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WHAT IS ASTROLOGY FOR?
The most important fact, however, is not whether the basic rules of the old classical astrology are still valid today, but what it is they are valid for. In other words, to what can astrology be most significantly and validly applied today, and what is actually implied in the belief that there is value in astrology for twentieth century man, and that it fills a meaningful need in our scientific and technological society?
If I ask these questions it is because we fail too often to recognize that the knowledge of facts alone acquires "value" only in relation to the person and the society that knows these facts. What matters is the relationship between the known and the knower, not the knowledge alone. A kind of knowledge which may have been most useful under certain circumstances to a certain type of men may become valueless or meaningless in another period of human evolution and under different conditions of life. As mankind develops new faculties, other more primitive means of perception or adjustment to the environment often become mostly obsolete and atrophy - or they are reoriented and raised to another level. If one does not understand this, one has really no sense of what evolution - psychic and mental as well as biological evolution - implies.
Astrology was almost certainly developed originally by man as a result of his earliest experience of the fact that, while the mist-enveloped, hot, damp jungle where primitive man lived brought to him constantly unexpectable life-or-death encounters, the clear skies seen in deserts or on mountain tops presented an awe-inspiring picture of order and periodicity in motion - thus predictable, because cyclically repeated celestial occurrences (the phases of the Moon, the north-south oscillation of the Sun during a whole year, conjunctions and heliacal risings of planets and stars, eclipses, etc.). All religions have been based upon this contrast between the order, recurrence and grandeur of celestial phenomena, and the seemingly inherent disorder, chaos, unpredictability and danger of events in the biosphere where man lives struggling for survival - that is, the contrast between heaven and earth, between divine and human-animal natures. It is because astrology was, as far as we know, man's original attempt to formulate the order of the universe and to draw from it a sense of relative security that astrology has been called "the mother of all sciences." All sciences are attempts to predict what will occur when precisely measured factors come together under definitely stated and controlled conditions. Science, however, does NOT oppose the order of the sky to the chaos of the earth; for its claim is that there is order everywhere, that laws of nature operate everywhere in any environment. By knowing these laws man can transform his environment so as to increase his well-being and productivity. Science deals with causal relationships between entities and energies operating within a particular environment. Thus if science - as the term is used today - were to accept certain basic premises of astrology, it would have to do so on the basis of the recognition that the solar system as a whole, and eventually the entire galaxy, constitute effectively the environment of mankind; and we shall see that an embryonic "cosmecology" (the science of the cosmic environment as it affects the biosphere) is already being developed.
I feel certain that the astrology of the archaic ages did not think of the sky and the planets in this sense. It believed in two different worlds: the "formative world" of celestial Hierarchies and stellar or planetary gods, and the world of earth-nature. The former ruled over, and indeed had created, the latter. Divine and human natures were essentially different. Cosmic and planetary gods played the tune; all living things and all earth-phenomena had to dance to its inescapable rhythms.
Many of the devotees of astrology even today believe implicitly - though they may not like to admit it - in such a dualistic picture, even in spite of such statements as "the stars impel, they do not compel." However, during the first two millennia B. C., a few inspired men began to proclaim that there was in man a "divine spark," that he, as a Soul, was essentially an exile on this earth - sent here, either to gain certain experiences, or to work out some past karma that this Soul could free itself from earth-bondage and either "return to its spiritual home" or realize even here its essential identity with an absolute divine Principle or Being. And Jesus taught: "The kingdom of heaven is within you." The Greek translation of his words uses the term makarios which means "the sky." This meant a great spiritual revolution. The duality heaven-earth, divine-human, order-chaos was transformed into unity. Order was everywhere. God was everywhere. Would not this mean that astrology had become useless?
It was so understood by most Christian Fathers and by the Church as a whole. Yet astrology persisted. Why? Because a new approach toward it began to evolve. This new approach was already implied in the old Hermetic axiom: "As above, so below" - that is, what occurs on earth and in man "corresponds" to what takes place in the sky, i.e., in the whole universe. The microcosm, man, reflects the macrocosm (i.e., the whole universe).
As astrology developed in Christianized Europe it mixed, in a rather ambiguous manner, the new principles of "heaven is within you" and occult correspondence with the old dualistic world-picture according to which creative celestial gods ruled over human nature from above.
By not recognizing that these two approaches to astrology are basically different, even if they can easily interact and interpenetrate each other, a vast amount of confusion has been produced. Old terms and concepts are still used which are no longer valid in terms of the new approach; and the confusion has become worse since man today thinks in terms of heliocentric (Sun-centered) and even galactic concepts, based now on the evidence of space-travel; yet the terminology still used by astrologers is mainly geocentric (Earth-centered). Thus, for instance, the astrologer speaks of "fixed stars," of the Sun "entering" a zodiacal sign or constellation, of the Sun and the Moon as "planets," etc. An equally confusing and ambiguous situation exists with regard to the meaning of "houses" and the new planets, of "planetary rulerships," of dignities and weaknesses.
The first thing astrologers should do, if they want to become "respectable" and see astrology academically and legally accepted, is to define clearly all the terms they use, and to agree on where the system they teach stands in relation to the whole astrological field, ancient and modern. A very difficult task considering that individual's opinions are often promoted with a nearly fanatic zeal, and that many astrologers present their findings on purely subjective grounds, viz., "In my experience with hundreds of charts, I find that. . . ." What is needed is a thoroughly objective and historical presentation of the various ways in which astrology has been and is being used - each way resulting from a particular approach-to-life or world-view and a particular temperament as well as cultural-social background. And the first thing to do is to accept the basic fact that there are indeed two basic approaches to astrology.
There is of course no absolute separation between them, and each takes much from the other; yet each is the expression of a fundamental way of looking at human beings and at the universe in general which colors every astrological concept and method of interpretation that is being used.
Astrologers may want to say at this point that what I am discussing here is nothing more than the difference between "mundane" and "natal" astrology, and that these represent merely two branches of the one art or science of astrology. But this objection deals only with the superficial aspect of the matter; for there are two very different ways of approaching natal astrology - and, even though it may be less obvious, various aspects of mundane astrology. What I am referring to is the fundamental attitude of the astrologer (and of his culture, historically speaking) toward the very purpose, meaning and function of astrology - as should be clear from what now follows.
