Prometheus The Awakener
September 28th, 2009
Richard Tarnas in his 1993 work Prometheus the Awakener likened the planet Uranus to the role of Prometheus in Greek thought, the titan who stole fire from the god’s, a power that was their secret provenance on mount Olympus. Looking down one day Zeus sees men in the plains below cooking over open fires and he realizes that Prometheus has stolen the secret of the gods so he has Prometheus chained to a mountain side whereby a huge eagle comes each morning and eats his liver, which heals again over night so that the eagle can eat it again the next morning. Quite a gift the titan stole for men, quite a punishment.
It seems even mythically the principle of individuation, the fire of illumination is linked potentially to pain and suffering. Now the Greeks were very concerned with concept of hubris, pride before the gods. Their pantheon was a particularly capricious one and the gods and goddesses therein are very obviously anthropomorphic projections of human qualities and distortions simply taken to an epic scale. Yet there was a sense if a human hero, a great warrior or great beauty challenged the power of the gods terrible things might happen – in fact technically this becomes the defining basis for the creation of the tragic forms of theatre and literature. A hero, with a fatal flaw plays out there grandiosity and at some point falls, or is punished by the gods. Uranus as Prometheus is a forerunner of this.
The Width of a Circle
September 26th, 2009
“Best of ways. That there be a law under the stars. For the galaxies drift
Outward to enter a new universe.
That there be, where we are, a law. And, seeing the mountain, the stream
Defining the valley, the old sea, we say This
Is the place.” Robert Duncan.
Since ancient times and in all the ancient hermetic divinatory and healing arts the notion of framing has been essential, what is the nature of the alchemical vessel, which sacred part of the earth will I read the song-line in, what lens to I view the world through, how wide is the circle? You might propose to take your own window, for an hour on a Friday afternoon (say around 2 o’clock the time as I write this now) and you may set aside an hour in which to watch the world through this one particular window; will she still love me if the rain comes, will I travel if the swift flies east, and if the sun breaks through the clouds, what then? Such, seemingly arbitrary framing serves to consolidate the intuitions focus, to chose to find significance in this world around us, to chose to participate. I will not attack such a view; can we be sure that many philosophical, cosmological and divinatory systems did not have their rudimentary beginnings in such roots? Certainly though many still attack Astrology today for much the same reason that we might be a bit suspicious initiating divorce proceedings based on the movements of a willow tree in the wind one, particular, Friday afternoon.
Astrology frames itself around one particular initiation: that of birth. Our birth or the birth of any person or event in the Cosmos, an initiation of monumental significance in the Astrological world-view, a re-enactment, in miniature, if you like, of the original birth from which all manifestation has proceeded forth from. Astrology finds that in the snap-shot of the heavens at the instant that you came into being that far from being cold, distant or impassive observers of your fate the heavens are indeed reflections, comrades and even instigators of that portion of reality that you will call your own. In fact one might say that in Astrology one finds the implications that the heavens are real and that in a sense they parent the new life on earth, that far from being just strange gasses and dust in the sky the planets are beings of a different order, another expression of life within the vast being (and intelligence) that we might name Cosmos. In a sense, in our deepest wrestling with the Angel Astrology we are forced into our own metaphysical whirlpool whether we like it or not, we are forced to decide – the side of the living mystery of life in all realms of being or a more 2 dimensional worldview, we are forced to partake of the mystery or hang or heads (literally – to not look up at the heavens) in denial. Before I begin to discuss the particular way that Astrology frames the birth moment in order to prepare ourselves for the feeling of this experience, of birth and its intense presence I would like to share an excerpt from the notes of Cecil Collins, one of the foremost mystical painters of the twentieth century:
“Walking in the street I feel arising from time an inscrutable sadness, from out of the stones a patience, what is this far calling longing? What are these flowing echoes? The beautiful hard skin of trees springing up into the sky, my father’s hand parts of the leaves at the end of the wood, in the cool length of evening it is a voice speaking in the mystery sorrow of the sinking fire of the sun, the day is mournful and wishes to cleanse itself in darkness. It is now as a child I feel the mystical sexual life of the elements, the hard stones and yielding plants, the lashing of water upon them, how they lift up their heads to consume the sunlight, how they live in the light of the rising moon with a stillness, with holy sex nerves drinking the subtle light of planetary love.”
These strange lights in the sky, might not just be distant echoes of our new found data quest (filing even all stellar phenomena) but may indeed have a life of their own, and a far from neutral one at that, they may actually care what is happening to us, how we feel, they may even be reaching out (“Often a star was waiting for you to notice it”, Rilke in the first Duino Elegy). Now this is a very unusual stance for a young Astrologer to be taking, normally this is the kind of talk that distinguishes us as complete cranks and mystic Marks. Yet I am suggesting that Astrology, in its elevation of the first cause, the movement into existence, the birth point (of man or universe) seeks to honour life for its own vitality, seeks to allow life to contain its meaning inside its own impulse to be. Rather like eminent psychologist James Hillman’s idea of the acorn of our youth containing the blueprint of the great oak of our maturity (in The Soul’s Code) we allow life in its and our own outpouring to contain as a seed essence or idea our own future potential. In some of her recent talks, I am thinking of one I saw on tape at the Findhorn Foundation Caroline Myss the celebrated medical intuitive has spoken of an 8th chakra: the first 3 deal with our primary personality functions, the next 4 with increasing states of integration and the final one, the 8th is located somewhere above the head and hold 12 archetypal patterns from within the reactions of which is our own unique life purpose contained. This is the place of the pure map, the map of the Soul, contained in the birth act and celebrated in the natal chart as the seed form of the full flower of ourselves. Rather than emphasize the scientific roots of Astrology right now (although there are many and the new scientific paradigm is extremely compatible) I urge us as thoughtful and compassionate beings to own and honour the Soulfulness of what we do when we consider a birth chart, and how we honour the life-pulse, the stream of love that flows into the world from that moment.
Astrology and Transpersonal Therapy: Hand in Hand.
September 14th, 2009
“I am dealing with…constructing thought forms which will embody the new techniques and ideas. These – during the next two centuries – will change the face of our civilization and inaugurate a period in human history in which methods will be tried and principles established which remain as yet totally unknown to the majority. This period will lead the race into a civilization and a mutual, co-operative interplay which will bring to an end the present era of selfishness and competition.”
This is a message from July 1935 given to Roberto Assagioli (the founder of Psychosynthesis) by the Master Djwahl Kuhl who also channeled the material collected by Alice Bailey for the Lucis Trust.
“We must remember that Astrology only correlates to reality, it does not cause it. Remember also that Astrology only operates relative to the observed and existing realty of anything – societies, world events and individual people. To accurately understand the past that has conditioned and defined the moment is to understand the probabilities of inner and outer future events.
…Most Astrologers recognize that we have begun the movement into the Aquarius Age. And as we move into the Aquarius Age it obviously means that the Pisces Age is now beginning to culminate. Anytime an Age comes to culmination, the opportunity and evolutionary intention is for the cycle of history relative to that Age to stop repeating itself. In order for this to occur, all the dynamics that are part of that Age come to a head within a relatively brief amount of time. This phenomenon thus creates a period of time in which the psychological experience of reality becomes one of condensed intensity, both individually and collectively.”
Jeffrey Wolf Green in an essay Pluto in Sagittarius published in Pluto 2 – The Soul’s Evolution through Relationships.
Dane Rudhyar, the great Astrologer and philosopher who was a close friend of Roberto Assagioli and who was a mentor of my Astrological teachers has a concept which he called – seed people – people who would bring the new paradigms and scatter them amongst the fields of as many open minds as was humanly possible. As Astrologers or Therapists (or both) in this cusp between the ages it is our job to sew seeds, to impregnate the soil of the collective with as many possibilities as we can contain.
Secret Writer
August 31st, 2009
Whilst watching a documentary on the breaking of the enigma code in the second world war (after the initial heroic efforts of Polish mathematicians something done by the British at an old manor house at Bletchley house) I discovered that the German high command created the ultimate encoder, with 10 separate encoding cogs, and they called it: secret writer.