Astrology: A Gift from the Dreamtime
“Reason has never been king of consciousness, it’s actually a janitor”
The previous article is about why our astrological signs haven’t changed. It’s an attempt to get the facts straight about these claims that apparently arise out of NASA kids articles*, but probably more so out of the perceived threat that if we embrace these old forms of thought we will be sucked back into the abyss of our past, into the primordial waters of the dark mother. And that the way of the great father (logical, reasonable) is the way to this bright sparkling place called The Future. You know; the story of Ascent.
Although it’s important to show up in that logical world sometimes, I am also aware of the under-representation in these discussions of the dreaming mind to also know. So, here is a thought experiment. Cast your mind back a few thousand years. Remove all elements of industry, starting with the device you’re reading this on, but also taking out factories, cars, skyscrapers, planes and anything requiring electricity. While you’re at it, take several billion humans off the planet. Consider that the Polis (some of the earliest western ‘cities’) in Greece would have had a population of less than 50,000 people.
* since this post was published, NASA have changed the above article to be more respectful towards astrology as a story tradition… making me feel like things can actually change.
It might take a little while to cleanse your world of all of these people and things. So here’s a section break to give you a moment...
Observing every night, generation after generation, with no light or air pollution, try to imagine just how spectacular the theater of the night sky truly was to our ancestors. Those of you fortunate enough to have visited the more remote parts of the earth will have better access to this cellular, ancestral memory. But truly, I don’t think any of us today can really fathom the sky they saw.
Take yourself there, lay down on the earth that has never been strip-mined or drilled for her oil, and stare up at that sky. You haven’t had a modern western education teaching you that the sky is empty and those stars are solar systems that are an unfathomable distance from you. And that there’s no life out there. And that life began with some big gaseous impersonal explosion.
As such, when you look at this sky, you just can’t help but to feel awe and wonder.
Much like when you stare at the clouds today, shapes begin to appear. Do we ‘make it up’ when we see a dragon in the sky? Did our ancestors ‘make it up’ when they saw two fish swimming in different directions, connected by an umbilical cord?
‘Make it up’ infers pretence. But you don’t have a modern education based on the Age of Reason to interfere with your dreaming.
So you see these fish. And next to them a man pouring out water from a large vessel. And next to him a sea-goat, a centaur-archer, a scorpion, some scales, a priestess, a lion, a crab, a pair of twins, a bull and a ram that links back to those fish. They don’t appear all at once, but are rolled out onto the stage slowly as the night progresses. Nothing is static. It’s always moving. This is clearly a dance and their stories were probably told via song.
But maybe you don’t see those shapes. You could see dragons and whales and strange three-headed beasts. Others might see ogres and trolls and witches. (It would be a strange human, though, who would look at that majesty and see ‘nothing’).
Yet, somehow, this ‘you’ who is an individual having a personal experience is just the surface layer of reality. Underneath that is the ‘we’, having a collective experience, who sees the shapes that make up the Zodiac. Nobody writes a law that says you must see these things. Moses doesn’t come down the mountain with a metric measure of commandments for you. Instead, the dreaming has its own shape to take. And it happens to be these 12 constellations. And they happen to be the phases of a story, each one a response to the one before.
[Story of the Zodiac coming soon]
It doesn’t end there. Countless more shapes appear that aren’t on the thin sliver of sky we now call the ecliptic. There’s the rest of the sky that is also lit up with constellations. And slowly and thoroughly, the mythology of the time would account for them all.
We don’t call it the ‘sky’ or even the ‘stars’. We have too much reverence for that. Instead, we call this The Heavens and it’s the perfect place for our gods and goddesses to appear and weave together their cosmology.
And appear they do. First as two similarly sized bodies: the sun and the moon. It’s clear that these are in no way ordinary. When the sun appears in the sky he has the power to shine so brightly that all other lights disappear. He demands a certain respect, in a monotheistic sense, and through him the concept of the ‘day’ is born.
But when his chariot descends in the western sky at twilight, the polytheistic world erupts onto the scene. The moon is a subtler light than the sun. Sometimes she’ll light up the whole world with a soft, etheric tone. And sometimes she’ll hide away, in her absence allowing the stars to shine even brighter in the sky.
We begin to also notice that some of these stars aren’t ‘fixed’ in place like the others. They wander through the constellations, with even the ability to go backwards for certain periods of time. Sometimes they come together, sometimes they move apart.
We can only see five such travellers. Two of them stay close to the sun. The closest one to the sun we associate with the trickster-god Hermes (Mercury). Sometimes we see him, sometimes we don’t. So he must have the ability to go into the underworld and back. The word ‘psychopomp’ is connected to him: guide of souls.
The other one close to the sun is sometimes seen as the morning star, and other times as the evening star. Her association with the twilight links her with the colours of dawn and dusk; the most beautiful moments of the day. She must be Aphrodite (Venus), the goddess of beauty, love, desire and sensuality.
We notice another traveller. This one is able to traverse the entire sky and has to him a red tone. His speed and agility and his courage to move away from the sun give us the impression that he has a heroic disposition. But he’s also somewhat rash and impulsive, often with no regard for his own safety or the safety of others. We call him Ares (Mars) and he rules over conflict, battles and war. Love him or hate him, like all the gods of the pantheon, he is a child of Necessity.
There are two other figures with free reign over the full passage of the Zodiac. They move much slower than Mars, more measured and considered. The faster of the two is the brightest light in the night sky beyond the moon. He must be a visionary to shine as bright as this. There’s a sense of him also being a smaller version of the sun, perhaps possessing some of the sun’s traits. He must be the king of the gods: Zeus (Jupiter).
The other one doesn’t shine as brightly, and is 2.5 times slower than Jupiter. His slow pace and his dimmer light lets us know that he’s further away, and must be the furthest Heavenly Body in the sky. Therefore, he must rule over boundaries and limits. The overthrown father of Zeus was Chronos (Saturn), who ruled over the Golden Age until Zeus’ revolution. Though disposed of his position, he’s still forever reminding Zeus of his limits, of the edges of his rule. He warns of the exhaustible nature of the earth’s resources and of all those who inhabit this place.
Without a telescope to see the planets beyond Saturn, this is the cast of our nightly theater. When they move into another Zodiac sign they have new challenges to face. When they meet or oppose each other there could be a tension or a harmony of these forces, or both. Everyone is born at a particular and precise moment of this cosmic theater; everyone’s life is a snapshot of their position in space and time; everyone’s life is an unfathomable collection of cosmic energies that stretches back to time immemorial and forward into the great unknown of the future. And in this present moment, the opportunity is to realise that moment and who you are within it.
And that is astrology.
