issue one.qxd - the centre for psychological astrology

Apollon

The Sun-god And The Astrological Sun - Liz Greene

Creativity, Spontaneity, Independence: Three Children Of The Devil - Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig

Whom Doth The Grail Serve? - Anne Whitaker

Fire And The Imagination - Darby Costello

Leonard Cohen’s "Secret Chart" - John Etherington

Issue 1

October 1998

£6

The Journal of Psychological Astrology

Apollo with the ecliptic worn asa sash. This figure is from the2nd half of the 5th century BCE,and is now at the VaticanMuseum. Figleaf courtesy of the Vatican.

Photo: E. Greene

Cover PictureThe Chariot of ApolloOdilon Redon©Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

“The French symbolist artist Odilon Redon, b. April 20th 1840, d. July 6th 1916, isolated byfrail health and parental indifference at an early age, peopled his loneliness with imaginarybeings, as he was later to people his works”

Joan Siegfried, Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia

Published by:The Centre for PsychologicalAstrologyBCM Box 1815London WC1N 3XXEnglandTel/Fax: +44-181-749 2330www.astrologer.com/cpa

Directors: Dr Liz GreeneCharles Harvey

Admin: Juliet Sharman-Burke

Distributed by:John EtheringtonMidheaven Bookshop396 Caledonian RoadLondon N1 1DNEnglandTel: +44-171-607 4133Fax: +44-171-700 6717

Edited by:Dermod Moore4 Midhope HouseMidhope StreetLondon WC1H 8HJEnglandTel: +44-171-278 9434Fax: +44-171-209 1648www.astrologer.com/[email protected]

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Apollon

The Journal of Psychological Astrology

Contents

Editorial 4This Creativity LarkDermod Moore

The Sun-god and the Astrological Sun 6The Mythology and Psychology of ApolloLiz Greene

Creativity, Spontaneity, Independence: 16Three Children of the DevilAdolf Guggenbühl-Craig

The Sun in the Tarot and the Horoscope 24Juliet Sharman-Burke

Whom doth the Grail Serve? 26A Personal Quest in Pursuit of VocationAnne Whitaker

The Point in the Circle: 32The Image of Apollo in the Greco-Roman WorldBrian Hobley

Fire and the Imagination: 44 The Heart of Our StoryDarby Costello

Leonard Cohen's "Secret Chart" 49John Etherington

Reflections 58Experiencing AstrologySarah Bartlett

Anima Mundi 60Astrology in the Theatre of the WorldCharles Harvey

Apollon

polon he who causes the heavenly bodies to move together in harmonyhaploun the simple, a euphemism for the complexity of the oracle, which is also honestiepaieon to heal, also to throw or strike (with consciousness)

from Greek and Egyptian Mythologies, compiled by Yves Bonnefoy, transl. Wendy DonigerUniversity of Chicago Press, 1992

CPA Seminar Schedule and CPA Press Order Form - centre pages

DDermod Moore is aDubliner. A former actorwith Ireland’s NationalTheatre, the Abbey, he is awriter and columnist, andspends a lot of time staringat a computer screen goingblind. He is in training as aPsychosynthesis therapist,and practices as a psycho-logical astrologer inLondon’s Neal’s Yard. Hemoderates the discussiongroup on the Internet onpsychological astrology.

My view of our planet was a glimpse ofdivinity.

Edgar Mitchell, Apollo XIV astronaut

Consciousness, creativity, individuality;these are goals that our Western cul-

ture currently espouses while we hurtleheadlong to the end of this Millennium. Asastrologers, we associate these qualitieswith the Sun, the heart of our psyches; weencourage our clients to strive for thesequalities almost without question. Theseare self-evidently “good” characteristics,our culture tells us; and every day thereare new therapies and remedies andschools of thought aimed at invokingthem. It’s time, however, to take a seriouslook at what they mean. We do not haveto go as far as Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig,mischievously playing Devil’s Advocate inthis issue, and see this drive to creativity aspathology. But we have to look at bothsides of a thing to know it, not only theside presented to us. The brighter thelight, the darker the shadow.

Ihope that this magazine will be of inter-est not only to astrologers, but to any-

one interested in the process of healing, ofgrowth. Mythology offers us such a mineof information on human psychology thatone does not have to accept the divinato-ry aspect of astrology to appreciate theriches that lie therein.

As astrology magazines go, Apollon isperhaps short on traditional astrolog-

ical articles; with the admirable exceptionof John Etherington’s knowledgeable andwell-researched foray into the life ofLeonard Cohen. What we are aiming foris a wide spectrum of thought and experi-ence on a particular theme; and in thisissue, I hope you agree we’ve achieved it.There are articles ranging in style from theacademic earthiness of

Brian Hobley’s research into the archaeol-ogy of ancient Greece and Rome, to theintensely personal and moving autobiogra-phy of Anne Whitaker, which brings herchart, and therefore our understanding ofastrology, to life. In Darby Costello’s pieceon “Fire and the Imagination” we are treat-ed to a dazzling fireworks display of fierysymbolism, that leaves one basking in herinfectious intuition; in Charles Harvey’selegant exposition of the psychology ofglobal economics and politics, he givessome idea of the backdrop against whichwe play out our lives.

We chose the name Apollonbecause first and foremost he rep-

resents the striving for excellence. And yetin spite of this admirable pretension, wealso chose the name Apollon, as opposedto the more familiar Roman version of hisname, because there is already a magazinecalled Apollo, which caters to the antiquetrade. As with everything, the mundane,trivial details involved in bringing a dreamto reality can cause one to stumble, if oneis not careful. In choosing the originalGreek name we are, however, conscious-ly reaching back further to his “Gentlemanof Olympus” nature; the only god forwhom all other gods would stand whenhe entered their presence.

As far as I can make out, the last mag-azine to be entitled “Apollon” was

published by the poet Nikolai Gumilevfrom 1909 -1916; it was the journal of theacmeist literary movement of Russia.Acmeists aspired to qualities of strength, con-creteness and clarity; but such admirableintentions didn’t prevent Gumilev from beingexecuted in 1921, for alleged involvement inan anti-Soviet conspiracy. To fully honourApollon attracts attention; his example servesto remind us of how ambivalent this atten-

tion can be.

EditorialThis creativity lark

page 4 Apollon Issue 1 October 1998

In attempting to understand how Apollolives on in contemporary culture, I

searched the Internet for his name. TheInternet, manifestation of the recentUranus/Neptune conjunction, is as closeas we can get to a collective mind at work,and observing it has proved endlessly fas-cinating for me in my work and play. Aswell as the expected mythological refer-ences, I found mention of the ballet byBallanchine/Stravinsky at the New YorkCity Ballet, some browsing software calledApollon, “Apollongym”, a tanning salon inNew Jersey, and a Greek football team. Ilearned that Apollon is also the name fora proposal for a new scientific experiment“to measure the gluon spin distribution ofthe nucleon by polarised photoproduc-tion of J/Psi mesons.” There’s also a web-site called “The Apollon Galleries” devot-ed to the male nude, which requests visi-tors “who are very religious or wish toenforce their values upon others” to “kind-ly stay out”.

However the vast amount of refer-ences to Apollo are of course relat-

ed to the American project to land on theMoon. It is endlessly fascinating how scien-tists choose their nomenclature. In choos-ing Apollo as the name of their projectthey were perhaps missing the point; sure-ly a Moon goddess should have been cho-sen, if it were the Moon we were trying toreach. But as the decades slip by since thatAugust night (in Europe, anyway) in 1969,when, at the age of six, I was woken up bymy father to watch history in the making,it is possible to place that quintessentiallyApollonian adventure in perspective.

As Liz Greene writes in this issue, “wecannot directly hear the wisdom the

Sun contains except through our feelings,bodies, and imagination.” In our effort toreach the Moon, with two competingsuperpowers vying to be first in the race,we gained not so much an insight into theMoon, as was expected, but into our-selves. For the first time we saw ourhome, the lonely blue planet suspended ininky blackness. Our urge was to reach out,to colonize, to inhabit, to possess oursatellite with what were undeniably thrust-

ing, phallic rockets; but the end result wasso much different to what we could haveimagined.

Using the Apollo missions as ametaphor for our own individual

journeys, we can see how paradoxicalour efforts at becoming more consciousare; how quixotic and yet inspiring, howtransient and yet indelible. The leap ofthe imagination that saw us break outof the realms of what we thought waspossible left behind nothing but a fewflags, a few bits of scrap aluminium, anda couple of golfballs on the surface ofour neighbour, who remains unbe-holden to us. But what we broughtback was the beginning of a new glob-al awareness, a self-consciousnesshitherto inconceivable.

Technology, which had brought somuch change to our world, so

much progress and so much destruc-tion, was being put to use in a way thatsatisfied no urge other than to grow. Ifthe end result of our journeys to theMoon - which cost several humanlives, as well as an obsceneamount of money, consideringthe poverty in the world - left uswith nothing but a few rocks, afew useful technologicaladvances, and some pretty pic-tures, then that is a salutaryreminder of the transience of ourown lives, and the significance offinding meaning and perspec-tive somewhere along the wayin our struggle for growth.

We’ve loosely based thisissue on Apollo himself,

and the theme of creativity. Eachissue we’ll attempt to addressdifferent facets of the mythologyof the solar god, and in so doing,we hope, learn a bit more aboutourselves. We hope youenjoy it.

Launch of Apollo XI

Apollon Issue 1 October 1998

Liz Greene holds a Doctoratein Psychology and theDiploma of the Faculty ofAstrological Studies, and is aqualified Jungian analyst. Sheworks as a professionalastrologer and analyst, andteaches and lectures exten-sively throughout Europe. Sheis a Patron of the Faculty ofAstrological Studies. She is theauthor of many books onastrological and psychologicalthemes, including Saturn,Relating, Astrology for Lovers,the Astrology of Fate, and TheAstrological Neptune and theQuest for Redemption. Shelives in Switzerland.

“What is a poet? He is a man ofreligious experience whose cre-

ative gift enables him to communicatespiritual truths to men. His poetry canbring deliverance from spiritual death,bringing his hearers to a new knowledgeof their divine Creator, who gave him thisspecial power. In this way souls that havebeen disordered can be healed, and thehuman relation with God may be restoredwhen it has been impaired...This is thefruit and indeed the purpose of music andpoetry, direct gifts from God to mankind.”Elizabeth Henry, Orpheus and His Lute

Myth and astrology have always been hand-maidens, for both are symbolic expres-

sions of the human perception of the cosmos.From Babylonian times onward, the planets,luminaries and fixed stars have represented notonly forces or agents which influence or corre-spond with human affairs, but also characters instories which express in imaginal form thearchetypal patterns inherent in life and in thehuman psyche. The astrologer who is willing toexplore the mythic background of the planetstaps a rich resource of understanding andinsight which can amplify and enhance our graspof astrological symbolism; and this in turn makesus better astrologers because we can enter intothe client’s inner world and communicate ourinterpretations in language which touches theheart as well as the intellect. The importance ofmyth is nowhere more emphasised than in ourinterpretations of the astrological Sun, which isencrusted in myths from many ages and cul-tures. Keywords such as “self-expression” donot really help us; mythic images convey muchmore of the energy and intent of the Sun. Andnone of these mythic images is more relevantto the expression and meaning of the Sun inthe individual horoscope than the nature androle of the Greek Sun-god Apollo (we havedropped the final “n” from the name in popular

usage, but his correct Greek name is Apollon).This deity stands behind not only the founda-tions of Western culture, but also behind manyof the attributes which Christianity later appro-priated and associated with Christ.

Apollo has been called the “gentleman ofOlympus”, the most quintessentially Greek

of all the Greek gods. In sculptures and frescoeshe is invariably portrayed as beautiful andyouthful; rarely clothed, his body is athletic andof those perfect proportions so idealised by theGreeks. But the origins of Apollo are far moreancient than classical Greece; archaeologicalevidence suggests that the beginning of his cultpredates the Bronze Age. There are many mys-teries surrounding the emergence of this god,not least his name, about which scholarly argu-ments still rage. We know of the origins of hisGreek form as early as the 8th century BCE,and by the 5th century BCE he was associatednot only with the Sun but also with prophecy,healing, the breaking of family curses, and thebringing of artistic inspiration (especially musicand poetry) to human beings. These multipleattributes make him a difficult god to compre-hend, for initially we may fail to see the con-nections between his many different faces. Butthe more we delve into Apollo’s many func-tions, the greater is our understanding of whatthe Sun really means in the horoscope.

Apollo the light-bringer

Just as the Sun itself was perceived in theancient world as the giver of light, Apollo as

the representative of the Sun was perceived asthe giver of inner light. “Know thyself” was thedictum carved in stone at his shrine at Delphi,and this emphasises the importance of Apolloas a symbol of consciousness. The god was notunderstood as the physical Sun in the heavens;he was the carrier of the Sun, bearing it fromEast to West each day in his golden chariot.The physical Sun was remote and untouchable;it was the One, the essence of life itself, impos-sible to approach or fully comprehend. Apollo’shuman form tells us he is a reflection of some-thing within the human psyche - a vessel or car-rier for the ineffable. It is not surprising that

The Sun-god and the Astrological SunThe mythology and psychology of ApolloIn this article, Liz Greene sets her gaze on the Sun and the solar god Apollo. She writesin her sparkling, lucid style about the main mythic functions of Apollo, namely cosmocrator,prophet, breaker of family curses, healer, and culture-bringer, and the relevance of these tounderstanding the astrological Sun.

Pythagoras and Plato both favoured Apollo, forphilosophy in its most profound sense - thelove of wisdom - is related to this process ofacquiring consciousness in order to reconnectwith what Plato called the “eternal realities”.Apollo’s role as breaker of family curses andslayer of the darkness was pre-eminent, and itwas to him that those tormented by guilt fromthe past turned. In myth, his conflicts withfemale chthonic underworld deities such as thegiant serpent Python and the terrible Erinyes or“Furies” mark him as the champion of thatwhich is free over that which is bound by theforces of fate and ancestral compulsion. Yetalthough he is the conqueror of these forces, healso incorporates them into his worship; thePython becomes one of his chief symbols, notonly in its serpent form in Greco-Romaniconography, but also through the priestesscalled Pythoness who communicated the god’soracle. These chthonic mother-deities werealso honoured at Delphi through the presenceof the omphalos or navel-stone, the centre ofthe earth, where the light of the Sun incarnatedon earth. On coins issued at Delphi we may seethe image of the omphalos or navel-stone as apoint at the centre of a circle; the circle wasassociated with Apollo because of the greatround of the Sun through the heavens, andbecause the circle is without beginning andwithout end and therefore suggests divinity andeternity. While there is nodirect documentary evidenceto suggest that the use of thisimage - the point in the circle- later gave rise to our astro-logical glyph for the Sun, firstused during the Renaissance, the connection isimpossible to ignore.

What does this role of light-bringer implyin terms of how we interpret the Sun in

the horoscope? First of all it suggests that thesymbol of Apollo describes some fundamentalcentrality within us - a core identity or sense ofpersonal destiny which arises from conscious-ness of ourselves as individuals, and which hasthe power to dispel the compulsions which

arise from one’s childhood and family back-ground. The Greek “family curse” is a vividdescription of unresolved unconscious conflictswhich wend their way from generation to gen-eration, eventually arriving on the psychicdoorstep of the “identified patient” (as he orshe is known in family therapy) who acts outthe burden of this unconscious inheritancethrough physical or psychological illness.Anyone who has experienced the power ofcompulsions - whether for drugs, alcohol, food,or through destructive or self-destructivebehaviour - will know how impossible it is toreason these away, and often it is only througha prolonged and honest exploration of trappedfeelings from the past that any release cancome. The therapeutic process is thus anApollonian process, not because it is intellectu-al, but because it is aimed at increasing con-sciousness and bringing light into the darkness.That which is kept in the dark cannot change orgrow. Non-verbal therapies can also achievethis goal; Apollo is not biased toward any spe-cial school of psychological thought, as long asthe process serves the growing sense of aninner self. The Sun in the horoscope is thus animage of something within us which is capableof forming a central and indestructible identityaround which the horoscope revolves - an egowhich can contain and perhaps even transformthe various conflicts and imbalances whichevery horoscope possesses. Such conflicts andimbalances, if exacerbated by early difficultieswithout any conscious light to illuminate theirorigins and nature, can result in great suffering.

AApollo the cosmocrator

Apollo is also the cosmocrator, the centrearound whom the solar system revolves. In

this role he is often portrayed in ancient artholding or wearing the zodiac wheel, for thezodiac is a representation of the ecliptic - theapparent path of the Sun around the earth - inimaginal form, reflecting a cycle of developmentwhich is embodied in the seasons andexpressed also in the multi-levelled cycles of anindividual life. (See images on inside front coverand overleaf.) It is worth noting that the zodiacis a Greek invention, and coincides in time withthe growing power of the cult of Apollo in the5th century BCE. Apollo and the astrologywhich we have inherited from the Greeks aredeeply linked, and both reflect the same essen-tial perception of an orderly cosmos. Theorderly motion of the cosmos depends onApollo as bearer of the purpose and intelli-gence of the divine light of the Sun, and it is hisreasoning principle that keeps the planets intheir courses. Here again we can gain a lot ofinsight into what function the Sun serves in thehoroscope, for this centrality puts the individualat the centre of his or her life, and allows theother factors in birth chart to relate to each

Apollon Issue 1 October 1998 page 7

Incuse square, within which a cir-cle with a point in the centre(omphalos)

Temple of Apollo, front and oneside visible; within, statue ofApollo naked, leaning on column.In pediment of temple, point incircle (omphalos)

Catalogue of the Greek Coins in theBritish Museum©Arnoldo Forni Editore,Bologna, 1963


Mosaic from the 3rd century CE,now at the Sentinum, Munich.The female figure represents theearth-goddess, of whom theomphalos is a symbol. Apollo’s“hula-hoop” is the ecliptic.

Photo: E. Greene

other in harmony. The orderly motion of thecosmos was understood as the Music of theSpheres, and here the god of music and the godas cosmocrator overlap and represent a funda-mental pattern in life which is both orderly andbeautiful. Every birth chart might be seen in thisway, regardless of how many hard aspects orplanets in detriment or fall one might find; andperhaps we might say that it is the ability toexpress the Sun which makes it possible tounlock harmonious possibilities, rather than thenature of planetary aspects themselves. In otherwords, a Mars-Saturn square or a Moon-Plutoopposition may generate conflict, but they aretruly destructive only when there is no centralcore from which the individual can relate to andbalance the needs of these planets. The Sun isthe great reconciler of internal planetary con-flicts, allowing them to work for rather thanagainst life. Once again, a sense of self is theglue which binds the chart together and allowsus to express and mediate it rather than becontrolled by it.

Apollo the artist

Apollo is a culture-bringer who inspireshuman beings to creative expression

through the agency of the Muses. This group offeminine figures each represents one of the arts

- and it is interesting to see just what theGreeks considered an art. Chief among theMuses was Calliope, the Muse of music, whichis also one of the gifts of Apollo himself; hencethe lyre with which he is often shown in ancientsculptures and frescoes. Urania is the Muse ofastrology, or, to be more precise, of astrologia,which was the combination of astrology andwhat we would now call astronomy. From theperspective of this mythic backdrop astrologywas not perceived as a science in the sense wewould now use the term, but rather, as an art;and inspiration by the Muse was deemed nec-essary in order to tap its wisdom. The Museswere variously considered Apollo’s compan-ions, lovers, or daughters; all three versionsexist in myth. But it is clear that, whatever rela-tionship they hold with him, they are expres-sions of his power to touch and inspire humanbeings through the creative imagination.

We should therefore not be surprised atthe link between the astrological Sun

and the field of human creative expression, rep-resented by the 5th house of the horoscope.The god provides the inspiration, but his Musesembody him in accessible form and serve asbridges between the god and the human imag-ination. In Gustave Moreau’s magnificent painting


Detail from “The Muses LeavingTheir Father Apollo to Go andEnlighten the World" by GustaveMoreau.It was painted in oil on canvas in1868, and is now in the Muséenational Gustave Moreau, Paris.©Photo RMN - C. Jean

It is relevant that theoracle was given bythe Pythoness; thissuggests that wecannot directly hearthe wisdom the Suncontains exceptthrough our feel-ings, bodies, andimagination.

of Apollo and the Muses, the god is shownsending the Muses forth to educate and inspirehumankind. (See opposite.) Apollo’s role is thusas educator, a word which comes from a Greekroot meaning “to lead forth”. This is Plato’s ideaof education - eliciting a response from the soulwhich reminds us of the higher spheres fromwhich we have come. Art as education is ratherdifferent from art as entertainment, or art aspolitical message. The solar dimension of artis-tic expression is a highly individual business,springing from deep within oneself and reflect-ing one’s own special connection with thesource of life. It is not a collective thing,although inspirational creative work may touchthe feelings of the collective if one is sufficientlyopen to the larger psyche. But its source is notthe collective; it is the individual Sun, the indi-vidual essence. The art of the astrological Sunmay not necessarily be in a form recognisable asart; it may be embodied in the way one livesone’s life. As a reflection of the role of con-sciousness in a person’s life, this solar link withinspiration suggests that, wherever the Sun isplaced in the chart, this is where we may expe-rience a sense of connection with the divinethrough finding some vehicle or mediumthrough which we can express that which ismost inspiring to our own souls. Here we cansee the connection between the Sun and voca-tion, whether that vocation is financially remu-nerative or something with which we are pre-occupied alone in our private hours. It also sug-gests that everyone has a “vocation” in thedeepest sense - even if it is not viable as amoney-earning occupation in the world. But asense of vocation cannot occur unless the indi-vidual is open to that inner inspiration, and will-ing to give loyalty to his or her individual valuesand vision.

AApollo the prophet

Prophecy is not something we ordinarilyassociate with the Sun. We tend to think of

prophecy in connection with psychism,although psychism is related to a blurring ofindividual boundaries and a capacity to enterinto the larger life of the cosmos (or the life ofanother human being) and feel what is occur-ring there. Prophecy, as it was expressedthrough Apollo’s oracles, is something quite dif-ferent. Apollo’s was called Double-Tonguedbecause his oracles were so perplexing; butwhat they expressed was a basic scheme ordesign, which could be interpreted (and usuallywas) from a purely personal point of view.Then the oracle generally went wrong, and wehave many myths describing situations wherethe hero or heroine tries to cheat the oracle, orinterprets it wrongly with disastrous results.

In other words, the message of the oracle wasnot “psychic”, but revealed in a flash the

essential pattern underpinning the individual’s

life, or highlighted the bare bones of a chapterin that life. We are really looking at what wemean by destiny, rather than “fate” in the com-pulsive sense, and in this respect Apollo’sprophecies are indeed related to the astrologi-cal Sun. When we glimpse an inner design ordestiny, it gives our lives meaning and gives ussomething to live for; and we can get insightinto that design if we look at the placement ofthe Sun in the birth chart by house, sign andaspect. Here is our future, the person we arepotentially capable of becoming and deeplywish and need to become, if we are to feel ourlives have some reason other than eating,reproducing, and dying. We may misinterpretthe flash of meaning which the Sun gives,depending on our age, circumstances, and emo-tional needs and conflicts. But the core story ofthe individual’s destiny is already known some-where inside, and this is perhaps why the Sun isso closely connected with vocation, one’s “call-ing”, or, as Howard Sasportas put it, “a call fromthe inner Self”. Prophecy as a glimpse of destiny,and destiny embodied in vocation, reflect oneof Apollo’s most profound links with the astro-logical Sun. It is relevant that the oracle wasgiven by the Pythoness; this suggests that wecannot directly hear the wisdom the Sun con-tains except through our feelings, bodies, andimagination. Without this mouthpiece Apollo’sknowledge is inaccessible. But unless we active-ly seek Apollo’s wisdom, the Pythoness is leftwith nothing to say.

We can also see the relevance of astrolo-gy to Apollo, in the sense that as

astrologers we seek to interpret the inherentpattern, the core story of the individual’s life.The birth chart is a form of oracle, not in thefortune-telling sense - although this dimensionof astrology has always been with us - but as ameans of ascertaining the basic design which isour destiny. That this design is inner rather thanouter is something which psychological astrolo-gy strives to emphasise, although life circum-stances tend to reflect and embody the internalstory. And like Apollo’s oracle, the configura-tions of the birth chart may be misinterpreted,by the astrologer as well as the client, becauseone lacks the perspective to view the wholepicture and is focused on a special or immedi-ate concern.

Apollo the healer

Apollo’s role as a physician-healer led to the riseof many Asclepions or healing centres through-

out the ancient world. Asclepios was said to be theson of Apollo, a facet of the god incarnated inhuman flesh, and at all these healing shrines somemonument or structure was always included linkingAsclepios with his divine father. Although there aremany mysteries surrounding just what kind of med-icine was practised at these healing centres, we doknow that music played an important part, as did the


inspiration and guidance of dreams. The astrologicalSun is therefore an inner healer, and it may beimportant for us as astrologers to understandjust what this might mean psychologically.

Sickness in terms of Apollo really means being cutoff from the light of the Sun. The Greeks under-

stood sickness to be psychic as well as physical, andthe means of re-establishing harmony within thesoul lay in music and dream-work - in other words,a relationship to what we would now call theunconscious. Today many of us tend to forget howprofoundly music affects us, and how it can gener-ate not only harmony but also disharmony. Musichas become a political as much as a cultural issuethese days, and we are in danger of losing sight of itseducational and inspirational function. But music isthe chief instrument of Apollo the healer, and musicwas understood to reflect the Music of the Spheres- the cosmic harmony. Thus sickness is a disharmo-ny of the soul, a break in the human connection tothe order of the larger cosmos; and healing is arestoration of inner harmony and a reconnection tothe source. The will to live is deeply connected withthe Sun in the horoscope, and the will to live arisesfrom a sense of meaning; and this in turn arises froma feeling of being connected with something greaterthan oneself. The Sun gives us a feeling of being avessel for something larger, something higher, and ifwe can put ourselves in harmony with it, we can finda meaning in life even if we experience tragedy andloss. Every physician knows that without the will tolive, the ill patient will die, regardless of the efficacyof physical cures. In the ancient world the Sun washyleg, the life-giver, and a loss of connection with theSun meant a loss of the will to live.

The harmony suggested by these ancientmetaphors may not mean harmony in one’s

life in the ordinary sense; no birth chart isdevoid of conflict and neither is any human life.But a sense of alignment is one of the gifts ofexpressing the Sun in the horoscope, and thisalignment with a greater pattern - a feeling ofindividual destiny and purpose - may lie closerto what was understood as Apollo’s healing.The process of psychotherapy is an obviousarena today where the individual can reconnectwith a sense of being what he or she is meantto be, freed from the pressures and expecta-tions of family background and collectiveunconsciousness. The arts are perhaps anotherarena where this sense of reconnection canoccur, provided they are kept free of politicisingand not subsumed entirely in the gratificationsof banal entertainment. But such a perspectiveis perhaps politically incorrect these days, forthe word “elitist” is forever on the lips of thosewho do not wish to make the effort to find theinner connection which the Sun requires of us.To be an individual is to be alone and elite, asis the Sun-god himself.

WWhen the Sun doesn’t shine

Depression, loss of the will to live, feelingdominated by inner compulsions, too

great a dependency on others, identificationwith the collective resulting in a sense of notbeing real unless others are there to provide amirror - all these experiences may result if wedo not express the Sun in the horoscope. Andexpressing the Sun means making room inone’s life for the values and needs of the Sun-sign, involving oneself actively in the sphere oflife represented by its natal house, and honour-ing the needs of the planets which aspect it.When we are cut off from the functions sym-bolised by the mythic Apollo, we experiencepassivity, powerlessness, meaninglessness, andloss of confidence. We need others to con-stantly affirm who we are, and we are fright-ened of having any individual feeling or opinionwhich might isolate us from the collectivearound us. No single planet in the birth chart isitself whole, and the Sun too may be overem-phasised at the expense of instinctual needsand at the expense of others; Apollo is not theonly god. But it is perhaps more common tomeet individuals who have too little, rather thantoo much, Sun. As astrologers we need to askourselves why any individual should not be ableto relate to the Sun in the horoscope. Practisingastrologers have all met the client who displaysnothing of the Sun, and cannot recognise any ofthe Sun-sign attributes in his or her tempera-ment. Why should this be?

Anumber of factors may contribute to theinability or unwillingness to form a strong

enough ego. First of these is the effect of theearly environment, which, regardless of internalchart strengths, may, if it is destructive enough,succeed - for a time - in blanketing the Sun witha suffocating darkness so that it cannot shine.Systematic erosion of the child’s sense of selfmay be part of this; parents who themselvescannot connect with Apollo’s light may resentseeing it in their children, and may do their bestto convince the child that it is the family thatmatters, not the individual. Collective pressuresmay also contribute, especially in societieswhere individual expression is tantamount to acriminal act, as it was under the old SovietUnion regime. But it is questionable whether adestructive environment can wholly thwart thelight of the Sun if the individual himself or her-self is not somehow caught in an inner conflict.To understand this we need to look at theaspects to the Sun in the birth chart, and also atthe way in which the Sun “sits” in the chart inrelation to the balance of elements.

Achart lacking in the element of fire maysuggest that the individual finds it hard to

trust the inspiration of the Sun, and maysee himself or herself as “uncreative” ordestined to serve those who are more

...expressing the Sunmeans making roomin one’s life for thevalues and needs ofthe Sun-sign, involv-ing oneself activelyin the sphere of liferepresented by itsnatal house, andhonouring the needsof the planets whichaspect it.


creative. This generates an inner conflictwhich may be helped by an honest look atover-dominant security needs or too greata dependency on what others think. A childwith such a chart balance, born into a fam-ily which emphasises responsibility to oth-ers, may readily take on the role of care-taker, and may fear self-expression as aninstrument of loneliness and alienationfrom the family. Hard aspects to the Sunfrom planets such as Saturn and Chironmay also reflect an inner conflict, a deepdoubt in one’s worth as an individual whichmakes it hard to trust solar light. The Sunmay be blocked, or there may be a strenu-ous overcompensation which offers no realrelief. Such aspects to the Sun may alsoreflect issues with the father, who may him-self be wounded or unable to express anindividual vision, or who may be too criti-cal, indifferent or disinterested to provideencouragement for his child’s developingsense of self. The Sun can indeed beexpressed however difficult its aspects, buta compromise may be required betweenvision and the reality of one’s personal lim-its. Hard aspects from the Sun to the outerplanets may also suggest a deep conflictbetween one’s openness to and allegianceto the collective, and one’s need to shine asan individual. Such a conflict also requires acompromise - a vehicle through which onemay express one’s own values and identityand also serve the collective for which oneis a kind of mouthpiece. Everything heredepends on balance; or, as we are instruct-ed by the inscription at Delphi, “Nothing inexcess”.

House placements may also reflect aninner conflict between individual self-

expression and collective factors; the Sun inthe 8th, 11th, or 12th may suggest, like theSun aspecting the outer planets, a deepopenness to the collective psyche and aneed to find a medium through which indi-vidual vision can be expressed as a contri-bution to the collective. The Sun in the 4thor 10th may reflect a powerful bond toone of the parents, which makes it hard forthe Sun to convey the light of one’s ownself; rather, it is a vessel for the unlived lifeof the parent. There are many other waysin which inner conflict may be expressed inthe chart, perhaps exacerbated by the earlyenvironment, which results in a loss of theSun’s light. Then we have to work harderto find and express the light. It should notbe thought that a well-aspected Sun in thesign of its dignity or exaltation means onehas no difficulties in life; too much Sun maybe too much of a good thing, and for thosein whom Apollo is thriving, the loss of lunarcontact may present a different but equally

painful kind of disconnection. But if weremember the symbol of the Sun-god ascosmocrator, loss of the Sun’s light is tanta-mount to loss of a sense of individualmeaning, and no amount of lunar emotion-al fulfilment can compensate for this. Wemay find a reason to go on living even if weare alone. But if we have no reason to live,then we will try to live through others; andwhen they disappoint us or refuse to allowus to continue along this path, we may thenhave to cope with the loss of the will to livewhich, in ancient times, was healable onlythrough the agency of Apollo.

TThe price to be paid

The mythology of Apollo also tells us theprice to be paid if we are to develop

the Sun and define ourselves as individuals.Apollo is a god who stands alone, unmar-ried and often rejected by lovers; and hehas bad luck with his children, all of whomcome to early violent ends. Orpheus is tornto pieces by Maenads; Asclepios is struckby Zeus’ thunderbolt; Phaëton crashes thesolar chariot and is consumed in flames.Although loved by gods and humans alike,Apollo has no family and establishes nodynasty. This imagery should not be takenliterally, for expressing the Sun does notnecessarily deny us a family or good rela-tionships with other human beings. But ifwe choose to be individuals, we may haveto sacrifice the luxury of living throughother human beings, and especially livingthrough our partners and children, whomay strongly resist what they experience asdomination. Thus Apollo is an image ofsomething within us which is alone and self-contained, and which can shine only if weare willing to detach sufficiently from oth-ers to affirm an individual centre and mean-ing. The price of enjoying the Sun’s light isa certain degree of aloneness, although thisis rarely literal in the sense of having noactual companionship. But inwardly, onecannot ever entirely sink into that state ofunconscious fusion which exists when theego has never fully formed. Some conflictwith family and collective may be inevitable.However, the ancient astrological associa-tion of the Sun with the heart and withlove suggests that what we often call lovemay actually be a state of psychic fusionand dependency; and it may even be thatwe cannot truly love another individual assomeone separate and worthy of respect ifwe are not separate individuals ourselves.

Apollo is of course only one of a familyof gods, and the Sun is only one of a

family of planets in the birth chart. We can-not be entirely alone, for we are part of alarger system and would be wise not to


KnowThyself!

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say

Welcometo

Apollon

forget our antecedents and our participation inthe collective in which we live and move andhave our being. But it is not surprising that, evengiven the nature of the unhappiness which aris-es when the Sun does not shine, we still showreluctance to pay the price for its light. Fear ofloneliness is the great enemy of solar light, andso is fear of envy, which is tantamount to thesame thing; for others’ envy hurts deeplybecause we need others’ love and approval somuch. If we are too unsure of ourselves to riskthe disapproval of others, we cannot expressthe Sun sufficiently. If we are worried that oth-ers will resent us if we produce, or simply are,something “special”, then we must alwaysensure that we are ordinary, and may thenattack and attempt to destroy others who dareto express solar light because we are eaten upby envy ourselves. This archetypal dilemma maybe observed not only in myth but also in histo-ry, and in the questionable position of the artistin society. The artist is recognised as special andis usually glamorised, but often also attackedand even destroyed by the very people forwhom he or she is the mouthpiece. This is nota political issue, but rather, an archetypal one,

although it has taken political forms throughoutthe centuries. One example was Plato, thatgreat adherent of Apollonian light, who was dri-ven from Syracuse and nearly murdered whenhe attempted to restrict theatrical perfor-mances to those which educated rather thanthose which merely entertained. History as wellas myth provides us with examples of howthreatening solar light can be, and not onlywhen it is itself overly dominant and expressedin tyrannical forms. For each individual, thisarchetypal conflict is relevant, for when we talkabout individual creativity, we are really talkingabout the definition of an individual essence,different from that of everyone else, which hasits own destiny and contribution to make to life.And because astrology itself is under the gover-nance of Apollo, through his role as cosmocra-tor and also through his Muse Urania, we asastrologers may be called upon to take the roleof the Sun when we interpret the chart for theclient, shedding light on how the client’s innerlight may be encouraged, as well as making clearthe reasons why it is not already shining, andthe price to be paid if it does.

Detail from a silver bowl fromthe 4th century CE, now at theMuseo della civiltà romana, Milan.©H. G. Gundel Zodiakos, 1992


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“The creative, spontaneous and indepen-dent human being is the goal of education.”

Anonymous, 1985

In a current psychological periodical, I cameacross this advertisement. “Course in

Psychology - five weekends. How can you becomecreative, spontaneous and independent? Attendingthis course will enable you to develop your creativ-ity, win back your spontaneity and become psy-chologically independent.” The advertisementangered me. The words “creative,” “sponta-neous” and “independent” made my gall rise. Ihad often heard and read these three words inconjunction with psychology and apparentlythey touched a sore spot in me. I felt I had toget to the bottom of the matter for myself.

I become uncomfortable when people talk andwrite about a phenomenon so often and with

such enthusiasm. The level of popularity leavesme with the impression that something is rot-ten in the state of Denmark. In the three con-cepts, creativity, spontaneity and independence,I imagined I sniffed something pathological. Forthis reason I will take a closer look at them inthe following discussion. CCreativity

Let us first turn to creativity. What is creative?The majority of what we call “scientific” def-

initions of creativity are anything but creative.Here are several examples from psychologytextbooks:“Creativity can be defined quite simply as the abil-ity to bring something new into being.” This defi-nition is a tautology: creativity is creativity.“An idea is accepted as creative in the social sys-tem when it contains new or novel elements in aparticular situation and when a meaningful contri-bution to problem resolution is seen.” This issomewhat more complex, but does not take usvery much further. “Creativity is the ability to operate not merely fromone perspective, but to consider and test out avariety of possibilities.” This is certainly correct,but no deeper dimensions open up for us here. Finally, I would like to quote Erich Fromm:“Creativity means to become more aware and toreact or, the readiness to be born new each day.”Fromm’s definition has the advantage that ituses an image, rebirth, but it is so general thatit, too, is not much help for us.

Above all, I became uncomfortable with themere term “creativity,” believing therein to

have smelled hidden psychopathology. In thisregard, the above definitions were not muchcomfort. They failed to explain my unusual vex-ation. I will refrain from defining creativity, itself,

since I have the impression that I am not cre-ative enough to do so. I will say that we findcreativity in the most widely differing activitiesof human beings; in art, in science, in technolo-gy, in psychology and so forth. There are appar-ently many kinds of creativity, but scarcely onesatisfying definition.

Prior to the Renaissance, creativity as a con-cept, as an idea, as something of great

import for the individual did not exist. Only inthe sixteenth century did the notion of the“genius” in the sense of the creative man appearin Italy. Such a “genius” was understood to bean artist or engineer, someone who workedindependently, who did not depend on theauthority of antiquity. By the seventeenth cen-tury, the word genius had become an integralpart of the Italian language in our present-daymeaning of someone who is creative. English,French and German then adopted the word inthe eighteenth century when CesareLombroso, the famous Italian criminologist,wrote his well-known book, The Man of Genius.In this work, Lombroso portrayed genius as theessence of the creative man.

Today “genius” has lost something of itsattraction; we speak of creativity instead. In

our age it is almost a “must” to be creative. It isexpected of us psychotherapists that we helpour patients become creative. Everyone is sup-posed to develop his creativity, goes the think-ing. The course I mentioned earlier is an exam-ple of how psychotherapists expect to helpeveryone become creative.

We should at least ask once and honestly,“Is everyone truly creative or at least

potentially creative?” Certainly a great numberof people are capable of very nice drawings andpaintings. We encourage patients, for instance,to express themselves in so-called artistic ways.Their “creations” carry great significance forthese patients and their therapist, representspiritual life and promote psychic development.If, however, we were being unprejudiced, wewould have to admit that such drawings, paint-ings and sculptures of patients are, as a rule,very collective and totally lacking originality.They contain no message for the general pub-lic, in no way do they have universal value andthey offer nothing new.

Reversing positions, let us consider the psy-chological ideas of the majority of us psy-

chologists and psychiatrists. By and large, ourideas are completely unoriginal and collective!We can hardly recognise any kind of creativityand even less something truly new in them. Inform and content, these ideas are but repeti-tions or simply plain hard work. They are notgenuinely creative, something very rare.

Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig isformer president of boththe C.G. Jung Institute,Zürich, and the InternationalAssociation of AnalyticalPsychology. He is the authorof several important andcontroversial books on psy-chological themes, includingEros on Crutches, Marriage -Dead or Alive, and Power inthe Helping Professions.


Creativity, Spontaneity, Independence: Three Children of the DevilIn his book From the Wrong Side, renowned Jungian analyst Adolf Guggenbühl-Craigoffers paradoxical views of established psychological truths. In the first chapter, reproducedhere by kind permission of the author, he tackles a trinity of sacred cows, and introduces usto a new concept: Self-Effacing Therapy. Take a deep breath, this may hurt a little...

From the Wrong Side - a paradoxical approach to psychologyAdolf Guggenbühl-CraigTranslated by Gary V. HartmanSpring Publications, Inc.Woodstock, Connecticut, USAISBN 0-88214-357-3

The greatness ofcreative workappears to bear noreal relationship tothe individual per-sonality and charac-ter of the creativehuman being.

*Parenthetically, when I speak ofthe artist, author and so forth, Iintend, as a matter of course, toinclude female artists andauthors. Since I belong to theolder generation, the masculinefigures of speech carry, on onehand, the quality of maleness and,on the other, have universal sig-nifcance, including both womenand men.

What about children’s drawings? Children’spaintings and drawings are touching,

often even profound, moving the hearts of par-ents, surprising our friends and interesting ther-apists. When hung on the wall, however, usual-ly they soon become boring. In my neighbour-hood, children spontaneously and on their ownpainted the walls of an underpass. They werelikewise permitted to decorate some of thewalls of their school. We were all enthusiasticand delighted, but after only six months these“works of art” had become increasingly tire-some until the adults wished that they wouldsimply disappear.

We project so much onto children andonto what they produce. We project the

divine child, an archetype which carries new-ness, freshness, hope and future. “Child” pos-sesses qualities of being alive, not-yet-repressedand blossoming. In the primitivity and awkward-ness of children’s drawings, we believe we findour own lack of originality and freshness. As wewithdraw these projections over time, whatremains are only somewhat tiresome drawings,paintings or sculptures.

What really characterizes a truly creativehuman being? What is unique about an

artist, for example, an innovative scientist, aground-breaking psychologist or someone whootherwise is a genius in the sense of theRenaissance? How is such an individual differentfrom the average citizen? The former’s work,ideas, or insights have importance not only forhimself or his family and friends, but are newand stimulating for a larger circle of humanity.This significance does not always manifest itselfimmediately and seldom goes uncontested, butis at least the goal of the activity.

Many creative individuals, artists especially,suffer from the delusion that they work

only for themselves and in no way for the pub-lic at large. Yet, when this same public fails tovalue their work, artists often succumb todespair. When the artist does not experience itconsciously, but represses the despair, it reap-pears in his dreams. “To show his work is vitalfor the artist, the sine qua non of his existence,”wrote the French painter, Edouard Manet. Tobe appreciated by the public is an existentialquestion for an artist. If a work of art neverinterests someone else, then perhaps it isbecause it is not art at all, but only the individ-ual expression of the artist. Lacking any newmessage for general humanity, art may be pure-ly personal. An artist wants to express morethan the personal, to do more than depict onlyhimself or heal more than himself.

The greatness of creative work appears tobear no real relationship to the individual

personality and character of the creative humanbeing. I have read many fascinating novels, seenvarious wonderful paintings, old as well as mod-ern and marvelled at numerous original ideas.When I subsequently have had the good for-tune to personally meet and sometimes get toknow the artist, author or scientist, I have usu-ally been sorely disappointed. I have come torealize that the greatness of the work seems inno way to correlate with any kind of greatnessof soul in the creator. I often, therefore, resolvenot to spoil my pleasure or my admiration forthe work, itself, by personal meetings with theoriginator.

Due to the play and the film, Amadeus,Mozart has recently received renewed

popular attention. It is difficult for me to explainpsychologically how this curious man couldhave created such divine music. Although hispersonality, life history and his being certainlyinfluenced his music in many ways, his person-ality does not explain the godliness of his music.

Is this discrepancy between person and workreally so astonishing? I believe it is only aston-

ishing if we view creativity as something per-sonal. I would like to postulate the following:the actual, meaningful character of a creativeindividual’s work has little to do with that indi-vidual’s personal psyche. To be sure, an author’smother complex, for example, will show itself inhis novels. Life history, forefathers and familybackground all influence the themes and stylesof poets and writers. Character and psy-chopathology find equal expression in the cre-ations of novelists as well as patients. To theextent, however, that a creation touches oth-ers, touches the general public, it is much morethan just the expression of a single person andhis problems. It seems almost as though thegenius, the creative individual, be he artist,author, or scientist, whoever creates in a non-personal way, is not himself, creative.* “Onemust be able to say that this or that painting isthe way it is in its power, because it is ‘touchedby God’”, said Pablo Picasso.

Neither consciousness nor unconsciousness,neither the creative individual nor the

genius are themselves creatively active. It is cre-ative, whatever this it may be, for creativity hap-pens outside of the individual psyche. A highlygifted author of psychological books expressedit this way: “When I write, it seems to me thatmy fingers write on their own and not I, myself.My fingers play with the typewriter likeautonomous beings.” Phenomenologically, atleast, it seems that a power external to the onecreating is at work, that the creator is but a toolor vessel. How do I arrive at this hypothesis?First, my hypothesis is based on my experiencewith artists and creative individuals from a variety offields, as I have already mentioned. My hypo-thesis also finds support in the word “gifted.”“Gifted” means nothing less than that we pos-sess something not part of ourselves, a gift,


something that is given to us. The supraperson-al aspect of creativity finds further expression inthe phrase “kissed by the Muses.” Somethingother, the Muses, “gifts” or “kisses” the poet.

Ibelieve that creativity is always impersonal,always transcends the personal. We should,

therefore, speak of “transcendent creativity”.The individual person is but an instrument hav-ing little or nothing to do with the creation. Bythe way, Freud says something similar. Freudemphasizes when speaking of the artist that hecannot say what determines an artist or whatart is. He is only capable of writing about thatwhich an artist expresses as a human being andhow this shines through in a work of art. Whatart is, itself, Freud claims not to know.

I must immediately interject the following:Transcendent creativity is in no way a blessing

for the vessel but more likely a curse. The mes-sage must be delivered, the work must be givenform, even when the vessel or the tool breaksin the process. Such human beings must be cre-ative, even when this means nothing other thanto suffer. Yes, often the personality of the onein question is destroyed. The vessel is too small,the tool too weak. I am reminded of the tragicbut highly popular example of Elvis Presley. Heexpressed something demonic/godly and he,himself, foundered on it. Alfred J. Ziegler, thenoted Zürich psychiatrist and author, broughtto my attention that in German the word Kunst(art) is as much related to kuenden (toannounce) as to koennen (to be able). Perhapswe could say that the artist’s ability lies in hiscapability to give voice, to announce, somethingbeyond himself, something transcendent. Thatwas certainly the power of Presley’s voice!These are a few of my thoughts on the tran-scendent power of what we call creativity.

As I already mentioned, the concept of cre-ativity carries another meaning and it would

be remiss of me to simply leave this other usageby the wayside. I have mentioned the works ofpatients who express their purely personalproblems in drawings, painting and the like. Notonly do patients take delight in such activity, butmany people sing, for instance and make musicfor the pleasure of their family and friends ( orto their distress). Unendingly, much of what istermed “creativity” occurs everywhere humanbeings are found. Much of it is touching and itmoves us in cases of people with whom wehave some connection. The works themselves,though, have no further general significance.

Iwould like to designate all this activity, “per-sonal creativity,” in contrast to transcendent

creativity. Personal creativity is abundant, can befound everywhere and is possible for everyone.All of us are, in the final analysis, something andhave, therefore, something to express. We alsospeak of creativity in this personal sense; weapply the same word even though it is some-thing completely different from transcendentcreativity. Indeed, we should not refer to per-sonal creativity as creativity at all. We might, forinstance, speak of self-development, self-expression or something similar. In such cases,what we are referring to already exists and isneither something truly new nor something ofwider significance. Despite the psychologicalimportance of personal creativity, I dislike thefact that it tries to appropriate to itself the pres-tige and honour of transcendent creativity.Personal creativity has far less to do with suf-

fering and with compulsion and produces noth-ing that goes beyond the purely personal.

We observe yet a third form of creativitywhich I would like to mention. We meet

it often in those engaged in the fashion andadvertising industry. Individuals with this varietyof creativity are capable of conceiving designswhich subsequently meet with great success infashion sales. They possess, in other words, theability to sense precisely what will come. It isnot necessarily true that in fashion the greatdesigners are the leaders in taste. Much morethey possess an almost mediumistic gift ofdetecting what is playing itself out and formingin the soul of the collective. They recognise, forexample, what kind of design and so forth willbe in demand in the coming months and years.

Certainly there exist individuals among fash-ion designers with transcendent creativity.

Often, however, they represent a form of cre-ativity that I would like to designate “collectivecreativity”. This form does not truly “create,”but senses in advance what is taking place in thecollective unconscious and makes use of it.From a negative perspective, we could charac-terize this type of creativity “hysterical.” We findit frequently among writers or psychologicalauthors, among individuals who foresee whichideas are on the ascendant and write aboutthem. They have a nose for the collectivetrends and sniff out what the fashion will be.

We must, therefore, differentiate betweentranscendent creativity first, personal cre-

ativity second and collective creativity third.The term is the same with all three and yet rep-resents three completely different things which,unfortunately, get confused constantly.Creativity enjoys a great deal of prestige, a pres-tige that properly belongs only to transcendentcreativity. The other two forms are usurpers, soto speak, of the reputation of transcendent cre-ativity. I can perhaps illuminate the standing oftranscendent creativity with an image. By “tran-scendent” I mean, as I mentioned, somethingthat comes through, shines through fromanother world. We could say that something ofthe Creator, something of God shines through.When we use this image, it is not out of placeto assume that transcendent creativity brings usinto connection with the divine and thereforejustifies the high esteem it enjoys. The applause,the recognition of the creative does not belong- I wish to emphasize - to the vessel, but to themessage the vessel conveys.

Many of us, though, have become “personal”to such an extent that we admire the ves-

sel, the genius, the artist or the creative individ-ual. We go so far as to assume the creative indi-vidual has something to tell us outside the areaof his particular giftedness. Further, we believethat in order to understand his work, it isimportant to understand his personality. Arthistory, for instance, has tried repeatedly toconnect the artist’s personality with his art. In1986, at the London School for MedicalHistory, students were to write about the fol-lowing topic: “Explain the relation betweenFreud’s character and his psychological theo-ries.” In my opinion, the topic should have readthe other way around, namely, “How didFreud’s character deform the beauty, the origi-nality of his psychological vision?” The questionis not how Michelangelo’s personality influ-enced his art, but how it interfered with it! The

Transcendent cre-ativity is in no way ablessing for the vesselbut more likely acurse.

Elvis Aaron Presley8 January 1935, 4:00 (CST)Tupelo Mississippi(Birth Certificate)


“Explain the relationbetween Freud’scharacter and hispsychological theo-ries.” In my opinion,the topic shouldhave read the otherway around, name-ly, “How did Freud’scharacter deformthe beauty, the orig-inality of his psycho-logical vision?”

taste of the wine can be tainted by the con-tainer - wine in a plastic cup never tastes asgood as wine in a glass. We can, however,never explain the taste of wine by the contain-er alone.

We have gotten side-tracked a little here.Applying the same word, “creativity,” to

three completely different things, namely tran-scendent, personal and collective creativity,leads to a mix-up and a confusion of values.Transcendent creativity occurs rarely - mostpeople do not possess a trace of it. As a rule,they are neither truly artistic, nor original, nordo they have any new ideas. We only copy,assimilate, adopt. We apply what other, original,creative individuals before us have made andcreated. As a rule, we are creatures and notcreators. When I say, “we,” I also mean we ana-lysts. We view ourselves as having to use theideas of others as precisely as possible since weare barely capable of developing any ourselves.

The confusion in the area of creativity isgreat. All of us long to transcend our mor-

tal bounds. Since “transcendent” creativityoffers the possibility of this experience, werevere it, look for it everywhere and demand itfrom everyone. Then we confuse messengerwith message, seeing the former as moreimportant than the latter. We search for some-thing in the wrong place and end up worship-ping idols. The result of this confusion is oftendetrimental to our psychological development.

Expecting everyone to be (transcendentally)creative is like expecting everyone to be an

Old Testament prophet or the founder of areligion instead of simply followers of someestablished religion or religious form. Individualswho modestly move within one of the existingreligious communities with no claim to original-ity succumb less to the great, sectarian move-ments of political and religious nature whichalways draws in countless others. Religion is apersonal affair to be certain, but new religiousforms and images are given to but a few.

Individuals who confuse their purely personalcreativity- read, self-development, self-expres-

sion - with actual transcendent creativity,become addicted to an illusion and overvaluethemselves beyond measure. Generally, theyare far from any religiosity but very near to amiserable self-cult. Analysis and psychotherapyunderstood wrongly can wreak great havochere. Many upstanding, decent and simple peo-ple have discovered their so-called creativity inanalysis - and begin to flood their environment,their room, their house - with the questionableproducts of their personal creation. They wastetheir time and have none left for reflection and,in particular, none for other relationships.

Iam reminded of a woman who arranged mar-vellous social gatherings. The combination of

the guests was, as a rule, stimulating and theculinary delights were outstanding. Throughanalysis she became “creative,” expended agreat deal of time giving expression to her soulin clumsy drawings and paintings and for yearsarranged no more gatherings.

SSpontaneity

Iwill turn now to spontaneity. Our psychic lifedistinguishes itself by a changeable balance of

different drives and archetypal forces whichsucceed in mutually balancing and holding eachother in check or not. I am not completely cer-

tain whether all of our drives or archetypalforces always possess within themselves thischecking action. With hunger, for example, thisdoes not necessarily seem to be the case, oth-erwise there would not be so many individualswith eating disturbances.

We often complain about the lack of spon-taneity and would like so much for love,

especially, to express itself spontaneously moreoften. “Ama fac quod vis,” - “love and you cando what you will.” Unfortunately, love rules usbut seldom. In the absence of Eros we aregrateful for moral or other inhibitions andrestrictions on our spontaneity. When love isnot with us and such is often the case, then it iscertainly useful for the dryness of morality tolimit our spontaneity.

If we were truly spontaneous, we would giveexpression to all our negative impulses as well

and often even resort to violence. Social lifewould hardly be possible under the rule ofspontaneity. “I could just kill him,” would thenbe more than a figure of speech. Furthermore,many men would sexually molest women con-tinuously - and, naturally, the other way aroundas well. Infants crying in the night would be lit-erally strangled should spontaneity truly rule.There would be no end to the horror. Ofcourse, I am being simplistic with these possibil-ities. I wish only to note that, in spite of suchscenarios, we consider complete spontaneitydesirable.

Of the three children of the Devil, spon-taneity is certainly the most appealing, the

attribute we would least wish to be without.With no spontaneity, where would be the beaugeste, where the innocent expression of ten-derness and so forth. I will have more to sayabout spontaneity later.

To repeat what I said in the introductionwhat the quotation at the beginning of this

chapter says is just as true as my statements -this is the paradox of psychology. Psychologicalstatements are especially valid when the oppo-site is also true. Someone else could sing thepraises of these children - creativity, spontane-ity and independence - just as easily as I char-acterize them as offspring of the Devil!

Independence

Let us now turn to independence, the third ofour devilish trio. Psychological laymen and

experts alike preach the importance of becom-ing independent - independent of mother,father, children, women, men, the collective,society and so forth. Is it not possible that ourprized independence bears many similarities toa paranoid delusional system? What, exactly, issupposed to become independent - the ego?But the ego depends on the energy of theunconscious. And what is in this unconscious -the archetypes? Even the archetypes are notsole rulers, depending as they do on they do oneach other. Too, without the ego, archetypescould eventually get completely out of hand.

Should our destructiveness become indepen-dent, we could easily degenerate into mug-

gers and murderers - think of the excesses ofNazi war criminals, Stalin’s purges or the “cul-tural revolution” in China. Should the archetypeof the dragon-slayer manifest its autonomy, wewould alternate between the wildness of cru-saders and cultic fanatics.


Since we are constantly connected with all ofhumanity through our collective uncon-

scious, how can we possibly be “independent”?We all live in a complicated internal and exter-nal network of dependencies. Parents are con-tinuously dependent on their children: the fateof their offspring influences fathers and mothersthroughout their lives. Only parents devoid offeeling can say, “My daughter is now a thirty-year old woman. What she does, what happensto her no longer concerns me. I am complete-ly free of her - independent.” Children dependon their parents even after their parents’ death.Over and over I experience the post mortemcoming to terms with parents, theAuseinandersetzung,* not just as release, butalso as the living out of fundamental connec-tion. Neurotic seventy-year-olds are not theonly people who call attention to themselves byhow much they talk about their parents.

Marriage partners, too, not only love oneanother. They depend on each other in

the depth of their beings (at least as long as themarriage lasts) and constantly influence eachother, often after divorce! While now and thenmaterial dependency increases with age, it usu-ally decreases. By contrast, though, marriagepartners are dependent their life long on thedynamics of the other’s psyche.

As I mentioned, our psyche lives in a networkof internal and external dependencies.

Instead of struggling against our dependencies,would it not be wiser to reflect on them and toattempt to locate and develop our soul withinthem? We would further our psychologicaldevelopment more by realizing that psychic lifeis dependence and that, therefore, we woulddo well to shape and form our dependence.

Not all eras and cultures have been soenthusiastic about independence. A

Japanese psychiatrist explained to me that amai,the Japanese word for human connection, canbest be translated as “loving dependence.” Thisemphasis on dependence in relationship hasspecific consequences. We in the West wouldsay to a guest, “If you are hungry, just go to therefrigerator and help yourself.” We would liketo encourage him to feel at home in ourkitchen. Apparently, this way of doing thingswould be confusing if not insulting to a guest inJapan. There the guest is honoured when hishost hands him a dish of vanilla ice cream withthe request to “Please eat.” A guest wouldnever serve or help himself, rather he is depen-dent in his choices. While in Europe it might bemore polite to ask, “Would you care for tea orcoffee,” in Japan one would say “You wouldcertainly like a cup of coffee.” A host decidesfor his guest and the latter recognizes the free-dom of this dependency. In the West, couplesin love are among the few to happily admittheir mutual and complete dependency ontheir beloved with statements such as “I can’tlive without you,” and the like.

GGod Complex

To recapitulate, I have tried to show that var-ious forms of creativity exist, among which

only one deserves to be called “creative,”namely “transcendent” creativity. To “possess”this form of creativity is as difficult for its bear-er as its occurrence is rare. The other forms ofcreativity, personal and collective, profit fromthe prestige which transcendent creativity

enjoys. When, however, we confuse the otherforms with true creativity, we experience adamaging delusion of grandeur as a result.

Ihave further established that spontaneity andindependence are of but doubtful psychologi-

cal value. At the same time we cannot simplydevalue something that currently is soesteemed. If thousands of psychotherapists,judges, ministers, teachers, professors, philoso-phers and so forth assert that modern manshould be creative, spontaneous and indepen-dent, then we must be able to find somethingdesirable in these three psychological phenom-ena. Let us examine our trinity from a mytho-logical and archetypal standpoint. Can we notdiscern some kind of myth concealed here?Could we even discover behind this triad anarchetypal psychopathology?

The word “creativity” comes from the Latincreare, “to create.” We name God our

“Maker,” the “Creator,” and human beings wename “creatures.” To be creative is an attributeof God’s: God created heaven and earth, creat-ed us and all living beings. He is, therefore, cre-ative - yes, only God is truly creative. Based onthis perception, Protestant circles of the 19thCentury rejected the usage of the word cre-ative in conjunction with human activities. Theyviewed the usage as sinful, prideful and arro-gant.

Iwant to mention something else concerningthe “anti-creative” tradition. In the oldest syn-

agogues of the Middle East there was often acathedra, a chair, which stood in readiness forMoses and upon which no one ever sat. Moseswas very close to God and through Moses,God created the Jewish Law. No one besidesMoses was able to be creative, a tradition whichfound the following expression. Until the late19th Century, orthodox rabbis went to thegreatest lengths never to be original. If any ofthem had an original idea, he had to conceal itbehind endless citations from the Talmud. In noway might he give the impression that he felthimself in the least to be original or creative.We are dealing, therefore, with two traditions.On the one hand, creativity is admired. On theother, it is regarded as an exclusive attribute ofGod and any human claims to it can only beseen as hubris.

Even so, creativity brings us face to face withGod. Can we say the same thing for inde-

pendence? We can certainly assume that theonly truly independent being in the world isGod. By definition, God is independent fromeverything and everything is dependent onHim. He is beginning and end, Alpha andOmega of creation. Whether Christian, Jewishor Islamic, God is totally independent. In addi-tion, only God can be completely spontaneouswith no fear of punishment. His spontaneity ismost troublesome for us: God does not haveto justify Himself to anyone. His moods, though,influence the course of the world. In his angerHe sent the Flood. After the Flood, regrettingwhat He had done, He promised never again todestroy humanity. Should He ever againbecome angry, however, nothing can stop Hissweeping mankind away with, for example, anatomic catastrophe. We cannot reason withGod.

As you know, C.G. Jung suggested anotherconception of God, a God who is also

*“grappling with”, “coming to terms with”


Patients should,therefore, give spe-cial attention to atherapist's shoes:there may be acloven hoof inthem!

dependent upon us, that is, not totally indepen-dent nor completely spontaneous. Jung’s notionof God has not prevailed - perhaps, not yet?We struggle today with the Christian, Islamic,Judaic concept, the concept of a God creative,spontaneous and totally independent. Seenfrom the perspective of the collective religiouscurrents, the Christian God has in recent timeslost significance and influence, at least inEurope. In the 19th Century, for instance, everypassenger on an Atlantic crossing prayed regu-larly every morning. This sort of religiosity ishardly imaginable today. Do we moderns notsimply put ourselves in the place of God? Dowe not believe that we are like God? Instead ofworshipping the creative, independent andspontaneous God, we seem to view ourselvesas creative, independent and spontaneous, atleast potentially. Here we are on the trail of apathology, the trail of a God complex or of anidentification with God.

Imust elaborate on something at this point. It isto Jung’s credit historically that he clearly dif-

ferentiated between ego and Self.Unfortunately, many psychological authors inadopting the concept of the Self, albeit withoutcrediting Jung, have caused confusion. The egodeals with the ordering of the interior worldand with coordinating our relationship to theenvironment. The Self is the centre of the psy-che, the vehicle by which we experience mean-ing. We could say it is the divine spark in us,that which brings us into relationship with Godin our psyches. Some psychologists are of theopinion that God is nothing other than a pro-jection of the Self outside ourselves. I am not socertain. God is significantly more than a projec-tion of some psychic force or energy. What wedo project is our longing for oneness with God.

We partially project the desire for onenessbackwards, regressively, as represented

by the myth of the paradise in which Adam andEve lived and from which they were expelled.We often misread the myth, however. Weassume it refers to a kind of memory of ourearliest childhood when the world was stillundivided. I believe the notion that in earliestchildhood we were one with our mother andthrough her with the world, what MargaretMahler calls "symbiosis," is as much a myth asthe one of paradise. The Garden of Eden is areligious myth; the idea of infant oneness is thecorresponding psychological myth.

Isuspect that life is extremely difficult for us allfrom the very beginning. Hardships begin in

our mother's womb. In the fetal stage we areexposed to all kinds of hormonal and emotion-al storms through our mother, storms whichwe do not understand and which we can donothing about. As soon as we catch sight of thelight of the world, we are further exposed tocold, heat, hunger and other unpleasant sensa-tions. Not only can we not grasp these sensa-tions, but we have to deal with the ambivalentfeelings from human beings around us includingour mother. Paradise in childhood, onenesswith mother, as I have said, is nothing but theconcretized, misunderstood mythology of par-adise.

We also project our longing for onenesswith God into the future, onto the king-

dom to come, the heavenly mansion of manyrooms. At the end of days, evil and suffering willbe conquered and death will have lost its sting.

This future projection promises complete bliss.Our yearning for utopia is another form of theprojection of oneness into the future, onewhich Communist leaders, among others, havemade use of. Their message is: "Things are badnow, but soon we will have paradise on earth."

The two mythologies, paradise lost and thekingdom to come, express exactly what

they describe. We mortal beings are never trulyunited with God. We long for union and eitherbelieve we have experienced it in the past orhope we will find it in the future. Perhaps, thereactually was a reality of union when the worldbegan, and perhaps we will experience it in ourpresent incarnated existence. What we doexperience is nothing less than a state of beingcut off from God. Much human, existential suf-fering comes from this separation, just as muchlonging comes from the hope of release fromthe separation.

This suffering and this longing can lead to anarchetypal kind of pathology. We attempt

to resolve the separation from God by becom-ing like God; we wish to be God. At the sametime we realize the discrepancy. We realizethat we are not God, that the Tower of Babelwas not completed and that Heaven has notbeen taken by storm. In many stories the Devilpromises to fulfill all of our wishes when we payhis price. The Devil, though, is a part of God,the shadow of God. So in reality, God's shad-ow awakens in us the wish to be like God. (I getinto difficulties here mythologically and start tobecome confused.) When educators, ministersand therapists of all kinds, all of us, encouragecreativity, spontaneity and independence, allattributes of God, they are taking the Devil'sside. They are encouraging us to become God,speaking imaginatively. They appeal to the Godcomplex, working in conjunction, to stay withthe image, with Satan, with God's shadow.Patients should, therefore, give special attentionto a therapist's shoes: there may be a clovenhoof in them!

Before I continue on the subject of the Godcomplex, I want to do something odd,

something that corresponds to the mythologyof the Devil but not completely with the logicof my argument. I want to play advocatus dia-boli for a moment. The God complex is sowonderful and fascinating that we are loath todo without it. It gives us a powerful feeling ofbeing uplifted, of being important, at least for atime.

Ionce knew a flute teacher who, for years, gavelessons to students with varying degrees of tal-

ent. She suffered from sleep disturbance andfinally went into analysis. Her analyst encour-aged her, or her dreams encouraged her, togive concerts. She was completely untalentedas a soloist, but her concertizing made herunbelievably happy. After the performances shefelt like she was walking on air and she lookedradiant. Her sleep disturbance disappeared fora while. Even her audiences, consisting mostlyof friends and relatives, were deeply impressed,not by the music, but by the fact that the con-certs appeared to completely transform thewoman. Without this passing phase of inflation,the woman would perhaps have remainedstuck in her sleep disturbance; the Devil had atleast gotten things moving. Of course, therewas also a price to pay. The woman began todirect her aggression toward her family and her


ability to reflect diminished. She becameextremely tiresome for those around her. Imention this story as an aside and will nowreturn to the God complex and its further discussion.

During the 18th and 19th Centuries, the educatedpublic greatly occupied itself with so-called insane

asylums. Laymen had a very definite conception of theinmates of these public institutions. They imagined thatone patient believed himself to be Napoleon, anotherto be Caesar or Alexander the Great and yet anoth-er the King of Kings or Emperor of the Universe oreven God, Himself. All of these figures, Napoleon,Caesar, Alexander and so forth, are men who sufferedfrom a God complex, who identified with God or agod either openly or in secret, who believed them-selves a divine incarnation. I find it psychologicallymeaningful that these psychotics so occupied theinterest of people living in the last two centuries. Theirinterest progressed to the point that they believed themajority of inmates suffered from delusions ofgrandeur and identification with God. The actual num-ber of psychotics with this diagnosis was not so large.People apparently assumed the essence of psychosis,the core of madness, to be the belief that one wasGod or at least similar to God. The height of madnessfound its utterance in the God complex, a fundamen-tal psychopathology.

Consciously or unconsciously, all human beings wishto come closer to God. This is an archetypal truth.

Wishing to be God or believing I am God is probablyan archetypal psychopathology. As I have shown, thenotion that creativity, independence and spontaneityshould be the goal of psychological development istied to the God complex. But perhaps I am being toogentle. The collective idea that everyone should be orbecome creative, independent and spontaneous asmuch as possible is a mental disorder. Such a goal ishubris and hubris for the ancient Greeks who coinedthe term, was extremely dangerous. It led to randomacts of violence due to the identification with the deityand was always punished severely.

We need to ask why the God complex-throughthe reverence for our unholy trinity - plays such

an important role today. That psychotherapists of allkinds promote this reverence is not particularly unusu-al. We are to some extent but priests of the collectivespirit, preaching and mediating general thinking andcollective psychopathology. Let me pose the questionagain: Why does the God complex have so much col-lective significance at this moment in time? I mustassume that it has always been significant given thekings, emperors, pharaohs and rajahs who insisted ontheir divinity (Louis XlV of France, the roi soleil comesto mind). With the spread of democracy, the Godcomplex, too, experienced a "democratization." TheGod complex currently hides behind the idea thatevery individual should or could be creative, sponta-neous and independent.

SSelf-effacing Therapy

All this compels me to plead the cause ofSelf-Effacing Therapy, of self-effacing analy-

sis and self-effacing psychology. I am opposedto any therapy and any psychology that has suc-cumbed to or lapsed into the God complex.Since neither we therapists nor our clients aregeniuses, the "effacing" part of this approachshould not be terribly difficult. In fact, so few ofus on either side fall into the genius categorythat it is not worth mentioning from a psy-chotherapeutic perspective. I offer an exampleof someone who was pushed into a creative

role, of someone who, in short, did not under-go self-effacing therapy.

The analysand I have in mind was a thirty-year old, somewhat depressive man. His

mother had always told him he was a geniusand his wife had carried on this mythology. Inhis analysis he freed himself from his mother'sfantasy but his analyst assumed the fantasy,thereby thrusting the unfortunate into "creativi-ty." Since he possessed a certain writing ability -he wrote his dreams quite well - he began todevote himself to general writing and content-ed himself for years in passing his time withworthless scribbling. In so doing, the real joysand sorrows of his life passed him by.

Self-effacing therapy would free us, wouldmake us happy and content not to be cre-

ative, to be free from transcendent creativity. Itwould make us content to value what most ofus are, namely, not creative. It would help us tothankfully appreciate the fruit of the work ofgenuinely creative individuals without, our-selves, having to suffer from our talent or per-ishing from it. What I call personal creativity candevelop successfully without false aspirations.Self-effacing therapy recognizes, for example,that only one in a billion will be the founder ofa new religion. None of us, therefore, shouldsuccumb to pressure to find our completelypersonal religion, but rather to modestly alignourselves with one of the established religions.

Furthermore, self-effacing therapy means tak-ing on dependence. It means realizing that

we are only small cogs in a giant mechanism,that everything and everyone depend uponeverything and everyone - father, mother, chil-dren, husband, wife, friends, society, culture andso forth. We can live out this dependence inhappiness and contentment. How much doesour continual pushing and shoving toward God-like independence block valuable psychologicaldevelopment? Psyche shows itself in depen-dence. I do not, therefore, consider it necessar-ily good when a patient's medical history states,"The patient succeeded in freeing himself fromhis dependence upon his mother. Currently, heonly sees his mother about four times a year,whereas earlier he talked to her on the tele-phone every week and visited her twice amonth." I think it would be better if the chartstated instead, "The patient is very much boundto his mother by innumerable ties that go backand forth between him and her. The patient isaware of the many contradictory feelings in thisrelationship. He hates and loves his mother in amuch more differentiated way.

Finally, self-effacing therapy could result in ourmistrusting spontaneity somewhat more

than we do.

Self-effacing therapy would mean that asclients, patients and analysands - and as ther-

apists - we recognize how non-creative, howlacking in spontaneity and how dependent weare. We would recognize that it is not neces-sary to take these expectations upon ourselvesand thus be driven into a desperate inflation.Self-effacing therapy invites us to live as most ofus truly are and not to have to measure our-selves with the yardstick of individuals who arecursed with a talent or a gift. Individuals withgenius are transcendentally creative and to thatdegree independent and spontaneous. Theyare only vessels, only tools for the creative,

Self-effacing therapywould free us,would make ushappy and contentnot to be creative


The collective ideathat everyoneshould be orbecome creative,independent andspontaneous asmuch as possible isa mental disorder.

spontaneous and independent message. Theypay and suffer fearfully for the message, a prob-lem particular only to them. For the rest of us,the problem is to suffer the way we are and notto demand of ourselves that we be unique ves-sels, creative and equal to God.

Self-effacing therapy helps us to accept ourcondition as it is and, naturally, to value and

take pleasure from genius where it appears. Ithelps us also to be glad that we are hardly evervessels of otherworldly messages and thereforesuffer less. We should be thankful for our lackof creativity, spontaneity and independenceand, at the same time, appreciate the fascinat-ing offerings of creative individuals. Here is anexample of what I am talking about. I knew aman of about fifty years of age who had a cer-tain amount of acting ability. Never did he con-sider becoming an actor, himself. In his freetime, however, he worked as a volunteer stagehand for a small theater group where his pres-ence always encouraged the actors. He recog-nized that he was not blessed and cursed with

talent. At the same time, he could participate inand enjoy the theater in a way that was satisfy-ing to him. This is what I mean about humblybeing what we are.

Insofar as we clients, patients or therapists con-tent ourselves to live with our human nature

and not to deviate into the God complex orthe Self complex - and here is the paradox - weprobably come closer to the Self and the divinespark in ourselves. Insofar as we recognize ourhuman limitations, we certainly come muchcloser to God than when we succumb to theGod complex in its triune expression of cre-ativity, spontaneity and independence.

Nothing that I have said in the foregoingpages is in any way new nor is it at all cre-

ative. Perhaps in this chapter I have strayed toofar into the no-man's-land between religion andpsychology - something of course that is difficultto avoid in psychology.


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JJuliet Sharman-Burke hasbeen practising astrologyand Tarot for the past twen-ty years. She has beenteaching and supervising forthe Centre for PsychologicalAstrology since its inceptionin June 1983, and also runsthe Centre's administration.She is also a qualified analyt-ic psychotherapist with aprivate practice in London.Juliet is the author of TheComplete Book of Tarot, TheMythic Tarot Workbook, andUnderstanding Tarot, and isco-author of The MythicTarot with Liz Greene. Shehas also written The BarefootBook of Stories from the Stars,a book for children. TheAstrologer, the Counsellor andthe Priest, with Liz Greene,and The Family Inheritance:Parental Images in theHoroscope, have both beenpublished by the CPA Press.

The Sun card in the Mythic Tarot

Astrology and Tarot are both disci-plines which come within the spec-

trum of Western Esoteric tradition.They come from the same source inthe way that from the grape comeswine, jelly, grape-juice and cognac - allare different and yet all come from thesame fruit. One cannot be consideredbetter or worse than another becausethey are intended for different purpos-es, yet in the course of a meal each ofthem may complement the others. It isthe same with Tarot and astrology.Among other things they may both beused for guidance on the path towardsself awareness as well as for divination.Astrology uses precise calculations todraw up charts while Tarot uses imagesto stimulate information hidden deep inthe recesses of the unconscious mind.

We are all familiar with the Sun inthe horoscope as the heart of

the chart, a symbol of the self and thepart of the personality which drives andstrives to illuminate, elucidate and clar-ify. The image of the Sun is also fea-tured in the Major Arcana of the Tarotdeck where it is associated with action,energy and confident planning for thefuture. In the Tarot the Sun suggestsactivity, strength and optimism, a goodtime to make confident plans for thefuture.

The Mythic Tarot uses the image ofthe Greek solar god Apollo to

depict the Sun, showing him crownedwith laurel leaves, which were used tocrown the victors of athletic and artisticcontests. He is portrayed holding hislyre, for music was an important form

of expression for the Sun-god, trans-forming darkness into light and giving itmeaning. If sorrows or fears werebrought to Apollo in a song, he wouldtake them away. Apollo's creativespark lifts us out of ourselves, especiallythrough music, which speaks with atranspersonal voice, crossing culturesand centuries and embodying humantragedy and triumph.

Apollo was not only patron of songand music but of the arts in gen-

eral - his attendants were the nineMuses. The arts act as a raising agent tohumans, taking an individual to agreater level of consciousness, encour-aging him or her to strive towards per-sonal excellence. In both the Tarot andthe horoscope, the Sun's positionpoints to areas of inspiration and excel-


The Sun in the Tarot and the Horoscope

In The Mythic Tarot, the Major Arcana card of the Sun is represented by Apollo. Here, JulietSharman-Burke, co-author of the book, takes a brief look at the symbolism of the Sun god.

Apollo, the Sun,represents the spiritof intellectual striv-ing, combined witha vision of thefuture whichencompasses anideal of perfection.

The Mythic Tarotby Liz Greene andJuliet Sharman-BurkeIllustrated by Tricia NewellRiderLondon, 1986ISBN 07126 30023

lence, yet it is worth remembering thatApollo's musical gifts once belonged tothe ugly, coarse goat-god, Pan. Apollowheedled the art of prophecy fromPan, while Hermes copied a pipe whichPan had dropped, claimed it as his owninvention and sold it to Apollo. In thisway the brilliant sun-god received bothhis music and his prophecy illicitly fromthe goatish, ugly and untamed god ofnature - an image which suggests thatshining creative endeavors often havetheir roots in darkness.

The Sun in a horoscope representsthe truly creative self - the vision of

what one could become. The MythicTarot uses Apollo's bow and arrow asan image of the part of us which cansee the purpose and reason for experi-ences long before we have understoodor processed them emotionally.Apollo, in both the horoscope and theTarot, is an image of the urge towardsconsciousness which exists in all life.The Sun symbolizes the thrust towardknowledge and a longing to rise out ofthe darkness of night, while the Moonin the Tarot and the horoscope repre-sents the unconscious, the "not-yet-known", the world of feelings which areoften ambivalent and unclear.

The Sun symbolises the power ofconsciousness to enlighten the

darkness of the unconscious - "knowl-edge is power". In both the Tarot andthe horoscope, the Sun stands forsomething greater than one individual'scapacity to gain knowledge and insight.Apollo is an image of the urge towardconsciousness which exists in all life,and he is therefore both the naturalcomplement and antithesis to his twinsister Artemis, the goddess of theMoon. Through many centuries andthrough the rise and fall of many cul-tures and civilizations, the thrust towardknowledge and the craving for freedomfrom the bondage of dark, unknownnature has driven mankind towardimpressive though dangerous heights.Apollo, the Sun, represents the spirit ofintellectual striving, combined with avision of the future which encompassesan ideal of perfection.

While the Moon is an image of adark place where hope is often

shaken if not lost entirely, the Sun's raysbring a sense of hope and faith whichdo not spring from any one person'sstriving, but from all of us, a humaninheritance of nobility and determina-tion which can restore our faith in our-selves because it is also a faith in themeaningfulness and purpose of thehuman journey. The image of theTarot's Sun symbolises that indomitablespirit that has always struggled againstsuperstition, helplessness, ignoranceand bondage to fatalism and despair.

On a divinatory level, the card ofthe Sun augers a time of clarity,

optimism and renewed trust. Yet theSun-god can be ambivalent, and toomuch light too soon can kill if knowl-edge is premature and destroys thenecessary time and darkness for thingsto gestate. Thus the card of the Sun fol-lows the Moon in the Tarot, just as inmyth they were twins. When the Sunappears in a Tarot spread it suggests atime in which it is possible to under-stand the pattern, to plan for the futureand to move forward.


AAnne Whitaker is anastrologer, astrology teacherand writer based in Glasgowin Scotland. She has hadmany articles published inrecent years, in a range ofpublications including TheAstrological Journal, Self andSociety, The AstrologyQuarterly, The MountainAstrologer (USA),Considerations (USA), andAstrolore. She has just com-pleted a three year Diplomacourse at the Centre forPsychological Astrology bysubmitting a thesis on TheMoon’s Nodes in Action,and is currently writing up astudy of the lives of nine-teen people in the West ofScotland “plugged into” lastyear’s Jupiter-Uranus con-junction.

Introduction

We live within, and live out, a profoundparadox. On the one hand, there are

certain archetypal forces upon whose unfoldingpatterns through time and space the whole oflife is predicated. There is a deeply impersonaldimension to human existence; over the millen-nia we all live out variations on the same basicset of themes. On the other hand, there is thatspark of individual consciousness in each personwhich says, “Here I am. I’m special. There’s noone quite like me.” Finding a way of reconcilingthose opposites is one of the fundamental chal-lenges of being human.

Ihave known this for a long time and like manyother people have struggled with the paradox.

Astrology with its symbolism, which can beused to describe both levels, has been of enor-mous help. But occasions of deep insight, wherethe dynamic of paradoxical forces can beunderstood and accepted at the level of bothheart and mind, are rare.

One such occasion was the first Liz Greeneseminar I ever attended, in December

1990. The theme explored was that of theinterplay of Puer and Senex, the divine childand the wise old man, those archetypal life pat-terns represented primarily in the horoscope byJupiter and Saturn. My whole chart is drapedround a dominant square of those two planets;I sat rapt, recognising in the weave of the sem-inar key threads of my family inheritance, myparents’ struggles with life in general and eachother in particular, and a key part of my own lifepattern.

Ifound the seminar particularly affirming of mysense of teleology. Without needing an image

of a personal God, I do need to feel part of anunfolding process which has meaning and pur-pose. The occasion also offered a corrective tothe potential for the individual ego to gorge onits heady sense of uniqueness - “This path I amwalking many feet have trodden, driven by thesame underlying imperatives. I am special, and Iam not.”

“Iam special, and I am not...” The seminarbrought fully home that the paradox which

I have long perceived to be at the core ofeveryone’s existence, is absolutely fundamentalto my own. Born in the very last hours of thebalsamic phase preceding the new Moon inLeo, in my horoscope Sun, Moon, Venus,Saturn and Pluto are all conjunct in Leo in thetwelfth house, square Jupiter in Scorpio in thethird. Ruler Mercury in Leo in the eleventh isconjunct Saturn and Pluto, guardians of thetwelfth house cusp.

The solar light burns in all of us. Astrologydemonstrates that it burns more brightly in

some lives than in others. I probably have moreright than most to address the question ofwhether an over-allocation of the gift of light isa blessing - or a curse. The balsamic stage of theSun-Moon cycle, and the placement of most ofthe Leo planets in the twelfth house, greatlyamplifies and polarises the contradictionbetween the personal and the impersonalwhich I have been discussing.

How can you be the universally recognisedand admired solar hero which all those

Leo planets demand, when a vast ocean’sunending tidal pull is forever drawing you andyour powerful ego back into its silent depths?Looking back over several decades of strugglingto bridge the personal and the universal, I thinkI have at least some idea of what it was like forParsifal in the Grail myths! The central task ofmy life has been to find ways of aligning a high-ly self-absorbed, individualistic, Romantic per-ception of life, and powerful creative drives,with the impersonal requirement to offer self-sacrificing service to the wider community andthe higher powers of the universe. For a verylong time, not knowing what the task was, I feltlike a frighteningly small cork bobbing on thesurface of a very big, dark, stormy ocean.

Every aspect of my life has been shaped bythis struggle. In keeping with the powerful

demands of the twelfth house, it is the attemptto respond fully to the vocational call that I have


Whom doth the Grail serve?A personal quest in pursuit of vocation

Astrology is an empirical art; the symbols we use have stayed alive for us through the cen-turies because our experience confirms their magical truth. It is by listening to people’s sto-ries that we learn how universal the language is; and yet, paradoxically, each person’s storyconfirms their own precious individuality. Here’s one such story, moving and humorous,from Anne Whitaker.

*Appearing in She, by H. RiderHaggard, Penguin PopularClassics 1994 (first published1887)

chosen to write about in this essay. As thereader will discover, all attempts to find my wayof being a solar hero have been well assisted bya fine collection of solar heroes along the road!

IIn the beginning

Iwas born on a small, frequently cold, wet andwindswept island off the West Coast of

Scotland; an appropriate place for someonewith so many twelfth house planets. The seadefined my life: I loved it and feared it, swam init, sailed on it, walked by it, lived by it - andwhen I was seven, owing to my father’s care-lessness, nearly drowned in it.

Childhood was full of larger-than-life malehero figures whose exploits, usually involv-

ing water and the sea, inspired my vivid andgrandiose imagination. Maternal grandfatherCalum’s last working years were spent as aChurch of Scotland lay missionary sailing roundthe outer islands, ministering to his flock. Hewas an eloquent preacher. As a young man hehad sailed to South America to work as arancher, at one point taming wild horses on hisown somewhere in the wilds of Argentina. Oneday he saved a man’s life, in the absence of adoctor, by plunging his badly-infected arm intoa pan of boiling sheepdip.

Paternal grandfather Fred was of genteelEnglish upbringing. He had been a Royal

Navy gunner in the First World War. Lockedinto his gun turret with his men, he was told tocome out victorious or dead. He lived to be 81;I was given the medal he won for that episodeafter his death.

My uncle Norrie was a wireless operator ona ship in World War II. He drowned

when his ship was torpedoed in the last twoweeks of the war. His was the only body found;having swum a long way to the French coast, hedied of exposure on the shore. My uncle RedMurdo the salmon poacher was featured in aleading article in the Sunday Times in the1970's. He was offered a great deal of moneyafter that for his autobiography but declined,saying “What do I want money for? I’ d only piss itagainst a wall.”

My father George combined the officialoccupation of senior local government

officer with the unofficial one of most notoriouspoacher in the Hebrides, for over 30 years. Heused to go out in his boat to check his nets inworking hours in full public view; “Why not? I’vedone my public duty for the day!” He was triedfor poaching in the 1950's in a case that madenational headlines; the QC he and his friendshad hired secured them a Not Proven verdict.George had taken the precaution of droppingthe bolts of the guns they had used over theside of his boat and into the sea as the policewere arriving to arrest him. This produced theimmortal line in court “My Lord, how could Mr

Whitaker have shot twelve deer with guns withouta bolt?”

These characters, both present and in familymemory, were the norm throughout my

childhood. It never occurred to me that mostother people’s lives didn’t have quite the samebright thread of derring-do running throughthem as mine!

The feminine principle was most powerfullyrepresented by Granny Whitaker - clan

matriarch, with a Leo Moon rising and strongPluto aspects. The first female town councillorin the Outer Hebrides in the 1920's, shebrought up three children of her own, and hersister’s two when she died young. Running ashop, and latterly a boarding house, she hadgreat style but never any money - like maternalgrandfather Calum, she tended to give what shehad to others in need. She was also a greatenvironmentalist, fighting the local town councilfor years over the fate of a tree which was get-ting in the way of a new housing development.She won. To this day a wall can be seen whichwas diverted to go round the tree! Granny wasa strongly masculine, strongly feminine woman- a kind of female solar hero - regarded by hercommunity as a woman ahead of her time. Iwanted to be like her when I grew up.

My first encounter with the archetypal fem-inine in literature came through the vivid

writings of H Rider Haggard, an EnglishVictorian author whose myth-steeped adven-tures set in colonial Africa fascinated me.Ayesha,* the beautiful, sexually alluring, ancient-ly wise and terrorisingly destructive queen whohad found the secret of eternal life which even-tually destroyed her, fuelled my dreams and mynightmares. I was very afraid of the dark in child-hood, fascinated by death, what might liebeyond, and why we were here at all, spinningat unimaginable speeds through space on ourtiny planet. I had a secret inner life fuelled byavid reading, with Grandpa Calum my only con-fidante.

Inever felt safe during childhood. Pluto’s transitthrough the twelfth house crossing Venus,

Moon and Sun, then squaring the MC/IC andcrossing the Sun/Asc midpoint, all took place inthe first ten years of my life; Pluto first crossedmy Ascendant when I was fourteen. From tento seventeen, Uranus crossed the Leo stellium,gradually catching up with Pluto. I grew up withunhappy parents in a stormy, unpredictable andsometimes violent marriage made worse by myfather’s womanising and alcohol abuse.

Ileft school early at 16, having submitted myapplication to go to university to study English,

Psychology and History, the previous winter.The triggering event, as transiting Uranuscrossed my Ascendant, was an assault by myfather. As the progressed Sun crossed theAscendant to join Uranus and Pluto, I emerged


from prison with my father as the governor, lit-tle realising that I was entering a different formof prison, this time with myself in charge.Escape into the intoxication of running my ownlife had motivated my departure from home -not any kind of reasoned vocational choices. Iwas the first member of my family to go to uni-versity, and was already regarded as strange.

IInto the world - but out of it

What did I want to do when I grew up? Ihad decided at eight years of age that I

wanted my independence as soon as possible,would never marry and never have children.This was in response to the frightening emo-tional mess in which I grew to adulthood. At 12,I had passionately wanted to be an archaeolo-gist. But this had been dismissed as a stupididea.

Having been fired up and inspired by allthose solar heroes, the bright side of my

family inheritance and the central figures of myvoracious childhood reading, I certainly didn’twant a traditional island woman’s life. I wouldbe a free spirit! The conviction also burneddeep inside me that I was different, special, andwould be famous one day. There was no onearound then to tell me that this was archetypalLeo grandiosity, vastly amplified in my case!

The university years were a mess. Withoutthe container, however unsatisfactory, pro-

vided by family and community, I nearly fellapart. Neptune in Scorpio in the third housesquared the Leo stellium for the entire periodand beyond. Uranus conjunct Pluto ran with theprogressed Sun in the first house. I didn't knowwho or where I was. I had eating, drinking andrelationship problems, and seventeen addressesin four years. The only stable male in my lifewas killed when I was nineteen. The followingyear, my first love fell over a third floor tene-ment staircase in questionable circumstancesand died. Another man nearly killed me twice.There were regular periods of deep depression,culminating in a long dark night of the soulexperience at twenty. At the end of it, I decid-ed not to kill myself, despite the depth of mymisery, but to choose life.

Why? There were human reasons; my lovefor my little brother, only a toddler

when I left home, whom I did not want to sad-dle with such a legacy. Although desperatelyangry with my parents, I did not doubt theirlove for me, flawed though it was, and under-stood that destroying my life would alsodestroy theirs. But there was something atwork in me during that long dark night forwhich I still cannot find adequate words. Thefeeling is of having been touched by the graceof God in the very depths of despair. Whichgod, I shall never know...

Asolar hero played a major part in shapingmy future - Ken, my adviser of studies and

an Aries Sun like my father. He was a diabeticwho swam in the North Sea every day of theyear including Xmas; his response to losing a legbecause of his illness was to get an artificial oneand take up long-distance cycling. We kneweach other for twenty years until Ken becametoo ill to keep in touch; he baled me out of allsorts of scrapes, including being thrown out ofuniversity twice, and wrote the references formy first two careers. He was my good, safefather. There has been a mentor of that natureat every important developmental stage in mylife.

It took four years to do a minimum subjectordinary Master of Arts degree. To this day I

regard its acquisition as one of the minor mira-cles of the Scottish education system. Onevignette sums this up. I submitted a third yearessay on the origins of the American War ofIndependence to my now eminent tutor, OwenDudley Edwards. It was as late as it could pos-sibly be, and had been dropped in a puddle inmy rush to his office to hand it in. He returnedit to me with a mark of 55%, and the comment,“This essay bears all the hallmarks of the tri-umph of innate intelligence over little or nomaterial. Your bibliography (I had cited WinstonChurchill’s History of the English SpeakingPeoples, having once had a cursory glancethrough it) I assume is a joke.“

Post Graduate

Following graduation, it was my intention tolive on a Greek island for a year and work at

any old job, letting the future decide itself. Stillonly twenty I had to be twenty-one beforeapplying for my own passport. Throughout uni-versity years, my father had resolutely refusedto sign my passport form, thereby exercisingthe one bit of external power he still had overme. “Don’t try forging my signature,” he had said.“I know you’re capable of it. I’ll get Interpol ontoyou!” Knowing he would, I didn’t. The Greekisland was out. This decided the next stage inthe vocational quest.

Glimmerings of a dawning realisation ofwhere my energies could be going, deter-

mined the next choice. I had emerged relative-ly sane and moderately able to function fromthe nightmare of my university years, becauseof the virtually unbreakable creative spirit whichhad mysteriously kept me going even when Iseemed, on the surface, hell-bent on self-destruction. Not being aware of this at thetime, for many years I couldn’t quite understandwhy I hadn’t died.

The other major saving grace was the healingpower of love - this I did recognise at the

time. My adviser’s consistent behaviour towardsme had been of patient loving kindness. A small

I certainly didn’twant a traditionalisland woman’s life. Iwould be a freespirit!


Anne Whitaker16 August 1947StornowayScotland7:35 AM (BST)(Source: Birth Certificate)TropicalPlacidusTrue Node

coterie of determined friends got me throughmy exams, resits, and more exams. At onepoint they had a rota to get me out of bed,make sure I got to the library, and wouldn't letme away until enough work had been done forme to scrape by. I owed my degree, and future,to the alliance of my inner spirit and their love.I was now beginning to realise that survivingharsh formative experiences might just be aqualification for helping other people in theirstruggles. I had been a nihilist for years, feelingthe world was going to hell and nothing I coulddo was of any value. But having chosen to live,I knew how important the love given to me,one small person, had been. The desire toreturn this love to the wider community beganto grow. I was groping towards being a child ofthe twelfth in an affirmative rather than adestructive manner. But there was a long roadstill ahead.

Iembarked on a one-year post graduate coursein Personnel Management, thinking vaguely

that this was something to do with caring forpeople. Having discovered it was about being asminimally reasonable to the workforce as man-

agement could get away with, in order to get asmuch work out of them as possible, I becamevery Marxist and started to rebel. This, com-bined with the all-consuming nature of anothertempestuous love affair, led to my being askednot to turn up for graduation. “We don’t wantpeople like you as personnel managers,” I wastold. How right they were!

Enter another solar hero. One lecturer hadinspired me throughout the course. A soci-

ologist, he was a specialist on the relevance ofFurther Education to industry, and supervisedmy thesis which was on that very topic. Thecollege didn’t like me - but they kept my thesisfor their library. This lecturer reminded me ofthe best aspects of my own father; incorrupt-ible, he gave not a damn for bureaucracy or anyauthority he didn’t respect. He was very muchon the side of the students. I admired him, andhe turned me on to the idea of becoming a lec-turer in Further Education. The very next year,I did. Honest but very good references fromhim and my university adviser, added to myown ability to sell snow to the Eskimos whenrequired, got me my first Adult Education job.


FFirst career

My teaching began with Saturn squaring theLeo stellium from the ninth house, on the

waning quarter of the progressed New Mooncycle which began shortly after my birth. I was22 and very scared of the responsibility.

My remit was to teach university entranceEnglish to mature students, as well as

Liberal Studies to a wide range of obstreperousapprentices in various trades, most of whomwere male, and all of whom were bigger than Iwas. It was in this first job that I began to devel-op the only tool which exerted any leverage onthose lads : humour. “Miss, fancy coming out withme tonight? We could go over my homework.”Loud sniggers. “Young man, when I take up baby-snatching, you will be the last to hear about it.”Silence.

Icoped with the Liberal Studies, loved theEnglish teaching, and have never worked so

hard in all my life as in that first year, making thejoyous discovery that I was capable of shoul-dering professional responsibility and inspiringtrust and confidence in my students.

However, restlessness still drove me. Inseven years I taught in five different parts

of Scotland and England, picking up a postgraduateDiploma in Education along the way. In the mid-sev-enties, with my progressed Sun crossing first houseUrania, a strange little Irishman I met in a laundrettein Bath told me I would become an astrologer inmy thirtiess. I thought this was tosh.

Ienjoyed teaching adults, and was popular withmy students, always putting them first. But I

hated the bureaucracy of the system, and thesmall-minded people who ran it. My bossesknew my priorities didn’t fit theirs, and weredeeply suspicious of me.

Second career

At 27, as Saturn moved into the twelfthhouse, the progressed Moon, already

there, began to cross all my Leo planets in itsreturn to its own position, and Mercury pro-gressed into Libra to square Mars, I returned tomy native island to become a full-time writer,having written on and off all my life, with phas-es of having poetry and articles published. I alsowanted to support my father. Scottish localgovernment was being reorganised and he washaving to apply for his own job, in the newWestern Isles local authority. Old scores weresettled for his defiance, incorruptibility andpoaching exploits. He was given the Deputy’sjob but couldn’t bear not to be the boss; so hestarted early retirement proceedings as well asa major escalation of his drinking habits.

Despite a daily writing routine in a cosy littleoffice in the air traffic controllers’ building

in the local airport, I could only stand living athome for four months, and moved back to

mainland Scotland. At one point I had threepart-time adult education jobs, teaching univer-sity entrance English in one college, Drama inanother, and Business Studies English in thecentral institution down the road. There fol-lowed two years during which, as one of myoldest friends succinctly put it, “You locked your-self up in that daft wee flat in Dundee and near-ly drove yourself crazy!”

Pluto, ruler of the IC, was transiting Neptunethroughout this time. It was a long and des-

perate, poverty-stricken period of confrontingmy illusions about who I was and what my lifemeant. It was another, less intense but moreprotracted, dark night of the soul. On realising Ihad writing talent, but lacked the ruthless drivewhich keeps people at it full time, the adven-ture ended. I couldn’t make a career out ofwriting, and also discovered my terror of failure;it was now staring me in the face. Now nearlythirty, I couldn’t be a wanderer all my life.Whatever came next, I resolved to stick to it.

The most important thing to emerge, at last,from many years of restlessness and suffer-

ing, was a belief that something meaningful wasgoing on which slowly, relentlessly, was forcingme to grow. A fragile sense of personal con-nection with forces much greater than myselfwas starting to form.

Iwas beginning to be able to swim in the deepdark waters of the twelfth house. For many

years I had had a recurring dream of beingswept away and drowned by a tidal wave. Atthe end of this period the dream came again. Inthe dream, knowing I had been drownedbefore, this time I knew what to do. Turning toface the shore, letting the wave carry me, Iknew I would be all right.

After that dream, life began gradually tocurve upwards. My last serious depression

occurred at 38, the year after my father died.There have been no more since then, despitemany hard times. Faith that my bright thread iswoven into a meaningful pattern continues toprovide an increasingly strong foundation forfocussing and directing my creative energies.

Third career

As the progressed Moon emerged from thetwelfth house, crossing my Virgo

Ascendant on the way to meet the progressedSun, and transiting Uranus in the third crossedChiron, I got out of bed one morning and onimpulse phoned the local social work depart-ment. “I want to be a social worker, what do Ido?” Six unqualified social work jobs were justbeing advertised, and I got one of them, despitehaving an argument about poor wages with ascruffy little man who turned out to be theDirector of Social Work for the Region. Whatthey saw was who they got!

In the mid-seven-ties, with my pro-gressed Sun cross-ing First houseUrania, a strange lit-tle Irishman I met ina laundrette in Bathtold me I wouldbecome anastrologer in mythirties. I thoughtthis was tosh.


1 For a very interesting discus-sion on “Why is the 33rd SolarReturn so special?” I refer thereader to Exploring PreliterateSources of Astrology, Robin Heath,pp17-20, The Mountain Astrologer,Volume 10, No. 3, April/May1997

2 Alan Oken’s Complete AstrologyAlan OkenRevised Bantam trade editionAugust 1980

Right from the start I felt I had found mypath. Loving the variety, unpredictability

and challenge which social work brought, thehigh degree of mobility and autonomy whichcould be found within a structure of account-ability, I also relished the opportunity to be anadvocate for the rights of the vulnerable. Ienjoyed the eccentricity and humour of myclosest colleagues, and admired the courage ofmy clients. Quickly feeling committed to a socialwork career, I applied for training as my secondprogressed New Moon took place in the firsthouse in Virgo. Saturn was still transiting theLeo stellium in the twelfth house, and Uranushad started squaring it from the third house.Yet again, a major life change was about to bedictated, apparently, by accident.

My degree lacked a social science compo-nent; not thinking I was eligible to do a

one-year post-graduate course, I had resignedmyself to doing two years of training. However,to my great surprise I was offered a selectioninterview for Glasgow University for a one-yearcourse. Discovering later that I had mixed upthe course numbers on my university clearanceform - and that finance would not have beenavailable for two-year courses - it really felt asthough Fate was intent on my going toGlasgow!

At the end of the interview, the interviewer,a rather aristocratic English lady, said, “Miss

Whitaker, you seem very keen. What would youdo if we turned you down?” I looked her straightin the eye and replied : “Miss Ford, I wouldundoubtedly go home and shoot myself.” For awavering moment, she thought I was serious.Then we both laughed. I got a place, andobtained my Diploma and Certification in SocialWork the following year. I have lived inGlasgow ever since.

Asocial worker for nine years, I worked inonly two different settings in the six and a

half years following qualification. I was slowingdown and sticking in at last, and finding exactlythe same priorities that had caused me to aban-don an official teaching career: organisation first,clients second, workers last. But I stayed, withmy awkward priorities : clients first, workerssecond, organisation last. I loved the work, andwith Saturn in the first house in Virgo approach-ing the progressed Sun, had begun to developspecialist expertise in child care; very appropri-ate for a twelfth house Leo with many child-hood wounds still to heal in herself.

My experience of adult education wasutilised through rapid involvement in staff

training and the supervision of student socialworkers. I also carried on writing, formally thistime. My social enquiry reports and Children’sHearing reports were often singled out forpraise. Those diverse creative abilities were begin-ning at last to come together in one context.

My boss was another solar hero, last heardof flying in rickety planes to and from the

Urals whilst establishing orphanages for aban-doned East European children. In 1996 we meton the London shuttle, not having seen eachother for 15 years. Within ten minutes he hadoffered me a job as a social worker in aRomanian orphanage. I said no, on the groundsthat I was now an astrologer and had a husbandand stepchildren to consider. “What sort of anexcuse is that?!” he said, mischievously. He waswonderful. Sharing my maverick attitudes, hesupported me to express my commitment inmy own way. I was a high flier in the world ofchild care, expected to move up the promo-tional ladder quickly.

Iended my own career in social work over thefate of an abused and vulnerable three-year-

old boy, having been told to place him in a thirdrate children’s home too far away fromGlasgow for me to visit regularly. There wereno foster parents available. I defied every man-ager I had, saying that this constituted such badpractice that doing it meant I had no profes-sional ethics and might as well leave. Eventually,my boss found some “lost” foster parents withwhom the little boy thrived. But my card hadbeen well and truly marked.

Iapplied for a post in a newly-created childcare team where there were six jobs. Saturn

was transiting the progressed Sun. I was turneddown. Knowing my career was over, I obtaineda transfer to psychiatric hospital work, where Iwent shortly after my beloved boss left, remain-ing in retreat there for four years, until the nextSaturn square.

FFourth career

Teaching, writing and social work gave meways of offering my energy creatively to the

wider community. That was satisfying. I foundthat I could have the variety and challengewhich I realised my restless spirit would alwaysneed, without the destructive discarding of jobsand relationships and roots which had charac-terised my late teens and the whole of mytwenties. But connection with the bigger pic-ture was what my soul still craved.

At 331, just before my retreat into thetwelfth house of psychiatric work, pro-

gressed Sun with transiting Saturn was squaringtenth house Uranus; transiting Uranus was onthe IC/South Node, Neptune trining and Plutosextiling the Sun. The Jupiter-Saturn conjunc-tion at the end of the year was due to fall exact-ly on radix Neptune sextile Mercury. Anyastrologer could have told me the Big Picturewas about to require my presence! A maleAries friend, to whom I had said very littleabout an increasing interest in astrology, gaveme a copy of Alan Oken's Complete Astrology2

for Christmas. I opened it and could not close



Editor’s Note:Anne supplied asealed envelope, along with hercopy, which she insisted that Iopen only after I had read herarticle. In keeping with Anne’ssense of drama, I invite readers tonow look at the back cover ofthe magazine, where the post-card that is so meaningful to her,and which is so appropriate toher story and chart, is repro-duced.

Archaeology supplies us with the evidence of how important the deities that we now con-sider “merely” archetypal influenced the daily lives and the environment of ancient peoples.In this article, Brian Hobley shares with us his research into the shapes of the ancientworld, that in so many ways still shape ours.

The post-Renaissance use of a circle with acentral point to symbolise the Sun in astrol-

ogy is a practise whose origins undoubtedly liein the Greco-Roman world.1 As a symbol ofApollo with the omphalos or “world navel”, itsorigins may go back beyond the 8th centuryBCE. As early as 750 BCE, Homer in the Iliadtells us for the first time that Apollo the Sun-god was the god of seers - he interpreted signsfor Zeus his father.2 As well as being a Sun-god, Apollo was the pre- eminent oracular god,the principal Greco-Roman god of prophecyand divination.Philosophical background

To the early Greek Pythagorean philoso-phers, the Sun (logos) was identified as the

heart/centre of the cosmos, the source of lightand life. To Plato the Sun represented the Ideaof the One as the source of existence.3 Apollo,to the Pythagoreans, was called the One. Thereare numerous interpretations of the nameApollo (Apollon) in Greek, and one suggeststhat Apollo means “not of many”. In the Greekalphabet, a circle divided into four quarters

equated to theos, God expressed as a pointwithin a circle. Significantly, the early Egyptiansconsidered God as the Eye of the Universe,and a point within a circle was regarded bythem as a symbol of deity surrounded by eter-nity - the god Ra.

In Greek mythology the circumference of thecircle is represented by the figure of Okeanos,

the “great circle”, the swift-spinning circularstream whose waves encircle the earth. Wesee this ouroboric stream depicted on theShield of Achilles, where Okeanos was repre-sented by the encircling edge of the shield,while the central knob of the Greek shield wascalled the omphalos.Omphalos: The Sacred Centre

Before the concept of a spherical earth, theancient Greeks conceived the earth as a flat

disc with a central point or navel. This navel oromphalos represented a central pillar or skyprop, viewed as the axis for a sphere. The propwas originally imaged as a central tree risingfrom the earth to the sky. A. B. Cook has argued

(continued on page 37)

it - the connection was instantaneous, like alightning bolt...

Imet both astrology and my Aquarian husbandIan in the same year, and have remained close-

ly involved with both of them ever since, Ianproviding the human love and stability whichhas supported me as I have slowly worked todevelop a deep connection with the imperson-al symbolic world represented by astrology.

Synthesis

Ibecame self-employed as Saturn made itsfirst square to the Leo stellium after the

Saturn Return, feeling strong and matureenough by then to attempt to bring all thediverse parts of myself together in my ownproject. I was a frightened but determinedsolar hero, taking on my biggest self-chal-lenge! In his usual role of providing the bigobstacle to spur my growth, my fatherdropped dead the month after I set up in pri-vate practice, just as Saturn squared the Sun,with progressed Sun moving into Libra semi-sextile the Sun/Asc midpoint.

Since then, I have been successful in bringingmy talents, abilities and experience together

in a way which honours my creative diversitywithout being superficial. I work as anastrologer, astrology teacher, counsellor, coun-selling supervisor, occasional broadcaster andpublic speaker, and writer. Since Pluto wentinto Sagittarius, Uranus into Aquarius, andSaturn into Aries, all triggering the Leo stelliumagain, I have completed a demanding astrologi-cal study course, and sent more of my writtenwork out than ever before. Having come toterms with the twelfth house more, I feel lessafraid of the outside world.

My aim is to aid others in their efforts to beall they can be, whilst doing the same thing

for myself. The great delight of astrology isbeing able, through its symbols, to function as abridge from the personal to the universal forother people, thereby creatively living out theparadox which has so dominated my entire life,for a long time almost destroying it.

My current verdict on the over-allocation of thegift of light ? It is both a curse and a blessing...

The Point in the CircleThe Image of Apollo in the Greco-Roman World

Brian Hobley, FSA, AMA,MIFA, BA, MSt (Oxford),was Chief UrbanArchaeologist at theMuseum of London from1969 to 1989, after whichhe took a Masters Degree atOxford University with athesis on cosmic symbolismin the architecture of theemperor Hadrian. He is cur-rently working on a bookconcerning the symbolic sig-nificance of circularity inGreco-Roman buildings.

The Centre for Psychological Astrology

October 3 Juliet Sharman-BurkeThe Tarot (Minor Arcana) This day will look at the Minor Arcana, studying the remain-ing 56 suit cards and using primarily The Mythic Tarot(although also using other decks), linking suits to elementsand court cards to astrological signs. As much time as possi-ble will be given to example reading in the group.October 4 Lynn BellPlanetary ContainmentsOne way of looking at a chart is to examine what precedesand follows a given planet. What kind of company does itkeep? The notion here is not so much one of ‘in-between’ butof where a planet is coming from and where it is going. Howis a planet coloured or conditioned by the last planet it con-tacts? What is it reaching towards?October 11 Charles Harvey Heights & Depths and the Flight into the Sublime -Neptune & Saturn & Individual Chart WorkNeptune and Saturn are a natural psychological polarity:Transcendence v Imminence, Unmanifest v. Manifest; theFlight into Sublime v. the Denial of the Sublime; the Idealistv. the Pragmatist. Where these planets are both stronglymarked in a chart, or where their mid-point is activated, thiscan lead to profound dilemmas, tensions and both physicaland psychological illness. This seminar will look at the man-ifestations and implications of this polarity and how to workwith it in practice. It will also consider the significance andlikely manifestations of the current long Saturn squareNeptune in our own and clients’ charts. Please bring yourown chart, including mid-point sort, for this seminar. October 18 Darby Costello The Moon & Transiting Outer PlanetsThis seminar will focus on the Moon and its relationship tothe outer planets. During the first half of the day we shalllook at natal charts in which the Moon is aspected by Chiron,Uranus, Neptune and Pluto and how to understand theseaspects in their reflection of early conditioning and lateremotional interactions. During the second half of the day weshall explore transits of the outer planets to the Moon withthe aim of interpreting the underlying meaning of suchaspects as they appear in various stages of our lives.October 25 Karen Hamaker Zondag The Influence of the 12th & 8th Houses onRelationshipsWe often tend to look for the 7th house when we considerlove-relationships or the 5th house for romances, but thewater houses, and especially the 12th and 8th, have a subtlebut nevertheless very strong influence on any relationshipsbetween parents and children, between friends etc.Understanding your unconscious wishes, fears, expectationsand attitudes will help you a lot in creating a deep and openrelationship.

November 1 Liz GreeneApollo’s Chariot: The Sun in The Horoscope Part IThis first part of a double seminar will explore the meaningof the Sun in the horoscope from mythological, psychologi-cal and astrological perspectives. Special emphasis will begiven to the mythology of the Sun as a symbol of conscious-ness and the development of individual identity and sense ofmeaning, through house, sign and aspects; the Sun as animage of the paternal inheritance; and the particular psycho-logical problems which may arise when the Sun is involvedin difficult configurations or unable to “shine” in the indi-vidual’s life. November 8 Liz Greene Apollo’s Chariot: the Sun in the Horoscope Part II

This second seminar on the Sun in the horoscope will focuson the Sun and the process of creative expression; creative“blocks” and the specific ways in which the individual maywork to feel better connected to a source of inner creativepower through the Sun’s house, sign and aspects; the Sun inmajor secondary progressions; important transits over theSun, particularly from the outer planets; and the Sun in termsof vocation and “life purpose”. This seminar as well as PartOne will use case material and group charts extensively toground astrological and psychological concepts.Nov 15 Charles Harvey Achilles’ Heels - Wounds in the Chart: How to Work with Them

The chart positions of Saturn and Chiron often indicate areaswhere we experience personal blockage, limitation andwounding. But equally the position of Neptune and 12thhouse planets can show where a subtler kind of wound,weakness and capacity for self-sabotage can occur. This sem-inar will explore the signatures of these different weak andblind spots in the chart and psyches and how to work withthem with yourself and your clients. The importance of mid-points involving these planets both as problem areas andpotential solutions will also be explored. Please bring yourchart and mid-point sort with you.

Nov 22 Matjaz Regovec Mercury the Mercurius Astrological & Alchemical Perspectives

Astrological Mercury is an interesting, yet curiously neglect-ed dimension of psychological astrology. For some reasonwe tend to overlook Mercury’s deeper significance, yet theimage of the alchemical Mercurius is extremely vivid andalchemical Mercurius plays a variety of very important roles.In this seminar we will explore the deeper astrological under-standing of this much neglected planetary deity. Some of thedifferent faces of Mercury will be examined including hisaspects to other planets.

Seminar Schedule - Autumn 1998

7th November Orientation Day with Liz, Charles and tutors for new Diploma Students - 10.30 - 12.30. RSVP.

For all & ex-diploma students - 2.00-4.00 Student/Staff meeting, discussions and presentation of Certificates and Diplomas.

Hans Baker is running 10 week Introduction to Psychological Astrology Course for Beginners/Intermediates at:

Central Club Gt. Russell St. WC2 Price £150.00. Courses run in both afternoons and evenings.Call Hans on 0117 940 5537 for full details.

APPLICATION FORM

Name: CPA dip student yes/no

Address:

Telephone:

I would like to apply for ____ place(s) at the following events:

Hans Baker Introduction to Psychological Astrology

Sat Oct 3 Juliet Sharman-Burke Tarot - Minor Arcana

Sun Oct 4 Lynn Bell Planetary Containments

Sun Oct 11 Charles Harvey Heights & Depths Neptune & Saturn

Sun Oct 18 Darby Costello The Moon and the Transiting Outer Planets

Sun Oct 25 Karen Hamaker Zondag Influence of 12th & 8th Houses in relationships

Sun Nov 1 Liz Greene Apollo’s Chariot: The Sun in the Horoscope, Part One

Sun Nov 8 Liz Greene Apollo’s Chariot: The Sun in the Horoscope, Part Two

Sun Nov 15 Charles Harvey. Achilles’ Heels - Wounds in the Chart

Sun Nov 22 Matjaz Regovec Mercury the Mercurius

Sat Nov 7 Orientation Day Student Staff Meeting (Only open to current and past Diploma students)

I enclose a cheque/postal order/money order in Sterling, drawn on a UK bank, for the sum of £_________

Post to: Centre for Psychological Astrology,

BCM Box 1815, London WC1N 3XX, England

Telephone and Fax: +44-181 749 2330

Email: [email protected]

Please Note:

All one day seminars are on Sundays between 10am and 5pm with the exception of Charles Harvey’s two seminars

which will start at 10.3O am. There are two coffee breaks and a lunch break. You are welcome to bring all charts

(preferably on acetate for use with an overhead projector) for discussion to all seminars. Fees are payable in advanceand must be sent with your application form at least ten days prior to the seminar date. Late applicants cannot be guar-

anteed a place.

The fee for each one day seminar is £37.00. If cancellations are received less than 10 days before the seminar the feemay be forfeit unless a replacement can be found. No acknowledgments are sent unless requested. Please enclose SAE.

Venues:

All one day seminars are held at Regents College, Inner Circle, Regents Park, London NW1

Nearest tube: Baker Street.

The Tarot workshop is held at 209 Hammersmith Grove, London W6

Nearest tube: Goldhawk Rd/Hammersmith Broadway/Shepherds Bush.

Introduction to Psychological Astrology Classes are held at Central Club, 16/22 Gt Russell Street, London, WCI

Nearest tube: Russell Square

Please do not turn up at a venue without booking in advance!

Books from the CPA Press

BBARRIERS AND BOUNDARIES

The Horoscope & the Defences of the Personality Liz Greene “Solid gold” - AJ

THE ASTROLOGER, THE COUNSELLOR AND THE PRIEST Liz Greene & Juliet Sharman-Burke“...Should be not just recommended, but compulsory reading” - AJ

THE FAMILY INHERITANCE Parental Images in the Horoscope Juliet Sharman-Burke “I would highly recommend this book.......It is rich reading” - TMA

TO THE EDGE AND BEYOND

Saturn, Chiron, Pholus and the Centaurs Melanie Reinhart “like a true Centaur, Reinhart is blazing a trailfor the rest of us to follow.” AJ

VENUS AND JUPITER Bridging the Ideal and the Real Erin Sullivan “I loved this book... I highly recommend it” - TMA

THE ASTROLOGICAL MOON Darby Costello “High quality, exquisitely produced hard-back which won’t fall apart when it has become a well-loved and often thumbed-through favourite” - AJ

THE ART OF STEALING FIRE Uranus in the Horoscope Liz Greene “Teaching at its best.” Horoscope

INCARNATION The Nodes and the Four Angles Melanie Reinhart“A most worthwhile, mindful and user-friendly book which will enrich the library shelf of any student of astrology” - AJ

THE HOROSCOPE IN MANIFESTATION

Prediction and Psychological Dynamics Liz Greene“Deep stuff... Rush out and buy Manifestation.” - AJ

DIRECTION AND DESTINY IN THE BIRTH CHART Howard Sasportas

RECORDED DELIVERY for added security for international orders; requires signature on delivery. £2.50 per orderTOTAL:

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About the Centre for Psychological Astrology

The Centre for Psychological Astrology provides a unique workshop and professional training programme, designed to foster

the cross fertilisation of the fields of astrology and depth, humanistic, and transpersonal psychology. The main aims and objec-

tives of the CPA professional training course are:

a) To provide students with a solid and broad base of knowledge, within the realms of both traditional astrological symbolism

and psychological theory and technique, so that the astrological chart can be sensitively understood and interpreted in the light

of modern psychological thought.

b) To make available to students psychologically qualified case supervision, along with background seminars in counselling

skills and techniques which would raise the standard and effectiveness of astrological consultation. It should be noted that no for-

mal training as a counsellor or therapist is provided by the course.

c) To encourage investigation and research into the links between astrology, psychological models, and therapeutic techniques,

thereby contributing to and advancing the existing body of astrological and psychological knowledge.

History

The Centre for Psychological Astrology began unofficially in 1980 as a sporadic series of classes and seminars offered by Liz

Greene and Howard Sasportas, covering all aspects of astrology from beginners' courses to more advanced one-day seminars. In

1981 additional evening courses and seminars by other tutors were interspersed with those of Liz and Howard to increase the

variety of material offered to students, and Juliet Sharman-Burke and Warren Kenton began contributing their expertise in Tarot

and Kabbalah. It then seemed appropriate to take what was previously simply a random collection of astrology classes and put

them under a single umbrella, so in 1982 the "prototype" of the CPA - the Centre for Transpersonal Astrology - was born, with

the administrative work handled by Richard Aisbitt, himself a practising astrologer.

In 1983 the name was changed to the Centre for Psychological Astrology, because a wide variety of psychological approaches

was incorporated into the seminars, ranging from transpersonal psychology to the work of Jung, Freud and Klein. In response to

repeated requests from students, the Diploma Course was eventually created, with additional tutors joining the staff. The Centre

continued to develop and consolidate its programme despite the tragic death of Howard in 1992, when Charles Harvey became

co-director with Liz Greene. Richard Aisbitt continued to manage the administration with great ability and commitment until

1994, when the burden of increasing ill health forced him to restrict his contribution to beginners' and intermediate classes. At

this time Juliet Sharman-Burke took over the administration for the Centre. Richard himself sadly died in 1996.

For further information, visit our website at http://www.astrologer.com/cpa or send a SAE to the administrator.

The CPA Press

Since the Centre’s inception, many people, including astrology students living abroad as well as those attending CPA seminars,

have repeatedly requested transcriptions of the seminars. In the autumn of 1995, Liz Greene, Charles Harvey and Juliet Sharman-

Burke decided to launch the Centre for Psychological Astrology Press, in order to make available to the astrological commu-

nity material which would otherwise be limited solely to seminar participants, and might never be included by the individual

tutors in their own future written works. Because of the Centre’s module-type programme, many seminars are “one-off” presen-

tations which are not likely to be repeated, and much careful research and important astrological investigation would otherwise

be lost. The volumes in the CPA Seminar Series are meant for serious astrological students who wish to develop a greater knowl-

edge of the links between astrology and psychology, in order to understand both the horoscope and the human being at a deep-

er and more insightful level.

Coin: Apollo seated on theOmphalos, 246-227 BCE, show-ing Far-Shooting Apollo with hissilver bow seated on the net-cov-ered omphalos stone at Delphi.

1 We first know of the glyphfrom Fracastro, Homocentrica,Venice, 1538, p 50. Neubebauerand Van Hoesen (GreekHoroscopes 1.163) state that theearliest Greek horoscopes fromthe 1st century BCE contain noglyphs or “ligatures” except forthe occasional use of the lunarcrescent and a “fallen cone” (itlooks like an inverted ice creamcone) which signifies the Sun.2 Homer, Iliad, 1.873 Plato, Laws , 898e 4 Cook, 2.1.167. 5 Nonnos, Dionysiaca, 2.296-7,4.290-1 (7.71 and 27.252).6 Ibid., 41.294.7 See A Catalogue of The GreekCoins in the British Museum,Central Greece, p 30, Nos 22and 23, and Lydia, p 71, Nos 8and 5, Arnoldo Forni, Bologna,1963.8 Burkert, 116.9 Luschey, 1939. The BritishMuseum has in its collections abronze omphalos bowl or phialeof Greek or Phrygian origin, c.7th century BCE, from Camirus.

that the word omphalos meant just what it says- “the navel”, that is, the navel of the humanbody, not the hub of the universe.4 The ompha-los represents the centre of sacred space, ameeting point between heaven and earth, themidpoint on the axis mundi, the world axis5 andcentre of the universe. When Harmonia wovethe veil representing the entire universe, shestarted with a representation of the omphalos atthe centre and worked outward.6

Any centrally located place was called theomphalos of the region. At

Apollo’s shrine at Delphi, seenby the Greeks as the centreof the earth, two navel-shaped omphaloi havebeen found. The origi-nal omphalos waslocated within thetemple of Apollo andwas a model for oth-ers in ancient times. Infact the god himself wasregularly imaged onGreco-Roman coins withthe omphalos, and his templewas also represented with thepediment (the focus of sacred imagery)containing the circle with the omphalos as apoint at its centre. 7

The Apollo temenos at Delphi was foundedsoon after 750 BCE. At the Pytho, the holy

sanctuary, in a sunken area at the end of thetemple (called the Adyton), would have stoodthe omphalos and tripod cauldron suspendedover a round well-like opening in the ground.This juxtaposition of Apollo with the omphalosand underground pit sacred to the chthonicearth-deities - the symbolic meeting betweenheaven and earth - occurs throughout theancient world. The omphalos name was alsogiven in the Aegean region to other structures,such as omphaloid beehive tombs and altars. AtDidyma, the great Apollo temple in Asia Minornear Miletos, an omphalos stands, where, over around well-like opening in the ground, the tri-pod cauldron was set up. 8 There was also a cir-cular altar in front of the temple. A widely usedlibation bowl called the omphalos bowl becameall but universally employed for libations in theGreek world. 9

Rome was provided with an omphalos or

umbilicus by Augustus, of a circular shape -

the umbilicus Romae, dated around 20 BCE, and

conceived as a point where all the roads con-

verging on Rome met. Augustus was, through-

out his life, a devotee of Apollo, and therefore

it is not surprising that he was to reproduce the

same juxtaposition of circular Apollonian sym-

bolism with the omphalos in Roman architec-

ture and religious symbolism.

In sum, the symbol of the circle with a centralpoint represented, in classical times, two

strongly held basic concepts of the ancient clas-sical world - centrality and circularity. The for-mer is connected with manifestation, earth, andincarnation, while the latter is connected withthe transcendent, heaven, and eternity.

TThe circular cosmos

Though the Babyloniansattributed divinity to the

planets, they never devel-oped the concept ofthe celestial sphere,and neglected spheri-cal geometry. TheGreek concept of thecelestial sphere guid-

ed Greek astrono-my/astrology in an

entirely new direction.The Greek idea of divinity,

from the 5th century onwards,saw planetary worship - especially the

perception of the Sun and Moon - develop andtransform through Greek astronomy and math-ematics and the ideas of Plato and Aristotle.The zodiac was a concept of the Babylonians,but was only fully developed by the Greekswith the introduction of the ecliptic.

Pythagoras (2nd half of the 6th century BCE)regarded the earth as another celestial body

moving in a circle like the Sun, Moon, and starsaround a central fire (the hearth of the uni-verse), which provided the motion force for thewhole universe. This belief became deeplyrooted in Greek astronomy/astrology. Platointroduced an advanced concept, that of aworld soul - the cosmos is a sphere having a cir-cular revolutionary motion, in the middle ofwhich God established “soul”. During the 5thcentury BCE the idea arose, through the impor-tant introduction of Orphic teachings, that thehuman soul comes from the gods, and afterrepeated trials returns to them, or else runs for-ever in a circle through the sphere of the cos-mos.

In sum, early Greek logic and thinking per-ceived a perfection in the order of the uni-

verse/cosmos, which was viewed as a livingorganism. The central focal point was theunmoving geocentric earth. All evidence thatrefuted this concept was rejected by an intel-lectual establishment intent on “saving theappearances”.

(continued from page 32)


If we read the sym-bolism correctly, thecircle (of Apollo,the One, the Light)contains and sub-dues the primitivepowers of the earthand underworld.

10 Plutarch, The Obsolescence ofOracles, 433e

11 Harrison, 1977, 438.12 Strabo, Geography, 10.5.2-3.13 Plutarch, Theseus , 21.14 Lucian, De Saltatione, 7.2.7115 Seiler, 37, Abb. 18

AApollo and circular symbolism

Apollo was widely worshipped in both theGreek and Roman worlds. Plutarch, the

Platonist philosopher who lived in Hadrian’stime, was a priest of Apollo at Delphi for thefirst thirty years of his life. Renowned for theprofundity of his thinking, he wrote: “The Sun ismerely Apollo’s offspring.”10 He then points outthat many among earlier generations mistaken-ly regarded Apollo and the Sun (Helios) as oneand the same God. “...[As] a body is to soul,vision to intellect and light to truth, so is thepower of the Sun to the nature of Apollo;and...the Sun is his offspring and progeny, beingforever born of him that is forever.”

Photius,11 quoting Proclus, describes to usthe ritual of the Daphnephoria in its worship

of Apollo Ismenios. “On the top of a decoratedpole is fitted a bronze globe, from which theysuspend smaller globes. Another smaller globeis fitted midway around the pole. By the top-most globe they mean the Sun, to which theyactually compare Apollo. The globe beneaththis is the Moon; the smaller globes hung on arethe stars and constellations.” Pindar (first half ofthe 5th century BCE) in his songs reflects in theDaphnephoria ritual the use of Apollo’s laurelbearing the globes and spheres.

By about 700 BCE, written sources such asthe “Hymn to Apollo” are available, and it

is clear that by the 5th century BCE, Apollobegan to be identified as a Sun-god. Hencelions and griffins, both of which have solarattributes, are in the retinue of Apollo. One ofApollo’s titles is Phoebus - “the Brilliant” - or“Apollo of the Radiant Sky”. This epithetappears on dedications as early as the 5th cen-tury BCE. To Plato, Apollo is “he who causes[the heavenly bodies] to move together in har-mony”. Apollo was said to have been born,signficantly for our study of circularity, on theisland of Delos12 in a group of islands known asthe Cyclades - Greek for “circle”. The hub orcentre of this necklace of islands was Delos.Here there was a circular sacred lake. On theisland the famous circular Crane Dance, the ger-anos, was danced by Theseus and his followersaround the Altar of Horns after they escapedfrom the Cretan Minotaur.13

Circular dances were performed by theGreeks from the earliest times, associated

with the deities Apollo, Ares, Dionysos andPan, who were all described as dancers. TwoApollonian ring dances are portrayed, of Dorianwarriors dancing with Libyan girls. Thelabyrinth/geranos dance of Delos is featured onthe François vase in the Firenze ArchaeologicalMuseum. A coin of Apollo from Polchos, datedfrom the 2nd century BCE, shows a circularlabyrinth, and one likewise appears on a 7thcentury Etruscan jug found at Tragliatella, justnorth of Rome. Lucian, a lecturer on literary

and philosophical themes, reflects on the cos-mic origins of circular dancing. “It would seemthat dancing came into being at the beginning ofall things...For we see this primeval dancingclearly set forth in the choral dance of the con-stellations and in the planets and fixed stars,their interweaving and interchange and orderlyharmony.”14 Encircling dances were thus tradi-tional and common in Greece, as was a dancearound an object such as a sacrificial pit or both-ros lying within the circle. Such also was theRoman ritual of the lustratio.

As stated above, the Apollonian temple atDidyma had a great circular ash altar, which

some scholars have argued was created withina circular temple or tholos. The sacred way fromMiletus to Didyma began at the harbour, wherea huge circular monument had been built.Circular symbolism for Apollo is thus clearlyseen in many major monuments, structures andartifacts.

Circularity, the soul, and heaven

The old Roman gods, such as Jupiter, Mars,Janus and Vesta, gave to humans little, if

any, hope for the afterlife - only Hades offeredthis, and the quality of this afterlife was dubious.Before the introduction of Orphic beliefs aboutthe afterlife, contact with the old gods wasmade by a circular offering pit or bothros, dug asa contact point with the chthonic forces of theunderworld. The universe was perceived as aclear duality - “above”, the inaccessible realm ofheaven peopled by the sky-father andOlympian heroes, and “below”, the realm of theunderworld. Sanctuaries known as heroönswere built for heroes or demigods, and areprincipally circular internally and square exter-nally. A bothros may have had a round building- a tholos (Greek) or tholus (Latin) - built aroundit, which is a significant symbolic method of con-taining these frightening chthonic gods whocould not be disturbed and certainly notdestroyed. If we read the symbolism correctly,the circle (of Apollo, the One, the Light) con-tains and subdues the primitive powers of theearth and underworld. Once a sanctified struc-ture in the ancient world was established, it wasvirtually impossible to abandon it without vio-lating its sanctity - but the chthonic powers itserved could be contained. The Athenian tholosin the agora, which survived for around a thou-sand years, is an outstanding example of thatsacred continuity and containment. In con-structing the tholos, the builders retained andconsolidated a round poros or altar-like monu-ment by demarcating it with fresh buildingmaterials. At Eretria a bothros pit is not onlyencircled by a tholos building, but the tholos itselfis within a circular fence, thus reflecting thestrong chthonic influences that needed to becontained.15


The mystery religions, such as those dedicat-ed to Cybele, Mithras and Orpheus, gave a

new concept of life after death. Hence they hada huge influence on the Roman world, whichextended into Christian doctrines in both sub-tle and obvious ways. Hercules (Herakles) wasalso the object of a mystery cult and wasstrongly identified with the belief in the afterlife.It was on the advice of the Apollonian Delphicoracle that the Romans imported the worshipof the Great Mother Cybele from Pessinus incentral Turkey, and she was duly installed in atemple on the Palatine Hill, which laterAugustus paired off with another temple toApollo. The mystery religions offered specialknowledge, with secret rituals and initiations toassist the soul, through various levels and tests,to a final resting place among the stars. Failuremeant an endless circle of ascent and descent.Macrobius calls it the “weary wheel”.16 ADionysian inscription captures the same senseof circularity, saying, “I have flown out of thesorrowful, weary wheel; I have pursued theeager feet the circle desired.”17

Diogenes Laertius says Pythagoras was the firstto assert that “the soul went round in a chang-ing wheel of necessity...”18

SSun wheels

Spoked wheels hanging from the ceilings oftemples, as seen on Apulian vases, are com-

monly held by scholars to be chariot wheels.Their appearance is such, but in the context ofa sacred place, their function should be consid-ered more symbolic. Here, Philostratos in theLife of Apollonius helps, for he speaks of goldeniynx wheels - celestial magic wheels that hungfrom a Delphic temple and are therefore prob-ably Apollonian Sun-symbols. Such paintedwheels have been found decorating the walls inAugustus’ house on the Palatine Hill in Rome. Ifthe iynx wheel symbols are representative ofApollo, we might reasonably expect them to befound in Augustus’ house, considering, as weshall discuss later, this emperor’s overwhelmingcommitment to Apollo. Significantly, iynges andsolar discs were known to have been placed inhero and cult sanctuaries as well as on theGreek shields (probably circular) spoken of byHomer.

Dionysius the Thracian (c. 170-90 BCE), aStoic and grammarian, wrote a book

(sadly lost) on The Interpretation of theSymbolism Concerning Wheels.19 Clement ofAlexandria, quoting this work, mentions “...thecase of the wheel that is turned round in theprecincts of the gods...” Such bronze wheels areknown in Egyptian temples and sanctuaries, setagainst door posts so that those who enter cansee them in motion. According to Jung, thewheel is an archetypal image, and the Sun-wheel is perhaps the oldest image there is.20

Cook argues, likewise, “...the adoption of aspoked wheel as a representation of the

Sun, entirely on intrinsic grounds alone, bothphysical resemblances being circular...Thespokes realistically imitate the rays and nimbusof the Sun.”21 The Sun’s movement through thesky is, in addition, a circular motion similar tothe rotating wheel. The Roman goddessFortuna often appears with her Wheel ofFortune, a solar disc with an omphaloid hub atthe centre, and this is frequently mentioned inLatin literature from the time of Cicero in thelast century BCE.

Mundus

Another ancient pit construction that con-noted centrality and circularity for both the

Etruscans and Romans was that of the mundus- a pit, usually circular, covered by a vault andused as a place of worship and contact with thedead. The word mundus has an etymologicalmeaning corresponding to the Greek universeor cosmos.22 According to Cato (234-149BCE), this pitlike cell was vaulted like the sky. ToVarro, the shape was that of a subterraneantemplum (temple) and corresponded with theheavenly templum, that is, circular.23

The mundus also had a second role, that ofthe source of a town’s life - the sacred

hearth or fire. Plutarch reports that the munduswas a round circular trench (comitium) dug intothe virgin soil, into which were cast the firstfruits or “good things”.24 “This trench theycall...the heaven, mundus, making which theircentre, and they inscribe the city as a circleround it.”25 In Rome the comitium dated to the3rd century BCE, and was a circular amphithe-atre of steps symbolising an augural (divinatory)temple. At Cosa in Italy the templum comitiumwas always circular. In other words, a new cityor settlement required an act of ritual inaugura-tion which was based upon the concept of cen-tring the site at the hub of the universe, sym-bolised by a central mundus and an encirclingditch.

Tholoi

Classical scholarship has long been attractedby the origins, development and purpose

of round buildings in the Greco-Roman world.In Greece there are early forms that can cer-tainly be dated before the early Helladic period,prior to 1500 BCE. Mycenean beehive tholostombs are probably dated from the 15th to the14th centuries BCE. These tholos tombs werebuilt for the elite, yet more modest ones werealso built for the common people. Constructednot only for sacred reasons but also for secularones, their origins could lie in circumambulationdances, themselves based upon centrality con-cepts and the circular nature of the cosmos andthe Sun’s path through the heavens. Greekastrology with its emphasis on the ecliptic

16 Macrobius, In SomniumScipionis, 1.12

17 Kaibel, Inscriptiones, No. 64118 Diogenes Laertius,

Compendium, 7.1219 Clement of Alexandria,

Stromateis, 5.24220 Jung, 18.8121 Cook, 2.57-9322 Festus, Compendium, 15423 Varro, De Lingua Latina 7.625 Ovid, Fasti , 4, 819-836


began to develop at the same time that theGreeks were developing tholoi.26 Scholars haveargued that Greek round buildings were con-nected to god and hero cults, and their roundshape derived from “containing” the centralhearth and altar or bothros pit.

The most active development of tholoioccurred in the 8th and 7th centuries BCE.

Their flowering took place in the late 5th and4th centuries, epitomised by the constructionof the tholos at Delphi II, the OlympianPhilippaeon, and the tholos at Epidauros. Thelatter tholos has unique sub-floor structureswhich have entered the literature as a labyrinthof annular passages possibly used for mainte-nance or rituals. Serious questions arise aroundthis idea because of the difficulty of movementin the very narrow space between the below-floor walls.

Who were the gods served by these tholoi?Macrobius, in reference to the cult of

Helios and circular monuments, says that bothApollo and Dionysus use round temples.27

Servius states that round temples served Vesta(Hestia), Diana (Artemis), Hercules (Herakles)and Mercury (Hermes).28 Athenaeus reports acircular tholos shrine of Aphrodite (Venus) onPtolemy IV Philopetro’s river boat.29 Statiusinforms us that Pollius Felis built a tholos toHercules on or adjacent to his villa atSurrentium.30 Livy confirms the use of tholoi forthe worship of Hercules: “Moreover, at Romethere are two round temples to HerculesVictor...”31 There is surviving today a roundtemple to Hercules Invictus by the Tiber in theForum Boarium. The Marble Plan of ancientRome shows the temple of Hercules Musarum(Muses) as a round temple. Hercules is a sacri-ficer and founder of altars, e.g. the Ara Maximain the Forum Boarium.

There is little doubt that both the documen-tary and archaeological evidence to date

indicates that Apollo and Hercules were themost favoured gods for circular temples.Hercules was much favoured by emperors,Stoics, and common people. He was simultane-ously a demigod, a god, and a hero.Pythagoreans revered both Hercules andOrpheus as having been inspired by Apollo, andthus they were seen as Sun-gods. In factHercules as a solar hero “stood in for” Apolloas an image of the god in mortal flesh. Hencehe wears a lion-skin, the lion being the animal ofthe Sun. The hope of a celestial afterlife wasencapsulated in the cult of Hercules. He wascharged by Apollo to fight Hera, the GreatMother. As a hero, Hercules is renowned forhis twelve labours, first known in the 6th centu-ry BCE through an epic poem by Peisandos ofRhodes. An association of this cycle of labourswith the twelve signs of the zodiac is difficult toavoid. At Ingel, near Trier in France, a free-

standing monument shows the apotheosis ofHercules after his twelve labours, ascending toheaven via the zodiac. Above is a head ofApollo and two griffins, creatures sacred to theSun-god. The temple of Hercules Musarum alsoconnects Hercules with Apollo, as the Musesare Apollo’s companions or daughters.

Though not mentioned by the ancient docu-mentary sources as having a relationship

with circularity, Asclepios, son of Apollo, clearlyhad close connections with this symbolism, asseen from the great tholos at Epidauros. Apollowas the supreme god of medicine and healththrough harmony (expressed as music). Thesoul rules the body, and the body’s healthdepends on harmony. Asclepios presides overthe health of the body. Hygeia, daughter ofAsclepios and granddaughter of Apollo, per-sonifies health, and was closely associated withboth Ascelpios and Apollo.32 A stone reliefpublished by Reinach33 shows Hygeia standingclose to a seated Asclepios. Her arm is fullyextended, touching a large circular disc restingupon a pillar. This unique depiction clearly givessymbolic emphasis to the disc, which can beconsidered as having an Apollonian solar signif-icance.AApollo at Pompeii and Rome

The survival of the Roman city of Pompeiibeneath volcanic deposits from the erup-

tion of Vesuvius in 79 CE has preserved manydetails of town life that seldom survive archae-ologically. In Pompeii Apollo was the chief deity.He and his sister Diana frequently appear asdecorative motifs in the most important houses- for example, the House of Apollo and theVilla Oplontis. At the House of Apollo is a wallpainting showing the god in front of a tholos,seated on a throne on a circular dais, with thefigures of the Morning and Evening Stars (theplanet Venus in her two manifestations) oneither side of him. (See opposite.) At the VillaOplontis, Room 14 is dedicated to Apollo, whois again seen in a wall painting standing in a tho-los. He is nude except for a short cloak, and hasluxuriant hair. The symbolic attributes of thegod are depicted in adjacent wall paintings -griffins, laurel and, most importantly, circles ordiscs with omphaloi or stars at their centres,hanging over painted gates. Archaeological evi-dence strongly supports the probability that thevilla was used by the family of Poppaea, Nero’ssecond wife, and thus an Apollonian decorativetheme was appropriate, Nero being totally ded-icated to the Sun-god.

In Rome Apollo retained full Greek character.He is worshipped with Greek rites and,

exceptionally, he keeps his Greek name; it wasnever Latinised. It is, without question, theemperor Augustus (first known as Octavian)who established the importance of Apollo inthe Roman world. Throughout his long life (he

26 Neugebauer, 1983, 243, and Cramer, 1954, 8.

27 Macrobius, Saturn , 1.18, 7-1128 Servius, Danielis ad Aen.,

9.406.29 Athenaeus, Compendium,

5.205d30 Statius, Silvae, 3.131 Livy, Roman History, 10.23.232 Lucian, Vol. 5, “astrology”,

2.52.233 Reinach (1912), 280, Fig. 2.


Three Figures: Drawing of a fres-co at the House of Apollo atPompeii, c. 62-79 CE, showingApollo in the centre on a circulardais with a circular coffered ceil-ing. Beside him are the two"Phosphori", the morning andevening stars, which were knownto be the planet Venus. Apollowas often shown with these twofacets of Venus because they fol-low the Sun so closely in its risingand setting; they are his "light-bearers".

Adopted from a drawing by W. L. MacDonald

34 Suetonius, De vita Caesarum,2.70.2

35 Ibid. 2.94.436 Ibid. 2.94.637 Ibid. 2.29.138 Ibid. 2.100

held power for fifty-seven years), Augustus’belief in Apollo as his adopted protector,patron deity and divine father never faltered.

Suetonius wrote, “Caesar [Augustus] was intruth Apollo...”34 The historian tells us of

Augustus being born the son of Apollo,35 andstresses the solar connection: “...As an infant[he] was found, after being lost, in a lofty towerwith his face toward the rising sun.”36

These writings clearly have a propaganda value,but also reveal how Augustus wished to beseen by his people. At the age of nineteen, atthe death of Caesar in 44 BCE, his bid forpower began. At the battle of Philippi in 42BCE, “Apollo!” was the battle cry. As early as 37BCE, Octavian’s coinage for the first time intro-duces Apollo directly, using tripods as symbols.In 36 BCE, during his campaign against Pompey(or possibly at the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE),Augustus (then Octavian) vowed to build atemple to Apollo at Rome.37 Sited on thePalatine Hill, close to Augustus’ modest house,this great temple (which was later to house thebooks of Sybilline prophecies) was the mostsumptuous and magnificent of all the earlyAugustan buildings. The only temple to Apolloin Rome before Augustus’ reign was theTemple of Apollo Medicus Sosianus, immedi-ately north of the Theatre of Marcellus. Thisstructure was eventually restored by Augustus,and, it should be noted, had a tholos, 5.2 metres

in diameter, located centrally and immediatelyin front of the temple - a position not unlikethat of the great Didyma temple altar tholos.

At the same time that he vowed to build thetemple to Apollo on the Palatine, Augustus

had begun work on his circular mausoleum,38

and shortly after the Battle of Actium whichgave him final victory over Mark Antony, heerected his own tholos on the Acropolis atAthens - the temple of Rome and Augustus,dedicated to his dynastic cult. The impact onRoman architecture of the great circular mau-soleum in Rome was considerable. ThatAugustus controlled the architectural symbol-ism as well as the iconography can hardly bedoubted. An interesting feature is the likenessof the structure of the tomb, as viewed fromabove, to the ecliptic, as the inner supportingwalls (not meant to be visible) divide it intotwelve segments. At the centre is an internalcolumn which could be interpreted as a form ofomphalos, as it carries externally at the top astatue of Augustus. At its base in the heart ofthe mausoleum lie the emperor’s remains.There is no structural need to place the statueon such a column, and therefore it must be ofsymbolic significance. (See over.)

Recent archaeological research has placedAugustus’ circular tomb at the beginning of

a tumulus building tradition that was to last for


centuries. Some scholars argue that he couldhave copied Alexander’s tomb, but there is nei-ther archaeological nor documentary evidenceto sustain this hypothesis. There is a greaterprobability that the circular shape was adoptedbecause it was an Apollonian symbol, and itsdesign was decided when Augustus was estab-lishing his commitment to Apollo as well as tothe Roman State.

The cumulative evidence for this suggestionis the work of a larger research report, and

cannot be considered here. However, it can bestated that Augustan commitment toApollonian circularity included what may proveto be a great circular open court built as part ofthe Augustan/Agrippan Pantheon built in 27-25BCE, at the same time as the mausoleum. Theoriginal transverse rectangular temple built byAugustus, and called the Pantheon, faced north

on a vista to the Mausoleum. On the south sideof the temple there apparently was built anintegrated circular open paved courtyard orpiazza whose shape and dimensions wereadopted by the emperor Hadrian for his ownPantheon built between 118-128 CE, which stillsurvives today and is considered by mostauthorities as the finest building of the Romanworld. This building, a “temple to all the gods”with an oculus or opening for the Sun’s light atthe centre of the dome, is rich in geometricalsymbolism based upon the circle and sphere.(See opposite.) Hadrian adopted the circularshape for his own mausoleum, and Apolloniancircularity surely had a profound symbolicmeaning for him as it had for Augustus, his pre-decessor and model.


Mausoleum of Augustus(Drawing of the building at thetop, with a circular ground planbeneath)©G. Gatti, L'Urbe, 1938.

Geometry of the PantheonThis is the theoretical sphericaland cubical geometry of thePantheon (Temple to "All theGods") built by Hadrian at Rome.

Adopted from W.L. MacDonald,The Pantheon: Design, Meaning andProgeny, London, 1976.

Burkert, W., Greek Religion, trans. J. Raffan, 1987.Cook, A. B., Zeus: A Study of Ancient Religion, Vol. 1

(1914), 2 (1925), Cambridge.Cramer, F. H., Astrology in Roman Law and Politics,

1954.Gundel, H. G., Zodiakos, 1992.Harrison, J. E., Prologomena to the Study of Greek

Religion, 1907 (1980).Harrison, J. E., Themis, 1912.Jung, C., G., Collected Works, Vol. 18, The Symbolic

Life, 1992.

Luschey, Heinz, Die Phiale, 1939.Neugebauer, O., A History of Ancient Mathematical

Astronomy (1975).Neugebauer, O., Astronomy and History: Selected

Essays, 1983.Neugebauer, O. and Van Hoesen, H. B., Greek

Horoscopes, 1987.Reinach, S., Répertoire de Reliefs Grecs et Romains, Vol. 2

1912.Seiler, F., Die griechische Tholos, 1986.


Bibliography of modern works cited

There are two things about fire that I wish tohave us keep in mind today. The first is that

fire, by its nature consumes and transformsthings. The second is that fire is generally destruc-tive if it isn't controlled. These two principlesoperate on every level, as far as I know; physically,mentally, emotionally and spiritually.TTerrestrial Fire

Let's start with material fire, if that isn't a con-tradiction in terms. In the Encyclopaedia

Britannica it says the evolution of man could beequated with his ability to handle fire. Hecouldn't come out of the warm tropical forestsuntil he could keep a fire alive. According tothis source it was around 500,000 years agothat we began to be able to handle fire. Thefirst evidence of this is in China, with Pekingman. Other men may have used it before, butPeking man definitely did. Before that, presum-ably, we met fire as a dangerous and terrifyingelement. It generates itself naturally throughspontaneous combustion, through dry branchesrubbing together, and through volcanoes. Thesparks generated from rolling stones can getalso get a fire going in nature. And then, ofcourse, there is lightning. Do you know thatthere are approximately 10,000 electricalstorms on the earth every day, and there areapproximately 100,000 incidences of lightningstriking the ground every day? Since it only hap-pens a few times a year in England it must hap-pen an awful lot in other places. It certainlyhappens a lot in Africa. When I was therethrough the 1970’s it was still the highest killerof animals and people in South Africa. I won-der if that has changed? Lightning is obviouslythe greatest natural generator of fire that wehave here on earth.

So, we learned to guard and keep a flamefrom the fires we came across, about half a

million years ago, but, we are told, it was notuntil around 10,000 BCE that we figured outhow to generate it ourselves. This period issome time between the Old Stone Age and theNeolithic Age - the New Stone Age. One of

the earliest tools was a pointed stick of hardwood, together with a piece of soft wood witha very small hole in it. When the hard stick istwirled in the soft wood very, very fast, it cre-ates a spark. Have any of you ever seen firegenerated in that way? Very impressive. Itmust touch something very ancient in us - itfeels so magical when the spark touches thewool or straw that you have ready.

From about 10,000 to about 7,000 BCE wegot some sort of control over fire - we could

generate it at will - and therefore we becamefree to move as far as our legs would take us.We could go into the cold places now, becausewe could take our warmth with us. Over timewe found that we wanted to stay in some ofthese colder places, and we developed thetechnology that allowed us to clear land, fash-ion suitable dwellings and cook food with uten-sils that we made. Since that time we havebeen finding more and more ways to use firepower and we have handled increasingly pow-erful fires for our own use. Think of the atom-ic bomb. That is an extremely dramatic expres-sion of fire power brought into shape andunder control by human ingenuity, whether welike it or not. And think of a rocket firing - thefire power that it takes to get the rocket out ofour gravity field and into orbit. I am not up onthe latest technology, but I am sure fire is beingplayed with all the time, and each time we putour brains to it, we come up with more exoticways to harness it. Do you know that the sim-ple friction match was developed here inEngland, in about 1827 - only 170 years ago -by a man named John Walker? We have comea long way since then and the question is, ofcourse, how well are we able to handle all thisfire power.

When it is said, however, that the evolu-tion of man is linked with his ability to

handle fire, there is certainly something to it.Let me quote here from Britannica: "Modernhistory of technology and science could be seenas a continual increase in the amount of energy


Darby Costello studied psy-chology, philosophy, andtheology at university in themid-1960's. She then wenton to study astrology withFrancis Sakoian and LouisAcker, and also with IsobelHickey in Boston. In 1971she went to South Africa fora brief visit, and stayedtwelve years. During thattime she worked with theMuseum of Man andScience in Johannesburg,recording the art and prac-tices of the samgomas, thepriest/priestess healers ofSouthern Africa. At thesame time she began prac-tising astrology, developing awide clientele over theyears. In 1983 she came toLondon. In the first fewyears she developed herpractice, and began givingworkshops and seminars tovarious groups. In 1988 shejoined the Centre forPsychological Astrology,where she has been teach-ing and supervising studentsever since. She also teachesfor the Faculty ofAstrological Studies, andteaches and lectures regu-larly throughout the UK andEurope. In 1996, DorlingKindersley publishedAstrology in their "Pocket"series, written by Darby andLindsay Radermacher of theFaculty of AstrologicalStudies. The CPA Presspublished The AstrologicalMoon also in 1996, and willshortly be publishing Waterand Fire, from which this istaken.

Fire and the ImaginationThe Heart of Our Story

In an extract from her forthcoming book, Water and Fire, a transcription of a seminar shegave at the CPA in September 1996, Darby Costello explores the concept of fire, andencourages us to think about “how we can navigate the air and earth and water by the lightof our fire selves”. Come in closer to the fire, and get warm...

...getting closer to thefire, the frightening heatof it, and the sense ofits potential unpre-dictability. The dangerof it! The excitementof it!

available through fire and brought under humancontrol. Most of the increased available energyhas come from even greater amounts and kindsof fire. The control of atomic energy is merelythe most recent step in the use of fire for thebenefit of mankind." A huge amount of ourtechnology is fire based, and it is our technolo-gy which has brought us to this level of civilisa-tion. I know that we all have attitudes aboutthis level of civilisation, but I am just stating afact here, not making a moral judgement.

MMythological Fire

There have been fire gods as long as we canremember. The Latin ignis, from which

arrives our “ignite”, in turn comes from Agni, aVedic god who was the messenger of the godsand the bringer of fire. It is interesting thatHermes is everywhere, even in fire. Fire inalchemy becomes spiritual fire and it is veryinterwoven into and akin to spiritual water.However, as fire it requires an “agency of con-trol” if it is to operate fully in accord with itsnature. It is said that “common fire” generatesnothing but destruction. In many early religions,fire becomes equated with “the Spirit”. It wasconnected to the notion of the central life forceitself, vitality. The Zoroastrians of Iran wor-shipped fire as the most subtle and etherealprinciple and held it to be the most powerfuland sacred power. They said it was kindled byGod and presented directly to man by theirdeity. Flame was guarded, purified and caredfor, long after we knew how to generate anduse it. Even as late as the temples of Greeceand Rome it was tended by the Vestal Virgins.When the Greeks migrated from one place toanother, they tended and transported thesacred fire of Hestia. Even today, every RomanCatholic church has a perpetual flame. It is onlyput out when a church is deconsecrated. Aslong as it burns, the Holy Spirit inhabits thebuilding.

The Siberians honoured their fire god bykeeping all filth and impurities away from

fires and hearths of any kind. The Aztecs ofMexico and the Incas of Peru worshipped godsof fire with sacred flames that they apparentlyignited in a concave metallic mirror by concen-trating the sun's rays on it. It must have been sodeep in us to hold fire as sacred - all thosethousands of years where keeping it lit meantthe difference between life and freezing orstarving to death. All those years during whichthousands of generations lived and died and noone could imagine that one day fire would begenerated by any man, woman or child. Wehad to wait for lightning to strike, grab a bit ofit, then go off into the wilderness where it mightnot strike for some time, and where we had tokeep it alive or die. How precious it must havebeen, how valuable. What sort of man orwoman would have been chosen to guard

something so precious? And what happenedwhen, through chance or carelessness, it wentout? You can see why it still has its magicpower for us - think of the incredible feeling afire in a fireplace gives, or a camp fire.

The Danger of Fire

All the way down to our animal roots, to thevery beginning, fire has been extremely

dangerous for us creatures. I don't know howmany of you have ever been close to an uncon-trolled fire. I've not been near one in a city, butI have in the bush, in Africa. In the winter, firesrage across the bush. One is constantly puttingout fires, your own or someone else's. Iremember jumping up in the middle of thenight so often, and rushing off to go help putout a fire on some neighbour's land; gettingcloser to the fire, the frightening heat of it, andthe sense of its potential unpredictability. Thedanger of it! The excitement of it! And theexhaustion at the end of it, when the fire iseventually under control. Every able memberof the community is part of it every time. Well,those who aren't, aren't part of the communi-ty. The potential destructive force of the firebinds everyone together - it tests each individ-ual, and at the same time it binds the commu-nity, but it is a harsh test and those who fail incourage are branded by that fire as visibly asthose whose recklessness takes them too closeto it.

Have you heard of fire divination? There isa divination call ignis specio - to see in the

fire. Anyone who has sat by a campfire for anylength of time can imagine how easily one coulddevelop this with the right rituals, discipline andlength of time. Gazing into a fire which hasbeen built and is contained, most of us enter animaginal realm. Gazing into candlelight settlesthe mind and imagination too, and brings asense of comfort that is very different to thecomfort felt by water. Both speak to somethingprimitive and deep within us - the realms ofspirit and soul.

In a simple way things get sorted out in frontof a fire, if you are able to let it in. A fire can

make you cry. A fire can turn tears to laughter.There's something immensely comforting aboutit when it is contained, and somethingimmensely frightening about it when it isn'tcontained. Atomic bombs are fire controlledand contained, but they are almost too muchfire for humans to deal with and, at this point,they are only used for destruction. Those whosupport their existence do usually believe theirpower of destruction is to stop greater destruc-tion, but most of us are suspicious. Nuclearreactors represent fire power too. Again, thereis really too much power for us to handle there,at this point in our development. The collectiveimages which arise out of atomic bombs andnuclear reactors are pretty horrific. From these


If we survive thedarkness, when thelight returns it oftenshows us a new ter-ritory to conquer, anew creative fieldand another shapethrough which ourhearts find meaning.

images, we feel that we are playing with morefire than we can handle, and that may be true.

Celestial Fire

But you can lose touch with fire, even the firein your own Sun. Unless you can reach the

central fire, the images at the heart of your Sun,then life is a two-dimensional grind. This cen-tral fire always illuminates your life - when itgoes out, you go out. In truth, it doesn't go out,it goes back, you might say, to its home, in therealms beyond form. But that's another thing.It can seem to go out; you can feel as though ithas been crushed by circumstances, by the dailygrind of life, by the cruel and harsh necessitiesof life. But it is always there, burning at the cen-tre. We lose touch with it sometimes - theimages reflected in the fire go darker when wecannot find fulfilment through action, when ourcreative capacity has no outlet, and when wecannot make meaning out of the events of ourlives. This must happen, it seems. It is part ofour spiritual life, whether we are conscious ofsuch a thing or not. Bodies get sick and emo-tions take us through the wringer. Our mindsgo blank or get filled with nonsense and we loseour light at times. When we lose that light, itusually indicates that we have arrived at amoment of transition. If we survive the dark-ness, when the light returns it often shows us anew territory to conquer, a new creative fieldand another shape through which our heartsfind meaning. When St. John of the Crosswrote of the “dark night of the soul” he musthave been speaking about this loss of fire con-tact.

So the fire is always there, whether you haveplanets in fire or not, whether you are in

touch with your “spirit” or not. Images from thearchetypal realms are always playing throughyour spiritual body. The Sun is the source oflight for all of us and each of us carries its lightin our hearts. We know our source, we feelthe heat from it in our bodies and in our hearts.We know when we are cut off from it - we feelcold in our bodies or cold in our hearts. Weknow directly, with fire-knowing. We don'thave to think about it or do something to learnit. Remember the moment when you sudden-ly fell in love with astrology? You may havebeen reading a book about it, or listening to aconversation, or having someone do your chart,and suddenly, you “got” it, and you had to getmore. The flame leapt up and that flame sentyou on a quest and that quest has now broughtin the other elements. You study it, you workwith the intellectual concepts that circle thesymbols, which you know in your fires - direct-ly - but which you have to work to translateinto language, into words that can convey this“fire-knowing” to others. You do your chartsand in the day-to-day experience of this youwork the vision into your being and into your

life until the vision, the fire-knowing, isexpressed through everything you say and do.The fire has then found material which canexpress it, keep it alive, warming yourself andothers in its light.

This “fire-knowing“ has to be translated ormade manifest through other elements if it

is to be communicated, or be of use. But notevery fire-knowing experience must be broughtdown into manifestation. There are someinstances of this “fire-knowing“ - when you arein the heart of a spiritual experience, throughmeditation, religious ritual, certain types of drugexperiences, and those moments which simplycome, “when the fire and the rose are one“. Inthose moments there is nothing to be done.You are so profoundly connected to that whichinforms all and everything, that time and spaceare no longer your prison. These are what wecall mystical experiences. Everyone experi-ences this at some point in their lives. Whatthey do with it, is another thing. Most peoplecan't leave it alone - they have to turn it intosomething. They have to translate it intoaction, into meaning. And who knows, it maybe appropriate to do that sometimes. But Ihave a secret suspicion that in the case of mys-tical events, it might be best to leave themalone. They come unbidden from the realmsof Spirit and they light up your life forever.

Audience member: Are these only availableto fiery people?

Darby: Oh no, these moment of grace cancome through water, earth and air too.

The ones that come through fire, come asimages. That is how you recognise them. Youwalk into a part of the forest where you seesomething miraculous, heart-stoppingly beauti-ful. Or you are waiting for a bus in the middleof the day, and suddenly the world stops and animage breaks through. There is nothing to bedone. But if this happens often, then somethingmust be done. It wants translating. And trans-lation reduces the original vision.

That is one of the difficulties with fire - yousee a vision, you sense the whole in the

part, you get inspired and energised. You seethe spirit of the thing. Then you try to bring itinto your life, express what you saw in one wayor another. You paint a picture. You write asong. You start to study astrology. And thework to develop the skills that will express thefire starts getting in the way of the fire. Youstudy astrology and there are all these contra-dictory bits of information, and the people whogive you the information turn out to be lessperfect than you want them to be, and whenyou try to express your own knowledge itcomes out clumsy and you are not understood,or worse, you are criticised. The work of bring-ing the fire into the world through our densetime- and space-bound selves is not easy.


Fiery people imag-ine that the onethey love has thesame images in theirheart and mind.

Sceno Graphia SystematisCopernicani (detail) from Andreas Cellarius’ Atlas,1708

And yet, this is the work that we call creative- the spark, the vision, and then the years

of practice to let it through the other elementsso that it can keep life moving and changing.Fire is always transformative, but it bothdestroys and transforms. Love often begins inthe fire. You meet someone, a spark fliesbetween you, and your mind and body andemotions all start churning around. The firegets it going. Whether this fire love turns intosomething that can nourish your whole lifedepends on other things.

Fiery people love passionately when the lightis bright between themselves and the other.

But there are problems in communication thathave to be attended to. Have you noticed howdifficult communication can be with very fierypeople? The fire seems to give such a clearvision of the infinite potential in the relationshipthat it seems inconceivable to the fiery person,that the other is not seeing the same thing.Fiery people imagine that the one they love has

the same images in their heart and mind. Theyimagine that those they love are operating onthe same principles.

A: And so if I assume that we will both tell eachother the truth all the time, and one day I catch

him out in a lie, I am not just disappointed in him, I amshocked to my core! I “know” that total honesty is theonly way to be with someone I love - no matter howmuch it may hurt him or me - and so I “know” that heknows the same thing. I am burned by the lies ofthose I love, if I am fiery.

D: Exactly. This is one of the difficulties of fieryperceptions. Similarly, you never know what

fiery people are doing with information you givethem. When people have strong fiery charts youspeak directly to their imagination - they understandeverything at once and patterns leap into beingthrough only a few co-ordinates. You can tell themthree facts and they leap to the principle behind thefacts. They have highly developed faculties for patternrecognition. Of course what you mean to say is not


always what they perceive. And so communicationcan be confusing. They leap to conclusions and youmay find out that what they took from what you saidis not what you meant at all! You tell your four plan-ets in Aries child how rude the man at the super-market was to you and next thing you know, thepolice are phoning you. They have your kid in the sta-tion because he went to the supermarket and start-ing throwing tins of tomatoes at the guy. Or you tella client with Sun and Mercury in Leo and four plan-ets in Sagittarius that they “know“ the nature of reali-ty directly. You then have to pay attention becausethey might have stopped listening while you are tellingthem how easily this knowing gets distorted and howlong practice of discipline and humility are needed ifthey are not to become destructive and get burnedup. The next thing you know, they have started areligion and they are saying to everyone you toldthem to.

A: You exaggerate!

D: Barely. But do you see what I am saying here?Fire responds to images, because the nature of

fire is imagination. The whole trick is what you dowith the fire, with the imagination. On this earth, fireis not enough, knowing is not enough. We are waterand earth and air too and in each of us these ele-ments are mixed. The fire may be the heart of themix, but it must interact with the other elements sothat food gets cooked, imagined dwellings get builtand poems and songs get spoken and sung.

So let's get down to the simple and obviousnotions that centre around astrological fire. We

speak of fire as exuberant, enthusiastic, full of faith,confident, zealous, bumptious - what else do we sayabout fire?

A: Fire is positive. Also thoughtless, heedless andreckless.

A: Fire is impulsive and also intuitive. I was think-ing about what you were saying about it coming

from images. That is interesting. Do you mean pic-tures? What do you mean by images?

IImaginal Fire

D: OK, back into the imaginal realm... There is abook by Henri Corbin called Temple and

Contemplation. He is writing about Islamic theosophyand he says that God, who is the “Hidden Treasure”,created creature to know him. But the intensity ofthe light (of God) had to be modified if it was to beaccessible to perception. You could say that to “see”the light creatures had to be different variations of alllight. The imago which is projected from this divineand eternal reality would be received according to thenature of the perceiving creature. Nature could bedescribed as different variations of light. The “HiddenLord” is manifested through the fire in different things,

through the elemental fire at the heart of things.Listen to what Corbin says here: “...the light that is themanifestation of this lord through the fiery nature,through the elemental Fire concealed within the sig-nature, is only perceptible to the organ of vision cre-ated by that same Fire. Like alone know like...”

This notion is expressed in different ways through-out history and through all cultures that develop

their mystical visions into thought forms and rituals bywhich one can attempt to reach the place of visionagain. It corresponds to the Platonic World of Ideasand the Neoplatonic Intelligible Realm as describedby Plotinus. It corresponds with the reality describedby saints and visionaries in all ages and through alltimes. One function of religious ritual is to create con-tainers in which people can place themselves so to bereceptive to this fire without burning up or going mad.Of course there are other functions of religion thatare not so elevated or grand, but one mustn't forgetthat the high dwells with the low, in this world of dual-ity. Religious mystical history is littered with peoplewho tried to get “there” too quickly, or without theproper guidance or preparation. And it is littered withpeople who received the light and went off on maddestructive missions with it. They were unable tosimply be grateful and full of awe.

The highest fire realms demand that you leaveyour discriminating mind at the threshold. This

mind is useful and necessary for part of the journey,but there is a point where one must make a jump. Itmight be like sub-atomic particle physics, where theheart of it can only be reached through a leap awayfrom your thinking mind into another realm of per-ception. As I said, this is the highest realm of fire. Butthere are “lower” realms, realms that are more com-mon, part of every day life. As you walk along thestreet and you watch people coming towards you,most of them are not noticing you, they are in “aworld of their own.” They are thinking, dreaming,remembering, imagining. They are feeling, sensing andmoving along, partly in their animal bodies and partlyin their imaginal bodies. Very few are actually thinkingin the sense of working through a series of ideas - theyare thinking in the sense of watching the driftingimages that arise as they walk along. Some of theseimages are water-based, some are fire-based. Someof these images they could describe, if you stoppedand asked them what had been in their heads a sec-ond before, but many of the images would be too dif-fuse for description - and of course many would betoo private! Images have all sorts of density and range.When I say fire is about imagination I am not simplyspeaking of things you see in your imagination, I amspeaking about a whole country, called Imagination.

“Just as there arethree main powersin fire - heat, lightand fleeting subtlety- so there are threesimilar powers inthe soul’s essence;the power of life, ofunderstanding andof desiring...”

Marsilio Ficino in hisCommentary on Plato’sPhaedrus


John Etherington has beenstudying and working withastrology for twenty years.He has the certificate of TheCentre for PsychologicalAstrology, where he studiedunder Liz Greene andHoward Sasportas. John hastaught astrology both pri-vately and for adult educa-tion, in London. He has lec-tured at the AstrologicalLodge, and has written fortheir Quarterly Journal. In July1994, he foundedMidheaven Bookshop,which he currently runs full-time. He is also distributorof CPA Press Booksthroughout the world. Thisarticle is adapted from a lec-ture he gave at The UraniaTrust in November 1996.He may be contacted at:396 Caledonian Road,London, N1 1DN. Tel: 0044 171 607 4133 Fax: 0044 171 700 [email protected]

“Individual men must risk speaking thetruth, their personal truth, for it will be

the truth for many others. An old Chinesesaying suggests that the one who speaksthe right word will be heard a thousandmiles away. For men to stop lying, to stopparticipating in the conspiracy of silence,they must risk showing their pain. Othermen may reflexively, leap to shame them,or, out of their own fear, dissociate fromthem. But in time all will come to thankthose who speak their truth aloud.” James Hollis Under Saturn’s Shadow -

The Wounding And Healing Of Men1

Leonard Cohen has been an innovative figurein contemporary culture for the past four

decades. In the last thirty years, he has record-ed eleven albums of a consistently high stan-dard, all of which have a timeless quality. Hissongs show a remarkable insight into love, rela-tionships and the human predicament. He hasalso proved himself to be a charismatic andentertaining live performer; yet his status hasalways been cult rather than mainstream. Onereason for this is that much of his music has anunfolding beauty and subtlety that demandscareful listening. Furthermore, his songs dealwith areas of emotional experience that manypeople would prefer to avoid, such as pain, loss,fear, guilt and loneliness. Cohen’s music is mostappreciated by those who gravitate to it from apsychic need. Those who do not understand it,or have not listened properly, associate himwith doom, gloom, razor-blades, and potentialsuicide. This erroneous and widely spread asso-ciation is very unfair to a man of such complex-ity and integrity. Cohen, however, by speakinghis truth, has gradually come to receive greaterappreciation. In 1987, singer Jennifer Warnessparked a revival of interest in Cohen’s work byreleasing an album of his songs. Since then,many top musicians including John Cale, Jeff

Buckley and Tori Amos have paid their respec-tive musical tributes to Cohen. Two recentbooks have also helped to put the recordstraight.2 In this article, I will use astrology tooutline the psychological themes in LeonardCohen’s life, and to illustrate his creativeprocess.

“Please understand I never had a secretchart to get me to the heart of this or any

other matter,” sings Leonard Cohen in “TheStranger Song” (1966). Leonard Cohen’s birth-time is unknown, but he has said that hebelieves he was born in the early morning,3 andhas also been quoted as saying that he thinks hewas born at daybreak.4 One thing of which wecan be almost certain, is that he is a “doubleVirgo”, as Virgo (a sign of slow ascension) wasrising, at Cohen’s place of birth, betweenapproximately 4.15 and 7.00 a.m. Appearance-wise, Cohen comes across as a Virgo. A typicalearly image of him is the photo on the cover ofhis first album. Here, we see him looking digni-fied and gentlemanly. He is wearing a dark jack-et, his expression is serious, and the sepia toneslend themselves to the subdued presentationthat is given. Overall his appearance is an earthyone. There are two possible Midheavens forCohen - namely Taurus and Gemini. I wouldsuggest that the more probable of these isTaurus, since the image that he presents to thepublic is one of sensual appreciation and con-sidered action. For the Midheaven to be inTaurus, however, the Ascendant would have tobe in the first six degrees of Virgo. Let usassume that this is the case, and for reasons Iwill later clarify, in an attempted rectification, 3°Virgo - making the Midheaven 26° Taurus (forconvenience, both of these have been round-ed-up to the nearest degree). For the timebeing, I propose that, initially at least, observa-tion is the best tool in rectification.

Literary critic Sandra Djwa has said that“Cohen’s dominant theme, the relationship

between experience and art, and more specifi-cally the suggestion that the value of experience


Leonard Cohen’s “Secret Chart”If all goes according to plan, this first issue is published on 1 October 1998 with a chart thathas the fixed star Pollux rising in London. According to Bernadette Brady, Pollux has the fol-lowing meaning: “The pain of creativity. Pollux represents the painful process of learning anddiscovering. The tormented artist, the person who sees or encounters the more difficult sideof things. These difficulties can take the main focus, swamping the person who constantlystruggles to pull themselves into clearer light.” If that doesn’t warrant Leonard Cohen’sname going on the cover, nothing does. Here, John Etherington takes a look at the manand his music.

©1992 Sony Music Photo: Dominique Issermann

1 James Hollis, Under Saturn’sShadow - The Wounding AndHealing Of Men, Toronto: InnerCity Books, 1995, p. 105. 2 Jim Devlin, In Every Style ofPassion,Omnibus Books, London1996. Ira Nadel, Various Positions,NY: Pantheon Books, 1996.3 Letter to the author, 14thOctober 1994.4 The Canadian Astrology Collection:Canadian Astrology Press 1998.5 Sandra Djwa, “Leonard Cohen:Black Romantic”, in Leonard Cohen,The Artist and His Critics:McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd. 1976,p. 95.6 Interview by Billy Walker inAmerican Sounds Magazine, 23Oct.ober 1971.7 Ibid..8 Ira Nadel, Various Positions, p. 499 Death of a Lady’s Man, London:Andre Deutsch, 1979, p. 198.

is to be found in the art or beauty distilled fromit, is a familiar motif of the late romantics.”5 Thissuccinct quote, with its emphasis on valuescould aptly be used to describe a 2nd houseSun in Virgo. However, since I am using a recti-fied time, I will be focusing mostly on the plan-etary aspects and sign placements of the plan-ets in Cohen’s chart. Hence, most of the mate-rial is not dependent on an exact birth-time.From the planetary perspective, I will begin withthe Sun. The following quotes from Cohen’searly recording career are highly expressive ofhis Virgo Sun. Referring to his own artistry, hesays, “I don’t see it so much as creativity (but)as work;”6 he also says, “If a man doesn’t have astandard of excellence his work becomesmeaningless.”7 Indeed, Cohen has alwaysshown himself to be a perfectionist; only releas-ing an album when it has been refined to thehighest possible degree. Virgo’s need for ritual isalso important to him, whether it be threepages of structured writing per day or the disci-pline of a Zen training, which he has pursuedfor many years. To further emphasize how

strongly he epitomizes Virgo, I shall mentiontwo quotations. The first is from Ira Nadel’sdefinitive biography Various Positions. Nadel saysthat Cohen “is unusually tidy and concernedwith detail. His homes have all been spotlessand almost bare in their furnishing; his note-books are all ordered by year, and his workhabits reflect his concern with discipline andprecision.”8 The second is from Cohen’s ownprose poem “How to Speak Poetry.” In this heurges the reader to “Speak the words with theexact precision that you would check out alaundry list.”9

The Sun in Cohen’s chart makes only onemajor aspect to another planet, namely a

sextile to Pluto. This aspect signifies the depthand intensity, as well as the powerful trans-forming quality of much of his work. It alsoshows him to be something of an outsider witha strong need, at times, for solitude. The Sun-Pluto sextile explains Cohen’s ability to illumi-nate the darker areas of human experience, andshows that for him, creativity is closely linked tosurvival. Fundamental to Cohen’s chart is the


10 M. Harding and G. Yariv,TheHome of Language, AstrologicalAssociation Journal, March/April1995, Vol. 37, No. 2, pp. 88-95.11 Ira Nadel, Leonard Cohen - ALife in Art, London: RobsonBooks, 1995, p. 145.12 “Sing Another Song Boys”from Songs of Love and Hate.

polarity between the Sun in Virgo and theMoon in Pisces. Thus, Virgo’s qualities of focusand attention to detail, particularly in the realmof the mundane, are polarised by Pisces’ attune-ment to the realm of the intangible, and to thefeelings of the collective. It is Cohen’s great giftto be able to mediate between these tworealms. Whilst language is usually associatedwith Mercury, Michael Harding and GailaYariv10 have argued that it also has much to dowith the Moon. This is because our initial pre-verbal experience of language comes to usdirectly from our mothers. I will describeCohen’s parental background shortly, but fornow we may note that his Moon is to be foundin the “poetic” sign of Pisces, and quite possiblyconjunct the Descendant .

In Cohen’s chart, the (wide) conjunction of theMoon and Saturn accounts for the melan-

cholic nature of his early recordings, and alsoshows his ability to preserve a tradition. At thesame time, the Moon-Uranus sextile shows thathe has an intuitive perception of new currents,which enables him to keep moving forwardartistically. The conjunction between chart rulerMercury and Jupiter (which most likely straddlesthe 3rd house) brings a visionary dimension tohis writing, whilst the Mercury-Mars sextile is asignificator of mental sharpness. This aspectshows that, through the written word, Cohen isable to convey sexual and sometimes violentimages in a powerful and cathartic way. Thewide square between Mercury and Plutoreveals Cohen’s more obsessive and neurotictraits (he often refers to his writing as “blacken-ing pages”). For Cohen however, application towriting can be a means of finding power andstrength, and of overcoming any doubts abouthis own masculine effectiveness (Mars opposesSaturn, but both make harmonious aspects toMercury).

Cohen has said that he believes seriousnessto be an agreeable thing, and this is shown

by his natal trine from Saturn to Mercury. Thisaspect also shows the patience and time that heis prepared to devote to his craft. To giveexamples - his song “Hallelujah” was writtenover a three-year period, whilst another song,“Democracy”, was distilled from a marathonfifty or more verses to the six which are used inthe recorded version. Cohen’s superb translationof Lorca’s “Little Viennese Waltz”, which he set tomusic in “Take This Waltz,” took one hundred andfifty hours to complete. Although it is not so wide-ly recognised, there is also much humour inCohen’s work (another expression of his Mercury-Jupiter conjunction, perhaps). This humour,albeit quite black at times, can be found in hispoetry, novels and later recordings. Cohen hassaid ironically, that in the future he will be seenas one of the greatest comics of his generation.

An important factor of Cohen’s chart, is thatMercury (in Libra) is in mutual reception

with Venus (in Virgo). Thus, the use of languageharmoniously interchanges with the skill of artis-tic craftsmanship; poetry being a natural medi-um of communication. Cohen as poet andmusician is clearly shown astrologically by theclose natal conjunction of Venus and Neptune.Venus is associated with beauty, harmony andsensuality; and Neptune with idealization, disso-lution, sacrifice, suffering and a yearning for thedivine. Both planets are associated with music,poetry, and aesthetics. The conjunction of thesetwo planets, possibly in Cohen’s 1st house, sug-gests his great charm and seductiveness. It alsoshows the hypnotic presence that he has whenperforming on stage. The Venus-Neptune con-junction, along with the Pisces Moon (that hassome of the same qualities) reveals his deeplyromantic nature, which tends to idealizewomen, and raise them to the stature of god-desses. Suzanne Verdal, with whom he had aclose friendship, and Marianne Jensen withwhom he lived, are supreme examples; immor-talized as they are in two of his most famoussongs. Cohen seeks redemption initially throughwomen, and then through art; well describedby Ira Nadel as “art united with the recognitionof the necessity of the spirit.”11 For the sake ofhis art, however, he has to let the woman go,and ultimately the perfect love which he isseeking remains elusive. In Cohen’s own words:

They’ll never ever reach the Moon, at least not theone that we’re after.It’s floating broken on the open sea …and it carriesno survivor.12

A Neptunian theme which emerges oftenin Cohen’s writing is that of the sacrificial

victim. In different songs he describes Joan ofArc burning in the flames, Janis Joplin “fixing”herself with heroin at the Chelsea Hotel, andthe tragic tale of Nancy’s suicide. The theme ofsacrifice also occurs in “Story of Isaac”; a songthat accurately relates the Biblical story ofAbraham’s attempt to sacrifice his son. AnotherNeptunian theme is that of longing; a lyricalexample being “Take This Longing”, inspired bythe singer Nico. Elsewhere, the romantic long-ing extends into a longing for the divine. In fact,sexual and religious imagery are often interwo-ven. An example is “Light as the Breeze” fromThe Future, in which the act of fellatio is likenedto kneeling at an altar. Another example is“Sisters of Mercy” from Songs Of Leonard Cohen,in which two girls to whom Cohen gives shel-ter for the night become figures of redemption.

It is important to consider the placing ofChiron in Cohen’s chart, where it is most like-

ly to be found in the 10th house. In mythology,Chiron is the wounded healer who is unable toheal his own wounds. This is a role into whichCohen easily fits, and he has personally stated


Leonard Cohen21 September 1934Montreal4:29 AM (EDT)Rectified by the authorGeocentricPlacidusTrue Node

13 Melanie Reinhart, Chiron andthe Healing Journey,Harmondsworth: Arkana, 1989,p. 196.14 Howard Sasportas, Directionand Destiny in the Birth Chart,London: CPA Press 1998, p. 202.

that he believes the only way of resolving thisdilemma is to find a means of embracing thewound. Ira Nadel has rightly observed that oth-ers’ suffering is alleviated through identificationwith Cohen’s work. Both of the personal femi-nine planets make squares to Chiron in hischart, and it is particularly apt that the man whowrote “Ain’t No Cure For Love” should have aChiron-Venus square. Images of woundedness,often linked with relationships, occur in severalof his songs. “Your pain is no credential here, it’sjust a shadow, shadow of my wounds” he singsin “Avalanche”. In another song, “Please Don’tPass Me By” from Live Songs, he reveals hisempathy with the suffering when he intones, “Ising this for the freaks and the cripples, and thehunchback and the burned, and the burning andthe maimed, and the broken and the torn”.Regarding the square between the Moon andChiron, Melanie Reinhart has said that men withthis aspect “may find themselves very aware ofemotional suffering in others.”13 HowardSasportas has emphasized that it can show sen-sitivity to the mother’s pain.14 Both of theseobservations are applicable in Cohen’s case.

The compassion that he has for those whohave shared his suffering is beautifully expressedin his song “If It Be Your Will” when he sings,“Let your mercy spill on all these burning heartsin hell, if it be your will, to make us well.”

Having outlined the main themes in LeonardCohen’s chart, I will now briefly trace his

life, and look at some of the major transits to hisbirth chart (all of the transits to which I hererefer will, unless otherwise stated, be withinone degree of exactness). Starting at the begin-ning, Leonard Norman Cohen was born on21st September 1934, to Jewish parents in theupper-middle-class area of Westmount inMontreal, Quebec. Several of his near ancestorswere rabbis, and his great-grandfather foundedthe first synagogue there. Appropriately, theorigin of the name Cohen is kohanim, whichmeans “priesthood”. Leonard’s father, Nathan,worked in the family business as a clothing man-ufacturer. Leonard is said to have thought of hisfather as reticent, withdrawn and introspective(suggested by the Sun-Pluto sextile, andScorpio on the possible cusp of the 4th house).Nathan was wounded in the war, and died in


15 Ira Nadel, Various Positions, p. 5. 16 Ibid., p.8. 17 Ibid., p.8.18 Ibid., p.21. 19 Ibid., p.21. 20 Ibid., p.49.21 Ibid., p.49.

January 1944, when his son was only nine yearsold (Sun-Pluto aspects often show an early sep-aration from the father). To honour his father,Leonard wrote his first poem, sewed it in abow-tie, and buried it in the garden. To quoteIra Nadel (astrological references mine) - “Artand sacrament (Venus-Neptune) and writing(Mercury, in mutual reception) becamefused.”15 He also says that the death left a last-ing scar, and that Leonard may have blamedGod for what had happened (it took him untilhis late thirties to come to terms with it). Afterthe loss of his father, Leonard embarked on alifelong quest for father/teacher figures. It isnoteworthy that transiting Chiron was squareto his natal Chiron at the time of the death.Another significant transit, which occurred twoyears later, was the conjunction of Chiron to hisnatal Sun, which coincided with his becomingaware of the holocaust.

Leonard’s mother, Masha, who was ofRussian descent, was quite musical. Suzanne

Elrod (the mother of Leonard’s son and daugh-ter, Adam and Lorca) is quoted by Ira Nadel asremembering Masha to be “Cohen’s mostdreamy spiritual influence.”16 He also says thatshe was by turns “melancholic, emotional andromantic.”17 She took on the role of nurse withNathan and suffered much after his death, withmood swings and occasional depression.Apparently, she tried to make Leonard feelguilty for being too independent. All of thesequalities are well-described by his Pisces Moon(square Chiron and widely square Saturn) andhis Venus-Neptune conjunction (if we assumethat Venus is the ruler of the Midheaven in hischart). Although Leonard Cohen was raisedwithin the Jewish tradition, he was also broughtup part-Catholic, by his Irish Catholic nanny.This explains why the imagery of the religion isprominent in several of his songs. Nadel saysthat the church represented romance toCohen, which is not surprising considering hisneed for ritual and romance. This is perfectlysymbolized by his Venus-Neptune conjunctionin Virgo. Other beautiful illustrations of this con-figuration are linked to his teenage study ofhypnotism. Nadel says that he wanted “totransform people, to make them beautiful,”18

and that he “sought to be a magic priest.”19

Regarding his hypnotism, the story is told thathe once hypnotized the maid, and got her toundress. He has, of course, been “hypnotizing”women ever since!

In 1949, Cohen chanced upon a book of verseby the great Spanish poet Federico Garcia

Lorca, who he jokingly says ruined his life. Atthe time, transiting Saturn was passing over hisVenus-Neptune conjunction. It was thus quitefitting that this death-conscious poet, with hisarresting imagery, should be the touchstone forCohen’s future “life in art”. It is also of interest

that Lorca’s Ascendant at 3° Pisces is oppositeCohen’s assumed Ascendant. Such a polariza-tion is said to indicate a strong affinity betweentwo people. Another major event for Cohen,that occurred in 1949, was the meeting with hisfirst guitar teacher. He saw a young Spanishimmigrant playing a guitar to some youngwomen, and asked him for lessons.Mysteriously, after only the third lesson, histeacher committed suicide. Once again, Chironby transit was making a hard aspect to his natalChiron, in this instance by opposition.

On his seventeenth birthday, Cohen regis-tered at McGill University in Quebec,

where he was to study poetry and literature.Transiting Saturn had just passed over his Sun,and the foundations were laid for his future cre-ative work. His most influential mentor atMcGill was Irving Layton, a successful poet,twenty years his senior. Together, they were tospearhead the modern poetry movement inQuebec. Upon graduation, Cohen furthered hisliterary studies at Columbia University in NewYork, where he arrived in Autumn 1956. As thepath widened for his future success, transitingJupiter was conjuncting Venus-Neptune in hischart. During 1956 his first book of poetry, LetUs Compare Mythologies, was published, whichlinked together sensual and religious themes. In1956-7, while Saturn by transit was squaring hisMoon, he began to experience depression, andwas experimenting with drugs. According to IraNadel, “he had always understood drugs to besacramental and ceremonial, not recreational”20

(as we might expect from his Venus-Neptuneconjunction). He also says that “as he matured,Cohen began to display the characteristics ofmanic-depressiveness”21 - including creativityand sexual activity, followed by withdrawal andanxiety.

It was most likely a Pluto transit which signifieda major turning point in Cohen’s career. Pluto

was making a close conjunction to the assumedAscendant when, in April 1959, he won a$3000 Canada Council Arts scholarship towrite a novel in England. Cohen arrived inLondon in December 1959, when the transitingNorth Node was conjunct his Sun, thus pushinghim towards his destiny. Upon seeing a clerk inthe Bank of Greece with a sun-tan, he decidedto escape the gloom of the English winter. Heheaded first to Athens, then to the nearbyisland of Hydra, where there was a flourishingcommunity of artists and creative people. It washere that he met a beautiful Norwegian blondenamed Marianne, who became his lover. Thisrelationship was to last, with interruptions, forsome six to eight years. It is worth noting thatthe transiting North Node made another sig-nificant conjunction later in the year, on thisoccasion to Cohen’s Venus. However, contraryto popular myth, he did not live an idyllic life on


Hydra for a consecutive six or more years withMarianne. He was, every few months, hoppingbetween Hydra and Montreal for different peri-ods, and also spending time in America andEngland. Thus, he was very much the “wander-ing Jew”, which we may consider to be anexpression of his Jupiter-Uranus opposition.

In October 1962, Cohen finished his first(semi-autobiographical) novel The Favourite

Game22. At the time, transiting Jupiter was con-junct his natal Moon, and transiting Uranus wasconjunct his assumed Ascendant. The followingyear (that of his Saturn return) saw the publica-tion of the novel, as transiting Pluto made aconjunction to his Venus and Neptune at 12°Virgo. Describing the book, Ira Nadel says, “Thelink between pain and beauty is clear and reflec-tive of the constant exchange between the twoin Cohen’s work.”23 As Uranus and Pluto cameinto conjunction in Virgo, they ushered in theSixties’ “revolution” and, in the process, madefurther significant conjunctions to planets inCohen’s chart. Uranus can signify suddenchange, and with the exact transit of this planetto his Venus-Neptune conjunction in late 1964,Cohen released a radically different volume ofpoetry entitled Flowers For Hitler.24 Even moresignificantly, as Uranus and Pluto sat togetheron his Venus-Neptune conjunction, he com-pleted his second novel Beautiful Losers.25 Itcombined erotic and religious imagery, and hasbeen described as an exploration into thedepths of madness (natal Jupiter square Pluto,perhaps). This revolutionary book, completedin a drug-induced frenzy, was to change theface of modern Canadian literature. Included isthe extraordinary poem “God Is Alive, Magic IsAfoot” - a piece of writing which to my mindepitomizes the Uranus-Pluto conjunction(according to Rex E. Bills The Rulership Book,26

gods are signified by Uranus and magic is ruledby Pluto).

Literature, however, did not prove a lucrativeprofession for Cohen. In the spring of 1966,

having written a few songs, he decided to headfor Nashville with a view to improving hisincome by making a country and westernrecord. This was not to be, for as Cohen him-self has often said, he was “ambushed” by thescene in New York, where he stayed in a smallroom at the infamous Chelsea Hotel. Key fig-ures in the New York scene were AndyWarhol’s Velvet Underground, featuring thestunning German model Nico on vocals. Cohenbecame infatuated with her, but his longing wasunrequited (during this period transiting Saturnwas opposing his natal Venus). Whilst in NewYork, he was introduced to Judy Collins, whorecorded some of his compositions on herbest-selling albums. After hearing these songs,John Hammond, who had signed Bob Dylan,championed Leonard Cohen. The signing took

place in September 1966, and the album SongsOf Leonard Cohen was released on 26thDecember 1967. Several major transits to hischart were then occurring simultaneously. Themost important of these was Uranus conjunct-ing his natal Sun, which signified the transitionfrom writer to recording artist. Also, assumingthat the Midheaven is correctly placed at 26°Taurus, there was a tight conjunction to it bythe progressed Moon.

Ishould perhaps mention that Leonard Cohenhas never expressed a particular interest in

astrology. However, the introduction to his firstsong-book (from the late Sixties) said that hehad been through drugs, I Ching, and astrology,and that he was ready to embrace any systemwhich helped to clarify his position! One systemthat he did train in was Scientology (which hediscovered in 1968, during a relationship withsinger Joni Mitchell). Cohen was awarded aScientology certificate known as a Grade IVRelease (transiting Jupiter was conjunct hisassumed Ascendant). Soon after this, he metSuzanne Elrod, with whom he had a long andcomplicated relationship. This coincided with amove to Tennessee, where he rented a farm.He is said to have felt somewhat isolated here;it being a time of despair and disappointmentfor him, leading to a mental breakdown.Cohen’s self-exploration and spiritual questingbrought him into contact with Rinzai Buddhism,and Joshu Sasaki, the master Roshi, who leads acommunity on Mount Baldy near Los Angeles.Although Cohen initially found the Zen trainingto be too physically demanding, he repeatedlyreturned to the community for personal reori-entation and discipline. Roshi’s name for Cohenwas “Solitary Cliff”, and the goal of his teachingwas to annihilate that which gets in the way ofthe true self - very appropriate for one whoseonly planetary aspect to the Sun is from Pluto.

During 1968, Neptune was sitting on theassumed IC in Cohen’s chart, transiting

Saturn was opposing Mercury, and there wasalso an eclipse, which conjuncted his Sun, onthe day after his birthday. All of these configu-rations suggest the uncertainty and change thathe was, no doubt, experiencing during this peri-od. In March 1969, his second album, SongsFrom A Room, was released. It is a bleak and aus-tere, but deeply moving work, which includesthemes of sacrifice, suffering and suicide. Hesaid that more people would come to appreci-ate this album when they entered the samepsychic landscape that he had inhabited duringits creation. He was right, but the record wasstill very successful at the time of its release. Inretrospect, it can be seen as a record whichrepresents the “shadow” side of the Sixties. InApril 1969, as transiting Jupiter conjuncted hisnatal Sun, Cohen was offered the GovernorGeneral’s Award for Poetry. He refused it,

22 Leonard Cohen, The FavouriteGame, London: Jonathan CapeLtd., 1970.23 Ira Nadel, A Life in Art, p. 59. 24 London: Jonathan Cape Ltd.,1973.25 London: Black Spring Press,1992.26 Tempe, AZ AmericanFederation of Astrologers, 1971.


27 Ira Nadel, Various Positions, p. 173, quoting Cohen intelegram from Europe.28 Leonard Cohen, The Energy ofSlaves, London: Jonathan CapeLtd., 1972.29 Ibid., p.116.30 Various Positions, p. 115.31 C. G. Jung, Collected Works, Vol12, Psychology and Alchemy,London: Routledge, 1953.32 Ira Nadel, Various Positions, p.237-8.33 Ibid.., p. 238.34 Leonard Cohen, Book ofMercy, London: Jonathan CapeLtd., 1984.

however, saying “While much in me strives forthis honour, the poems themselves forbid itabsolutely.”27

Transiting Pluto was closely conjunctCohen’s Sun from January 1970 to July

1971. His first tour began in May 1970, and hesaid, quite appropriately at the time, “I don’twant purity any more, I want it dangerous.”Later that year, he was to follow Jimi Hendrixon-stage at the Isle of Wight Festival. In 1971,Songs Of Love And Hate was released. This wasan even darker album than the previous one,and also more intense. It has, quite justifiably,been compared to the work of the Belgiansinger, Jacques Brel. The book of poetry thatcame out of this period was The Energy OfSlaves.28 Cohen called it “a ‘raw’ book thatopenly records my pain.”29 I can strongly rec-ommend it to anyone who wishes to study theeffects of a major Pluto transit! From this vol-ume comes the following verse:

Welcome to this book of slavesWhich I wrote during your exileYou lucky son-of-a-bitchWhile I had to contend with all the flabby liarsOf the Aquarian Age.30

In the spring of 1972 Cohen’s second tourtook place. Throughout the year, transiting

Neptune was squaring his natal Moon, and heseemed to be quite vulnerable. In Jerusalem, ina seemingly drugged condition and with tears inhis eyes, he ended up breaking down on stage.This incident is recorded in the film of the tour,Bird On A Wire. In addition to this, with transit-ing Saturn conjuncting his natal Chiron andsquaring his natal Venus, his relationship withSuzanne was de-stabilising. His next album offresh material, New Skin For The Old Ceremony,records some of the traumas of his relationshipproblems, but also shows his yearning for somekind of rebirth. “I said father, father change myname; the one I’m using now is covered up withfear and filth and cowardice and shame”, hesings in “Lover, Lover, Lover”. The cover of thealbum is the coniunctio spirituum showing theunion of male and female. This image from analchemical text had been revived in Jung’sPsychology And Alchemy.31 Cohen’s use of thisimage suggests he was seeking the harmony ofthe masculine and feminine principles; not onlyoutwardly, but also inwardly (i.e. with his own“anima.”)

Transiting Uranus was opposite Cohen’snatal Uranus throughout 1975, and the

years of 1976-7 saw the dissolution of his “mar-riage”. In late 1977 the album Death Of A Ladies’Man was released. This record, produced andco-written by Phil Spector, was the onlyrecorded work where Cohen lost artistic con-

trol. Throughout this period, transiting Neptunewas squaring his natal Venus. The album wasfollowed by the book Death Of A Lady’s Man. In1978, Cohen’s mother died, following an oppo-sition from transiting Saturn to his natal Moon.The next album, Recent Songs, was an extreme-ly beautiful though underrated work, and isamong his very best. This serious and focusedpiece of art was based on the type of musicthat his mother had known and loved. It wassymbolized astrologically by a conjunction ofSaturn to his natal Venus, and a conjunction ofPluto to his natal Mercury.

Approaching fifty and his Chiron return,Cohen needed to find a true sense of

direction. He pursued his spiritual quest, mainlybecause he felt so stuck. To quote Cohen, “Idiscovered the courage to write down myprayers. To apply to the source of mercy.”32 Healso said, “ I wanted to affirm the traditions I hadinherited.”33 Thus, he returned to Judaism andattended synagogue as transiting Saturn made aprolonged conjunction to his natal Mercury (hestill considers Judaism to be his religion).Emerging from this period was Book Of Mercy34

- a book of modern psalms that deal with spir-itual longing. The album Various Positions thatfollowed this, also contained religious themes.Despite their quality, both were overlooked bythe public at large, and the album was notreleased in America at the time.

It was a transit of Pluto, by sextile, to Cohen’snatal Venus that brought a full artistic rebirth

for him musically; and on Valentine’s Day 1988his album I’m Your Man was released. It retainedthe passion and lyrical strength of his earlierrecordings, yet had a fuller, more powerfulsound which included the use of synthesizers(Uranus was trining its natal position and squar-ing the Sun in Cohen’s chart). The record wasto become a great commercial success, andprompted a lengthy promotional tour. Thealbum which followed in November 1992, TheFuture, was again highly acclaimed, and preced-ed another long tour. Most of the touring prof-its were spent on expensive wine (another per-fect illustration of Venus-Neptune!)

This extract from the song “The Future”(originally titled “If You Could See What’s

Coming Next”) was certainly prophetic of the,then imminent, Uranus-Neptune conjunction:

Things are gonna slide in all directions.Won’t be nothing, nothing you can measureanymore.The blizzard of the world has crossed thethresholdAnd it has overturned the order of the soul.When they said “REPENT”, I wonder whatthey meant.


Photo: Agence Sygma - France

The song “Anthem”, drawing on Kabbalisticsources, gives a more hopeful message:

Ring the bells that still can ring.Forget your perfect offering.There is a crack in everything.That’s how the light gets in.

Cohen’s renewed success came to a certainculmination when he was honoured with

the Governor General’s Performing Arts award.The news was announced on 5th October1993, as Jupiter returned to its natal position inhis chart. More changes were afoot for Cohen,and by the end of 1993, his three-year relation-ship with actress Rebecca de Mornay hadchanged. At the beginning of the following year,transiting Saturn was conjuncting his natalMoon and assumed Descendant. During 1994,with transiting Pluto sextile his Sun and trine itsposition at birth, he did the narration for a film

about the Tibetan Book Of The Dead. Plutonicand Scorpionic influences have been integral tomuch of his creative output. It is particularly sig-nificant that from the beginning of his musicalcareer until 1996, his progressed Sun was inScorpio. We may also note that in his fifth har-monic there is a Moon-Pluto conjunction inScorpio.

In 1996, after many years, Cohen’s natal Venusprogressed into Sagittarius (followed, within a

year, by the Sun). This was the herald of a morephilosophically and spiritually oriented era in hislife and work. A once-in-a-lifetime transitoccurred for him on 9th August of the sameyear, when transiting Neptune opposed hisnatal Pluto. Within a day of this, he wasordained as a Zen monk at the Mount Baldycommunity, where he has now been living forseveral years (natal Moon sextile Uranus, andNorth Node in Aquarius). Here, he cooks forhis friend and teacher Roshi who is now over


35 Interview by NigelWilliamson, Uncut Magazine,December 1997, p. 25.36 Helene & Willem Koppejan,The Zodiac Image Handbook,Dorset: Element Books, 1990, p.324.

All songs © Leonard CohenStranger Music Inc.

ninety years old. Cohen often rises at 2.30 a.m.,and with shaven-head and robes for attire,spends much of his time meditating. This helpshim to fully acknowledge his deepest feelingswhich, if avoided, he knows can lead to depres-sion. He also does maintenance work, and inthe winter has to shovel snow. He regards him-self and his comrades to be “the marines of thespiritual world”35 (very appropriate for a 12thhouse Mars).

Recent interviews with Cohen combine Zenwisdom with ironic humour. They also

make it clear that he is still composing music,and is considering writing another novel. At thetime of writing, he is in the process of complet-ing a new volume of poetry The Book OfLonging. The lunar eclipse of 6th September1998, opposing Cohen’s Venus, suggests criticaldevelopments in his creative work and relation-ships. Simultaneously, progressed Mercury inexact sextile to his Venus-Neptune conjunctionsuggests an excellent period for the communi-cation of art, and also for significant social con-tacts (especially with women). This should cer-tainly be an inspirational time for him.

To conclude, I will relate how I came to rec-tify Leonard Cohen’s birth-time (my per-

sonal approach to such a speculative matterbeing an intuitive and imaginative one). Before Ihad any idea what Cohen’s Ascendant was, Iconsidered what might be an appropriate signi-ficator for an artist who was on the “crest of awave” in terms of career success (this, I thought,should coincide with a major tour). I settled forJupiter transiting the 9th house and approachingthe Midheaven, and decided to check the posi-tion of Jupiter during Cohen’s major tours.Beginning with the “poet’s tour” of 1964, Ifound Jupiter to be at 17° Taurus. Next, Ichecked the date that I met Leonard Cohen(July 7th 1976), which was in the middle of a“best of” tour, and again found Jupiter to be at17° Taurus. Realizing that I was on to some-thing, I considered Cohen’s “major comeback”tour of 1988, and yet again found Jupiter to beclose to the same degree in Taurus. Looking forsymbolic confirmation, I decided to check theSabian Symbols for degrees around 17°Taurus. Nothing seemed to be particularly sig-nificant until my eyes rested on the following:

226° Taurus: A Spaniard seranading his Señorita.

Here, surely, is Cohen’s guitar teacher playingto the young women - or could it be theSpanish poet Lorca? I realised that I had stum-bled on a possible Midheaven for Cohen (espe-cially as 26° Taurus puts 17° Taurus at theGauquelin degree). I thus rectified the chart tothe appropriate time (4.29 am), and considered

the Sabian Symbol for the Ascendant.

3° Virgo: Two angels bringing protection.

Here surely are the sisters of mercy. To quotethe song - “All the sisters of mercy they are notdeparted or gone. They were waiting for mewhen I thought that I just can’t go on.” Cohen’stwo singers, Julie Christensen and Perla Batalla,are also called “the Angels.”

With regard to the descendant, it is worthconsidering the Janduz symbol for this

degree (3° Pisces) which is as follows: “Underthe portico of a fine mansion at night, stands awell-dressed gentleman waiting for a group ofladies and gentlemen to join him… behind themis a very simply dressed woman. Behind her, fromthe far left, comes a tattered beggar tottering witha stick.”36 Here, from Cohen’s song “Bird OnThe Wire”, are the pretty woman and the beg-gar leaning on his wooden crutch.

To test my theory about Cohen’s birthtime, I decided to set up an

Astro*Carto*Graphy map for the rectifiedtime. It occurred to me that certain placesshould figure prominently in it, and I wasnot disappointed; the results being as fol-lows: through Britain there is a Jupiter-Ascendant line - this is the country towhich Cohen came to write his first novel,and where he has met with great success asa musician (this line also goes throughSpain, where he has achieved great popu-larity); close to Hydra, there is a Moon-ICline - here he bought his first home, andlived with Marianne; through Nashvillethere is a Saturn-Descendant line - here heexperienced isolation and the restrictionsof “marriage”; through Jerusalem there is aNeptune-MC. line - here he is said to havedropped acid and broken down in public;and through Los Angeles there is a Pluto-Ascendant line - here he experienced thedisruption of fires, floods and riots, but hasalso undergone a transformation throughhis Zen experience. Finally, on the subjectof Astro*Carto*Graphy, it seems appropri-ate that my own Venus-Ascendant linegoes directly through Montreal. This affirmsmy personal identification with Cohen’swork, even though, at the time of writing, Ihave not been to Quebec.

For all of the reasons stated above, I concludethat Leonard Cohen was born at 4.29 a.m.

(to the nearest hour, it’s four in the morning).But I may be wrong!


Babs Kirby’s new book Experiential Astrologyand Barbara Schermer’s Astrology Alive give

excellent guidance for both individuals andgroups about participating in astrology andexperiencing the energies and patterns that res-onate at any given moment in our lives. Bothare leading exponents from either side of theAtlantic in the field of “experiential astrology.”As Barbara Schermer points out, “this newastrology is in reality a re-emergence of thevery old, from a time when archetypal energieswere readily available and deeply felt”. Thebooks are aimed at the student, the profession-al astrologer, andthose with someastrological knowl-edge, whether theirbackground is fromthe arts, psychology,or spiritual practice.The idea is that toexperience astrology,in whatever way youpractice or whichev-er school you follow,is to bring astrologyalive and to partici-pate in your relation-ship with yourselfand others.

Every astrologerhas a different

perception of astrol-ogy, but astrologyseems mostly to be abridge betweenheaven and earth where we can learn to walkalone. Some use this bridge for scientificresearch, for theory and abstraction, otherswalk upon the bridge as if it were a jetty intothe spiritual realms, serving their needs for aplatform for their belief systems. Others maysimply love the drama of it all and create a dan-gerous bridge, narrow and unstable. They par-ticipate willingly, but only in the illusion.

But at the very centre of the bridge a para-dox lies waiting to snap at your heels, like a

muzzled terrier. This contradiction is the verynature of living astrology.

There are many who test out psychologicalastrology to see it if works for them. Some

may stop on the bridge awhile and reflect andcontemplate the human condition: they willlook back at the earth-bound giants and for-wards to the divine gods, to the place no one

knows for sure. There are those who con-sciously look over the edge of the bridge downinto the great chasm of darkness below. Theseastrologers look into the very bowels of humanbeingness, to “listen to symbols”, to “watchmusic”, to understand better the flow of life inrelation to the patterns of the planets. But itdoesn’t actually matter which particular schoolyou adhere to; the muzzled terrier is aboutyour own experience.

Babs Kirby’s book Experiential Astrology drawson many different kinds of tried and tested

psychological techniques, humanistic pathwaysand transpersonal creativi-ty, psychodrama and guid-ed imagery to make thatbridge more structuredand accessible. This is oneway to bring awareness toourselves and others - tobegin to know what theessence of being a humanbeing is all about, or atleast try to.

Experiencing astrologymeans having an

awareness of our subjec-tivity, yet attemptingobjectivity. As in BarbaraSchermer’s book, theessence of experienceinvolves anything fromrole-playing, rituals, yogicand chakra energy balance,to observing your person-al philosophy, art and psy-

chology, all as part of a greater whole whichastrology embraces.

To live astrology may mean to seek out thestill centre, yet to remember we are mortal.

To seek the divine in inner and outer places,observe our reactions and the outer masquer-ades of ourselves and others, hopefully withoutjudgement or arrogance. Being astrologicallyminded means we are usually curious aboutwho we were before we were born, and weattempt to remember the absolute truth thatthe birthchart does not lie. It is through symbolthat we are brought nearer ourselves, so whynot bring it to life? We may understandparental issues, applying and separating aspects,pre-natal eclipses, configurations of addictionand insecurity, the cycles of the moon and thebiggies, the transpersonal planets and theirscouring pathways. Then the penny drops and

RReflectionsExperiencing AstrologyIn Reflections we’ll be asking our contributors to go away and read a couple of books, seea play, a concert or an exhibition, and come back and expand on their experiences for us.Sarah Bartlett read Experiential Astrology and the recently re-issued Astrology Alive.

Sarah Bartlett trained withthe Faculty of AstrologicalStudies in the early seven-ties, gaining a Certificate; butshe rebelled against theFaculty diploma!She’s an artist and a prolificwriter, befitting a 5th houseSun in Gemini; a psychologi-cal astrologer, teacher,mother and woman, it sayshere. She has appeared onTV as an astrologer, and hascontributed to newspaperssuch as the Daily Mail. Sarahhas written the Love Signsseries of astrology books forthe Sunday Express; FengShui for Lovers, The LoveTarot; The Five Keys of FengShui; Women Sex andAstrology; The World of Mythsand Mythology; and therecently published MythicalLovers, Divine Desires. Sarahis currently working onanother Feng Shui book, tobe published next year.

M.C. Escher's “Scholastica”, illus-tration page 19 ©1998 CordonArt B.V. - Baarn - Holland. All rights reserved.


Astrology AliveBarbara SchermerThe Crossing Press CA 1998ISBN 0-89594-873-7

Experiential AstrologyBabs KirbyThe Crossing Press CA 1997ISBN 0-89594-798-6

we begin to acknowledge the triggers that res-onate with what we already are in essence.

We may notice all these things, but alsoknow that there is something far more

mysterious at work. Perhaps this is why livingthe art of astrology is the nearest we can get toa symbolic experience.

We are like Hermes when we both plun-der the depths of our unconscious

where few dare to enter, and yet ascend to theheavens to recreate ourselves out of our dark-ness. But the safety net of astrological knowl-edge brings us power and so we address theissues surrounding that power. This is when wecan only return to the bridge again, the cycle ofour lives reflected in the running planets, thecycle of the planets reflected in our own danceswith life.

The experience of walking across this bridgehas echoes of the Taoist Yin Yang unity. Yin

is like astrology - receptive, nurturing, symbolic,preserving with its ancient heritage, traditionalroots and womb-like possibilities, always creat-ing, always shape-shifting. Being can be likenedto Yang - dynamic, self-aware, focused, anabsolute arising in every inturned arrow of selfreflection. To unify Yin and Yang is to liveastrology, by whatever approach you get off on.But does the art appeal to many? Is the journey,and the participation in the unfolding of thegreat scheme of the universe and the unfoldingof our own inner and outer growth, an easyoption?

Even astrologers have their personal geis ( InCeltic mythology this was a taboo or curse

given to the great heros and warriors at birth byan unknown “benefactor”). By transgressingtheir life-time taboos one by one, the heroicCeltic warriors eventually found inner peaceand creative transformation. Similarly, psycho-logical astrology enables us to attend to ourown curses and taboos, for only then can weever understand anyone else’s.

There is an old Buddhist saying, “When youpoint your finger at someone else, don’t

forget there are always three fingers pointingback at you.” Try it! Astrology is about puttingour trust in the chart rather than the client, whomay, “like the equivocation of the fiend, lie liketruth”. So even when we are practising astrolo-gy we endeavour to be aware of our own reac-tions and perceptions, for if we do not, we maytoo easily point the finger, and the fiendbecomes ourself.

It is interesting how as astrologers we paint ourportraits of our clients on the same canvas

and with the same oils and brushes, yet thepainting will always be different, clouded by ourown unique perception. Each encounter is anew experience to be lived, each event in ourlives, each transit we note and intellectualiseabout, each cycle we observe at work, is anexperience of enrichment of soul and spirit aswell as of intellectual savvy. We may remarkwhat this means in astrological jargon, we mayturn to our colleagues and friends and insist

how dull it is to be living with transiting Saturnsitting bang on the IC, but unless we trulyunderstand what that actually feels like, andhow it might feel to someone else, then ourpsychological theorising, however it is “backedup” with computerised graphs and statistics,create only intellectual arrogance, not anawareness of being.

If we have “eyes unclouded by longing” thenwe may also begin to reclaim our projections

and see ourselves out there, rather than assum-ing we are only in here. Sure, we will probablycarry on falling in love, projecting ourselves allover the place, do wrong, do right, search for aspiritual meaning, despise, hate and love, sacri-fice and compromise, experience pain, hungerand joy. But if we really want to try our luck onthe bridge with the terrier’s snapping jaws, wemay with conscious participation sense aninkling of being only what we can be, for a whileat least.

Both these books are about a way of comingto terms with our true nature, to discover

and explore ourselves, whether we are tradi-tionally rooted, mundane, electional, horary orpsychologically biased. Whatever turns you on.To see your astrology in action in relation toyou, and to see yourself in relation to astrologyis perhaps what experiencing it is all about. Thetrouble is, as soon as a “new” school, or a newway of thinking about astrology arises, it getsfolded neatly into a package, it gets a label anda locker-room key all to itself. Suddenly itbecomes separated, partitioned, defined and“different from” this kind of astrology or that.Maybe experiential astrology is more like therain falling on many umbrellas. It is indefinablebecause it relies on each of us experiencingourselves and holding up our own chosenumbrellas in our own unique way.

Just as Astrology Alive and Experiencing Astrologygently remind us, living astrology is to experi-

ence the very essence of being who you are inany moment. In a sense it is to watch, observeand participate in the creative unfolding ofyourself in relation to the astrological dance sothat you may also have some understanding ofothers. It is about seeing through the illusion ofself to discover the self, and it is about honour-ing what Alan Watts called of himself “a coinci-dence of opposites” - exactly what each of usis.

Both of these books are invaluable guides tocreative animated astrology, whether your

intention is to enjoy the journey for yourself, orfor teaching others a way towards that too.Living astrology is not just to practice it uponothers, nor is it to become obsessional aboutthe Moon. It is to reflect, to stand upon thatbridge and see through the person that standsupon that bridge and still know that you can’tlift yourself up by your own bootlaces. But tolive it means exactly that - it is a lifetimeart.


CCharles Harvey DFASTROLS,is co-Director with LizGreene of the CPA wherehe regularly lectures. Healso teaches on the annualFAS Summer Schools atJesus College Oxford, at hisBath Astrology Seminars,and in Zürich and Slovenia.His company Consider hasjust published a new editionof his and Michael Harding’sWorking with Astrology. HisMundane Astrology, co-authored with MichaelBaigent and NicholasCampion is the authoritativetext on the subject. Charlesis past-President (1973-1994) and now Patron ofthe Astrological Association.He is also Chair of theUrania Trust, the education-al charity dedicated toastrology. Charles lives inSomerset with his wife SuziLilley-Harvey, with whomhe co-authored Sun Sign-Moon Sign. They have twosons. Their latest book ThePrinciples of Astrology is dueto be published by HarperCollins in February 1999.


“No man is an island entire of itself: everyman is a piece of the Continent, a part ofthe main... any man’s death diminishesme, because I am involved in Mankind:And therefore never send to know forwhom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee.”

John Donne, Devotions

The unfolding cosmos is a series of interlock-ing stories. The mini-Olympian struggles,

comedies, commonplaces, triumphs andtragedies each one of us enacts during thecourse of our life are not only written in ourown personal horoscope and expressedthrough our individual soul. As in a hologram,analogous dramas, dilemmas and potentialitiestelling essentially the same stories are acted outat the time of our birth in the theatre of theworld through the anima mundi,1 the WorldSoul or Oversoul. These archetypal stories canbe found splashed across the news headlines, inthe weather reports, the gossip columns, themovements of the markets, the racing resultsand every aspect of mundane existence.

This phenomenon is what the writer, philoso-pher and scientist Arthur Koestler named

The Secular Horoscope, the title he used for thefirst chapter of the initial volume of his autobi-ography, Arrow in the Blue. Koestler opens thebook in the library of The Times newspaperwhere he is studying the main stories that werein the news around the time of his birth, andshows how these stories metaphorically reflectthe kinds of issues with which his own life wasto become pre-occupied.

Plays within plays

In fact each of our lives is, as it were, a sub-plotwoven within the great tapestry of history, and

is in many respects subservient to the largersaga. Just as Tom Stoppard’s Rozencranz andGuildenstern are Dead gives us an entirely newperspective on Hamlet, so mundane astrologyenables us to obtain invaluable glimpses of thelarger plot within which we enact ourMidsummer Night’s Dreams, Othellos, King Learsor Comedy of Errors. The more clearly we cansee and understand the meaning of the BigStory “out there” that is weaving together all of

our lives, the better our understanding is likelyto be of our own local story and the currentexperiences of our clients “in here”.

This dialogue and dance between individualand collective souls, which the astrologer

reads in the form of transits, is beautifullyevoked in a poem by Rabindranath Tagore.

That which oppresses me, is it my soultrying to come out in the open,or the soul of the world knockingat my heart for entrance?

The answer is of course “both”. Mundaneastrology allows us to begin to understand

the deeper significance of seemingly randomworld affairs and what they mean for us per-sonally and collectively, and how the “out there”and “in here” are essentially the same.

The key tool that we need to master in orderto decipher the unfolding plot of history is

the planetary synods, the cycles of each pair ofplanets as they move from one conjunction tothe next. For as Plato tells us in the Laws, theplanets “are the sources of the World Order”,and in the Timaeus “Time is the flowing image ofthe Eternal” and “the planets are the instru-ments of Time”. In other words, the planets arethe means by which the individual God-thoughts, the Gods, unfold the eternal Mind ofthe One into the temporal, manifest cosmos. The Ultimate Video

In modern imagery, the planets are the differ-ent colour signals which weave together to

create the ever-changing images of the ultimatevideo of all videos. The whole story of stories ispresent on the video tape simultaneously in theeternal timelessness. But for the story to beintelligible in the temporal, manifest world thevideo has to be unwound, at a set speed in time,as a vast but orderly sequence of oscillations ofcolour pulses. The planetary cycles are whatplay out the different colour elements of the“film”. Mars unfolds the reds, Saturn the black,Jupiter the white, Neptune the violet, and so on.

So, for example, the ever changing relation-ship between Jupiter and Saturn pulses out

the dance between white and black, the unman-ifest and the manifest, puer and senex, whilstSaturn-Neptune pulses out the black-violet

Anima MundiAstrology in the Theatre of the World

Polarity in astrology is one of its most intriguing characteristics; in every sign or planet therelurk those qualities which are opposite in nature. As we have been examining Leonine cre-ativity and individuality throughout these pages, it’s time to swap the microscope for thetelescope, and zoom out to see the bigger Aquarian picture, the world around us. Andthere’s no better person to do that than Charles Harvey.

dance between the manifest, boundaried andsubject to decay imminent and the unmanifest-transcendant paradisiacal, the actual and theideal. In this way the inaudible, invisible sym-phony of eternal Colours, Sounds, Ideas isunfolded and woven into the seamless flow offormative images to create the fabric of theactual world.

Each horoscope is a freeze frame in this on-going performance which shows the video-

engineer, the astrologer, the precise relationshipbetween the sounds, colours, Ideas at thatinstant. The one crucial difference in this analo-gy is that with individual consciousness this isnot simply a mechanical process. The individualsoul can work to give clearer focus and everdeeper expression to their particular part of thestory, so that “the more we build up our ownsoul, the more we build up the soul of ourneighbour,” to paraphrase St Catherine of Siena.The astrologer’s job is to try to clarify the per-sonal plot for the individual. The mundaneastrologer attempts to shed light on the BigStory.

IIn the Penal Colony

Kafka, in his short story In the Penal Colony,depicts a prisoner fastened face down in a

pit whilst a caligraphic engine repeatedlyenscribes with ever deeper cuts upon his backthe words “I am guilty”. The prisoner will onlybe released when he is able to divine and speakthe message that he can only sense but neversee. And so it can seem to a struggling human-ity that the planetary cycles endlessly sound outtheir symphonies like a mysterious web in whichwe are caught dancing like puppets, hearing butnever truly listening to the meaning being sung.Kafka’s prisoner is freed, as is Pinnochio able tolive as a real human boy, by apprehending themeaning in the message of the gods.

Astrology enables us not only to translate theletters and words in the message of the

individual horoscope but also, by studying thepredictable cycles of the planetary Gods, toscan past and future and to see where thesewords fit within larger sentences, chapters andstories, and then, ideally, as with the use of tran-sits, show the relationship between. (See AnneWhitaker’s superbly eloquent autobiographicalessay in this issue, p.26.)

In each issue of Apollon I will be focusing atten-tion on the global, social and cultural signifi-

cance of a particular planetary cycle which isprominent in the sky at the time and alerting usto the kind of ideas, issues, situations and eventsthat this will be bringing to the fore. This branchof astrology is still in its infancy but I hope thatby reflecting on these processes we can gradu-ally come to a greater understanding of whatthe cosmos is, as it were, asking us to bring toconsciousness.

In this first issue I will be focusing on the cur-rent long-running Saturn-Neptune square that

is so dominating world affairs at every level atthe present time, and that will continue to do sothrough into next April, 1999, when Saturnsquare Uranus will become increasingly thedominant flavour of the year.

But before embarking on unravelling specificdetails of this 36-year cycle of Saturn and

Neptune and the colour of threads that thisIdea contributes to the tapestry of life, we needto remind ourselves of some differences of

emphasis in mundane astrology compared tonatal. Specifically in mundane astrology:

~Each planetary synod is seen as spellingout a total story of relationships. Like a

film, later episodes, phases of the cycle, canonly really be understood against the back-ground of the scene-setting opening shots ofthe initial conjunction.

~The repeated cycles of each planetarypair, when viewed over time, form their

own characteristic pattern as their conjunc-tion phases move around the Sun and thezodiac. In the case of Saturn and Neptunetheir dance creates a nine pointed star over aperiod of 328 years - See their mandala inFigure 1. Each planetary synod expresses itsformative processes at every level from themost physical to the most metaphysical. Eachlevel of meaning has something to tell us if welisten to the Ideas behind their expression.

~A planetary pair is seen to be in a recip-rocal relationship - e.g. in their cycle

Neptune modifies Saturn quite as much asSaturn modifies Neptune. Which appearsdominant at any point is a matter of perspec-tive.

Figure 1Reading the Whole Cycle

As the planets steadily change relationship inthe 360° of their dance from one conjunc-

tion to the next, so the dynamic and dialoguechange, from the fused intimacy of the conjunc-tion, through the working relationship of thesextile to the conflicts and bust ups of thesquare, the mutual enjoyment of the trine tothe confrontations and potential collaborationsof the opposition and then back again throughthe returning phases. And of course betweenthese major phases are the nuances and sub-tleties of discourse of each of the other har-monics: quintile, septile, semi-square, nonile,decile and so on.

Figure 2 gives a picture of some of the mainphases of the archetypal cycle. In fact it

shows three cycles which are familiar to us, theannual, lunar and daily, placed concentricallyone within another so as to show their essentialidentity. The daily cycle has been depicted inthe reverse of the normal convention in orderto highlight the parallels. The cycle divides natu-rally into two main phases:

~The outgoing, waxing phase, from thedark of the New Moon to the light of the

Full Moon, marks the progress of the rootIdea, the thesis of the cycle as it proceeds out

1 The anima mundi, the Soul ofthe World, in Platonic philosophyis the term used to signify thatprinciple which provides theover-arching unity of all things. Itis that Unity of which our ownindividual soul is both a fragmentand a replica, and to which weremain subliminally connected.The world soul is the animatingprinciple that gives unity and iden-tity to all things throughout themanifest world, enabling everyentity to be both separate andyet identical in essence. Theanima mundi is seen as the medi-um through which the DivineIdeas, unfolded by the planetarycycles, are distributed into themanifest world and each one ofour individual souls.From this perspective, all things,from an atom to a super galaxy,participate in soul and areensouled at the moment of theirinception as separate entities. It isbecause of Soul in this universalsense that we are able to drawup a horoscope for a country ora company or this journal, Apollon. The myths of Osiris, Dionysiusand of the other heavenly godswho are sacrificed and dismem-bered, refer to the way in whichthe unmanifest, transcendentOne descends into the manifest,imminent many-ness of individualsouls. The restoration of eachseparate soul to the Unity of theanima mundi is of course the pur-pose of the Mass, in which, by theconsuming of the body andblood of Christ, we are restoredin consciousness to our Unity inthe “Body of Christ”.

Figure 1The pattern created by the helio-centric dance of Saturn andNeptune over the period 1917-2245 AD, from Neil F.Michelsen’s Tables of PlanetaryPhenomena.


Figure 2

2 The definitive text on mundaneastrology which includes a detaileddiscussion of each of the planetarycycles is given in Mundane Astrology- An Introduction to the Astrology ofNations and Groups, by MichaelBaigent, Nicholas Campion, andCharles Harvey, distributed byThe Urania Trust, 194 The Butts,Frome, Somerset BA11 4AG; Email: [email protected]: http://urania..org

into the world and strives to manifest,express and establish itself.

~The incoming, waning phase, as the seedIdea, having reached its anti-thesis at the

the Full Moon, midsummer, begins to returnand distribute the fruits of its experience backto the world.

There is no space here to describe the spe-cific contributions each phase in this cycle

has to make to the total picture. I have set outthe significance of each of the main aspects inthe cycle in Chapter 6 of Mundane Astrology,2

which is essential reading for anyone wanting toget to grips with this vital dimension of astrology.

TThe Saturn-Neptune Mandala

The mandala in Figure 1 (showing the patternof conjunctions) shows the heliocentric

dance of Saturn-Neptune over a period of 325years. We can see that each successive con-junction marks out the points of a nine-fold star.At the end of 325 years the conjunctions comeback to a similar point in the zodiac.

Saturn-Neptune, like Saturn-Jupiter on anoth-er level, is the paramount cycle to do with

the interplay of vision and matter, ideal andactual. This circular nine-fold form immediatelyreminds us of Apollon and the nine Museswhich he brings into harmony. The Saturn-Neptune story is in this sense the pre-requisitefor the work of every kind of creative artist, bethey musician or statesman, poet or doctor ormystic. It is about translating into earthly termsa vision and an ideal. It is the nine Muses who,each in their own area, lift the soul’s imaginationto touch the Real Ideas which, being dynamic,impel the artist soul to action.

Saturn-Neptune is the process of “materialis-ing the spiritual and spiritualising the materi-

al”. It is a cycle of clear-seeing which can captureglimpses of the Empyrean in sound or image. It

is the Our Father prayer which impels the aspir-ing soul to bring Earth into conformity withHeaven. This focusing of the vision can be quiteliteral. as Michael Harding shows in his brilliantbook, Hymns to the Ancient Gods, where in aneloquent and beautifully researched study ofSaturn-Neptune he shows how the periodaround the Saturn-Neptune conjunctions arerepeatedly associated with major developmentsin the telescope and microscope, instrumentswhich make the invisible visible and sharpen andclarify our perception of the hazy and obscure.The Law of Expression

As natal astrologers we tend to think of theplanets as specifically relating to character,

health and life events. The moment we startlooking at the planets at work in the world wesee that there is no limit to the ways in whichthey can manifest. Their faces are to be seen atevery level. For example:

~The physical level - through seismic andgeological activity, chemical reactions, the

weather and other natural phenomena. In thecase of Saturn-Neptune this is a highly seismiccombination and is especially associated withflooding, as we see currently in China and muchof Asia, and for example in the devastatingfloods in Europe at the 1952/53 conjunction.

~The biological level - through vegetation,epidemics (e.g. “influenza” named for its

believed connection with planetary influence)and the activities of animal life. Saturn-Neptune,which at a physical level has much to do withthe decay and disintegration of the body, isespecially related to the emergence of new dis-eases and epidemics.

~The cryptic level, whereby the names ofpeople, places and things will resonate with

prevailing patterns. Thus in 1989 one of theprevailing clichés that attended the collapse ofcommunism was “The End of History”.


Figure 3 German Empire1 January 187100:00 (LMT: -0:53:28)Berlin, GermanyTropicalPlacidusTrue Node

~The volitional level - through the policydecisions and actions of individuals and

leading figures in every walk of life, so that theSaturn-Neptune conjunction in Capricorn of1989 accompanied enormous deflationarypressures from governments world-wide andthe drive to eliminate waste and increase pro-ductivity.

~The emotional level - through art, fashion,popular crazes and the general shaping of

the prevailing cultural trends through film, the-atre, literature, music, etc.

~The intellectual level - through the currenttrends in thought and philosophy as

expounded in academia, business, politics, lec-tures, books, periodicals, TV and radio pro-grammes.

~The mystical level - which in the case ofSaturn-Neptune is the essence of the

synod: head in Heaven, feet on Earth, express-ing itself through new religious and spiritualimpulses.

SSaturn-Neptune and the Socialist Dream

We could look at this Chronos-Poseidonduad at all these levels and how they are

expressing at the present square. We couldexplore, for example, the way the Earth-Waterdialogue has over the past months been quiteliterally producing devastating bursting of damsalong the Yangtse; disastrous mud slides aroundthe world; bogging down the spacey aspirationsof the Glastonbury Festival; the “mud slinging”against Diana, the Princess of Wales, and its“spoiling of the Ideal” and the rage that thatengenders; the crisis over the erosion of theeast coast of Britain; the emerging epidemic ofpolice corruption including the final exposure ofthe web of deceit that led to the conviction andhanging of Derek Bentley at the 1952/53Saturn-Neptune conjunction and the alcoholicsuicide of one of the policemen involved; theplummeting price of oil and its impact on thedebtor oil-producing nations; and so much else.Space, however, dictates that we confine our-selves to a consideration of the way in whichthis cycle expresses itself at the level of eco-nomic and political philosophy and practice.

Paradoxically (and all planetary pairings are bydefinition paradoxical and multifaceted)

Saturn and Neptune can be seen as Capitalism(Saturn) v. Communism (Neptune) and as Faith(Neptune) v. Materialism (Saturn), as the actu-alising (Saturn) of the Utopian dream(Neptune), v. the destruction (Saturn) of theUtopian. Saturn, with his emphasis on self-reliance, individual identity and personal prop-erty, is opposed to Communism with itsemphasis on the community, the collective, themerging of separate identity and resources forthe sake of the All. Neptune says that “prop-erty is theft”, whilst Saturn considers Neptunethe embodiment, if it has a body, of fraud,deceit and mendacity. This dance both speaksof Christian socialism and embodiment of reli-gious ethic within the state, and atheistic mate-rialism with the total repression and denial ofthe transcendant as a threat to the State. This isthe story of idealistic womb to tomb of thewelfare state, and yet also of the need to ring-fence the state with walls and secret police topreserve the possibility of a Radiant Futurefrom external contamination.

The connection between socialism andSaturn-Neptune has been recognised by

astrologers since the end of the 19th century. Itwas the great French astrologer Andre Barbaultwho first mapped out the historical evidenceand used it to forecast the crises for the SovietUnion of 1952/3 and 1989. Looking at the lastfive seed points, conjunctions, in this dance wefind:1846 - three conjunctions at 27°18’, 26°20’ and25°42’ Aquarius - Karl Marx (Ascendant 23°Aquarius) and Friedrich Engels (Ascendant 28°Leo) formulating their Aquarian theory GermanIdeology and The Communist Manifesto (actuallypublished 1848.)1882 - conjunction at 16°29’ Taurus - the prac-tical formation of many of the key trades unionsand socialist groups in Europe. The GermanEmpire (Pluto at 17° Taurus in 8th house, seeFigure 3 below) under Bismarck becomes thefirst nation to introduces sickness insurance andsocial welfare.1917 - conjunction at 4°45’ Leo - the RussianRevolution and the creation of the communistSoviet Empire with its promise of the “RadiantFuture”. 1952/53 - three conjunctions at 22°47’, 21°38‘and 21°12’ Libra - the death of Stalin and therise to power of Krushchev begins the termina-tion of years of repression and the beginning ofthe competition with the West. The most recent conjunction of 1989 (see thegraphic ephemeris, Figure 4 overleaf) we needto consider in much greater detail. For this isthe seed moment of the 36-year Saturn-Neptune process in which we are currentlyengaged, and hence the thesis that the criticalout-going square is now challenging. In 1989there were three conjunctions at 11°55’, 11°14’and 10°22’ of Capricorn. The impact of thisdeath/birth process was amplified by the closingconjunction of Uranus to Neptune, also inCapricorn.1989 was the greatest Year of Revolutionssince 1848, following another Saturn-Neptuneconjunction, and brought about the collapse ofvirtually every major communist state in the


Figure 4 (above) 445° graphic ephemeris for 1989 showing the three Saturn-Neptune conjunctions and the opposition from Jupiter throughSeptember-November - the three conjunctions are circled above, indicating their exact positions

Figure 5 (below) 45° graphic ephemeris for 1989 superimposed on the German Empire chart (as in Figure 3)

11° 55 Capricorn

11° 14 Capricorn10° 22 Capricorn

Figure 7New Moon in Berlin29 October 198915:27 (GMT)BerlinTropicalPlacidusTrue Node

Compare with the 1871German Empire Chart, Figure 3

world except China and Cuba. March saw thefirst democratic election in the USSR but alsomassive Chinese repressions in Tibet. In MayCongress elected Gorbachev President ofUSSR. In June, as Chiron moved to the opposi-tion of the conjunction, the student revolt wascrushed in Tiananmen Square. In August camethe resignation of P.W. Botha, President ofSouth Africa and the beginning of the end ofapartheid. In October came the resignation ofthe East German President and the emergenceof a new democratic Hungarian republic. Mostdramatically, almost exactly as Jupiter made itsopposition to the conjunction in mid-November exactly with the old GermanEmpire Sun and MC-IC (see Figure 5) the BerlinWall disintegrated and German re-unificationeffectively began. The dam had burst, the floodgates opened. By the end of the year the oldSoviet Empire had totally evaporated.

At a technical level it is instructive to see howthe October 1989 New Moon immediate-

ly prior to this final conjunction, Figure 7, whenplotted on Astro-Locality chart (Figure 8 over-leaf), shows the Saturn-Neptune oppositeJupiter right across the MC-IC almost exactlydown the frontier between East and WestGermany. At the same time the Moon is on theDescendant through the same region. Giventhe fundamental connections with the Germanchart already noted, this chart for the monthahead identifies the locus of popular dissent andyearning for liberation with uncanny precision.

The collapse of the old Soviet Empire whichfollowed this massive line-up was immedi-

ately greeted in the West as “The Death ofCommunism”, “The Triumph of Capitalism”and as “The End of History” (the ultimateNeptune-Saturn illusion!)

At the time I, and other astrologers, notedthat plus ça change, and underlined that if

people wanted to believe such fairy tales, theyshould reserve final judgement until after thethrice-repeated square of 1998/9 - Figure 9,inside back page, when Saturn in Taurus andlate Aries squares Neptune inCapricorn/Aquarius. And here we are, a twin-kling of a decade on and the Brave New Worldof capitalism is found to have some fairly severecases of clay feet rot on its hands. All aroundus we are witnessing a state of economic andphilosophic crisis in the institutions that werebrought to birth under the conjunction.

We may note that with impeccable timing,the present stock market crash was

timed by the New Moon on 23rd July, immedi-ately following the all-time highs on the majorworld markets around 20th July. This NewMoon fell in close opposition to Neptune andsquare to Saturn. At this point the market(Saturn) started to crumble (Neptune) over thecoming weeks, its falls being further acceleratedby Mars in Leo completing a T-square withSaturn and Neptune on 20-26 August.

TThe Seeds of Evil

So what went wrong? Why this sudden disil-lusionment? As always it is a question of

over-identification with an archetype.Humanity finds it desperately difficult to steerthe Middle Way. The “Triumph of Capitalism”led naïve economists, well-meaning politicians,as well as cynics and opportunists, to totallyembrace this distorted thesis. In consequencethe conjunction saw an acceleration world wide

of the privatisation (liquidation) of state assets(Neptune through Capricorn). Most significant-ly, it saw the rush to globalise (a good Neptuneword, the mirror of the Socialist International)the world economy into one free-market econ-omy so that everyone could become con-sumers of capitalist goods.

In a classic role reversal, Neptune as the pre-vailing myth of Communism ("workers of the

world unite") was replaced by the myth of thefree flow of capital. ("Capitalists of the worldunite"). Total free trade (Neptune) became theself-evident Great Good. "Protectionism", thesimple desire to retain some measure of intelli-gent, self-interested, national control (Saturn)over resources and to control the flow of inter-national capital, became the Great Evil. No onechose to notice that historically the USA andEurope were until very recently two of themost "protectionist" economies. They both stillare in terms of Saturn's area of agriculture.

Especially perniciously, the World Bank andthe International Monetary Fund (IMF)

began putting in place “economic reforms” inEastern Europe and the Third World condi-tional on the destruction of “inefficient” systemsof production and the creation of massiveunemployment, as though individual people’slives (allegedly dear to the West) were imma-terial. With the influx of speculative investment(Neptune) into areas of cheap, desperatelabour (Saturn), came instant fortunes for thefew. But for vast millions these reforms havemeant, in effect, a return to colonialism, withthe colonial power being faceless InternationalCapital without even the moral obligations ofthe old paternalistic colonials.

Those interested in understanding the rootsof the present crisis and the extent of the

problems of the economic reconciliation of col-lective and individual economic philosophiesshould read the Professor of Economics at theUniversity of Ottawa, Michel Chossudovsky’s


devastating critque of Western post-1989 economicpolicy, The Globalisation of Poverty. This suitably aptSaturn-Neptune-titled book spells out how WorldBank and IMF policies have, in the best Capricorn tra-ditions, put in place the framework for a world ofgrowing inequalities. The popular unrest fromIndonesia and Korea to Eastern Europe is happeningbecause of policies which ensure that a large majorityare consigned to poverty and despair in the interest ofa narrow sector of privilege and power. The seeds ofthis evil are now rapidly growing plants at this Springpoint of the Saturn-Neptune cycle.

As always at the square of the cycle, the basic the-sis has to be questioned radically. The two princi-

ples are tugging tangentially to one another. Most vivid-ly at the present time we are seeing the collapse of thebanking system in Russia and the re-emergence of theold Communist party as a dominant player. Butthroughout the world where lopsided economic solu-tions and institutions were put in place, the least pleas-ant of Saturn-Neptune mud is hitting the fan. The col-lective is demanding that it have its part to play in theequation. Likewise throughout Europe, western andeastern, there is a sense of the need to find a ThirdWay and the growing awareness that we are poisedon the brink of possible total financial collapse, and thesimple solutions of 1989 are fundamentally flawed.Tony Blair in Britain, born in 1953 with his MC square

to an opposition of Mercury with Saturn-Neptune, isone leader struggling to find such a middle ground.

Those captivated by Neptunian speculative greedon the stock market are now having to look to

Neptune’s concern for the greater whole. The Saturn-Neptune international bankers who have put in placenarrow, economic reforms are now having to face thebankruptcy, poverty and despair and the anger thatthe “spoiling of the Ideal” brings with it. Their insensi-tivity and indifference to the instant destitution theirpolicies were creating in the name of “economic effi-ciency” are now being exposed. Neptune requiresthat Saturn live up to its rhetoric of individual dignity indistant places overseas as much as at home.LLooking Ahead

So what lies ahead? Ironically for the West, preach-ing unbridled global capitalism as the source of end-

less growth, the sexy myth of free trade will begin tofade before the flood of ultra-cheap Asian goods.Pressures for Saturn "protection", denied to IMF clientsin the emerging world as "reactionary", will no doubtseem entirely reasonable when our own survival is atstake.

The coming months are likely to continue to be atime when Utopian longings meet hard facts,

when self-deception and wishful thinking have tocome down to earth, sober up and ‘“get real”; when

Figure 8Astro-Locality chart for

New Moon 29 October 1989

15:27 (GMT)

For further discussion of location astrology and

Astro*Carto*Graphy seeWorking with Astrology- The

Psychology of Mid-points,Harmonics and Astro*Carto*graphy Michael Harding & Charles Harvey

Consider 1998ISBN 1-873948-03-4

Consider58 Keyford, Frome, Somerset

BA11 [email protected]


narrow IMF solutions and their obscene instructions tothe starving to “be frugal and eat less” have to give wayto the realities of survival and a larger, more imagina-tive, compassionate humanity.

However, to do anything requires leadership andthe weight of authority. At Saturn-Neptune

times this is a scarce commodity. So how Real can ourleaders get without the perspective of the archetypaland the moral responsibility that that engenders?Many of the problems of this time are summed up bythe picture of the leader of the West, crippled by sexscandals and a plummeting stock market, embracingthe leader of Russia, the militarily second most pow-erful nation on earth, who is fatally sick with alcohol, arampant Communist opposition, and a mafia-riddenand run economy. In Japan and Germany the leader-ship is equally in doubt. With Neptune’s square, Saturnhas lost his gravitas and authority. Who can possiblybelieve such leaders?

Looking ahead, we can see that the next Saturn-Neptune square occurs on 1 November at 29°30’

Aries/Capricorn, with Mars simultaneously on the mid-point from 14°30’ Virgo. This is a very vicious“Terminator-type” combination which falls close to adegree area much assocated with the US stock mar-ket, dollar, and Federal Reserve, and suggests furtherfalls and instability. No matter what bounce there maybe in the world’s stock markets, it would be unwise toput money in the markets before this time, or ratheruntil after the Mars-Jupiter opposition of 6thNovember which is likely to mark something of a turn-ing point..

The last Saturn-Neptune square in April 1999 fallsonce again in Taurus-Aquarius, this time at 4°07’.

We note that this is square/opposition the Saturn-Neptune conjunction of 1917 at 4°45’ Leo. This willcertainly keep Russia and the old USSR states firmly inthe melting pot with a continuing leadership crisis. Thisline-up also strongly implicates united Germany whoseDescendant and North Node are at 4°26 and 5°15Aquarius. The new Germany was born in Berlin at0hrs on 3 October 1990, with the MC and Sun squareSaturn and Neptune (a suitable signature for a statecreated of Capitalist and Communist elements!),which is further reason to expect Germany to be both

in the firing line and at the focus of attempts to grap-ple with the reconciliation of these two social and eco-nomic poles.

At the same time we can anticipate thatCommunist China (3:15 pm, 1 October 1949,

Peking) with its Moon rising in 3°11’ and 5°57’Aquarius will certainly not escape from an economicand social battering. At a practical level this suggestscompetitive devaluations with neighbouring Asianeconomies. At a deeper level it suggests a tide of socialunrest which will lead to radical reforms.

The Saturn-Neptune square is not of course actingalone. It is immediately followed by Saturn square

Uranus throughout most of 1999, the majorNostradamus eclipse of August 1999, and then theepochal Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in Taurus in 2000.This is the last conjunction of the GreatChronocrators, as the ancients called them, in Earthsigns for some 900 years. In Taurus it suggests that thiswill be the last opportunity to get the world econom-ic structure sorted out in preparation for the next 200years of Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions in Air signs. So thecoming months and 1999 are likely to see a good peri-od of decay and doubt which will force the “powersthat be” to totally engage with the creation of a “NewWorld Order” as mooted in 1989.

The good news that astrology can always bring isthat no season lasts for ever. Following the current

economic and leadership crisis, Saturn will move on toform the trine to Neptune in 2002. This should furtherencourage economic structures which honour bothsides of the individual and collective equation, in readi-ness for a further testing of the thesis of 1989 at thetriple opposition in 2006 and 2007. The sooner wehonour the fact that we needs must honour all of thegods, the sooner the larger world will be able to dis-cover life before death. The current generation of1998/99 babies will be looking to the SecularHoroscopes of the present time to understand thework they have to do. Let us hope and work that, bythe time they are in charge, they will be living in a worldthat is more aware of the deeper archetypal Realities.No doubt the generation of February 1997 will beensuring that they do!

Figure 945° Graphic EphemerisJanuary 1998 to June 1999

The thee instances of Saturnsquaring Neptune are indicated.Note how Mars joins in on thesecond instance, on 1 November1998

Books mentioned:

Hymns to the Ancient GodsMichael Harding.Available from the Urania Trust,vide supra

The Globalisation of Poverty - Impactof IMF and World Bank Reforms Michel ChossudovskyThird World Network 1997ISBN 983-9747-23-1

Tables of Planetary Phenomena Neil F.MichelsenACS Publications, San DiegoISBN 0-935127-08-9. For historical studies of the plan-etary cycles this is the essentialtext, giving detailed listings of themajor planetary conjunctionsfrom 501 BC - 2100 AD, anaspectarian of planetary phases1700 - 2050 and much, muchmore. It includes colour man-dalas of the dance of 96 differentpairings of planets and asteroids.

1° 29’ Fixed29°30’ Cardinal

4° 7’ Fixed

issue one.qxd - the centre for psychological astrology

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