DEVELOPMENT OF KNOWLEDGE

Has it ever occurred to you that your mental development as a human child began by looking up to the skies? Snoopy the dog of Charlie Brown says it, Look Up, while lying down on top of his dog house. Life is about looking up. It has life's secrets, he says. Such a reality, Z’ev Ben Shimon Halevi in his classic book, Anatomy of Fate, Astrology and Kabbalah, contains everything, including the perfect and the imperfect, the true and the false. But with Snoopy, the emphasis is on the Sky, higher level, then the Ground, lower level, first the perfect, then the imperfect. Why? A dog knows the answer. But he can’t tell you. All that he can say is to tell you through his action, that he is faithful to his master/mistress. Fidelity is the dog's paramount virtue.  On a metaphysical level, it’s like saying have faith in the One who created you and All That Is. You are here to find out for yourself. So we continue in our search for answers for how did we develop the amazing knowledge that we have? The objective Universe, moreover can only be seen in the totality by the absolute eye of God. Anything less is subjective, Halevi declares.

The hierarchy of perception or understanding ranges from the lower level of dense materiality, up through the metallic and mineral realms and the vegetable and animal kingdoms, to Man who occupies a position roughly half-way between the dimmest spark embedded in solid matter and the brilliant light of Divine spirit.

The upper Worlds constitute increasingly greater degrees of consciousness passing up through the cosmic realms to the level of perception and being which is just before attaining union with the Godhead as seen in a mystical ecstasy by St. Teresa of Avila and other well known mystics. Man, holding the midway position is in a unique situation because he links the upper with the lower Worlds.

Early man was a creature of the senses. He found himself born into a physical situation where his psychological and spiritual faculties were either undeveloped or redundant. This was because as Halevi speaks, at the time of his arrival on Earth he had to cope with an organic body and survive in a tough natural and elemental habitat. At this stage of development (evolution) he was little more than an animal himself, having evolved – or descended, according to one’s beliefs – into a rather slight mammalian primate.

DEVELOPMENT ENERGIZED BY FOUR ELEMENTS

Halevi continues: adjustment to the elements was a matter of life and death. Five senses gave him a very physical picture of the world about him. The next level of awareness was the vegetable part of his incarnate nature. His body, like all plants, needed an Earth-based home for a root, even if it was just a cave, water to drink, air to breathe and light to be energized by, sustained by the four elements. This also meant he was under two sets of laws: the elemental that confined him to a particular range of physical possibilities and the vegetable that held him within a strict daily rhythm of waking, sleeping, eating, excreting, and a lifespan of being born, maturing, propagating and dying.

Thus it was that while man was physically governed by elemental and natural laws he could also rise above them.

This was possible because he had the ability to view himself by observing. Man could evolve out of the moment by moment sensual bound condition into the possibility of considering what happened in the past and what might occur in the future. This faculty for conscious projection forward or backwards into time is unknown in the other organic kingdoms that only live day by day. Such an appreciation of the 'here and now' generated a unique perception of the non-physical world.

TERRESTRIAL AND CELESTIAL POWERS MIX

Halevi: from this point of departure from the sensual dimension came the belief that behind every elemental phenomenon and vegetable and animal species may be an unseen intelligence. That indeed there was a supernatural world above the natural. This gave rise and it occurred all around the globe, having the hundredth monkey effect, to a whole collection of spirit beings who governed the various manifestations of the Universe. Out of this developed mythologies that mixed the history of the people with the actions of the gods. This appreciation of the Universe was not sensual but emotional. The form was expressed in sagas that described a world governed by fear, love, bravery, cowardice, grief, sacrifice, exaltation. Thus was born to each culture the archetypal symbols of the terrestrial and celestial powers that surrounded mankind.

THE SKY – Least Comprehensible to Man

The sky had this particular fascination because of all the factors in the Universe it was the most incomprehensible. To begin with it was the most remote thing in an environment and held a mystery far beyond the most inaccessible earthly seashore or mountain range. Nothing but the luminaries, the planets, the stars and the Milky Way lived in the vast cosmic cave that overshadowed the Earth. During the summer days the solar disc was all powerful above the Earth, although at night he gave way to his gentler consort the Moon, who as his feminine counterpart had her waxing and waning temperament like the female of the species in the natural world below. The male and female combinations gave way to the solar and lunar archetypal symbols their particular character and so the coming together of perhaps an eclipse or the separation at night when the Moon was fully herself (we call Full Moon in Taurus for example as we just had at the Wesak festival honoring Buddha's birth and death near the QC rotunda last April 28, 2013 ) bred many stories cast in human form about the relationship of the celestial husband and wife.  The planets were likewise treated, each god and goddess' image generated by the peculiar brightness, color and characteristic movement.  All over the Earth remarkably similar archetypes were invented to describe for example, Mars who was considered by his red color and sudden advances and retreats to be warlike. In contrast Venus with her clear blue sheen was seen by many cultures to be feminine and beautiful, and Saturn, the slow, dim mover through the constellation, was inevitably felt to be like an old man, a watcher of events celestial and terrestrial.     .

This pantheon was slowly filled out by individual gods of particular rivers or mountains, and later, as the heavens were seen to be more than a backdrop to the Sun and Moon deities, the constellations and the planets were robed in a very special variety of mythology. The sky had this particular treatment because of all the factors in the Universe it was the least comprehensible. To begin with it was the most remote thing in the environment and held a mystery beyond the most inaccessible earthly seashore or mountain range. Nothing but the luminaries, the planets, the stars and the Milky Way lived in the vast cosmic cave that over-shadowed the Earth, and they were revolving around the Sun. No birds, not even the great eagle, could stay up for as long as the sun. Here was a strange world inhabited by many elemental moods, sometimes calm, at others violent, and behind these windy and watery states there was the evermoving changes of light and shadows.

Halevi: so it came in the passage of time as cultures blended into civilizations that the poetic cosmic sagas merged as the archetypes: Venus called Aphrodite in Greece, Ishtar in Assyria, Astarte in Phoenicia and Nana in Babylon, slowly focused into a single image

CONCEPT OF ORDER IN CREATION

The concept of order in Creation was a self-evident one even to the purely sensual. Nature continually demonstrated it in the progress of the seasons and in the processes of birth, propagation and death. This in turn made the thinkers perceive that there was a hierarchy of celestial influence namely, the lunar, planetary, solar, stellar and galactic levels of the Universe.

Halevi: out of this came the system rooted upon the original Sumerian cosmology formalized about 3000 BC in which the cupola of the sky contained the visible, while above the gods ruled from the invisible realms beyond.

THE ZODIAC FORMS THE DOME

Later the dome was adapted as a base for celestial coordination in which the Heavens were divided into sectors with a grid that related to the Sun’s ecliptic. Also added were the northern and southernmost lines of the Sun’s tropical oppositions. This format came to be known as the Celestial Spheres. The scheme was further calibrated by the Greeks according to the degrees or days of the year and the twelve solar-lunar compromise divisions of the Zodiac.

ZODIAC DIVISIONS in Astrology

About this time the evaluation of the planets in each sign and their active and passive rulership was resolved. So too was the sub-schema of the elemental and cardinal, the mutable and fixed factors in the Zodiac and the major angular relationships between the heavenly bodies. Enclosing this detailing was the finalized model of Creation to explain the origin and structure of Existence in a mixture of allegory and observation fact. This now classical world picture has been preserved in the Ptolemaic formulation which describes one of the early theories of relativity in which the Earth pivots a geocentric set of spheres/

Over must have been, Halevi continues to explain, in relation to the many millennia of collecting data, a very short period of two thousand years there was designed the system upon which Astrology is based. Where this actually occurred is not so important as the fact that at around the same period of 600 to 400 BC the Chinese, the Greeks and the Jews for example were formulating their own metaphysical systems. So that it is of no surprise to discover in the Middle East the preoccupation with celestial mechanics crystallized into remarkable detail a teaching on the laws of the heavens and the effects of the luminaries and planets. This precipitated the first horoscopes.

At this point the elemental, vegetable, animal and emotional and intellectual phases were brought together and fused into a system which, except for details and minor additions, has been with us for over two thousand years. Having reached its peak Astrology then entered a plateau of refinement in which the creative work of perhaps a small body of people became tradition, on its crystallized form. The phenomenon of ignorance, Halevi further explicates, awed by a little knowledge and some theatrical devices has occurred throughout the ages and has masked serious Astrology with a dubious reputation. The two other classes of astrologers may be seen as the learned and the wise. The former make up the main body of practitioners. This small body are those who see Astrology as more than a system of individual or mundane analysis and prediction.

They view Astrology as the original formulators did, as esoteric Teachings on the Universe with all its laws embodied in the interconnection between the macrocosmic scheme of the world and the microcosmic image of man. This is the approach Halevi and us shall attempt to explore.

Moreover, Jungian psychoanalyst-astrologer Alice Howell would like to invite you to consider the following facts of our cosmic life. It will make you feel extremely smart just knowing that you can remain yourself despite the fact that the following is true:

1. The Earth is moving at 1,000 mph as it rotates on its axis.
2. The Earth is also traveling 66,000 mph as it orbits around the Sun at 481,000 mph.
The Sun and Solar System are whizzing along the edge of the Milky Way.
4. The Milky Way is clocking at 1,350,000 around a cluster of galaxies.
5. Plus every part of your body is in constant motion, and every atom in it is a mini-galaxy dancing and whirling at incalculable speeds.
And yet you remain you! Now that's divine magic!