Credible Accounts of Creation

"Assigning intellectual achievements to one culture over another is a process which carries a heavy ideological load."

                                              Tamsyn Barton

                                               Ancient Astrology

My natal saturn had an incredible visit from mars Friday, Nov. 9.  The hour I was born more than 50 years ago Saturn was in the 3rd house (east coast USA) at 25degrees Sagittarius, and I do find that I bring a sober frame of mind to discussions of philosophy.  I like humor and polemic, but at bottom I approach discussions of philosophy and religion with an awareness that they shape institutions.  So I was glad to have spent the several hours leading up to that meeting of phantom and physical planets in Sagittarius with someone who cares deeply about friendly conversation and spirituality.

Western astrology teaches that the spiritual preparation for seeking truth is to enter subjective experience and face with courage and a steady hand that which we find within.  There are usually few if any people in an individual's life that have the will and capability required to accompany them on the journey into their private night.  I was fortunate to be with just such a friend Friday when preparing for the meeting with old philosophical beliefs in the process of being dissolved.  I think of beliefs as not so much things we hold to be true, but ideas which are dear to us; visions that we treasure for their ability to help us make sense of life or lead us to the kind of life we would like to live.  Beliefs to me are ideological treasures luring us into a more beautiful life, one as yet only imagined.

Myths are accounts of how life came to be as we know it, in the context of all existence and nonexistence.  Our ancestors have taken a collective look, over various cultures and countless generations, at what they perceive to be their common origin, the point from which all the miracles and suffering emanate; the first cause. 

This is the purpose of myth, to weave what we know about existence into a memorable story that captures the depth of meaning in what we are experiencing as a race of divinely inspired creatures.  We feel grateful for the gift of life and look for someone to thank, we want to know them, we are drawn into the past in a quest to give a nod of the head to them, maybe to shake their hand; some of us would like to spend time among ancestors listening to their stories, reliving their lives, past, present future in the language of music and poetry, number, nature and change.

We know this human story to extend hundreds of thousands of years into the past within a solar neighborhood that we describe in billions of years, but many of us do not know that there are sacred documents of sister cultures that date back 3,000 years which outline this same story in multiples of billions of years, following and projecting the trajectories of stars above us far into the past and future.  Many of us are not only unaware of, but convinced that no ancestors exist as far back as 3,000 years who could predict the whereabouts in the sky of a star 100 years or 1 year in the future.  We are like the indigenous people of a colonized land that have had our language systematically repressed.  Those of us who are ignorant of astrology are literally an indigenous people colonized and robbed of their native language, unable to discuss fluently our collective knowledge of life.

The language of organic time, of which Plato is a fairly recent philosopher, is widely seen as nothing more than a cheap self help distraction at best or an insidious con game at worst.  Students in American universities are taught the works of Boethius but discouraged from studying the same math and astronomy which he practiced under the guidance of Philosophy, the apparition of redemption who consoled him and lifted him up to the heights of wisdom at the hour of his death.

This is the value of astrology; not predictions, but the consolation of philosophy, the real understanding from the first duality of two particles with opposite polarities to the infinite permutations generated from there to here; all the light, explosions of stars and attractions that come from what we know not and through billions of years created us.  Our real past and future is not secret, it is shamed and stripped of the dignity of poetry, soul and assumed unity and direct inheritance from the ultimate source.  Those who embrace astrology acknowledge their oneness with all that exists past present and future and seek to understand the meaning of life through the humble study of the passage of organic time.

Now this is what I'm talking about when I say I love astrology.  Frankly it makes me feel much more sane than using clocks as exclusive measures of time.  This is the chart for the moment I clicked the send button on the above post.  How can anyone not cling to such a system for evidence of the divine?