Read an Excerpt
The Heavens Declare
Astrological Ages and the Evolution of Consciousness
By Alice O. Howell Theosophical Publishing House
Copyright © 2006 Alice O. Howell
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8356-3061-0
CHAPTER 1
THE RING OF QUIDDITY
Dear Friend,
October 25, 1980, was a rather remarkable day. It was a wedding day, and the bridegroom and the bride were both crowned with white hair. To tell the truth, it was one of the happiest days of my life! I am only sorry that you were not there, but I had not yet met you. Despite the protest, at first, by one of my children that it might be unseemly at our age to have a big wedding, we had one. When I pointed out that all those invited might be willing to show up at my funeral, so why not a wedding?, she really had to agree. Well, we called it a "love feast," and friends and family all came bringing food. We were married in an Episcopal church by three dear friends: two were clergyman, one a Buddhist monk. Walter, my husband-to-be, had flown to Long Island from California. Miraculously, we had met aboard a ship on the Mediterranean while I was teaching a course on Jungian symbolism and the collective unconscious as we visited Italy, Greece, Egypt, Israel, Turkey, and Yugoslavia.
I wore a deep rose-red velvet gown with a crown of daisies on my head and was attended by two little granddaughters, who were flower girls, and a solemn grandson, who was the ring bearer. Another dear friend sang the aria from Mendelssohn's Elijah: "O, trust in the Lord, wait patiently on him, for he will bring thee thy heart's desire." I remembered first really hearing it on the radio some twenty years previously while mending my children's clothes and pricking my finger, which brought tears—a time when life seemed pretty hopeless indeed. It is so strange, isn't it, when we are asked to trust, how the ego interferes and tries to sort it all out, and we remain convinced that there is no way out of despair. I have experienced that quite often and can only say, numb as I felt, I did trust. Probably because, having met my teacher M when I was so young, I knew better than to deny the possibility of solutions. But I can confess it was hard, and it went on being hard for a long, long time. So this music on my wedding day filled my heart with special gratitude.
When the Buddhist monk began his blessings, we were on our knees and wondered how long the chanting would continue. I clearly remember Jessie, aged four, calling out in great concern, "Oh, Daddy, he doesn't know how to talk!" After the ceremony, we repaired to the reception hall, a medieval Norman building brought over stone by stone from France by J. P. Morgan. Some Irish musicians began to play the accordion and bodhran, the drum, and we danced jigs and reels till the lights suddenly went out. Huge iron standing candelabra were brought in, flares were lit, and we went into a sort of time warp. The whole event, in fact, felt like time out of time.
My reason for mentioning this is that, besides the wedding guests, all the elements attended. There was such a storm that most of the Eastern seaboard suffered a blackout! The wind howled, thunder and lightning boomed and crackled, and sheets and sheets of rain fell from black skies and swirled and eddied in huge puddles outside the church. I remember one daughter-in-law, up to her knees in water, writing "Just married!" in lipstick on our car. When we left for our honeymoon, we drove in utter darkness to Connecticut, and the next day the seas were so rough that the ferry to Martha's Vineyard was unable to sail. That's rough!
I was reminded of this when I began thinking how to start our next series of letters. I knew that we should begin with a discussion of the signs. How could we first approach them through the elements? Somehow the coniunctio, or inner marriage, takes place in the midst of the four elements, and, by golly, that's what really happened. So by hindsight, I see that the wedding must indeed have been blessed with more symbolism than I had realized. I never truly appreciated that until this moment.
What a pleasure to hear from you! I am so pleased that you are eager to continue your study of astrological processes and that you see how they relate to Jung's many-faceted concepts of the individual and, indeed, the collective psyche. I am so grateful that the former letters on the planetary archetypes (published as Jungian Symbolism in Astrology), merited publication and proved helpful to others as well. You should keep that book handy to refer to as we go along. It might help refresh your memory.
Maybe it would be helpful to give you a preview of what I hope to cover in this next series of letters, so that you can see the whys and wherefores of studying the elements and the signs before getting to the exciting but more transpersonal matter of the astrological ages. We hear so much about the "New Age" and do not appreciate the fact that not only is there a recurring cycle of ages, each cycle approximately 26,000 years long, but there is every historical evidence pointing to the fact that both the collective unconscious (as Jung called it) and the collective consciousness are in evolution, and, furthermore, that this evolution is repeated sequentially and psychologically in each individual. This makes it relevant to each of us. So I will try to explain this majestic unfolding in terms as clear and simple as I can find.
Also, I thought it might be helpful to you to include a small glossary summarizing basic definitions of terms (p. 257) so that you can refer to it whenever you feel uncertain of something we covered in the first series of letters. There are many excellent texts on astrology already in print, so the purpose of these letters is rather to emphasize two things: (1) the necessity for understanding within yourself and through your own body the various processes represented by the signs; and (2) appreciation of their equivalent within the psyche. After all, we are psychosomatic creatures, and Jung has pointed out that many of our individual problems can be worked upon within the psyche without necessarily being acted out in the physical world as "fate." This would include many illnesses having a psychological disturbance at their root—though not all.
I always like to remember that the word "cosmos" means beauty, the beauty of order and harmony. When you realize the way our solar system interconnects with the greater model of the ring of the twelve visible constellations, it takes your breath away. I think it would relieve much of the religious angst of the modern world to see at least a glimmer of patterned meaning or meaningful pattern to the unfolding of our history, both individual and collective. We have had to wait for a more general understanding of the collective unconscious and of Jung's other great contribution, the concept of synchronicity, to grasp this. (See Glossary, p. 257. Go on, try it!) But I think we are ready now, and, hopefully, a new understanding of astrology's function will be our guide. Each of us has to take on the task of seeing a spiritual reason for our individuation: it is our very uniqueness that represents our gift, our "widow's mite," to the collective. And the collective unconscious is the sum total of consciousness of all creation, ever there for each individual to draw upon deep within himself or herself. No wisdom nor love is ever wasted. Even our terrible sufferings are not wasted, for they go through the alchemical transmutation of pain into wisdom, leaving traces behind in the collective unconscious which may help others. This is the source of myths.
There is a deep reason why universal myths abide, becoming the ground of all religions of the world. As Jung pointed out, they are not "untrue stories," but rather are always true of the psyche unfolding in sacred time and space, always now and here. They are the literature of the collective unconscious. Myths can be seen as providing a "morphic reasonance" for the psyche. The biologist Rupert Sheldrake proposes that, with the gathering of a critical mass, sudden leaps occur in the evolution of species. Perhaps then myths provide a gathering place for collective wisdom, for all the human trials and errors, of each individual's suffering, failure, and triumph. Through the templates of universal myth, God willing, we may be guided and initiated, one by one, until the story of each age is completed. Thus, no one's love or effort, however small or seemingly insignificant, is ever in vain. Any one of us could add the culminating and critical drop of consciousness that might suddenly change us all for the better. Humanity, despite its rich differences in race, culture, and religion, remains a collective species. As we evolve into this new Age of Aquarius, the task is clearly to recognize this as a fact and to see that the new creative dichotomy will be that of the individual and the collective, that of the collective and the cosmos.
So, for me anyway, the essential message is a positive one: we can look up to the mystery of the heavens and see that they coincide and connect simply and naturally with the vagaries of our everyday life, giving it the meaning we so desperately seek and want to believe in. This connection may no longer be a question of blind faith: there is now a modicum of factual proof—scientific, practical proof. There seems to be a "menu"(!)—a sequence, something that the ego in us can "read" for comfort's sake but must always remember that we cannot control. We can now recognize it, savor it, and help to fulfill it. My glass of water connects me to all the water in the world; my little candle flame connects me to all the fire in the universe. But I need not aspire to control the totality of these elements. This would be hubris, and it seems typical of humanity sometimes to forget that.
I always remember my teacher M's admonition that the true purpose of astrology is a spiritual one, to help each individual understand those universal processes, called "gods" by our forebears, that operate both outside and inside us. Its deepest purpose is to reveal the unus mundus, the "one world," underlying our various graspings of reality. Alas, much of today's "astrology" remains a parody of this, which is all the more reason to persevere.
So let's begin without further ado. Just to refresh your memory, let me repeat a few basic concepts:
Natal astrology answers five elementary questions:
Who? Answered by the Sun, which generates its own system.
What about the who? Answered by the Moon and the other planets which reflect, in different ways, the light of the Sun.
How? Answered by the twelve signs, which modify the above and will be the subject of these letters.
To what degree? Answered by the aspects or geometric relationships among the planets, which will also be discussed.
Where? Answered by the twelve houses, which give us the locale in the outer and inner worlds and represent the stage sets upon which the drama of a lifetime unfolds.
As you know, the underlying premise of both analytical psychology and astrology is that we all subjectively experience the objective world, and in a fashion that is unique to each of us as individuals. Jung was concerned that we learn to do this more consciously, thereby fulfilling our deepest duty to God by helping the spirit to incarnate more fully in the manifest world, and, at the same time, to release the imprisoned splendor of creation through our consciousness. In more ordinary terms, he stressed the importance of self-acceptance, of wholeness rather than perfection, seeing the purpose of analysis as leading beyond the healing of neuroses to ongoing spiritual growth. For him, he said, the process of analysis was "maieutic" (note the four vowels!), in which the therapist serves as a "midwife" to the inner rebirth of the transformed ego, now able to function harmoniously in relationship to the inner Self, the mysterious center and totality of the psyche—the Christ Within or Atman, or as I like to refer to it, our Divine Guest. This reborn "divine child" is conceived within the individual mother soul (psyche) and its indwelling fathering Self, a divine spark, called by some the "scintilla." This process is said to be contra naturam (a reversal of nature's way), yet it mirrors nature's laws, for any new birth requires a coniunctio between feminine and masculine. Here it comes between a god and a virgin mother—a theotokos (god-mother) within the psyche of a mortal individual. Can you see how the symbolism of the human family is the closest the sages could come to expressing such a deep and loving truth? It is not the literalism that obtains here, but the clothing and personifying of a mystery in the simplest terms for our understanding.
To be such a midwife is a high calling for sure. Doubtless for many it is an unconscious one, very naturally forgotten in countless counseling sessions when two people confront each other to go over the seemingly endless and painful details of woundedness. We have all been there. Nor is this limited to analysis per se; it occurs between parents and children, teachers and students, priests and parishioners, doctors and patients, coaches and athletes—wherever one is seeking guidance and another is seeking to guide in matters involving the inner growth of character and personality.
Astrology fits into the picture in that it can provide a map, if you will, to an invisible world, the very "kingdom of heaven which is within." It can describe for us, not so much what our experiences are, but how we tend to process those experiences, to respond through projecting our own inner archetypal images in meaningful ways onto life and the people who surround us.
As I have said before, the chart is to the psyche what DNA and RNA are to the body: the template that patterns the way we consume life. We unconsciously use this template all the time, whether we believe in astrology or not. But we are given a blessing and a grace in the option to use it consciously and for its deepest purpose, something Jung called "individuation" as it applies to the Self in us, and which the theologians call "incarnation" as it applies to Christ in Jesus. This points to the concept of the Christ Within or the Atman. In this sense, the life of Jesus becomes a paradigm for Christians, a model of how to carry our own cross with faith in the powers of redemption. For every great religion there is such a model, an example of human life lived fully and simultaneously at both the human and archetypal level. They have become one. Moses, in the Age of Aries, was the poignant and heroic model for the collective birth of the ego, for, like the ego, he could lead his people to the Promised Land, yet he could not enter it. Viewed symbolically, he, like our own individual ego, had the task of leading his people (our inner throng) out of captivity, through a desert (a meaningless inner wasteland) to a Promised Land, a twice-born life. The closer to individuation any mortal comes, the more archetypally meaningful the events of that life are for the rest of us. Certainly we project upon such avatars, but it is because the highest in us resonates to the highest in them. It takes one to know one!
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Heavens Declare by Alice O. Howell. Copyright © 2006 Alice O. Howell. Excerpted by permission of Theosophical Publishing House.
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