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Astrologer's Notes:
Thinking Magically and Critically: Contemporary Astrology and What It Can Do For You:
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Recollecting our Soul
Part 1 of 2 parts
by Erin Sullivan
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What is it about the ethos of today that brings clients to an astrologer asking about their spiritual path? So many people are concerned that their spirituality and sense of soul is not being satisfied or lived out in their daily activities.
The history of astrology's evolution, and the emerging practice of it as an individual tool has become a revealing social barometer. The primary concerns of the individual are always reflective of the greatest insecurities in the collective. Aside from the most recent development in astrology's long history - clients and astrologers using astrology as a guide for self-development and greater understanding of their inner life - the primary concerns are reassuringly human: relationships, financial security, career, health (more a body/mind concern these days), family safety and, of course, their unfolding futures.
That most of today's clients are deeply concerned about their spiritual path, suggests that the distress is pandemic and a loss of connectedness with the divine has become totally conscious. That clients hope to find the answer in their horoscope, or at least through the interpretations of the horoscope, acknowledges that the ancient signs and symbols continue to offer a link to their contemporary situation.
The separation of nature (soul) and culture (mind) is not just a twentieth century event but was an ancient concern - and though the issue didn't arise in the consulting rooms of astrologers circa 500 BCE, it was a powerful worry for the western philosophers that seemed to emerge from nowhere into the early Athenian culture.
As far back as 600 BCE, already there was conscious awareness that somehow a gulf had formed between natural law - nomos - and cultural law - physis - and based upon that awareness a philosophical dialectic ensued. The very fact that the concept of a division existed - that there was a 'consciousness' at all - lies at the contemporary concern for all that is desacralized and secularized. Ancient poets feared for this split and through their very awareness of it, signaled its truth.
The sacred and the profane
Exactly what is it that we are missing? What is the astrologer's client saying when she wants to know what her spiritual purpose is and is she living it out? Is it a sense of loss of centre? Is it a true feeling of lack of purpose or inspiration in life? Is it even real? Could it be part of a more sinister suggestion that the gods have fled and humanity is now being hoisted upon its own petard? Or is it a cultural imposition, a slow, degradation of unity in consciousness? I can't hope to fulfill that question in this article, but perhaps shed a bit of light on these age-old questions as they arise in the astrology consultation.
The question of spirituality and contemporary soul is a vast, complicated and yet terribly simple issue. In The Sacred and The Profane, Mircea Eliade writes about this very issue - the problem of religious experience and its apparent loss through human evolution and social secularization of soulful things. He writes about the split, defining the experiential differences between the sacred and the profane as: "The sacred always manifests itself as a reality of a wholly different order from 'natural' realities. . . Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as . . .an hierophany - [thus] something sacred shows itself to us." (1)
Soul - sacred and profane
So, a religious experience can be differentiated from a mundane experience by the quality of feeling tone it engenders. From the Latin word numen, comes the adjective numinous. Numen means 'god or goddess; divine will; divine command; divine authority; divinity; divine majesty'; and, secondarily it means 'oracle' - all of which impart a feeling of something wholly 'other', of something outside ordinary experience. Numen, then, is not human nor is it cosmic, but evokes a profound sense 'otherness'.
We find numen alive when we know something by other than rational means - when an epiphany reveals a truth. Because we are so wordy today, and tend to compartmentalize everything (a manifestation of the nomos/physis split) and rationalize everything, the mechanized world thinks, therefore, that this experience is invalid, or at best fanciful and imaginative.
However, the loss of connection to the sacred does not eliminate our human need for religious experience. For those who do not have a religious framework - a church, a temple, a synagogue, a sect, a doctrine - religious behaviors still abound. The loss of the sacred as an integrated aspect of life itself results in secondary types of expression such as superstition, nostalgia, sentimentality; obsessive adherence to self-defined 'laws', ritual social activities and so on. For instance, the handshake as a ritual of acknowledgment and other various cultural (secular) greetings, behaviors and shibboleths that allow one to pass from one state of being to another, are all rooted in a religious core.
Fast forwarding to the year 2000, where the division of nature and culture has arrived at a truly alarming global condition, it only makes sense that we all feel concerned about the loss of soul in daily life on an individual basis.
Astrology's role in healing the split
Astrology in itself is a synthesis of the mind/body split; it is the experience of the unity of heaven and earth. Alone, it stands as the metaphor of the undivided self - where both inner and outer worlds meet and where body and soul reside together, untrammeled by the evolution of time and civilization.
Since the earliest days, astrologers have remained steadfast in their belief that the relationship of the planets and the heavenly bodies is connected to the workings of the world. The world, and astrology along with it, has flourished tremendously since the first known horoscope, thus today astrology is more complex, more accurate and more integrated into the mainstream than it was two-and-a-half millennia ago, but that is a statement of its truth. Astrology would never have survived and undergone the requisite changes in tandem - indeed, ahead of, in my view - with scientific and creative social innovation, had astrology itself not been an immutable truth.
Since the beginning of our known history, astrology has undergone peaks and troughs, purges and reclamations, it has survived proclamations and edicts and intellectual scoffing; the attempt to place the astrologer at the periphery of the intellectual universe has only succeeded in part. This may have been a blessing in disguise - apartheids may separate but they cannot sever, indeed, certain cultures flourish in isolation and in rare atmospheres. Astrology is one of those cultures.
Because astrology incorporates both the technical and the symbolic, we can accept a twofold philosophy of this soul/body split: one is the mechanistic time-based concept that science has advanced to subsume soul, thus we can blame it on Rene Descartes or on Newton and his 'single vision' as the poet William Blake called it and/or we can adopt a metaphysical idea that we may have forgotten our soul in the overwhelming busy-ness of contemporary society. I think both are true, hence let's look at an ancient idea of recollecting our soul in the midst of life.
Anamnesis - recollection of the soul
The astrological Neptune recalls the ancient myth of Er, in the tenth book of Plato's Republic. (1) In this tale, Er dies, and comes back to tell the story of his soul's transition from body-death to soul-incarnation. It is a long and detailed journey, but for this purpose we'll focus briefly: after many experiences and the appointment with the Moirae (the three Fates: spinner, weaver and cutter of life's thread) Er's soul reaches and crosses the Plain of Oblivion, which is like Tucson in the summer, hot as the proverbial hell, then arrives to the River Lethe. Er is warned not to drink too deeply from Lethe, but to only slake his thirst, for, ". . . they [the souls] were all required to drink a certain amount of water, but some were too stupid to look after themselves properly and drank more than the required amount." (3)
Lethe - forgetfulness - is the Greek root of our word, lethal, and it is lethal to the soul's memory to drink too much of it's waters because we will then have greater difficulty recollecting our soul's life-purpose once it is reincarnated. It is assumed that the soul has chosen its new body-life and thus will need to recall why it chose that body-life if it is to be a 'successful' life!
Healing the inner split: the astrologer's role
When we are concerned about our spiritual path not being integrated into our daily life, it is an indication that we have been deeply influenced and contaminated by the collective loss of soul memory. But how else can the collective become healed or transformed if the individuals within it each do not take up the aegis for change? The feeling of being soulfully detached from physical life is at best depressing and sad, and at worst a spiritual emergency.
If this is the case now, then as with all diagnoses, it is a sign that resolution is already in process, deep within the individual and collective psyche. These are days of spiritual emergency - witness the vast numbers of books in the last decade alone on the subject of soul, loss of soul, desacralization of society, reclaiming spirit, healing the wounds of culture and so on!
It seems we have lost innate ways to recall easily our soul's purpose and its integrity in our mundane path. William Blake, born in 1757, worried differently but similarly to Yeats, who flourished over one-hundred years later: ". . . The Last Judgment is an overwhelming of bad art and science. Mental things are alone real; what is called corporeal, nobody knows of its dwelling place: it is in fallacy, and its existence an imposture. Where is the existence out of mind or thought? Where is it but in the mind of a fool?" (4) Harsh words, but relevant to our topic. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold (5)
We are living what the ancients predicted, and poets and artists have wept over - we are deep in the chaos of loss of center. Historically, sacred sites were created with the centre as the literal core of the world, the anima/axis mundi, and from that central point, life radiated outward. Sacred spaces and locations being the centre for tribes, cultures and eventually, cities and countries, is analogous to the 'centre' of the individual being the core of spirituality and psychic wholeness. We might consider ourselves as a microcosm wherein all our parts and components are a replication of the world itself.
The symbols and signs in the horoscope embody the totality of the human experience, and since we are made up of all of them, each of us is an expressive part of that whole. The fact that a personal horoscope is biased, and has only a small representation of this whole means that we are designed to act out in a particular fashion, with personality, ego and so on, but we are not restricted to that.
There are twelve signs comprising 360°, there are two lights, eight planets and Chiron (and more if you use asteroids, parts and so on), each of which is in a precisely measured part of that zodiac based on the time of birth. These configurations in their totality are completely unique - they have never existed before, nor will they repeat again in degree, minute and second - ever.
The natal horoscope is both centre and circumference - it is both the core of Self and circumference of worldly experience. You are the centre, the zodiac is the circumference of your world, and the planets are your assigned tasks, your way of being in this world. The soul is not separated from any of this, it is infused, and thus can be recollected through all aspects of living - in your own way.
This view does not preclude specific choices in spiritual paths, or religious expression - but it helps come to terms with one or many that are uniquely 'familiar' and helpful to each individual. Finding that space or path is the life-work of recollecting the soul's purpose.
The temenos - both sacred and profane
Reflection on the soul's purpose requires a sense of safety and a place in which the reflection can be seen. Ideally, the chart reading should create a place for this reflection. A sacred space is called a temenos, and the temenos that can be created in the consulting room or on the telephone with a client, is not defined by walls and doors. It exists outside the realm of matter, and thus, between the astrologer and client him or herself, in some mysterious ritual. In the course of discussion, invoking the symbols and signs in the horoscope, it is possible that numen arise, and truths emerge.
There is however, no rote formula for this experience, which makes archetypal and psychological astrology very difficult to teach - it is only learned. Each chart, each individual and each moment in time is unique in the universe. The combination of horoscope, astrologer, client and moment in time creates the temenos in which the numen might arise. (6)
The issue of centrality being the core of spirituality is resolved in the natal horoscope. That all spiritual icons or sites in the ancient world depicted the 'centre of the world' out from which all life emerged is replicated in the horoscope as a spiritual mandala, as well as a mundane map, all radiating out from the Self-centre. With the sacred, there is a sense of absolute reality and the profane is organized by compartmentalized, segmented reality.
The natal horoscope is a graphic depiction of a symbolically specific mnemonic - one for each person. The individual is in the centre with the array of planets around, all contained within the confines of the zodiac. We have there a perfect picture of self/centre circumscribed by the zodiac/archetypes and the planets all around acting as agents for the Self's archetypal purpose.
To be continued next issue
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Erin Sullivan,
Astrologer
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Erin Sullivan is one of the brightest lights in contemporary astrology. She has been integral to the growth of today's astrology, having founded many groups, run symposia, taught for over thirty years and presented at international conferences around the world.
She is Canadian born, and has lived in many cultures - in 1989 she moved to London England where she took on the position of Series Editor for Penguin, Arkana's prestigious Contemporary Astrology Series. Her tutoring for the Centre for Psychological Astrology in London gave birth to two of her books: Where in the World?Astro*Carto*Graphy and Relocation, and Venus and Jupiter: Bridging the Ideal and the Real.
Erin returned to North America in 1998, and continued to teach, write and consult with clientele from all nations. Her three other books are published by Samuel Weiser (now RedWheel/Weiser Publications):
The Astrology of Family Dynamics (a best seller)
Saturn in Transit: Boundaris of Mind Body and Soul,
and her masterpiece, Retrograde Planets: Traversing the Inner Landscape.
Her company, "Southwest Contemporary Astrology" publishes unique personalized astrology profiles - reports - available online on her website's secure shopper!
She now lives and practices and writes in her Rio Grande riverside home in Northern New Mexico.
Erin Sullivan
SOUTHWEST CONTEMPORARY ASTROLOGY Reports online at:
www.ErinSullivan.com
"As the World Turns: Your Personal Solar Return Profile" - a 60+ page booklet with predictive timing and trends for your solar year - fully illustrated with calendars, beautifully written.
"Your Personal Heroic Journey" - a 70 page booklet, illustrated with full interpretations for a lifetime of Saturn Transits - your cycles of growth and development.
1008 Paseo del Pueblo Sur, #255
TAOS, New Mexico,
87571-6412 USA
Tel: ( 1 ) 505-758-1931
Ext. 1 for SCA
Fax: ( 1 ) 505-751-1353
www.ErinSullivan.com
for Southwest Contemporary Astrology
Erin Sullivan
erinsullivan@newmex.com
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