The Split in our Stars

About a month ago my housemate sent me an article with the title ‘NASA says our star signs are wrong - but the 13th zodiac has upset people’. The first line of the article: ‘People are freaking out after discovering they may have been following the wrong star sign for years.’

I let out a sigh, or maybe a quiet groan, and prepared for the same news cycle that happens once every five years or so. Shortly after that another friend brought my attention to it, then my sister living on the other side of the world. In that mysterious way that these things happen, the ‘news’ had started to spread.

The source of the claim that, remember, had ‘everyone freaking out’, was a NASA article for kids* warning them of the great fallacy that is astrology. Complete with this fantastic illustration that I think, back in the day, we used to call ‘clip art’, the article opens with the line, ‘Astronomers and other scientists know that stars many light years away have no effect on the ordinary activities of humans on Earth.’

The last time this article was updated was January 13, 2016. So, yeah, it’s pretty groundbreaking stuff. Like I said, once every five years or so.

As astrologers, we’re no strangers to the ridicule that comes from scientific rationalism. This is the dominant religious paradigm of our day, after all, and those that step outside of it appear as heretics and need to be kept in check. Just spend another moment with this clip art picture… Astrology is not a science because this white man with glasses, nice respectable clothes and a receding hairline said so. And that’s that.

The article scoffs at those foolish ancient Babylonians who just didn’t have the scientific equipment we have. Of course the Universe isn’t made of meaningful stories. The rich cosmologies that our ancestors told each other, dreamed into the stars, and then flowed into the mythopoetic traditions of Ancient Greece and beyond were merely delusions of those who didn’t know better.

Like the First Peoples of North America and the Aborigines of Australia and Amazonian Tribes and African Villagers and…

If we look at the hostility towards astrology with a psychological eye, we might wonder why it’s so offensive to the western mind to allow a section of society to continue to work with our solar system as though it were meaningful. In psychology we know that the disturbing force is often where the gold lies. It tends to represent the part of the psyche that has been rejected and exiled; the disturbance itself representing a shadow longing for wholeness.

Perhaps this reaction is an attempt from the Cartesian split (mind-body, consciousness-matter) to heal itself. But like an individual psyche, this collective split can be hard to see, and even harder to heal (make whole). In fact, before the 17th century and the onset of the ironically named ‘age of enlightenment’ (where we turned the lights of industry on and the power of imagination off) astrology and astronomy were just the one thing: astrologia (latin). Let’s look at how our database of consensus reality, Wikipedia, views this moment of history:

“Since the 18th century they have come to be regarded as completely separate disciplines. Astronomy, the study of objects and phenomena originating beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, is a science and is a widely studied academic discipline. Astrology, which uses the apparent positions of celestial objects as the basis for the prediction of future events, is a form of divination and a pseudoscience having no scientific validity.”

These last two sentences show how casually we tend to disregard the sacred, the mythic, the poetic, the feminine, the felt, the implied and the invisible as just silly nonsense. Just feel the warmth and reverence for astronomy here as a respectable, honourable discipline and astrology, by comparison, as ‘apparent’, ‘divination’, ‘pseudoscience’ and without validity.

Of course, it’s not just astrology that bares the brunt of this form of prejudice. We can see it in small and large ways all throughout our history and into the current day. Monotheistic missionaries for centuries have spread the good word of the one god and systematically replaced, often violently, many of the world’s polytheistic traditions. In subtler ways, funding goes towards the measurable sciences as the immeasurable world is either ignored or ridiculed as ‘woo woo’ or nonsense.

As such, we have lost so much of the wisdom that stories have held from time immemorial in human consciousness. These stories were storehouses of information about the natural world and how to live in harmony with it. When the brilliant poet Ovid in Metamorphoses (8AD) writes about the Golden Age when Saturn ruled, the implication is that when we knew how to live within our limits (Saturn’s realm) the earth provided for us endlessly and easefully. When he was overthrown by Jupiter (expansion, growth) we had to work harder and harder for less and less yield.

The literalist modern mind rejects such talk of these ‘gods’, and so misses what they are referring to. What their implication is. And here we are, forgetting our limits, and consuming the natural world to the demise of countless species and to the brink of our own extinction.

Taking a moment here to feel the above line as the reality that we all inhabit, a longing arises in me for a time when the poets and mystics were deeply revered. It seems to me that Rationalism and Mysticism are estranged twins who have somehow been fighting for so long that they’ve forgotten they’re related. The divorce of astrology and astronomy seems an unnecessary split that has come from this form of perverse literalism.

The telescope amplified our sight but blinded our vision. When we looked into the universe and saw so much empty space and nothingness we took it as evidence that we are alone, with no gods to help us. As above, so below, when we turned to the inner world after witnessing the nothingness in space we saw no soul, no invisible force that moves us. The more we expanded on our five senses through technology the more the evidence piled up that this place is nothing but a mechanical, meaningless place for us to use as we see fit, for our own ends and nothing more.

But it was just a mistake. A transgression of the measurable sciences into the invisible worlds. Imagine if the next time a physicist was asked about the meaning of life the reply was, ‘I don’t know, that’s not my area of expertise. I work only with the measurable world’ and they referred you back to the oracle, the priest, the shaman, the monk, the medicine woman, the energy worker or the astrologer.

In these polarising times, perhaps we need to ponder the word ‘repair’. To re-pair is to put something back in touch with its archetypal opposite. To see these apparent splits as actually two sides of the same coin. The hostility felt between the two sides points to the heat of their attraction/repulsion dynamic. Rather than the logical mind that says one must be right and one must be wrong, perhaps we can imagine that they’re both right, just working within separate paradigms. And what is it that might bring them back together? Martin Shaw shares a six minute story below that may enlighten us to the process. A fight, a falling into the alchemical sacred river, and an emerging from the waters as whole.

* since this post was published, NASA have changed the above article to be more respectful towards astrology as a story tradition. They removed this clip art picture and now simply state the difference between astrology and astronomy in a way that feels respectful to both sides. In fact, they even link to a resource encouraging children to engage with ‘legends of the night sky’ and make up their own stories about the constellations. I don’t know about you, but this truly warms my heart and allows me to imagine that these old, crusty structures really can change.