.........................................................................................The Pagan/Nature Religions Implications of Astrology
............................................................................................................Nature Religions Scholars Network
................................................................................................................American Academy of Religion
................................................................................................................................Toronto
.......................................................................................................................23 November 2002
.............................................................................................................................Michael York
..................................................................................................................Bath Spa University College

Recently, while looking up the origins of the words ‘auspicious’ and ‘favourable’, I discovered one I did not know, namely, ‘auspicate’. This refers to an inaugural ceremony, probably something like – or at least including – an invocation that one performs before an undertaking to ensure good luck. Probably the most direct form of auspication is the simple acknowledgement of deity or the sacred itself. Consequently, whatever the holy is or may be I wish at this juncture to signal it as an inaugural step to the presentation of my talk on the pagan and/or nature religions implications of the discipline of astrology.

Much of my own pursuit and study of the sacred has occurred through the study of words and their rudimentary origins. As a sociologist, I would term this methodology a sociology of etymology – one in which I seek to discern the fundamental apprehensions and how concepts and more complex verbal formulations are built up from them. For instance, apart from such basic designations for number, colour and a range of primary perceptions, much of the vocabulary in English, French, German, Latin, Greek, the Sanskrit-derived languages and, more broadly, Indo-European develops from verbal roots. In this sociology of culturally framed underlying and primordial prehensility, perhaps the most elementary verbal state is that of ‘standing’. This of course contrasts with the state of lying horizontally or flat (such as in the condition of sleep, death or the theme without the variations of sexual activity) as well as the state between being upright and parallel with the horizon, namely, declining and inclining. And of course, standing predicates the possibility of motion such as in walking and running. And almost needless to say, not all motion requires verticality as its predicate since horizontally we might swim or even fly. But the root concept is the verbal idea embedded in the root ‘to stand’ – the foundation of an incredibly wide range of further conceptual constructs such as state, status, stature, station and such position modifications as existence (‘to stand out’), understanding (‘to stand under’), superstition (‘to stand above’), outstanding (‘to stand out’) and ecstasy (again ‘to stand out’). Beyond all these and more, it would seem to me at least that another wide range of words that we use derive from various verbal notions of ‘turning’, ‘bending’, ‘twisting’ and the like.

Two other seminal categories in the etymological development of words stem from ‘speaking’ and ‘seeing’ – things that we might do from the living, existential state of being. For the former, some of the earliest Vedic speculation begins with the acknowledgment of the goddess Vac, the divine personification of speech – an idea we find elsewhere such as ‘In the beginning was the word’ in the Gospel of St. John or in the importance of the name for much indigenous African religious perception. On the other hand, seeing underlies the ‘Let there be light!’ creative act of Genesis as well as that magical instance of Hindu darshan.

I chanced upon the word ‘auspicate’ when seeking to understand the etymological origins of propitiation – that ancient process by which humans and communities have sought to render the gods favourable to a specific project. We know that propitiation might involve ritual, prayers, ritualistic petitions, sacrifice, offerings, vows and the like, but what is it to be propitious? Etymologically, it signifies ‘rushing forward’ from the Latin verb petere ‘to walk, to move’. The idea seems to be that through honour or worship we might augment a deity’s desire to spring forward for our aid, defence, well-being and/or joy. Propitiousness denotes being favourable or auspicious. And in seeking out the radical components of auspiciousness, that is when I discovered the word ‘auspicate’

But what is auspication? Again, let me turn to its etymological origins, and, in so doing, we are back with that verbal category of seeing – in this case, the seeing (Latin specere)of birds (Latin avis). In other words, augury – the seeing of omens through birds, especially the flight of birds. The auspex or ‘bird augur’ played an important role, if not the important role, in the earliest forms of the Roman art and science of divination. The augurs would demarcate the templum or the consecrated space within which the movement as well as kinds and numbers of birds were then to be discerned as signs revealing the will of the gods. And while the templum proceeded in time to become the ‘temple’, the seminal idea here is that a god, goddess or the gods speak to us through the avian extension of nature (the eagle and swan being sacred to Jupiter, the peacock and goose to Juno, the raven to Lugh or Macha, even the garuda to Vishnu). And of course in its most basic formulation, that is, before the more intricate embellishments developed by the ascending Roman state, the seeing of birds itself is the sign of good fortune or auspiciousness.

* * * * *

But why astrology and why the pagan/nature religions implications thereof? Well, the answer to this question is, well, convoluted. What isn’t we might ask or ask at least rhetorically? But to explain the history behind the question as succinctly as possible, picture a doctoral candidate who is passionately interested in paganism attempting to do this a decade and a half ago in the venue of a relatively conservative Anglican theology department in Britain. Through various manoeuvrings and compromises, I was eventually able to get the door open through a focus on the emerging New Age movement of the day. And, once through that initial door, I next managed to get the side door open for paganism to slip in as well. Now fast forward through a staggering series of lucky breaks to the Department for the Study of Religions at Bath Spa University College where I became the de facto coordinator of the New Age and Pagan Studies Programme. In time, I was approached by Nicholas Campion, one of Britain’s foremost astrologers, who wished to read for his Ph.D. in the area of astrological belief. Nick’s choice of possible supervisors was not unlimited. In fact, it came down to a handful if not less number of possibilities.

Now there are two developments that emerged over time as Nick has progressed under my supervision. First, when he initially began, I would have classified him as an astrological believer. But after receiving a grounding in methodological detachment and objectivity, I would no longer characterise him as such. Instead, Nick Campion seems to have lost his conviction in astrology as an accomplished fait accompli and is now simply looking at it as a cultural and sociological phenomenon. Secondly, Nicholas Campion is the contemporary astrological world. There is perhaps no one of any real significance within its community that he does not know, even knowing well. He also knows who has the money and what they wish to do with it. So without my knowledge, Nick worked with an astrology trust as well as the administrators of Bath Spa to establish a centre for the study of cultural astronomy and astrology. With our university college occupying land owned by Prince Charles who is passionately interested in preserving the land as is, it is virtually impossible to secure building permits. All we are allowed to do is reconstruct an already existing building. As half our campus site is a working farm, a dilapidated cowshed was found and in time converted into what is now known as the Sophia Centre for the Study of Cultural Astronomy and Astrology. Nick’s plan was for yours truly to direct the new centre, and after the inevitable bureaucratic and administrative delays, our official launch occurred on the 15th of October of this year. We have a dozen MA students after something like only three-to-five weeks to inaugurate the entire programme from scratch and virtually no time to advertise apart from word-of-mouth. But among this number, we have students who have come from Australia and New Zealand and include professional astrologers. Without exception, I am pleased that the calibre of the students is high-to-excellent without exception.

My own experience with astrology is limited. I did study under people like Dale Sherwood, Ray Unger and Jack Fontane in southern California in the 1960s and eventually taught the subject at the Cosmos Centrum in Amsterdam in the 1970s. However, in one of those fortuitous stories in which a book drops off a shelf into one’s hands, I proceeded to investigate the festival origins of our secular Julian-Gregorian calendar which, at the end of the day, is something more commensurate to an earth-oriented form of paganism such as we might classify a nature religion. Eventually, astrology became for me something comparable to excess baggage. I recognised its validity but did not need it. I became more fascinated with celebration than with prognostication.

So fast forward once again, and now we have a disillusioned astrologer manqué, a pagan ex-astrologer, heading an academic astrological centre. On one hand, there is no conflict – at least along the lines that astrology was taught to me originally as an empirical science. It had been explained by my teachers that astrology is based on observation – years, centuries, even millennia of accumulated data concerning, if not the effect of the stars on human behaviour, the patterns of correspondence that can be discerned between stellar positions and configurations and the events of our lives and the temperament of our natures. And what convinced me in fact of the validity of scientific methodology was when I asked Professor Carlo Lastrucci[1] during my MA studies at San Francisco State University whether in principle astrology was subject to the same rigours of confirmation/disconfirmation as any other empirically based discipline, and he replied affirmatively.

* * * * *

So now to the present. I have long felt that the method of divination itself is secondary. I discovered that a gypsy in Laguna Beach, California or a Hindu student living in Germany would read the palm of my hand identically. Moreover, whether George Darius using a combination of psychic intuition and astrological consideration, an Indonesian soothsayer reading the bumps of my head, an iridologist studying my eyes or a tarot card reader in Timbuktu, they will almost inevitably say the same things. All this has made me wonder whether some ‘as above, so below’, macrocosmic/microcosmic correspondence exists that the various divinatory systems from haruspicy, augury, geomancy, mediumistic channelling to horoscope casting and palmistry access in their own ways but convey essentially the same similar findings.

But if this were true, astrology would be less the result of empirical inquiry as it is a complete a priori prognostic system developed out of its own internal logic and balancing of patterns. And whether astrology could still be subject to further empirical confirmation, and I believe it could and should be, I am learning through my students as they appear to practice it that astrology is much more a self-sufficient Platonic hermeneutic that has been systemically rather than empirically derived. In fact, as British astrology Patrick Curry explains, contemporary astrology is a Platonic/Neoplatonic study that allows an interchange of effect that includes not only the influence from above on the below but also the reciprocal impact on the heavens from actions on earth. Curry contrasts this Platonic astrology with Aristotelian science that posits an Unmoved Mover that remains unaffected by our actions. In an Aristotelian understanding, influence occurs downwardly only. It is not a two-way process.

For the Sophia Centre, the interest remains with the culture and history of astrology or, more broadly, cultural astronomy in which astrology is one area along with archaeoastronomy, calendrical science, stellar religion and cosmology among others. What both science and religion have in common is their windowing onto the cosmos. Both are interested in part on what is out there and how we are impacted by it. We are specifically looking at human behaviour as it is influenced by belief concerning the stars and heavens. My understanding of paganism is its affinity with corpospirituality, its understanding that there is nothing beyond nature or at least that the tangible is the matrix for all further development. Such nominally pagan orientations as Pythagoreanism, Platonism, Neoplatonism, Orphism, Kaballah or cabbalistic magic I consider gnostic positions that commence from an a priori transcendent and usually wishes to return to it. Many of the implicit assumptions to be found within contemporary astrology are gnostic rather than pagan, but in its origins, astrology would appear to have been pagan rather than transcendental in any gnostic sense. As a way of looking at the heavens, astrology has always been and still is geocentric. The earth is its referent point. In fact, a person’s horoscope is simply a map of the heavens showing the position of our solar system’s planets at the time of nativity in reference to that person on the planet. In other words, a birth chart takes the individual himself/herself as the nominal centre of the entire cosmos. If nature religion is that component of pagan spirituality that is focused on tangible reality as it is encountered and hopefully ecologically protected and conserved on our planet, the geocentric foundation of astrology has pagan implications that I wish to explore and better understand for the future.

As part of that understanding, I believe the clarification that Patrick Curry made during a lecture on the 4th of this November is helpful, namely, that divination is less about telling us what will happen as it is about indicating to us what we should do. While this is certainly the case with much of contemporary astrology and would seem to be the prevailing divinatory aspect, if any, of the nature religions of today, divination in the traditional sense applies equally to divining the past, present and future. It has been concerned inevitably with identifying evil-doers or harmful agents, help in the selection of a marital partner, the recovery of lost items, assistance in determining the most fortuitous situation or actions. In short, divination has been the attempt by people to discern the will of the gods in relation to a human desire. It comprises any of a number of techniques to fathom the unknown, including the interpretation of dreams, necromancy, possession, haruspicy, casting of lots, geomancy, etc. Astrology itself belongs to that wider attempt of observing patterns in nature or life. But instead of working with presentiments or the expectation, for instance, that death comes in threes, astrology seeks its patterns among the planets, luminaries and constellations of the heavens.

In the contemporary Western pagan world, a general sentiment would seem to be that astrology is something that is too cerebral for the experiential and emotional bias of present-day practice. But what many practitioners do not seem to acknowledge is that devotion to or use of the lunar phases and the quarter festivals of the equinoxes and solstices in the determination of celebratory timing is itself a rudimentary form of astrology. Like astrology, western nature religions are geocentric. But while the focus is upon the earth and ecology, it is not limited to the terrestrial alone. The organic, holistic view is to understand the earth as a living organism, and as with any organism, its surrounding environment must always be taken into consideration in the understanding of its survival, possibilities and potentials. To understand the natural cycles, it is incumbent to look into the heavens as well. But when we look at and into the cosmos in any way as being something more than simply a mechanical phenomenon, something more than a machine, we are looking beyond pure astronomy, however fascinating and mysterious it alone may be, and to astronomy’s mother which we know – or at least used to know - as astrology.

 

............................................................................................................ Endnote

[1] Carlo L. Lastrucci, The Scientific Approach: Basic Principles of the Scientific Method (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1963).