognized, but only in the degree of their cooperation, and for its duration in the particular frame of reference. He is not disturbed by enmity because he cannot put himself in any other person's point of view enough to understand its occasion, and thus anticipate its menace. He carries no animus, therefore, and nurses no grudges, although by the same token he may demonstrate an exceedingly long memory, always recognizing the opponent who once has proved a threat to his interests. The fire type ends up a law unto himself. The everyday world is valuable to him when he may use it for his own purposes, and he does so to the full degree of his convenience and capacity. Whatever declines to fit into his scheme is disregarded, if that is possible. Otherwise he seeks to eliminate or, if necessary, to destroy it. This means he is totally dispassionate in the true sense of that word. He feels himself to be all there is of life. To this fact everything else must give tribute, if he is to recognize any living experience as real. Hence he is able to uncover magnificent resources in himself, but when blocked he is baffled most thoroughly because there is no other greater source to which he can turn. What at times is a magnificent aplomb can become an almost childlike helplessness.
THE ALCHEMY OF WATER
The world turns softly
Not to spill its lakes and rivers,
The water is held in its arms . . .Hilda Colliding, Water
The three signs of the zodiac defined by the summer solstice are Cancer, at the solstitial point, and Pisces and Scorpio, the two mansions which express the alchemy of water in a subordinate and equinoctial distinction. The meaning of WATER, as both an element of the ancient alchemists and a broad generalization of human character, may be summed up as pure self- completeness. It was accepted by Thales, first of the philosophers and scientists among the Greeks, as the original substances of everything else. This is a hypothesis with some literal if superficial support in the almost complete and primary dependence of chemistry, and all organic forms, on the familiar liquid. The solstices have been seen to identity the symbolical point of pause and fulfillment, or where the sun turns in its semi-annual swing from south to north, and back again. They serve, in astrology's natural or naive representation of reality, to show the consummation of life, or a basic all-completeness in the temperate zones where man maintains his personal constants in a seasonal milieu. The Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn symbolize the extent of greatest possible deviate existence, or movement away from the equatorial mean of simple non-distinctiveness, and this lean to a social self-consistency has a statistical correlation with man's greatest capitalization upon the achievements of all his fellows, through a sort of assimilation to them in toto.
The water signs, therefore, have come to represent the most universal generalization of human experience, or the largest possible participation in the undifferentiated wholeness of existence, such as is shared by everyone. They are the source, in any chart, of all information concerning the well-being of the total realm of experience within which a particular native functions. They reveal reality in a fashion exactly the opposite of fire's presentation. In the sense that the first of the four elements finds nothing in existence but itself ultimately, water contrariwise grants reality to everything else in an equal degree with itself. Universality thereby becomes a variant form of absoluteness. Water as an element represents this universal inclusiveness in its tendency to deny the separation of anything from the whole, and gives a clue in the horoscope to those characteristics by which anyone may act in a complete disappearance of himself in the group, becoming its representative. These signs delineate the personal touch with that underlying sustainment by which experience as such is made possible. The personality is not dissipated into the whole by this universalization of the self, but rather the whole is realized and found of use through a personal completeness. The water signs reveal whatever enables the individual to embrace all possible extremes within his own private periphery of reality.
The Water People
The water sign people are the most expansive or smooth of all. They constitute the type which requires the least understanding in close association, and hence they are the ones most noticed or appreciated in casual contact. Water as an element, like fire, is absolute and primary, but in a reversal of emphasis, so that the individual of this classification accepts everything as existing wholly within himself in a psychological sense, rather than feeling that nothing wholly exterior to himself is of any import in his life. This native includes rather than excludes whatever is of no immediate pertinence in his experience, and is as dispassionate as the fire person in an entirely different way. Exactly as it never occurs to the latter that anything might have any reality apart from his contact with it, so it never enters the head of a man described predominantly by water signs that anything can function aside from that totality which he knows and assimilates into himself. The positive solstitial type enfolds all existence without the slightest reservation, in the nearest possible approach to universal completeness, precisely as the primary equinoctial individuality tends to eliminate everything but the bare solipsistic potentials of selfhood. The complete extremes of personality in this contrast do not and cannot exist literally, of course, but the nature of the zodiacal mansions is best realized by dramatizing the various distinctions they emphasize. The fire group delineates the ultimate of self-contained individuality, irrespective of the actual degree in which it may be encountered, and the water triplicity presents the complementary potential of a sheer universality, again only as approximated in actual society.
The water natives assume that everyone is readily assimilable, and they are distinguished by a strong and at times over-whelming and perhaps distinctly unwelcome solicitude for their fellows. They are like the fire-sign individuals in their inability to recognize the personal distinctiveness of associates and intimates but, whereas the latter will more often push these others aside, the water men and women will seek to enfold them in entire accordance with purely private and personal notions. It is quite incomprehensible to one of this type that his ministrations should be objectionable to someone else. The two primary groups are identical in their essentially naive intolerance of everything alien to their own nature and experience. They differ only in the fact that, while the equinoctial natives make everything other than self unimportantly discrete, the solstitial triplicity cannot conceive existence apart from itself, even in a rejection or disregard of some troublesome or utterly minor detail of experience. Water knows reality only as it becomes all-embracing in an immediate fashion. The world is a whole in this alchemy of character, and this is a functional fact to which these people must give a continuous and everyday expression.
THE ALCHEMY OF AIR
For they have sown the wind, and
they shall reap the whirlwind.Hosea, 8:7
The three signs of the zodiac defined by the autumnal equinox are Libra, at the equinox itself, and Gemini and Aquarius, the two mansions which express the alchemy of air in a subordinate and solstitial distinction. The difference between the two equinoctial points, at Aries and Libra, is one of emphasis on the direction of deviation, that is, towards the north as the positive effort of the self to establish itself through its simple or primitive act of self, and towards the south as its correspending and negative attempt to have confirmation of itself and its values through both (1) its own characteristic reaction to the external world and (2) the common or typical response of that world to its own desires. In the classification by astrological triplicities, the elements of fire and water are original or PRIMARY, and the characteristics they show are fundamentally primitive or without necessary external relationships. Air and earth by contrast are DERIVATIVE or dependent in the sense that they reveal facets of self which, as functionally insufficient in their own nature, are essentially complex. Function becomes more immediately personal, or directly co-operative, through these secondary types in the four psychological genera.
The meaning of AIR, as both an element of the ancient alchemists and a broad generalization of human character, may be summed up as the pure outreach of self. The original implication of the term is rather lost in English, as against Hebrew and Greek, where the same word (ruach, or, pneuma) indicates both spirit — i.e., inner or eternal livingness — and the everyday breath of man, thereby identifying not only the activating caprice within him but also the atmosphere in which he moves. Here is not the simple self-assertiveness of fire, symbolized by the sheer undifferentiated integrity of the vernal equinox, but rather the continuing inspiration — in both the basic or literal, and the figurative and much more common implication — of everyday experience, The air signs, in consequence, became the superficial indication of thought and intelligence to the medieval astrologers, but what they show is not so much a circumstantial wisdom as a rational orientation, a continual attempt to validate existence. This permits a step beyond simple self-cognition, and is the generalization of experience through a common participation in human norms and values. These signs in the horoscope are the source of all information concerning the well-being of the conditioned or consciously refined selfhood, that is, the more superficial personality. The alchemy of air is best understood when the element is identified as fire in the process of formation or disintegration. This is pure individuality in that state where it is not certain within itself, and so seeks a continual reassurance, often and of necessity at the expense of others.
The Air People
The air-sign people are the most tentative or uncertain of all. They constitute the group which is the most easily understood or appreciated in any given or conventional reference but which, nonetheless, is the most baffling of the four in general, because it is superficially the most changeable or non-reliable. More than anything else, these individuals are characterized by (1) their effort to participate in whatever goes on around them, (2) their joyous reaction, whenever there is a chance to do something of a tangible nature, and (3) their consistent effort to find a better place for themselves in the world at large. They are fundamentally enthusiastic, as well as partisan. Hence, while the fire and water types are essentially dispassionate, the natives with dominant air indications are very much the reverse, a particular distinction they share with the earth triplicity. The air individual is the most superficially willing and helpful, or else officious and upsetting, of the basic groups. He has the greatest gift for articulation and self-promotion. He is exceedingly adroit in dealing with meaning, significance and implication, as might well be expected of one fundamentally seeking to contribute a reality to relationships which in themselves usually lack enduring qualities.
Differing from the two primitive types, the air and earth people are more transient in their influence on others, as well as in the emphasized pointing of their own being. This characteristic is a necessity, of course, if they are to be as effective in change as the other two groups are in what, by contrast, is always changelessness. The air and earth temperaments are essentially focused in the moment, therefore, and inclined to be more concerned with immediate circumstances than remote and abstract generalizations. Fire and water natives accomplish things, for the major part, by remaining relatively unmoved in a given situation, despite any superficial activity in asking their psychological impassivity. Air and earth individuals function by a self-movement or reaction which makes the exterior and transient realities, by comparison, relatively motionless. These latter types, in consequence, are usually most insistent upon having their own way in the passing and trivial details of everyday living. They can become psychologically distressed to an unhealthy extent when the world around them refuses to stay put.
THE ALCHEMY OF EARTH
So simple is the earth we tread,
So quick with love and life her frame:
Ten thousand years have dawned and fled,
And still her magic is the same.Stopford A. Brooke, The Earth and Man
The three signs of the zodiac described by the winter solstice are Capricorn, at the solstice itself, and Virgo and Taurus, the two mansions which express the alchemy of earth in a subordinate and equinoctial distinction. The difference between the two solstitial points lies in the emphasis on the type of fullness which selfhood achieves, following upon the direction of its deviation from the equator. The north, positive and water-sign stress is upon completeness in practical life, or an exterior wholeness, and the south or negative fulfillment of character must be visualized as an inner or spiritual reality. This is utterly contradictory to the usual and material concept of earth as representing inertia, the mere clod among men. Stopford Brooke, in the lines just quoted, catches the basic idea with true insight, as did the ancients in their myths of Gaia, Ceres and Demeter. Earth is the great matrix which, as each individual assimilates himself into its awe-inspiring and illimitable expanse, constitutes him a spiritual entity in his own right. Then he is able to heal and help his fellows, or lift them up, wherever he goes. The meaning of EARTH, as both an element of the ancient alchemists and a broad generalization of human character, may be summed up as pure self-realization. It is the completely personal substance of all things, as embraced in the popular phrase. Mother Earth. Here is where spirituality is ritualized through nature as the needed reassurance of fullness for all living creatures. The magic of ultimate sustainment, as when the perennials yield their testimony to a creative or functional reality year after year, gives man his needed certification of an individual totality. This is far from the equatorial and equinoctial mean of fire and air where he gains his identity, it is true, but merely gets ready to live. Here he knows the fruits of his effort.
The triplicity represents the most comprehensive generalization possible in any real experience, and in any chart is the source of all information concerning the ultimate and practical sensitivity of the native as a responsible animal. A strong emphasis of the triplicity will often indicate a high intuitive ability, as well as a fine gift for the passing fulfillment of self in all others. Hence these signs are a vital clue to the appetites and surface emotions of the being. The doubt by self of its own universality, which provides the psychological origin of the earth alchemy, has its expression not only in the effort to fold all existence into self through the senses, but also in whatever there may be of a pseudo-experience, as the exercise of sensation through an imperfect or incomplete reference. Here is the indication in horoscopy of tendencies toward hallucination and fantasy, or the function of compensation by which the self rejects whatever threatens its own sense of wholeness, that is, denies its need to feel necessary to something other than itself. Personality is revealed in pure objectivity by the earth signs because they indicate the effort of everyone to demonstrate the practical warmth of universality. They chart the self in those phases of itself encountered most directly by others, presenting the self in its attempt to shape the world to its own private potential.
The Earth People
The earth-sign people are the most critical or exacting of all. They are the most responsive to practical relations, but they are inclined to pre-empt more than their own fair share of things, and they are interesting to others only in some special milieu where they can be compelled to make adequate contribution to the joint relationship. Hence, of the types, they are the most dependent on exterior experience as a needed and compulsive dynamic. Because the element is like water in its universality — of which however, it requires constant reassurance — the problem of natives with this
predominant emphasis is fundamentally one of interior strengthening, such as facilitates the fullness of an outer consummation. Unlike air, this self-mobilization must obviously be centered more largely in literal than vicarious experimentation, and must be carried on until it has its fruits in an actual realization. Indeed, the earth person must feel everything, whether correctly or as a matter of wishful thinking, wholly complete within some practical and definite frame of reference which he knows or can test. Air individuals may dance around the edge of external reality with considerable success, but those who belong to the earth triplicity must struggle continually to get into everything they do with all of themselves, head and feet, clothes and all.This means that these individuals are more acutely sensitive about themselves than in any other group. They do not have the agonizing self-awareness of air, but are apt to be on the defensive continually in a very real way, always seeking a justification of themselves to others, indirectly if not otherwise. Their extraordinary gift of sustained participation in experience, when manifest in the realm of feeling, gives them a real passion. They are sentimental instead of enthusiastic, as in the case of their air-sign cousins. Because they are forced to a constant self-mobilization within themselves, of a more personal and less rational sort than air, they are under necessity to instrument or articulate their struggle towards their self-realization by an exaggerated outer symbolism, and as a consequence they are, more than any other group, concerned with the most minute and exact placing and arrangement of things about them. Although emotionally, like water, they feel the whole world has its existence within them, they find the most immediate and effective way to be sure of this is to dictate the petty details of life for others in every possible respect. The earth people in consequence are most characteristically fussy, and are apt to be caught up in a multitude of minor concerns.
Astrology, How and Why it Works
