Ian Freer  Cultural Astronomy
A graduate in classics and law, Ian Freer teaches history and mythology and has studied Greek and Latin sources as well as ancient Egyptian history. He trained in astrology at the Faculty of Astrological Studies, where he  won the Veritas Award for excellence in the Diploma (History and Astronomy) examination. Ian leads public and private tours of the ancient astrological exhibits in the British Museum.  He has been Vice-chair of the Astrological Association (AA) and contributed to their conferences; and his historical papers have appeared in the AA Journal. He taught Constitutional Law for the Open University; and he writes  in the fields of Public Law and Town & Country Planning for a number of legal periodicals.
Last updated: 26/6/2011
LINKS:

The Picatrix: Lunar Mansions in Western Astrology, by Ian Freer
http://www.astrologer.com/aanet/pub/journal/picatrix.html
Articles:

WHEN WAS THE TELESCOPE INVENTED?

          Historians have long been interested in the story that Roger Bacon invented a telescope at Oxford in the 13th century. Until 1991, it was always believed that Hans Lippershey, the Dutch lens maker, constructed the first practical telescope in 1608, which was used by Galileo in the following year. Lippershey had first offered his telescope to the Government of Holland for use in war. The refractor type of telescope used by Galileo contains no mirrors and the observer looks through one end.

          In the Elizabethan era, secret espionage work was carried out with glass lens telescopes. This was kept secret until very recently.  We already knew that one of the leading scientists at Court, Dr John Dee (astrologer royal to Queen Elizabeth), was extremely interested in optics (and would have read avidly Ptolemy’s lost book on the subject, if available, in addition to the numerous writings of Roger Bacon known to have been in his collection) but the area seems to have developed into practical application.  The Digges family, father and son, were the scientists who developed this new technology.

The father, Leonard Digges, who died in 1571, worked out the principles of the reflecting telescope.  In this design the eyepiece is at the side and light is collected by means of a mirror. It had previously been thought that the reflector was first used by Isaac Newton and his colleagues, a century later.  Leonard Digges had been condemned to death in the reign of "Bloody" Mary for taking part in an uprising to protest at the Queen’s marriage to King Philip II of Spain. Fortunately, he was pardoned when Elizabeth came to the throne.

The son, Thomas Digges, ranked among the finest mathematicians of the 16th century. He was elected MP for Wallingford, Oxfordshire in 1572 and was later MP for Southampton. Thomas was made overseer for the repair and refortification of Dover harbour. He fought in the Dutch wars against Spain with the rank of muster-master-general of the English forces.  It has been suggested by the astronomy researcher Colin Ronan, in an address given on 30 October, 1991, to the British Astronomical Association, that Thomas Digges used the telescope to observe stars invisible to the naked eye but this was probably kept secret for military reasons. It was a means of detecting hostile Spanish ships and there would have been a fear that they might change the shapes of their sails to avoid detection. A book which he wrote, containing the crucial diagram, was never published because of fear about a possible Spanish invasion. In 1576 Thomas Digges drew a diagram showing planetary orbits around the Sun as described by Copernicus 40 years before, surrounded by pictures of what he called “this orbe of stares fixed infinitely…with perpetuall shininge glorious lights innumerable.”  Thomas Digges also said that his telescope enabled him to see far-off objects “as plainly as if you were corporally present, although it be distante from you as farre as eye can discrye.”

Sir Patrick Moore, the famous British astronomer, said that Mr Ronan had made"an extremely exciting discovery which deserves to be taken seriously".

Copyright Ian Freer, 2004

Further reading: The Daily Telegraph;  31 October 1991: report of address by Colin Ronan to the British Astronomical Association
Wikipedia, History of the telescope, accessed 23 May 2010
"Ian, you are clearly a natural educator at heart." Clare Martin,  President,  Faculty of Astrological Studies
Egyptian Stars
(A Parallel Origin for Astrology)
by Ian Freer M.A.

Summary

Egypt had a great influence on our calendar and time-keeping. It is the source of House Division and of the threefold division of the zodiac signs into decanates. It had mythical and divine characters projected into the constellations, like Ancient Greece. These myths are often an obscured source for the Greek zodiac myths. It is the home of the Hermetic Tradition, which has always nurtured western astrology. The pyramids are evidence of a belief that human spirits went to the stars and their layout demonstrates the Hermetic axiom, "As above, so below". The Egyptians contributed greatly to astrology in every way, apart from the planets.

Introduction

Egypt's geography teaches the division into four quarters. The river Nile, on whose banks the people live, splits the country sharply into eastern and western halves. The west, where the sun sets, was associated with death and so the Valley of the Kings in the Western Desert was used in the New Kingdom to hide the dead Pharaohs in well protected tombs.

         Many local tribes, with their own gods, were fused into two kingdoms, North and South. The god Set was very popular in the (northern) Delta region. By around 3,400 BC, a people were known in Egypt, called the Followers of Horus, the Hawk. They subdued the followers of Set. The land was united by the first Pharaoh, Narmer or Menes, around 3,200 to 3,150 BC. The contentions of Set and Horus was always thereafter a major theme of their religious myths. Horus gradually became more popular, as did his parents, Isis and Osiris. They are most significant in relation to the cult of the afterlife.

Osiris was the god of fertility, the original Green Man. Isis, his devoted widow, has many striking similarities with the Virgin Mary. The Sun-god Ra or Amun-Ra, was seen as the supreme life giver, engaged in a nightly struggle against death in the underworld or passing via the mouth through the womb of the over-arching star-spangled sky-goddess Nut, to be reborn every dawn.

At no time was there a wholly consistent religion of the whole nation. While individual cities tended to honour a Holy Family of three main local deities, a total of more than 6,000 deities are recorded, making correlations to other religious systems an ultimately thankless task. As time passed, more and more foreign invaders overran the land. Contacts with Persia, Greece and Rome were very fruitful for astrology and probably introduced lunar omens, followed by the zodiac and planets as key significators.

It is tempting for Westerners to make “one for one” correspondences but accuracy requires a spending of much time acquiring a familiarity with the Egyptian deities on their own terms. It is sometimes suggested, for example, that Set corresponds to Saturn, yet their origins and contexts show that this cannot be the case. Set is a desert god, linked with storms, invoked for the cure of headaches. He is linked with red hair, a red dog or desert fox, the hippopotamus and the mysterious "Set animal" with a long snout, long flat-topped ears and erect bifurcated tail, possibly an extinct kind of anteater or deer, or even an astral spirit of the Hyades (the pointed V-formation in Taurus). Saturn, on the other hand, was a pastoral god of sowing and reaping, based in Italy, which has no deserts. Jupiter, not Saturn, was the local storm god. Neither Set nor Saturn were invariably negative as they did have a function. Ra was protected by Set on his journey through the underworld against the great Chaos serpent Typhon. This is a positive use of Set energy, as was the deployment of a Set regiment in the Egyptian army.

Greco-Roman views tend to dominate after the conquest of the Macedonians (4th century BC). The legacy of Alexandria with its definitive library has seen to that. This was the power base of Ptolemy the astronomer (2nd century AD), so that his writings reflect more of the cosmopolitan Hellenistic outlook than any native tradition. In fact Greeks in Egypt led fairly separate lives from the natives but something of the old mysticism crept in and subtly altered what they wrote. Always there was an interest in the power of the Stars, which they called Seba. Their symbol was a five-pointed stick shape; when contained in a circle this meant the Underworld (Duat).

Cosmology

The universe was imagined as a rectangular box. Solar eclipses occurred when the Sun in his boat was attacked by a huge serpent. Lunar eclipses occurred when the Moon was swallowed by a sow who regularly ate it away for half the month until it died in agony and was born again. The Moon was a male deity, known as Thoth, Khonsu or Yah. The origin of the universe was infinite primal water, the Nun. From a lotus flower appeared the first land, the primal mound, which is probably the concept behind the pyramids and obelisks. A family of gods appeared; the Pharaohs are the successive reincarnations of one in particular:Horus.


The Astronomical Ceiling of Seti I

















One of the first major star maps is datable to the New Kingdom, Dynasty 19. The diagram  above  of the Northern night sky comes from the ceiling of the burial chamber deep in the tomb (KV 17) of Seti I in the Valley of the Kings. He was the father of Rameses II, the Great, probably the Pharaoh of the Exodus. Seti I reigned from 1291 to 1278 BC and his tomb, discovered by Be!zoni in 1817, is the most imposing found in the valley; sadly it is closed to the public to protect it. Part of this diagram can be identified with reasonable certainty (you may wish to refer here to a modern star chart) but it is not drawn to scale. The stars are shown as large red dots, with the constellations in yellow pigment.

The hippopotamus Taweret, protectress of women in child-birth, is a form of Isis (disputed by Ros Park) and is in the place of Draco. The hawk-headed man is possibly her son Horus, in the place of Cygnus, whose wings form the same shape as his bent arms. Between the two lies the foreleg of Set (but according to Ros Park, it is not related to Set but is the Mooring Post), which is in the place of Ursa Minor and points to the pole. This grouping may illustrate the myth related in a text from the Temple at Esna: "It is Isis as a hippopotamus who tethers the foreleg in the northern sky in order not to let it go upside down into the Duat. It shall be with her, being the goddess Ipy in the sky, and she shall not release it forever and ever." The foreleg of Set in animal form, as a red fox or dog, had been cut off by the triumphant Horus at the end of his struggle with Set and was placed in the night sky for safe keeping. Thus was the god of chaos defeated by cosmic order, tethered to the pole position for eternity.

The Bull is the Egyptian equivalent of our Great Bear. The rest is oft-debated. The lion to the left of the diagram could well be Leo (as suggested to me by the then editor of the AA Journal, Robin Heath) or the head could be Corona Borealis on the body of Bootes. (Kurt Locher ascribes the Lion to Camelopardis near Auriga, and the bird between its paws is strongly reasoned to be the Pleiades, according to a letter from Ros Park.)

The Star-gods near the North Pole

In 1997, Jackie Huxter and I tentatively identified the man driving the spear into the crocodile with club-wielding Hercules, the prominent summer sky-giant. The pose is similar to that of the first Pharaoh, Narmer, shown striking his enemies with a lifted club on the Narmer palette; and to many other later Pharaohs elsewhere, notably Tutankhamun, in the act of spearing. It may be a ritual pose (variously shown as spearing or clubbing, always with raised arm) intended to identify the Pharaoh with a mighty astral spirit. Jackie Huxter believed that Hercules the constellation was the Greek form of Horus, so it would be natural for the Egyptians to show their living Pharaohs, as Horus incarnate, in that pose. (In Ms. Huxter’s theory, the Cerne Abbas Giant, possibly about 2,000 years old, is an earthly representation of this same astral deity, and thus the site of revels at May Day when at dusk Hercules rises over the eastern horizon above it.) It would follow that the crocodile victim is in the position of the upper section of Ophiuchus which it greatly resembles in shape.

The Denderah Zodiac

The northern circumpolar constellations are shown in the centre, and can be contrasted with the astronomical ceiling of Seti I. There are fewer of them and the foreleg of Set is now shown as a fox, while the bull has been reduced to one leg. The zodiac animals are illustrated in the mixed Egyptian and Babylonian style of the era. The goddesses of the Cardinal Points are in the quarters. Around the edge are shown the deities of the 36 decans, the first of which is Sirius, following Orion shown as a walking man.

Denderah is in Upper Egypt, but further north than the Valley of the Kings. This famous diagram (see below) is late Ptolemaic, from before 30 BC. It came from the Osiris Chapel of the temple of Hathor and is now on show in the Louvre.

The Denderah Zodiac From the Osiris Chapel at the Temple of Hathor

The whole scene is an event chart displaying the planets in their exaltations, presumably an election. Unlike modem astrological charts, limited to the ecliptic band, this is an example of full-blown sidereal astrology using the entire northern hemisphere of the night sky. The implication is that stars themselves were omens.

The cult of Hathor is at least as ancient as that of Horus. Hathor is sometimes an alternate of Nut, the goddess of the night sky. Nut’s over-arching body, shown in many other places in Egyptian art, is the template of the upper hemisphere of the astrologIcal chart, and the flat body of Geb the earth god below her is the template for the Ascendant/Descendant axis across the centre.  The lower hemisphere relates to the night journey of Ra in his sun-boat through the underworld.  (The further subdivision of the diurnal cycle into Houses by the Egyptians has been related elsewhere by Deborah Houlding.)

The structure of Egyptian temples envisages the roof as Nut and the floor as Geb. They were always meticulously aligned to the Cardinal points. This also happened with the pyramids. Likewise the Sphinx gazes due east to the rising of the Sun at the Spring Equinox.

Zodiacal Myths

The pattern of the major Egyptian myth of Isis and her family is very often the basis for a Greek reworking into the standard zodiac myths we tell today. Why else would Virgo be shown with wings if she were not copied from Isis, who took on the form of a bird of prey to conceive Horus by Osiris? The scales of Libra are generally related to the Judgment of the Egyptian Afterlife in the Duat. Libra is therefore linked with the West, just like the corresponding 7th House. The two linked fishes in Pisces were originally Isis and Horus, escaping from Set, before they became Aphrodite and Eros escaping from Typhon. I have explained the Egyptian aspect of the complete zodiac myths elsewhere.

The Planets

They were originally of periphal importance, apart from Venus.  She is the star which crosses, shown with two heads, proving the awareness that it could appear as both morning and evening star. Its ruling god was Osiris and the figure is a heron. Mercury was called Sebeg and its ruling god was Set, perhaps because both have a trickster aspect. Mars was the star of of heaven, called the Red Horus or Horus of the Horizon. Its god was Ra. Jupiter was the star of the south, whose god was Horus who bounds the two lands. Saturn was the star of the west, whose ruling god was also Horus, and is called Horus Bull of the Sky. Since Horus was connected with the Hawk and the Sun, both of which move through the sky, it was appropriate to identify moving planets with aspects of the deity. Knowledge of retrograde motion is shown by the description of Mars as "the star which journeys backwards in travelling". In the way we today interpret the planets, Egypt clearly had little or no effect compared with Babylon, Greece and Rome.

The Decanates

This was a division of the sky ecliptic into 36 equal parts, starting from  Sirius and Orion, but most have never been  identified with certainty. They are regarded as the masks of spirits called the Lords of Time. More than 50 decan lists survive. The heliacal rising of the decans was used in time-keeping in the period from the 9th to the 12th dynasties, thereafter culmination was more favoured. They were ultimately replaced by the zodiac and absorbed into it. Lilly's Faces are their direct descendants. Firmicus Maternus and the compiler of Picatrix used them, as do contemporary writers. A Polish manuscript of Picatrix has curious illustrations of the decanal images.

Each night, seven of the decans were invisible while twenty-nine became visible before dawn. The myth explains this by Nut as mother sow eating her piglets and quarrelling about it with Geb. Alternatively, the stars are fish in the lake of Duat (Underworld). At sunset Ra enters the Duat by the mouth of Nut in the West.

Omens

A demotic papyrus, probably composed about the 6th century BC, showing Babylonian influence, lists omens for different countries including Egypt according to eclipses (Text A) and the colours of the Moon (Text B). This type of writing is directly ancestral to the great Egyptian astrologers Nechepso and Petosiris (2nd century BC). They had greatly expanded the scope of the eclipse predictions, naming 39 countries as opposed to a mere 5 in Text A. Many texts were attributed to them, most of which are lost except in quotation. They are often identified with Pharaoh Nectanebo II and the priest Petosiris whose tomb survives at Hermopolis. However, these correlations are very dubious. Legends in the Middle Ages said that Nectanebo went to Macedon and astrologically elected the birth of Alexander the Great.

The Calendar

The Egyptian year was not fourfold like ours but threefold. Four months were allocated to the flood season (commonly known as the Inundation), four to planting and growth as the waters retreated (Winter), four to the harvest (Summer). The flood season usually started with the heliacal (dawn) rising of Sirius the Dogstar following the summer solstice after 70 days of invisibility. Sirius is the Latin name for Sothis, the Greek name of the Egyptian Sopdet. The rising date of Sirius could differ from the first rising of the Nile by up to a few weeks. Markers were set to record the annual rising of the Nile. A star-sighting instrument was invented which enabled the correct time for the celebration of calendrical feasts to be accurately determined. An inscribed instrument (a Merkhet) made from a date palm rib, is kept at the Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Most of the knowledge of the stars was in the hands of the astronomer priests at Heliopolis, a very ancient site whose ruins now lie underneath the eastern side of Cairo. (Their sun-god Ra is sometimes represented as a winged scarab, Khepri, which means" He who comes into being" or "He who brings into being", which is thought by some to have exactly the same meaning as the Hebrew name of the deity, Yahweh.)

The earliest calendar used in Egypt was however a lunar one, used for agriculture and festivals. This was not reliable in the long term because of the difficulties of assimilating it into the solar year. It has been suggested that about every three years it was supplemented by a thirteenth lunar month to correct this tendency. One scholar has suggested that the number of lunar months might have varied from eleven to fourteen, if it was controlled by the annual rising of the river. This illustrates the most notable characteristic of all lunar calendars, that they need frequent and irregular adjustments to fit the incompatible solar cycle. Consequently, Robert Graves' inventive transformation of the first thirteen letters of the Druids' Ogham alphabet into a rigid lunar calendar is either not practical or insufficiently explained.)

In the very earliest Dynasties, around  2900 BC, the Egyptian astronomers came up with a better calendar, which is very close to the Gregorian calendar that we use today. They based it on the solar cycle and created a basic year of 360 days with 5 Dog Days (sometimes called epagomenal days) added on. The first month was the month of Thoth, the God of Writing and also a lunar deity. There were 12 months of 30 days each, with 3 ten-day weeks (probably because of their decimal counting system). The 30 day month is still with us and I suggest that it may possibly have been derived from the Lunar Mansion system - we do know that the Egyptians had a system of lucky and unlucky days which predates Hesiod, and that Lunar Mansions were attributed lucky or unlucky qualities. Gradually these 10 day weeks shortened to the 7 day week we still use now.

Each year was also helpfully recorded as a regnal year of the reigning Pharaoh. Over the course of four years the civil calendar crept 1 day ahead of the true solar year of approximately 365 and a quarter days, because it was a wandering year. The cumulative effect over centuries produced some ludicrous situations. A 13th century BC papyrus records, "Winter is come in Summer, the months are reversed, the hours in confusion." Farmers probably ignored the civil calendar as it was so inaccurate.

The heliacal rising of Sirius coincided with the beginning of the civil calendar only once about every 1460 years. It did so coincide in AD 139 so similar coincidences happened in 1317 BC and 2773 BC. Readers should note that the 365 day civil calendar normally had no practical connection with the heliacal rising of Sirius, despite the misleading use of the expression "Sothic Year." It is this Civil Year, as adapted by Julius Caesar and Pope Gregory XIII, which is the direct ancestor of our own.

A reformed lunar calendar tied to Sirius was introduced about 2500 BC, side by side with the civil, to schedule religious events and the lunar feast day that gave each month its name.

The development of accurate astronomy and time keeping was behind that of Babylonia until the last dynasties. Day time was measured by sun clocks, similar to sundials. From at least the Middle Kingdom, coffins were decorated with star clocks, the decans, that identified different hours of night. During the reign of the New Kingdom Pharaoh Amenhotep I, water clocks made their appearance. These were often made in the shape of the Baboon, an animal sacred to Thoth, who was associated with the measurement of time. The Egyptians had no name for a unit oftime shorter than one hour. The day was divided into 24 hours, 12 for day and 12 for night. The length of the hour varied according to the season, dividing equally the period between dawn and dusk, a tradition which is still used by astrologers when calculating planetary hours, as it was the normal convention of the Greco-Roman world. By 1300 BC at the latest, the concept of 24 equal hours had also been developed in Egypt and was adopted by Greek astronomers who passed it on to us.

Pharaonic Star Cults

The Orion Mystery by Bauval and Gilbert has drawn attention to the belief that the living Pharaoh was Horus incarnate and at death became transformed into his father Osiris. (As Jackie Huxter’s hypothesis supposed the living Pharaoh was Hercules the summer sky-giant, it seems appropriate in that hypothesis for the dead Pharaoh to be Orion, the winter sky-giant.) The evidence that the Pharaoh's soul went to Sahu, their name for Orion, is derived from the Pyramid texts, which are the earliest religious writings known anywhere in the world. Some texts say the Pharaoh goes to the Sun but others say to the stars in the Duat. The Duat is not only the night sky and the Underworld but it is reflected in the special land of Egypt itself. The Giza complex models Orion's belt. It is suggested that the mysterious passages in the Great Pyramid were used ritually as astral launch pads for the deceased Pharaoh's spirit on its journey to Orion. Dahshour has a pyramid formation which the authors Bauval and Gilbert related to the Hyades in Taurus.

Hermetica

All this points to Egypt as the likeliest home for the Hermetic axiom, "As above, so below," and it was certainly the home of the Corpus Hermeticum in the Hellenistic era. I suspect that these texts have ultimate sources far older than was credited by their critic Casaubon, because they refer, for example, to the decans. Casaubon used a redating of the Greek literary style (about the 2nd century AD) to debunk the belief, held by John Dee and the other Renaissance Hermetists, that they predated Moses and were therefore of more authority than the Old Testament. Certainly Casaubon was ignorant of much Egyptian thinking because the hieroglyphs were not translated until 1822.

Conclusion

The importance of Egypt in the way we do astrology - using accurate dating by year, day and hour - is crucial, because that is based on the way our whole society measures time. We have tended to lose their original focus on the wider night sky in limiting ours to the zodiac band along the ecliptic. This is the result of making the planets primary significators rather than other omens, such as colours of the Moon. The decans still have some importance but it is a purely symbolic one that bears no relation to their original location below, not in, the ecliptic. In the 2nd century BC, the leading world astrologers were Egyptians but they were to be replaced by the Greeks and Romans, including Claudius Ptolemy, who seldom mentions the Egyptians in his textbook. The twelve-fold house division and the zodiacal myths are rooted in Egypt but that is now obscured by usage elsewhere. If we focus solely on the planets, we will miss much of what Egypt has to offer in its grandeur of vision, its stunning art and architecture, and immortal sense of the mystery of life and death. This mystery is, to me, central both to astrology and the existence it describes.

Select Bibliography

Egyptian Astrological Texts, O. Neugebauer and R. Parker, Brown University Press, 3
       Volumes, 1960, 1964 and 1969.
From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, by E A Wallis Budge, Oxford, 1934.
"Immortal Star Spirits," Jackie Huxter-Freer, Talking Stick, Issue XX, Winter 1995/6.
"The Origin of House Meanings," Deborah Houlding, (The Astrological Association Journal,
       Vol.36, No.1, January 1994.
Origins of Astrology,  Jack Lindsay, Muller, 1971.
The Orion Mystery, Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert, William Heinemann Ltd, 1994.
"Star Beasts - Egyptian Goddesses and Zodiac Myths," Ian Freer, The Traditional Astrologer,
       Issue 2, Autumn 1993.
The Valley of the Kings, John Romer, Micheal O’Mara Publishing, 1981.

N.B. The original version of this article appeared in the Astrological Journal, Vol. 39 (1), January 1997. In the following issue (March, 1997) it was the subject of a critical letter by Egyptologist Rosalind Park. The editor, Robin Heath, kindly published my response to her letter. Anybody wishing to rely on this newly revised copyright article for his/her own research is strongly advised to read the letters section of Vol.39 (2)  of the Astrological Journal first, which will enable them to evaluate the conflicting views and to learn of further sources mentioned by Ros Park.
© Ian Freer, 2005
Is Astrology a Football Game?

At the risk of entering the realm of parody, I believe that, in traditional astrology, the client was viewed as the football, kicked around the field of life by opposing good and evil forces, comprising teams of planets and other omens.  The pitch was marked out into houses and signs which determined the nature of activity on that spot. Eventually the game ended and the client died. At that point the highlights of the match were summed up. The astrologer was the referee, intervening with judgment calls at critical moments in the match.

In modern, psychological astrology, the client is viewed as a player, responsible for much of what happens and unable to foresee more than vaguely what the rest of the match holds in store.  The ball is his life. The two teams represent the inner and outer aspects of life, always somehow connected although apparently different. The team strip might look different but remarkably similar humans wear both strips and any of them can be signed to different teams. The astrologer is still asked to play the referee here, although now more subtle and likely to say that any final decision is the player’s own responsibility.  Good and evil are not in this picture, just times of ease and times of challenge or opportunity. 

The modernists believe that they have advanced their level of understanding very significantly. The traditionalists believe that the modernists have lost a useful certainty.   Is this where contemporary astrology stands?

There must be a third choice to be made. Western philosophy has often been described as being “footnotes to Plato” and from that tradition, I offer the threefold structure of philosophical enquiry: thesis, antithesis and synthesis.  The position of the omen-reading divinising traditionalist is the thesis; that of the modernist a clear antithesis; and they can only be reconciled by a higher synthesis.

My take on this is that all systems of astrology (and there are of course many more than this simplistic model of two main types) may be “true” at their own level. Synthesis implies always a higher level than the starting point, a kind of meta-level. There must therefore be at least two levels and possibly many more.  Help for this approach is available from many sources: Theosophy, Kabbalah, General Semantics (as a source of NLP), Gnosticism, Hermeticism and Superstring Theory are some of the fields that spring to mind.

In Kabbalah there are said to be Four Worlds in Creation and eleven sephiroth (the emanations of the divine source of all, the sequential stages by which the physical world came into manifest existence).  In contemporary Superstring Theory (see http://superstringtheory.com), physicists are quite co-incidentally postulating an eleven dimensional universe with each dimension separated from the next by a membrane or “brane”.  My favourite theory on multiple levels is General Semantics, founded by Count Alfred Korzybski (see www.general-semantics.org).  His writings taught me to see that multiple levels of reality were involved in the process of perception and that each stage has a filter. This is why different people can, oddly, experience the same events in many different ways. It explains the subjectivity of much human experience and tackles head on one of the central areas of earlier philosophy: how our analysis of existence is bounded by the senses.

Each player has a different view of the match determined by dimensions of time and space. So the player has a subjective experience, just like the ball in the first example. We can treat the subjective experience as if it were objective for the sake of practicality; isn’t this what a traditional astrologer does routinely? It shouldn’t be too hard, because physicists too use entirely different sets of rules, depending upon whether they are examining large bodies or subatomic particles. Newton and Kepler still work for the big stuff but we know very well that they don’t at the level of quantum physics.

Inevitably, there are specialists in physics, so they only operate with one set of rules. Likewise, there are specialists in astrology, who have to operate with one set of rules or risk confusion.  The challenge today then is not to know two sets of rules in depth but on the contrary to know about the existence of other astrological rules and yet to stick wholly to one set for the greatest effectiveness. 

The danger is of being over-educated and entering a railway siding of “mutual stultification”.  Of course, on the football pitch we know that each player is sticking consistently to one team throughout the match. A valuable lesson?


© Ian Freer, 2006



Is astrology like a football game?
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Also on this page:
Denderah Zodiac
Seti I ceiling

Note: Ian's interests are the history and culture of astrology and astronomy. He does not do astrological  charts.