Mark Jones Astrology Blog

The Poisoned Apple: the dialogue between Religion and Science and the formation of the modern world-view.

Image courtesy of Roberta Tocco Photography

Over a series of posts I will engage in an extended meditation on the dialogue of Religion and Science and the way that the relationship between the two has been crucial in the formation of the modern world-view.

Astrology and Psychotherapy (alongside Existential and Spiritual concerns) will be brought to bear on the analysis both as a perspective for understanding but also as part of the subject matter.

So, for example, astrology will provide perspective through analysis of birth charts, and themes of history through transits as well as being the subject of analysis itself; for example the differing ways that religion and science have attempted to engage with or deny astrology and its precarious status in the modern world.

Part 1 - Apple for Teacher

“Late that autumn of 1925, Robert did something so stupid that it seemed calculated to prove that his emotional distress was overwhelming him. Consumed by feelings of inadequacy and intense jealousy, he ‘poisoned’ an apple with chemicals from the laboratory and left it on Blackett’s desk… Fortunately, Blackett did not eat the apple; but university officials somehow were informed of the incident. As Robert himself confessed to Ferguson two months later, ‘he had kind of poisoned the head steward. It seemed incredible, but that was what he said.’”

On the Tricks of Demons

In his 1563 book, On the Tricks of Demons, Johann Weyer, a Protestant physician, questioned the capacity of old peasant women to fly on broomsticks and become the sexual consorts of demons. He wrote, “Love men, kill errors, fight for the truth without any cruelty.” This sober, sincere and rather kindly man wondered if many of these poverty stricken old ladies were not just suffering from depression (melancholia) and mental illness; issues more than exacerbated by the prolonged torture they would suffer at the hands of their interrogators.

This appeal to sanity and compassion was not enough to stay the hands of Jean Bodin, whose On the Demonic Madness of Witches is an extended critique of Weyer’s appeal for moderation. Bodin points out how torturing and burning these old women was nothing compared to the eternal damnation that awaits them and which the general public, witness to this orgy of violence, needed rerminding of! Near his death, Bodin published Drama of Universal Nature (1597) in which he wrote: “There is nothing in the world...pleasanter to behold, or which more deliciously revives the mind, or which serves us more commodiously, than order.” The feminine is the antithesis of this dubious “order.”

“All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable,” says the Malleus Maleficarum and as Brian Easlea in his sensitive and considered book Witch Hunting, Magic and the New Philosophy writes, “Whatever else it is, the Malleus Maleficarum is a misogynists’s textbook.” This triumph of misogyny was published by two Dominican friars in 1486 in which it was argued that God allows a certain amount of evil in order to celebrate the triumphant response of the righteous in stamping out the cursed sections of humanity; more often than not, the feminine. The tricks of Demons tolerated in order to incite the treats of the righteous; a process for which they argue there can be no due legal process because of the inherently satanic nature of the accused...

Recently I was fortunate enough to go to Florence. I turned this into a mini vacation, in Tuscany first (Pisa, Lucca and Montecatini Terme) and then Florence itself. Whilst the vacation was good, despite the crazy driving of the Italians (truly scary in their capacity to pull out of junctions and parking spaces at the side of the road with no indication) the real focus of the trip had come about through an opportunity created by a great friend who I trained in Psychosynthesis with from 1999-2002.

Already friends, training together, as the babies of the course (by age and therapeutic experience at least) far from wiping out the friendship as some on the training thought would happen - including the course director at times, mind you her comment when we turned up for the start of the second year was a surprised “Oh I didn’t expect you two to come back”! - Training together, alongside shared journeys into Kabbalistic magic, the Findhorn community in Scotland, Buddhism and writing (amongst other things…) cemented a shared creative drive. When as a student, I was struggling to complete my first homework in Evolutionary Astrology it was Keith that I turned too to help me think through the psychology of the birth chart on that depth level.

Keith, a Psychosynthesis Therapist working in a university and private practice, had the university support a trip to the Psychosynthesis conference in Rome in which he presented an excellent paper, Paradise Sustained, which can be read here - http://keithhackwood.com/paradise-sustained/

A paper that rather ruffled some of the expensive older Italian feathers: a Psychosynthesis community in Italy somewhat notorious for closed ranks. Will Parfitt (http://www.willparfitt.com/) who gave a keynote address at the end of the conference singled out Keith’s approach as representative of a future potential for the Psychosynthesis community. For those who wanted to there was a trip to Florence to the Psychosynthesis Institute, basically the old home and workplace of Roberto Assagioli. Keith had written to the conference organisers previously about his friend, an author and international speaker who could not make the conference but would love to see the homestead of Psychosynthesis (no actual lie…) and I have this good friend to thank for what turned into a profound encounter for both of us with the private papers of a renaissance man some of whose work has been wilfully concealed from the world. Even it appeared the very people who had trained us!

After an introduction and brief tour of the house by the group of women visiting and, it was revealed, organising a recently discovered batch of material from Assagioli’s private archive that had only been opened up because the attic room it was stored in had come in danger of water damage from a leak. These boxes were literally ordered into the basement to be stored away (the symbolism of the layers of the unconscious and the attempted repression is almost comical) and yet one writer in residence who was assisting could not help herself but have a look in the box. Thank you, Pandora.

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."