Astrology An introduction

Astrology may be loosely defined as 'the study of the real or pretended relationships between the heavens and the earth'. It is one of the oldest and most widespread of human activities and interests. A recognizable astrology played an integral part in every highly developed civilization of the past - Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek, Indian, Chinese. Muslim, Mayan. Though very much alive today, there has probably never been a time in which astrology has been so grossly misunderstood.

On the one hand, a vast audience follows the daily horoscope in the newspapers and believes astrology to be a more or less valid system of fortune-telling. On the other, a united body of sceptics comprising the 'educated public' believes astrology to be absolutely without foundation, a superstitious attempt by primitive man to read order into an essentially chaotic and meaningless universe, and to stave off the unknown through bogus divination.

But a study of astrology soon shows it to be more complex than either believers or sceptics allow. Like religion or art, astrology-is multi-faceted and many-levelled. Just as it is pointless to discuss the religion of the Jesus Freaks alongside the religion of Meister Eckhardt, or to talk about a pop song in the same terms as a Beethoven quartet, so it is futile to try to deal with astrology as though it were all of a piece.

The astrology that occupies space in the daily paper bears little relationship to the sophisticated symbolic astrology that attracted so many of the great minds of the past. Men such as Plato, Pythagoras, St Thomas Aquinas, and Johann Kepler accepted astrology not as a means of foretelling the future but as a symbolic master-plan of the structure and functioning of the universe that satisfied their inner experience. It is interesting that, in recent years, modern physical science has discovered many relationships and correlations between celestial and terrestrial events: relationships an earlier generation of authorities would have flatly declared impossible. Modern astrologers maintain that these discoveries are sufficiently numerous and sufficiently-telling to acquit astrology- of the charge of outright superstition and to make it again worthy of serious consideration, at least as far as its principles are concerned.

Underlying Principles of Astrology

Fundamental to astrology is the assumption that the universe is unaccidental; a manifestation of Divine Will, ordered and coherent and therefore susceptible of interpretation. Astrology has always been considered a key toward such interpretation. The reasoning behind the astrological method is analogical rather than logical, perhaps best and most commonly expressed in the saying 'As above, so below'. The universe is conceived of as an interrelated whole, an immense spiritual organism in which each part relates to every other part. The solar system, in astrology, is not a chance agglomeration of stellar matter, but a sentient, organized cosmos, whose operation is inextricably entwined with that of the earth, and of man and everything related to him on the earth.

Unmodern as this manner of hierarchical thinking may seem, it is the focus more than the manner that is responsible. The pathologist who, regarding evidence of an excessive flow of adrenalin, concludes that the absent patient is angry or disturbed, is operating in similar fashion to the astrologer who, studying the horoscope of an unseen child born with the planet Mars in the constellation of Scorpio, and badly aspected, concludes that this individual will tend to be violent, sensual and domineering, indeed, subject to excessive flows of adrenalin. Perhaps the chief difference lies in the ease with which the pathologist can test and control his conclusions and the extreme difficulty for the astrologer of doing the same.