One of the challenges of studying traditional astrology is the fact that we live in a profoundly different world than that which gave birth to our system of Western astrology. Astrology makes no sense in the context of the usual modern world way of thinking – you’ve probably had the experience of trying to explain why you “believe in” astrology to non-astrologer friends who view your practice as a quaint relic from more superstitious and less enlightened ages.We need to come to terms with that change in worldview.
We look out into the night sky, and we do not see the same world that our ancestors did. The traditional world has a completely different shape, which gives an entirely different concept of the cosmos.
In this essay I want to do some imaginative exploration of the shape of the traditional world, and of the modern world, how our modern world has lost some of the dimensions that make sense of astrology.
The Traditional Cosmos
I want to start by sketching out the traditional cosmos and the modern cosmos, and then consider how it affects our thinking and our imagination.
We start with the earth, right at the center of the mutable or created world. Around that, within the orbit of the Moon we have the sublunary sphere, the realm of the four elements. This is the mutable world, the mortal world, the world of disorder and change. Around that we have the perpetually moving and regular spheres of the traditional planets planets. The planetary spheres are moving, but in an orderly and predictable fashion, and they move in that most perfect of shapes, the circle. Outside of the planets is the sphere of the fixed stars, bordered by the firmament – unmoving, eternal, fixed, the realm of Heaven or the Heaven, the abode of the highest gods.
We have three worlds or realms – the moving, mutable world of earth, the elements and the moon, and the unmoving eternal world, with the planets as a perpetual world mediating between the two.
As humans we also live in multiple worlds – we have an eternal part, an immortal soul from the highest gods, and a mutable, mortal part. Like the planets, our human consciousness mediates between time and the eternal.
Saturn, the outermost traditional planet, is right at the border between the moving spheres of the planets and the unmoving sphere of the fixed stars. Saturn is the doorway, the guardian, the gatekeeper, standing at the edge between time and eternity. (I explore the implications of that symbolism at great length in my recent book on Saturn.)
In the traditional world the planets were not simply physical balls of rock and gas. Each of the traditional seven planets that we can see in the was considered to be the outermost garment or shell of an intelligent being, a god, from a higher dimension, who then was one of the lords or viceregents or supervisors and managers of our world of change. So the planets exist in spheres between the eternal and temporal world, and each planet is itself the outer garment of an eternal god, mediating between worlds.
From top to bottom the traditional cosmos is alive with God and the Gods, from the highest divinity to the lowest elemental daimon.
The Modern Cosmos
With the modern solar system we have added the three new modern outer planets, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Saturn is no longer outermost. There now is no outside border, no unchanging and unmoving fixed stars, and no eternal, unmoving firmament.
The earth is no longer at the center of created universe. First we learned that the earth is one of several planets orbiting around the Sun. More recently we now know that all of universe is in motion and seems to be rotating around a point we call galactic center.
The created universe now goes out in all directions with no borders. Some theories claim that universe returns back on itself so that it is in some way a closed system, but not a system with a world outside of it. We have lost the sense of there being a boundary between mutable and eternal worlds.
For all intents and purposes the dimension of the unmoving and eternal world outside of our mutable world no longer exists; it is no longer a part of our imaginative reality. There is no Heaven up there, there is just endless space Out there.
Let’s explore the imaginative differences between these two models of the cosmos.
Heaven and Earth
In the traditional cosmos the material universe has a border, a boundary, and outside that boundary was another dimension – the Heavens. The Heavens were transcendent, not just up there spatially, but in an entirely different realm.
Now, we look out into a boundless infinity. At first glance it seems the universe should now feel bigger, right? It’s not that simple. We have an infinity, but it is an infinity of empty space. The material space-time universe goes on and out forever and ever and there is no getting outside of it.
Imaginatively the universe has been flattened. You can argue that it’s actually gotten smaller because we’ve lost that imaginative sense of another dimension, the sense that there is an eternal place outside of our time and space reality.
Even when you occasionally read of scientific theories of a fourth dimension, as in some mathematical systems, this dimension is still an extension of the physical universe. You’re still trapped inside it; in the modern imagination there is no world outside of the infinite physical universe.
Going to Heaven meant something imaginatively real and concrete. You had streets, you had massive buildings, you had angels and archangels and all sorts of celestial inhabitants.
Now heaven – or, rather, outer space – is just a dark blankness. Imagine yourself dying, and then waking up without your physical body after death. I am betting there is a good chance you are imagining something like waking up in outer space, in a blank darkness. There may be some kind of intelligent entity that then appears, maybe in a human sort of form, maybe like a space alien, maybe just a sphere of light that communicates by telepathy. Our imaginative concept of heaven has changed; we’re not ascending up to heaven, but out into outer space.
In the new cosmos you look up into the night sky and see a shapeless dark infinity that goes on in all directions.
In the old cosmos the night sky is more like looking up into a cathedral, a vast dome. The cosmos is a place of worship, and it has structure. (That is what I am depicting in the header image of my site. It is Universe as Cathedral.)
The Universe and the Gods
Recapping the three levels in old cosmos: you had the sphere of the elements, inside the orbit of the moon – the sublunary sphere – and that was the domain of change, mutability, mortality – shifting and unstable. Next up was the perpetual world of the traditional planets, which moved in ordered and predictable circles.
It was thought that the planets were not made up of the same sort of matter that we have here on earth. It was something else – perpetual, a motion that goes on forever, made of a matter than never changes or decays. Also, each of the planets was not a one-dimensional physical object or ball of rock. Behind each of the planets was an intelligent being, a God, so the physical planets were like the outermost garments of a multi-dimensional living being. The seven planets were like seven lords of viceregents who were responsible for directing and overseeing the ordered movement of the physical universe. The living gods of the planets were outside of physical reality, in another dimension.
It was once thought that the planets and the stars were all made of a different kind of physical matter than our earth, the sphere of the elements. The planets were thought to be made of an eternal and unchanging substance. Now we “know better”, we know the planets and stars and everything else in this infinite shapeless universe are all made of the same material elements that we have here on earth. We’ve gained knowledge in one dimension… and we’ve lost knowledge in another kind of way. we’ve lost that sense of there being a world outside of our world.
There is no outside anymore.
We’ve lost eternity. We’ve lost Heaven. We’ve lost the realm of the Gods. We look up at the planets and the stars and we no longer see the outer garments of Gods; we see balls of rock and gas and ice.
Consider this clause of the Lord’s Prayer. This is a perfectly acceptable way of translating it; I think of it as the astrologer’s version.
Thy Kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
On earth as it is in the Heavens.
In the traditional model the heavens are ordered and earth is disordered. This is a prayer asking that the perfect order of the Heavens – the order which we study in astrology – that this perfect order be mirrored down to us, and shape the disorder here on earth.
Now, instead of Heaven and the Heavens, we have endless outer space, which presumably has the same mix of order and disorder that we have here on earth.
The Shape of Time
Space is not the only aspect of our modern world that has a different shape. Our concept of time is also different. Time used to be cyclical, spherical. You looked up, and saw the perpetual ordered motion of the planets. Time moved in a circle.
Now when we look out on infinite space, we also look out into infinite time, out into an endless open, unshaped future. The future is infinite unshaped potential.
Imaginatively, we never transcend time; it just goes on and on in like infinite space. We no longer have the sense of time and eternity as being different dimensions, different levels. Like space, time has gotten flattened out and just goes on forever.
Modern time has a different shape. It is no longer cyclical but linear, moving in a single direction. This linear shape of time is the modern metaphor of progress. The past is behind us, the future is before us. There is also a value judgment that goes with this; the past bad, outmoded and restrictive, and the future good and positive.
In the traditional world, since we exist in both the eternal and mutable worlds, there is a cycle in the sense that we started out in the eternal world, and came to earth, and then after death we return to the eternal world to reap the fruits of our experience here. The idea of reincarnation, of multiple lifetimes on earth with in-between periods in the eternal, was common in the traditional world. The concept of there being a judgment or reckoning after death for our actions here on earth was very common if not universal.
In modern astrology that concept of reincarnation and karma has been imported from Eastern cultures, and many astrologers are not aware that they are part of our Western tradition also. That is not an integrated part of our modern world.
In the traditional cosmos we start in eternity, descend into time, then return to eternity. In time we do not experience reality all at once; it plays out in cycles. For people who do not practice astrology in the modern world it is most natural to conceive of time linearly, and thinking in terms of cycles does not come naturally.
The dimension of eternity is gone. Eternity is not the same thing as endless time, it is outside of time.
Causality
Talking further about the lost vertical dimension – in the traditional cosmos causality was vertical, from the top down, starting in the eternal world and working its way down the chain of gods, angels and daemons down to our earth. The eternal world creates and causes the physical world and acts on it, sustains its existence.
In the modern world all causality is horizontal, within the physical universe. There is no causal realm outside of the physical universe acting on it. Again, the universe has become flattened.
In the traditional model from Aristotle there are four different aspects to causality – Formal, Efficient, Material, Final. For example, if you were making a table, the design is the formal cause, wood is the material cause, the work of carpentry is the efficient cause, and sitting at the table to dine is the final cause. The formal and final causes are not physical; they are of the dimension of mind acting on matter.
In the modern world we’ve mostly gotten rid of Aristotle’s model, and when we say cause we mostly mean only the efficient cause. Modern science recognizes only efficient causes and explicitly excludes the possibility of final causes. I think this is part of the reason why much of modern science has a hard time making any sense of human consciousness or of free will. It just isn’t necessary for the scientific model.
This also means that the modern world model has no way of making sense of Divine Providence, God and the Gods taking care of the world and moving it in the direction of the greatest good. This was such an important concept that at one time there were debates over whether Providence was general or particular. Today the concept has mostly fallen out of common usage, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the word providence itself is labeled as obsolete some time in the near future.
It is true you will sometimes hear it said that Things work out for the best. In our modern world that statement has no clear sense of an actor or operator doing the working out; it is more like circumstances just kind of arranging themselves or falling into place without any higher power having to do any arranging or directing. The concept is vague and unfocused.
The Vertical Dimension and Values
Given that the modern cosmos now lacks a heaven above, and just expands outwards, with the loss of the vertical dimension we have nothing to look up to. There is a loss of higher values to judge from, the loss of all sense of there being an eternal moral standard that all people are judged by. This leads to a sense of the relativity of values. All are spread out before us on a flat plane, so we’ve lost the concepts of higher and lower. We’ve lost the sense of being judged by eternal laws, or of there being an eternal judge
In art we’ve lost any meaningful sense of higher and lower, greater and lesser. Who is to say that Beethoven is higher than Elvis?
There has also been a flattening out in the subjects of art. Art no longer depict higher subjects, gods and heroes to look up to. A landmark modern example of this change in art is James Joyce’s classic novel Ulysses, which follows the doings of perfectly ordinary people on a perfectly ordinary day doing perfectly ordinary things. There is no sense of higher or lower values, noble or ignoble actions. Stuff just sort of happens. It is very much a product of a twentieth century worldview. In Joyce’s world in Ulysses there are no heroes, there are no gods.
At its most extreme, with this loss of a sense of measurable values, you can get to a point where there is no measurable truth, only each person’s opinion. There is no Truth per se, there is My truth and Your truth.
Window into the Eternal
In the traditional mode, the created world is a window into the eternal world, and temporal things mirror eternal things. In the modern world the window is shut, and the material universe no longer mirrors anything beyond itself.
The Shape of Astrology
Part of what draws people to studying astrology is that sense of wanting to recover the dimension of the sacred, of a divine order beyond our world, reaching down into our world. We want to recover the sense that the universe and our lives have design, have purpose and meaning.
Working with traditional astrology changes how you think. After years of imaginatively placing myself in the world of the traditional cosmos I can see parts of it that we have lost in our modern world. The purpose of this essay is to share that difference in perception and imagination.
We are never going back to the old, earth-centered model where there is an unmoving dome above us that marks the border between heaven and earth. However, I think we can regain some important features of the traditional model, and being astrologers can help make these alive and viable to us. Here are some qualities I think we need to recover.
- The sense of our material world as having a border, and there being a different, eternal dimension outside of it. We are not trapped in this one dimension.
- The universe is still spherical in shape, and the center of that sphere is right where I am. My sphere of awareness reaches out in all directions and forms a kind of massive sphere around me. This can be visualized as a kind of holographic reality, where any and every point is at the center.
- The sense of the Gods as alive and intelligent, and the sense of the physical planets as being the outermost shell or garment of these gods ruling and ordering our cosmos.
- The sense that we as humans live in two worlds at once, a temporal and an eternal world.
- The sense that there is an eternal order underlying our mutable world, or perhaps surrounding our mutable world. I sometimes imagine the world I see around me as if it were projected on a spherical screen, where the eternal dimension is behind it.
- The sense that there is an eternal moral order. We live in the light of the eternal world every moment in time, and we are held to account and judged by our actions. The consequences of our thoughts and actions are not arbitrary, they are under eternal law. You might have had a parent who told you that God is always watching what you think and do, and that is pointing to a very important truth about the world we inhabit.
Now, after years and years of studying astrology, when I look up at the cosmos, I don’t see empty space. I see something more like an ordered, shapely eternal dance taking place within a vast cosmic cathedral. And, I can sense the hand of the Gods at work in the world, and the eyes of the gods looking at me from the planets and stars.
The heavens declare the glory of God;
and the firmament sheweth his handywork.
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