Post by johnbc on Oct 8, 2020 0:36:54 GMT
Even today, when we talk about astrologers, many people think of sinister men with pointed hats, looking at the sky from their tall towers and interpreting it according to their delusions. And yet, they are already penetrating science offices and laboratories, mixing with chemists, biologists, meteorologists, doctors and financiers.
In the last century, Carl Gustav Jung announced the return of astrology to university cathedra. At the time, this was true only in a few rare schools of psychology in Switzerland, where courageous pioneers, like Jung himself, encouraged or promoted semi-official courses in astrology at night for future clinicians, under the complacent eyes of the old rectors.
Today, Stanford University, the Zurich Higher Technical School and seven more universities worldwide promote regular studies on astrology. At the University of Paris (and France is the most conservative country in the face of astrology), Professor Robert Jaulin, in the course of ethnology, grants supplementary “credits” to students attending astrology classes, and another ethnologist, Jacques Halbronn, founded the University Astrological Movement, which brings together hundreds of students and professors from the same university, and promoted the last Astrology Congress in Paris. This congress was attended by figures of the size of Eric Weil, professor of philosophy at Louvain and a world-renowned thinker.
What happened? Has astrology changed or the massive opinion of intellectuals is carrying out a collective ‘mea culpa’ in the face of the art of Ptolemy and Kepler, which even a few decades ago was considered only a diversion of maddening eccentrics or an excuse practice to deceive popular good faith? Where did this revolution come from, transforming what yesterday was deceit and illusion into what today is deep research and serious reflection?
In 1666, Expelled from University Cathedra
To begin with, it was not the advancement of science that expelled astrology from university cathedra, as is normally supposed, but a hasty interpretation of Copernicus’ discoveries. Expulsion was decreed in 1666 by Colbert, Louis XIV’s minister, with the claim that astrology had no scientific basis.
In reality, the science of the time had no minimum conditions to really ascertain this, and the first statistical research on the subject was done only three hundred years later. What Colbert supposed was that, since horoscopes were drawn geocently — that is, with the Earth in the middle, and the Sun, Moon, signs and Planets around — they could not work, since Copernicus had demonstrated that what was in the center was the Sun and not the Earth.
Colbert simply did not realize that the horoscope was not exactly geocentric but anthropocentric, that is, that it represented the universe centered not on Earth as a physical reality, but on Man, on the individual. The horoscope was not a physical map of the universe (although it was also this), but a map of its meaning, a map of the meaning of the universe, as it appeared to a certain individual at the time and place where it was born. For these purposes, the center of the universe, the center of individual experience, was obviously still the Earth (except for the hypothesis that the querent was born on Mars or the Star Vega), and Kepler himself, who calculated the heliocentric orbits of the planets, he continued to draw horoscopes geocentricly until the end of his days.
While the astronomical chart was entirely objective and material, the astrological chart was both objective and subjective, like the Tibetan mandalas, which represent both the circle of the outer universe and the interior of man. This subtlety eluded Colbert. The more sensible German and Swiss universities preferred to leave their astrology cathedras open, albeit without occupants, and it was this loophole that allowed Jung to announce a triumphant return.
In 1945, Rehabilitated by Statistical Evidence
This return would be nothing triumphant, however, if eloquent evidence had not been discovered, shortly after, that the relationship between man and star is not a pure fantasy.
This discovery came when, in 1950, the French researcher Michel Gauquelin decided to clean up, by statistics (his academic specialty), the issue of “astral influences”. Since the beginning of the century, the great astrologer Paul Choisnard asked statisticians to do this. But it was very difficult, because a single astrological chart (made for the time, date and place of birth of an individual) has more than a thousand factors to be taken into account.
Around 1945, another astrologer, Léon Lasson, was finally able to formulate a good method of applying statistics to astrology. Gauquelin perfected this method and employed it in research that covered five thousand astrological charts.
The research put to the test a single astrological doctrine, however ancient and fundamental: that not only certain planets are associated with certain professions (Jupiter to politics and theater, Saturn to science, Mars to sports and military arts, Moon to literature), as well as such planets will exert a more intense influence, if at the moment of the individual’s birth they are placed in certain privileged points of the sky. These points are, according to the doctrine, the ascendant, which is the most eastern part of the horizon line, and the mid-sky, which is the highest point of the Zodiac (band of signs) in relation to a certain place on Earth.
If the theory were right, Gauquelin thought, certain planets would be more frequently in the ascendant and in the middle of the sky at the birth of people whose professions were related to those planets, than at the birth of other people. Saturn would be more often in the ascending and mid-skies of scientists, Mars in the military, Jupiter in politicians and actors, etc. Conversely, a Saturn would be rare in the ascendant or mid-sky of sportsmen or actors, and so on. Moreover, it would be necessary for this frequency to significantly exceed the average of chance (in the jargon of statisticians: theoretical frequency), in order to be able to believe that the phenomenon was something more than mere coincidence.
From the scientific point of view, the hypothesis to be tested was a complete absurdity, but the statistics were more favorable to the absurd than to the scientific point of view. With a frequency that could only be attributed to chance with a possibility of 1 against 10 million (that’s right), the planets were there where the astrologers said they would be: Jupiter in the ascending and mid-skies of the actors and politicians, Saturn in the scientists, Mars in sportsmen and military, Moon in writers. Conversely, the Moon was neither in the ascendant nor in the middle of the sky for those who were not writers, Mars for those who were not military, etc.
Although all this seemed like a diabolical plot by the stars to confuse the common sense of the poor scientists, Gauquelin, with exemplary intellectual honesty, published the results of the research, which immediately became the subject of scandal and general protests. The director of the National Institute of Statistics in France, Jean Porte, invited by Gauquelin’s opponents to unmask the whole hoax, redid the calculations and reported after some time: unfortunately, the calculations were right. Even so, Gauquelin redid the research, this time gathering no less than 25,000 maps, in France, Belgium, Holland, Italy and Germany, and again reached the same results. Again Jean Porte redid the accounts, and again they were spotless.
In the United States, The Humanist magazine published a petition by 186 scientists against astrology. In response, hundreds of letters came in favor, and The Humanist decided to arbitrate the question by promoting research similar to that of Gauquelin, with smaller sampling but greater statistical control. The results, for the third time, were the same.
Now, it remains to be seen what is the nature of the phenomenon
All the debates that have been held have shown that astrology is an infinitely more complete subject than its opponents ever imagined.
Example. When he could no longer deny the results of the research, the most ferocious French opponent of astrology, astronomer Paul Couderc, then head of the Paris Observatory, thought he had discovered a withering argument when declaring that a correlation was a thing, and a cause and effect mechanism, another; that the Gauquelin research had established a correlation between the stars and man, but in no way proved that the stars cause human actions, “as astrologers intend”.
Astrologers limited themselves to displaying the classic texts of their art, from the Emerald Table by Hermes Trimegisto (millennia before Christ) and the Ennades of Plotinus to the treatises of Paracelsus (15th century), Kepler (16th century) and Robert Fludd (17th century), in which the relationship between stars and men is explained everywhere as a process of similarity, analogy, sympathy, correlation, synchronism, and never of cause and effect.
And they added: no astrologer has ever said that stars cause human actions, for the simple reason that the principle of cause and effect, so important for the materialist scientist, is, for astrologers, a minor and secondary principle. The major principle is the law of analogy, whereby the big and the small, the macrocosm and the microcosm, matter and consciousness, have a similar structure and dynamics, since they are just different faces of the same phenomenon.
Poor Couderc never imagined that he was handling such a large hornet. Since that time, the groundless controversy of pro-and-against astrology has practically ceased, and a high-level theoretical debate on the nature of the phenomenon revealed by the Gauquelin research has started. If it was not a cause and effect relationship, what relationship was it then? A timing, as Jung intended? Or, as Gauquelin himself, a tenacious scholar of biorhythms, said, is there a “cosmic clock” in every living being that makes it receptive to all the rhythms of the universe around it? What exactly was the sense in which the ancients spoke of “analogy”? Would analogy not be a mental instrument usable by science, for the analysis of phenomena that are too large and complex, such as the dynamics of social and political life, the great ecological systems, the economies of the great nations? Didn’t the ancient astrologers have, millennia ago, the intuition of a scientific method for addressing major problems? Wouldn’t they have done, as Lucien Malavard said, “human sciences avant Ia lettre”? This is today the great astrological debate, which involves some of the most compelling and vivid questions in contemporary culture and occupies some of the best minds today.
The Stars in Religion, Biology, and Finance
At the same time, research continued. In the field of history, it was possible to obtain a vast collection of evidence in favor of the thesis of astrologer Marcelle Senard (and of all traditionalist astrologers), according to which the Zodiac is a kind of universal key of all religions.
Applying a structural method to practically all the religions and mythologies of the world, the historian Jean-Charles Pichon discovered that there are only twelve basic myths in all peoples and places, and that these myths succeed one another in a more or less regular order.
These basic structures are none other than the twelve signs of the Zodiac. Pichon’s work is too revolutionary and too massive to be endorsed or contested en bloc, but it will certainly remain a classic in the historiography of religions.
Biologists have also discovered some things pleasant to astrologers. First, simple correlations between planetary cycles and the metabolism of animals and plants established by Frank A. Brown, of Northwestern University, USA (which has no direct astrological value, but is a favorable indication of the type of interdependence postulated by astrologers, and that even 40 years ago was considered mere fiction). Then, a gale of confirmations of the old correlation — this one, purely astrological — between the moon and fertility. A Czech researcher, Eugen Jorias, a doctor and astrologer, went so far as to establish an astrological process of predicting women’s fertility periods by the position of the Moon at the time of their birth. A survey by the Czech government found 94 percent sucess rate in the Jorias method.
Next, neurologist Leonard Ravitz, from Duke University, discovered that marked changes in the electrical potential emitted by the human body occurred according to the phases of the Moon and, even more (consistent with the astrological doctrine that the Moon is related to mental illness, hence the word lunatic), that in psychotic patients such changes were markedly more acute than in mentally healthy people.
More recently, US economist L. Peter Cogan sought to ascertain to what extent the cycles of pessimism and optimism of investors, with clear reflections on the stock exchange, coincided with planetary positions. Covering the period from 1873 to 1966, his study concluded that such cycles responded symmetrically to the positions of the Sun in relation to Saturn and Uranus (planets that, according to astrology, govern capitalism). The cycles of pessimism corresponded to the relations of 180 and 90 degrees (“evil” angles, according to the astrological tradition).
“Blessed is he who can read in the starry sky”
Beside that, the Dutch doctor Nicholas Kollerstrom, a researcher at the Medical Research Hospital in London, redoing an experiment by the philosopher Rudolf Steiner, showed that certain chemical reactions with metallic tones have their results altered when performed under certain planetary conjunctions. Kollerstrom notes that the planets that had the power to alter these reactions were precisely those that, according to astrological tradition, are related to the metals that, in solution, he used in the experiment. Saturn, whose traditional metal is lead, altered the reactions with lead sulfate, and was indifferent to the others; the Moon, whose metal is silver, only touched silver nitrate; Venus only changed copper sulfate, since its metal is copper; and Mars, which governs iron, altered iron sulfate reactions.
At the same time, doctors and biologists from all over the world have been studying, even under Unesco sponsorship, the relationships between planetary cycles and human biological and emotional rhythms, under the name of biometeorology or biopsychometeorology.
Faced with the convergence of so many paths towards a phenomenon that was denied en bloc a few decades ago, enthusiasts of the connection between men and stars exult in joys and hopes. But what matters is not this, but studying this phenomenon, learning to contemplate it and understand it. Entire times ignored, Kant and his time saw the starry sky above and the moral law within themselves. They saw a divided universe, where man’s inner need, the moral law, had nothing to do with objective reality. Until very recently it was like that.
Thus, at the beginning of the 20th century, among the horrors of the Great War, the materialist thinker Georg Lukacs said: “Blessed are the times that may have in the starry sky the map of the paths that are open to you! Blessed are the times whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars! For them, everything is new, and yet familiar! Everything is adventure, and everything belongs to you, because the fire that burns in your souls is of the same nature as the stars“. By rediscovering the clue of the relationship between the cosmos and man, our age begins to see, after a long darkness, the moral law in the starry sky and the stars in the heart of man.
In the last century, Carl Gustav Jung announced the return of astrology to university cathedra. At the time, this was true only in a few rare schools of psychology in Switzerland, where courageous pioneers, like Jung himself, encouraged or promoted semi-official courses in astrology at night for future clinicians, under the complacent eyes of the old rectors.
Today, Stanford University, the Zurich Higher Technical School and seven more universities worldwide promote regular studies on astrology. At the University of Paris (and France is the most conservative country in the face of astrology), Professor Robert Jaulin, in the course of ethnology, grants supplementary “credits” to students attending astrology classes, and another ethnologist, Jacques Halbronn, founded the University Astrological Movement, which brings together hundreds of students and professors from the same university, and promoted the last Astrology Congress in Paris. This congress was attended by figures of the size of Eric Weil, professor of philosophy at Louvain and a world-renowned thinker.
What happened? Has astrology changed or the massive opinion of intellectuals is carrying out a collective ‘mea culpa’ in the face of the art of Ptolemy and Kepler, which even a few decades ago was considered only a diversion of maddening eccentrics or an excuse practice to deceive popular good faith? Where did this revolution come from, transforming what yesterday was deceit and illusion into what today is deep research and serious reflection?
In 1666, Expelled from University Cathedra
To begin with, it was not the advancement of science that expelled astrology from university cathedra, as is normally supposed, but a hasty interpretation of Copernicus’ discoveries. Expulsion was decreed in 1666 by Colbert, Louis XIV’s minister, with the claim that astrology had no scientific basis.
In reality, the science of the time had no minimum conditions to really ascertain this, and the first statistical research on the subject was done only three hundred years later. What Colbert supposed was that, since horoscopes were drawn geocently — that is, with the Earth in the middle, and the Sun, Moon, signs and Planets around — they could not work, since Copernicus had demonstrated that what was in the center was the Sun and not the Earth.
Colbert simply did not realize that the horoscope was not exactly geocentric but anthropocentric, that is, that it represented the universe centered not on Earth as a physical reality, but on Man, on the individual. The horoscope was not a physical map of the universe (although it was also this), but a map of its meaning, a map of the meaning of the universe, as it appeared to a certain individual at the time and place where it was born. For these purposes, the center of the universe, the center of individual experience, was obviously still the Earth (except for the hypothesis that the querent was born on Mars or the Star Vega), and Kepler himself, who calculated the heliocentric orbits of the planets, he continued to draw horoscopes geocentricly until the end of his days.
While the astronomical chart was entirely objective and material, the astrological chart was both objective and subjective, like the Tibetan mandalas, which represent both the circle of the outer universe and the interior of man. This subtlety eluded Colbert. The more sensible German and Swiss universities preferred to leave their astrology cathedras open, albeit without occupants, and it was this loophole that allowed Jung to announce a triumphant return.
In 1945, Rehabilitated by Statistical Evidence
This return would be nothing triumphant, however, if eloquent evidence had not been discovered, shortly after, that the relationship between man and star is not a pure fantasy.
This discovery came when, in 1950, the French researcher Michel Gauquelin decided to clean up, by statistics (his academic specialty), the issue of “astral influences”. Since the beginning of the century, the great astrologer Paul Choisnard asked statisticians to do this. But it was very difficult, because a single astrological chart (made for the time, date and place of birth of an individual) has more than a thousand factors to be taken into account.
Around 1945, another astrologer, Léon Lasson, was finally able to formulate a good method of applying statistics to astrology. Gauquelin perfected this method and employed it in research that covered five thousand astrological charts.
The research put to the test a single astrological doctrine, however ancient and fundamental: that not only certain planets are associated with certain professions (Jupiter to politics and theater, Saturn to science, Mars to sports and military arts, Moon to literature), as well as such planets will exert a more intense influence, if at the moment of the individual’s birth they are placed in certain privileged points of the sky. These points are, according to the doctrine, the ascendant, which is the most eastern part of the horizon line, and the mid-sky, which is the highest point of the Zodiac (band of signs) in relation to a certain place on Earth.
If the theory were right, Gauquelin thought, certain planets would be more frequently in the ascendant and in the middle of the sky at the birth of people whose professions were related to those planets, than at the birth of other people. Saturn would be more often in the ascending and mid-skies of scientists, Mars in the military, Jupiter in politicians and actors, etc. Conversely, a Saturn would be rare in the ascendant or mid-sky of sportsmen or actors, and so on. Moreover, it would be necessary for this frequency to significantly exceed the average of chance (in the jargon of statisticians: theoretical frequency), in order to be able to believe that the phenomenon was something more than mere coincidence.
From the scientific point of view, the hypothesis to be tested was a complete absurdity, but the statistics were more favorable to the absurd than to the scientific point of view. With a frequency that could only be attributed to chance with a possibility of 1 against 10 million (that’s right), the planets were there where the astrologers said they would be: Jupiter in the ascending and mid-skies of the actors and politicians, Saturn in the scientists, Mars in sportsmen and military, Moon in writers. Conversely, the Moon was neither in the ascendant nor in the middle of the sky for those who were not writers, Mars for those who were not military, etc.
Although all this seemed like a diabolical plot by the stars to confuse the common sense of the poor scientists, Gauquelin, with exemplary intellectual honesty, published the results of the research, which immediately became the subject of scandal and general protests. The director of the National Institute of Statistics in France, Jean Porte, invited by Gauquelin’s opponents to unmask the whole hoax, redid the calculations and reported after some time: unfortunately, the calculations were right. Even so, Gauquelin redid the research, this time gathering no less than 25,000 maps, in France, Belgium, Holland, Italy and Germany, and again reached the same results. Again Jean Porte redid the accounts, and again they were spotless.
In the United States, The Humanist magazine published a petition by 186 scientists against astrology. In response, hundreds of letters came in favor, and The Humanist decided to arbitrate the question by promoting research similar to that of Gauquelin, with smaller sampling but greater statistical control. The results, for the third time, were the same.
Now, it remains to be seen what is the nature of the phenomenon
All the debates that have been held have shown that astrology is an infinitely more complete subject than its opponents ever imagined.
Example. When he could no longer deny the results of the research, the most ferocious French opponent of astrology, astronomer Paul Couderc, then head of the Paris Observatory, thought he had discovered a withering argument when declaring that a correlation was a thing, and a cause and effect mechanism, another; that the Gauquelin research had established a correlation between the stars and man, but in no way proved that the stars cause human actions, “as astrologers intend”.
Astrologers limited themselves to displaying the classic texts of their art, from the Emerald Table by Hermes Trimegisto (millennia before Christ) and the Ennades of Plotinus to the treatises of Paracelsus (15th century), Kepler (16th century) and Robert Fludd (17th century), in which the relationship between stars and men is explained everywhere as a process of similarity, analogy, sympathy, correlation, synchronism, and never of cause and effect.
And they added: no astrologer has ever said that stars cause human actions, for the simple reason that the principle of cause and effect, so important for the materialist scientist, is, for astrologers, a minor and secondary principle. The major principle is the law of analogy, whereby the big and the small, the macrocosm and the microcosm, matter and consciousness, have a similar structure and dynamics, since they are just different faces of the same phenomenon.
Poor Couderc never imagined that he was handling such a large hornet. Since that time, the groundless controversy of pro-and-against astrology has practically ceased, and a high-level theoretical debate on the nature of the phenomenon revealed by the Gauquelin research has started. If it was not a cause and effect relationship, what relationship was it then? A timing, as Jung intended? Or, as Gauquelin himself, a tenacious scholar of biorhythms, said, is there a “cosmic clock” in every living being that makes it receptive to all the rhythms of the universe around it? What exactly was the sense in which the ancients spoke of “analogy”? Would analogy not be a mental instrument usable by science, for the analysis of phenomena that are too large and complex, such as the dynamics of social and political life, the great ecological systems, the economies of the great nations? Didn’t the ancient astrologers have, millennia ago, the intuition of a scientific method for addressing major problems? Wouldn’t they have done, as Lucien Malavard said, “human sciences avant Ia lettre”? This is today the great astrological debate, which involves some of the most compelling and vivid questions in contemporary culture and occupies some of the best minds today.
The Stars in Religion, Biology, and Finance
At the same time, research continued. In the field of history, it was possible to obtain a vast collection of evidence in favor of the thesis of astrologer Marcelle Senard (and of all traditionalist astrologers), according to which the Zodiac is a kind of universal key of all religions.
Applying a structural method to practically all the religions and mythologies of the world, the historian Jean-Charles Pichon discovered that there are only twelve basic myths in all peoples and places, and that these myths succeed one another in a more or less regular order.
These basic structures are none other than the twelve signs of the Zodiac. Pichon’s work is too revolutionary and too massive to be endorsed or contested en bloc, but it will certainly remain a classic in the historiography of religions.
Biologists have also discovered some things pleasant to astrologers. First, simple correlations between planetary cycles and the metabolism of animals and plants established by Frank A. Brown, of Northwestern University, USA (which has no direct astrological value, but is a favorable indication of the type of interdependence postulated by astrologers, and that even 40 years ago was considered mere fiction). Then, a gale of confirmations of the old correlation — this one, purely astrological — between the moon and fertility. A Czech researcher, Eugen Jorias, a doctor and astrologer, went so far as to establish an astrological process of predicting women’s fertility periods by the position of the Moon at the time of their birth. A survey by the Czech government found 94 percent sucess rate in the Jorias method.
Next, neurologist Leonard Ravitz, from Duke University, discovered that marked changes in the electrical potential emitted by the human body occurred according to the phases of the Moon and, even more (consistent with the astrological doctrine that the Moon is related to mental illness, hence the word lunatic), that in psychotic patients such changes were markedly more acute than in mentally healthy people.
More recently, US economist L. Peter Cogan sought to ascertain to what extent the cycles of pessimism and optimism of investors, with clear reflections on the stock exchange, coincided with planetary positions. Covering the period from 1873 to 1966, his study concluded that such cycles responded symmetrically to the positions of the Sun in relation to Saturn and Uranus (planets that, according to astrology, govern capitalism). The cycles of pessimism corresponded to the relations of 180 and 90 degrees (“evil” angles, according to the astrological tradition).
“Blessed is he who can read in the starry sky”
Beside that, the Dutch doctor Nicholas Kollerstrom, a researcher at the Medical Research Hospital in London, redoing an experiment by the philosopher Rudolf Steiner, showed that certain chemical reactions with metallic tones have their results altered when performed under certain planetary conjunctions. Kollerstrom notes that the planets that had the power to alter these reactions were precisely those that, according to astrological tradition, are related to the metals that, in solution, he used in the experiment. Saturn, whose traditional metal is lead, altered the reactions with lead sulfate, and was indifferent to the others; the Moon, whose metal is silver, only touched silver nitrate; Venus only changed copper sulfate, since its metal is copper; and Mars, which governs iron, altered iron sulfate reactions.
At the same time, doctors and biologists from all over the world have been studying, even under Unesco sponsorship, the relationships between planetary cycles and human biological and emotional rhythms, under the name of biometeorology or biopsychometeorology.
Faced with the convergence of so many paths towards a phenomenon that was denied en bloc a few decades ago, enthusiasts of the connection between men and stars exult in joys and hopes. But what matters is not this, but studying this phenomenon, learning to contemplate it and understand it. Entire times ignored, Kant and his time saw the starry sky above and the moral law within themselves. They saw a divided universe, where man’s inner need, the moral law, had nothing to do with objective reality. Until very recently it was like that.
Thus, at the beginning of the 20th century, among the horrors of the Great War, the materialist thinker Georg Lukacs said: “Blessed are the times that may have in the starry sky the map of the paths that are open to you! Blessed are the times whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars! For them, everything is new, and yet familiar! Everything is adventure, and everything belongs to you, because the fire that burns in your souls is of the same nature as the stars“. By rediscovering the clue of the relationship between the cosmos and man, our age begins to see, after a long darkness, the moral law in the starry sky and the stars in the heart of man.