Mark Jones Astrology Blog

In Memoriam

“Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove;

Thine are these orbs of light and shade;
Thou madest Life in man and brute;
Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast made.”

~Tennyson, the first lines of In Memoriam, for the death of his friend.

The end of 2011 saw the deaths of two figures whose work has shaped my understanding of the understanding of depth psychology and the realms of potential offered by expanding psychology into the realms of the transpersonal and the soulful power of the imagination. One was Roger Woolger whose book Other Lives, Other Selves opened up the doors of perception into the world of prior life regression in a way that was totally cognisant of the therapeutic power of such a perspective.

“You know, Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved to Vienna to live and study. He applied to the Academy of Fine Arts and later to the school of Architecture. Ever seen one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I’ll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War 2 than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.”

From "The Unlived Life," section of Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art.

Pressfield, the author of the Legend of Bagger Vance and a historical novel on the battle of Thermapolyae is making the extreme point that what emerges from the depths of ourselves that we do not live out creatively, will ultimately turn instead to destruction. Steven Forrest posted a link to a news page on Facebook today that asserts "nearly forty per cent of Europeans suffer mental illness." This is of course a masterly example of the caution (nearly) and bold co-existing and the marvellous use to which statistics can be put as this list includes those suffering from dementia and alcoholics just as much as it does people being medicated for depression (as a salient commentator on the posting suggested we may indeed pathologize the normal issues and stresses of life to a nonsensical level). 

Hello everyone. I'd just like to make a quick announcement. I've been working on a book for the last few months, and I'm excited to announce that the major work is complete and the book is now in the editing process. The book is tentatively titled: Healing the Soul: the Lunar and Planetary nodes in Evolutionary Astrology. We're hoping to release the book near October, just before the next Evolutionary Astrology conference this fall.

“My idea, then, is that a great work of art often has at its center a long floating leap, around which the work of art in ancient times used to gather itself like steel shavings around the magnet. But a work of art does not necessarily have at its center a single long floating leap. The work can have many leaps, perhaps shorter. The real joy of poetry is to experience this leaping inside a poem. A poet who is ‘leaping’ makes a jump from an object soaked in unconscious substance to an object or idea soaked in conscious psychic substance.”

So wrote Robert Bly in a pamphlet in the 1970’s reissued recently in Leaping Poetry, a magical essay on art, interwoven with many of his free flowing translations of poetry from around the world. This is his statement of the meaning of freedom, of a spacious movement inside one’s being that resides at the heart of a poetry that has the capacity to move us. This is the space, the impulse towards soaring inner freedom, that I propose lies at the core of the Capricorn archetype, a principle normally associated with the structures of society and consciousness and the nature of conditioning: within the heart of the home of Capricorn lies the deep seated yearning for inner freedom.

So powerful is this need that many defenses (Saturn) are created by the psyche under the aegis of Capricorn, many armoured layers of protection against this potential leap of consciousness, this impulse for freedom. One part yearns for the leap, another part, fearful of chaos and all that might ensue in the new life (born free) generates restriction, born from anxiety. In this way we psychologically chose to participate in the strictures of conditioning that appear around us. By implication just as we chose them through fear, we could un-chose them as an act of liberation.

In recent posts I have been discussing the issue of lack of meaning in the modern world and that Evolutionary Astrology in its radicalism (claiming insight into the nature of the Soul’s desires and the present and past life selves it manifests to explore those desires) can only be understood by a return to meaning implied by the understanding of symbolic correspondence epitomized by the hermetic maxim, “As above, so below”.

Now I wish focus a little on the meaning of the term ‘evolutionary’ and by exploring that as a theme in and of itself, how that might illuminate the context overall of a truly Evolutionary Astrology.

I was recently introduced to Henryk Skolimowski, a Polish professor of Ecological Philosophy, in whose writing I’ve discovered a free-thinking, mystical utterly reverent radical viewpoint about the spiritual dimension of our current struggles as a civilization.

He offers a supremely optimistic counter to the lack of vision implied in the idea of world-as-machine that is so implicit in our technological fantasies and waste. As part of this vision Skolimowski honours the importance of evolution, the problems it poses to our understanding in the face of its scale and the joy of the life force that, in its dynamism and variety, shine forth:

“Yet we have a problem with evolution. It is so large. It cannot be contained in any definition. It is expressed in everything, but it cannot be expressed in words. In wanting to catch evolution in a net of words we are chasing the continually evasive phantom of becoming. How can we comprehend the totality of evolution, while we cannot express its meaning in crisp definitions? By pointing at this Enormous Phenomenon of Life in its various processes becoming. The glory of evolution is the slimy little amoeba beginning to react to the environment semi-intelligently. The glory of evolution is the first eagle stretching its wings. The glory of evolution is the first monkey using a stick as a tool. The glory of evolution is the Vedic hymns conceived in silence and expressed then in ecstatic rapture. The glory of evolution is the monumental Principia Mathematica Philosophia Naturalis of Newton, attempting to express all visible nature in quantative laws. The glory of evolution is our reflective mind reflecting on the glory of evolution."

"(Some people think that the) movements of planets in the heavens cannot influence the lives of men on earth. It would be rather a crude definition of astrology which said that they could; the real interpretation is more vast and more profound: that the entire universe is one tremendous harmony, that the same forces are at work in the macrocosm and the microcosm, the cosmos and the individual, that the tendencies in a man and the events in his life flow to the same rhythm as the planetary movements in the skies; that, although the intricacy of the arrangement would make a mathematician's mind reel, no individual can be born except at the moment when the position of the heavens is such as to mirror his nature and destiny. It is a typical misunderstanding which led some people in camp to argue that a man's character is not formed by the positions of the stars at his birth but by heredity. Actually, it is never said that the positions of the stars form a man's character but that they indicate it; and heredity is one of the influences which they indicate. It often happens that several members of a family are born at about the same time of day or have birthdays at about the same date, and both of these are varieties of family likeness which would show in a horoscope, though, of course, by no means the only ones. "

-From My Life and Quest by Arthur Osborne

In my previous post I addressed the problem of meaning. In a necessarily brief but I hope important way, I suggested that the issue of meaning and purpose is critical to both the individual and to the collective if we wish to co-create a more harmonious world. I then posited that astrology is one the great gifts of symbolism that allows us to participate within a Cosmos that has presence, or meaning in and of itself and for us. In the quote above, Arthur Osborne, the great follower and interpreter of the teachings of the sage Ramana Maharshi, describes what I see as the essence of the role of Evolutionary Astrology. That is that it presents a method for interpreting the symbolism of the perfect cosmic accord between the mathematics of the movements of the planets at the precise moment in space and time of the birth of an individual consciousness and how that symbolic map of the sky is in resonance with the karma of the individual coming into being.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, dictated in the months following his release from a concentration camp, Victor Frankl delineated one of the seminal theses of the modern era: he noticed that people’s loss of a sense of meaning was the critical precursor to their death. Of course the camps were a machinery of death - Eichmann’s accounting was in essence the mathematics of evil and statistically millions were to die: the dice evidently were loaded. Yet Frankl saw something unfold in his experience that taught him about the inner workings of that process as it happened to individuals around him: as young women had their head shaved and in so doing are robbed of their beauty and femininity, as others could not cope with separation from their loved ones and fear of the fate that might have befallen them, their ‘will to be’ faded and within days they would pass away.

Frankl himself, separated from his wife (whom he would discover only after his release had died in another camp), was of course highly stressed but his moment of confrontation with this inner precipice came at another moment. When a guard bullying him tore apart his jacket, revealing his dissertation - on which he had spent years of his life researching and writing, sewn into the lining - he destroyed it, shattering Frankl’s will in the face of the loss. Frankl saw before him an emptiness which if he gave way to, he would die. Something inside him, some other aspect of his will was lit and he walked away from the loss and chose not to find it meaningful enough to die for. Instead the torch paper inside him burned with a new sense of meaning and purpose, something inborn and inherent arose in him, the life force celebrated for its own sake, dis-identified from any one form. And he was able to live on that fire for the rest of his incarceration.

Evolutionary Astrology & Personal Psychosynthesis

The authors, Keith Hackwood and Mark Jones, friends for many years, trained together in Psychosynthesis at the Synthesis school in Bristol and continue to develop their joint interests in many areas, including Tibetan Buddhism, the Hermetic tradition, Evolutionary Astrology and the creative & healing arts. Astrology and Transpersonal Therapy: Hand in Hand, Together: An exploration of the natural relationship between astrology and psychosynthesis.

Download the PDF: Dancing The Twelve Steps