Sense of the Sacred
“Mankind today is in dire need of a new mythos, and of a reawakening of the sense of the sacred.”
So said Dane Rudhyar, father of humanistic transpersonal astrology, author, poet, composer and spiritual-philosopher. Rudhyar coined the term transpersonal astrology in 1930 – long before the word transpersonal was used in conjunction with psychology. He defined the word as a process of ‘descent’ of transcendent spiritual power and illumination through the normal consciousness and eventually the whole personality of a human being. The source of that power was beyond the personal consciousness and awareness. Much like the descent of grace in religious terms. Rudhyar believed in the power of symbolism to bring significance into every process of life. He felt the deepest meaning of symbols had to be intuitively experienced through both the mind and the feelings. Astrology of course, is a symbolic language. It has the power to bridge the mind and feelings as it evokes the meaning of the relationship between man and the universe, of which he is part. Could astrology then, be our new mythos?
I don’t see why not. Our ancient ancestors viewed the entire universe as a living organism. This organism had a hierarchical structure, wholes within wholes. The doctrine of the macrocosm and the microcosm was an idea based on an analogy between the whole and its parts: the lower is a microcosm of the higher. The doctrine that everything in the universe hangs together mainly by hidden affinities provided the foundation of astrology. Each human being was a microcosm – a miniature universe – reflecting the macrocosm. As above, so below….
According to Plato this ‘one universal mind’, or psyche, manifested certain themes, forms or ideas and these were the models for all things of substance. These ‘divine ideas’ were the ‘gods’ and ‘goddesses’ of Greek mythology and their visible counterparts were the planetary bodies. Aries, the god of war, was visible as the planet Mars – ruler of the sign Aries. From these divine ideas a spiritual energy flowed downwards and was impregnated on nature at all levels, mental, biological and physical. Carl Jung called these inner gods archetypes and believed them to be the structural elements of the human psyche.
Huston Smith was a man who devoted his life to researching comparative religions and philosophies. He believed the great spiritual traditions of the world can be summed up in three words man mirrors cosmos. Smith held that this one truth was discerned and lived by all peoples of the world, by all civilizations in the world and was taught by the best minds right down to the 18th Century. The sole exception to this belief has been Western man since the 18th Century !
In the late 17th Century the modern world began to take shape. The empirical method of the newly emerging science (destined to become our new ‘religion’ of scientism) validated only experience that could be objectified. The price to be paid was the extinguishing of the ancient understanding and experiencing of the world as ensouled. The intelligent, living consciousness of the kosmos became a scientific, mechanistic world and in this world anything occult, anything which could not be quantified or subjected to experiments, was rejected. Astrology was one such victim of the new science. It was cast into the shadows. That was, I might add, despite the fact that Galileo, Kepler and Newton all subscribed to the organic world view of the ancients and were themselves astrologers!
Tragically, in destroying an organic awareness of the world, nature herself became a victim. Thus began the wholesale destruction of our mother planet, who (according to the Gnostic tradition), was the creator of the Anthropos. That’s us.
Things changed somewhat in the late 20th Century with the emergence of quantum physics. This paradigm encompasses the view that the universe is a self-creative, self-organizing conscious Being.
In other words, implicit in the postmodern science are the principles on which astrology was founded! There is nothing new under the sun right. Might Rudhyar’s ‘new mythos’ potentially be nothing more or less than an ancient one – a recognition that man mirrors cosmos, as exemplified in the art of astrology? Could astrology hold one of the keys to reawaken our sense of the sacred?
From my perspective, as one who has danced with the star logos for almost four decades now, the answer is unambiguous. Astrology is a sacred art. It can, it does, awaken ones’ sense of the sacred.
As can immersion in nature and the natural world. And other soul-stirring practices and non-practices. The problem is, we have become used to outside authorities telling us what to do and how to think. Scientism is a case in point. ‘The science is settled’ – there’s an oxymoron if ever there was one. Newtonian mechanics evolved into quantum physics in a relatively short period of time. It is pretty obvious that our understanding of our world is evolving, therefore how can science ever be settled? No, I think you’ll find this counterintuitive term was dreamed up by shadowy vested interests. I’m looking at you carbon con ‘official narrative’. (Let’s demonize the gas of life!)
It seems to me then that part of the problem (in the reawakening of our sense of the sacred) is our conditioned habit of looking to outside authorities to tell us what to think. From the brief history I’ve outlined it is clear – humanity has not always been like this. We have been programmed through centuries by those in positions of power and control to the point where our heads and our hearts have been thoroughly divorced from each other. First it was the religious priests who told us what to think and do – then it was the money priests and the science priests. And astrology was cast into the shadows long ago – because an individualised path to the divine was not part of the program. (Never mind that they – the religious cult leaders, appropriated astrology for its own ends). Men in black wielding fearsome power and control were to be the only way to the divine, or ‘god’ as they called it. Our ancestors were forcibly separated from their inner knowing and their reverence for the natural world under threat of torture and death (see Inquisition) before the new science of the 17th Century put the final nail in the coffin.
So now, we know the problem let’s get to the remedy. On one level it is simple: we must throw off the shackles of outside (invariably nefarious) authorities. If we are to recover our hearts and our inner knowing it is imperative we do. Let’s face it – the ship is going down, fast. It may have been written in the stars that we wouldn’t recover our true heritage as children of the kosmos, until calamity struck. I doubt many would disagree – we are living in calamitous times. On another level, it is challenging. We have reached the zenith of egoism and materialism and letting go of all of that is no small ask. But we are now being called to return to the principles and wisdom of the natural world that our ancestors knew; an awareness of the ensoulment of the universe. Are we able to evoke the descent of a transcendent spiritual power and illumination and thus reawaken the sacred in our lives? It is either that, or we go the way ‘they’ would have us go – into a transhuman, AI world. The Astro logos – the mythos of the stars, could be one path to our redemption. Approached with reverence astrology has the power to evoke this descent and awaken the sacred heart that lies deep within us. Astrology unites our little personality selves with our divine selves and thus the divine we have in common with all life forms in the universe. The archetypes astrology symbolizes, those gods and goddesses of mythology, are brought down into our flesh and bones, our dreams and our memories and our capacity to make sense of life in this realm, through our personal birth charts. We become those gods and goddesses in our acknowledgement of them. But we will need courage to awaken this heart. Courage, from the French word for heart, is a word to hold close in these times. When courage is lost, all is lost. We will need courage to let go of all that we have mistakenly believed to be valuable in this materialistic, consumerist society of ours. And we will need courage to create a new way of being. One thing is for sure, nature - usurped, raped and abused as she has been for so long is our ally and it is through her that we will recover our souls and the souls of every living being on our planet. We must see her as the living, conscious being she is – in partnership with Sol and Lunar. The other planets – well, there’s another story for another time…
Courage then. As we move into this last half of the craziness that has been 2022.