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After Symbolism
by Dale Huckeby


Note P.G.: The first part of Dale's essay has been published (without notes) in CURA's 25th edition (March 2003). The entire text is published here.
 

      Symbolism has been both the saviour and achilles heel of astrology. By enabling it to seem valid to its adherents, it has ensured its continued existence and development. Its nature, however, limits the extent of that development. Since astrology can be "right" even when the chart or event is wrong, there is no confrontation with reality to correct and improve it. Astrology can move to a higher level only if symbolism is supplanted by empiricism. An empirical astrology would not merely be illustrated by real-world observations. It would be based on them. The purpose of this article is to show how.
 

1. The Symbolistic Paradigm

      According to the late historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn much of what we learn, even science, is by example. Students learn to do science by modelling their own efforts on the standard problem-solutions found in their textbooks. Those problem-solutions, the legacy of their predecessors, are the paradigms Kuhn so famously described in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. [1] When we learn by example we learn how to do something without knowing everything that's involved in doing it. This kind of knowing, in which we don't fully know what it is that we "know", was termed tacit knowledge by Michael Polanyi. [2] In "The Function of Measurement in Modern Physical Science" [3] Kuhn gives a striking example of tacit knowledge. He refers to a kind of table students often encounter in textbooks, which might show in one column the expected expansion of a metal, according to theory, at each of a list of temperatures, with an adjacent column showing the actual results of measurement. The student is supposedly convinced of the validity of the theory by seeing that the measurements are in "reasonable agreement" with the theoretical figures. But how, Kuhn asks, does the student know what constitutes reasonable agreement? In some fields it requires agreement to the first six or eight places to the right of the decimal point, whereas in some parts of astronomy within a power of ten is close enough. He concludes that the table is not there to convince the student that the theory is valid. It's there to show her what constitutes reasonable agreement! She already accepts her field's validity. Its paradigms simply show her by example how to do that kind of science (including necessary departures from what the field's practitioners think they're doing and ought to do).

      Astrology students, too, model their efforts on standard problem-solutions, or paradigms, the sample delineations they encounter in their classrooms and texts, and they, too, learn more than they realize. Part of what they learn is how to cover all possibilities in advance without being aware of that fact or its implications. In theory the astrologer wishing to predict the future tries to determine when significant configurations will be in effect and which event(s) will best fit the symbolism. However, configurations that can be considered significant are almost always in effect and virtually any event will fit the symbolism. This is difficult for us to see because we normally analyze events that have already happened. From this perspective the configuration usually seems important and the event seems to fit the symbolism perfectly. But that's because we already know what happened and when. When forecasting before the fact we're confronted with an embarrassment of riches: seemingly significant configurations month after month, year after year, and hardly an event that won't fit the symbolism. No time when something important isn't supposed to be happening, no event that isn't supposed to be happening at all times. But an astrology that in effect predicts all things at all times actually predicts nothing at all!

      Astrology magazines do contain forecasts, of course, but are they really predictions? Example: The president will be in the news next month. The astrologer subsequently refers to an embarrassing disclosure about someone in the administration, or a crisis somewhere in the world requiring the president's attention, anything associated with the president, as "what I meant". However, the substance of the prediction, what actually happened, is rarely if ever supplied before the fact. What we generally have are vague, meaningless generalities capable of being satisfied by a vast number of specific outcomes. A similar pattern prevails in client consultations. The astrologer offers vague generalities, his subject excitedly provides details in the form of "client feedback", and the astrologer then gives the astrological explanation of those details, another version of "what I meant". Neither realizes that most of the content of the analysis is being provided by the client. When astrologers do occasionally have striking "hits" they forget the law of averages. Make enough predictions, some will be right by chance alone. And those are the ones that will be noticed, remembered, and cited as the astrologer's and astrology's norm.

      But if assimilation of the existing paradigm teaches the neophyte to unconsciously cover all possibilities before the fact, so that astrology will always seem to work, how does she do so? What are the specific mechanisms by which symbolism works? Consider these examples taken from two widely admired and emulated astrologers, Noel Tyl and Dane Rudhyar. [4] Tyl, in The Horoscope as Identity, [5] delineates the chart, with Saturn opposite Neptune from the eleventh house to the fifth, of a man who commented that his sex life had tapered off normally during his mid-thirties. Borrowing the opening line from Grant Lewi's Heaven Knows What [6] description of Saturn square or opposite Neptune - "Ambition has a way of going to sleep on you" - and noting the fifth house connotation of sex, Tyl exclaims, "Ambition throughout the sex spectrum [Tyl's emphasis] had fallen asleep." And with that clever play on words career ambition, which was what Lewi was talking about, becomes sex drive. This is similar to Rudhyar's criticism of the Equal House system, as quoted by Alexander Ruperti in the October 1977 edition of "The Mercury Hour": [7] "An ambiguous situation exists in such a system, because the meridian is no longer a line of reference. Consciousness is thus deprived of its 'verticality' - which means, of a basic spiritual and social dimension."

      What these arguments have in common is that both are based on wordplay, neither is derived from observation. Rudhyar doesn't say that he's observed that sets of people with different planets aspecting the MC differ in the nature of their spirituality. Instead, he offers a metaphor-based argument. He associates spirituality, which we think of as "higher" qualities, with the "verticality" of the meridian overhead, and concludes that the latter has to be taken into account in order to account for the former. Tyl performs similar verbal gymnastics with "ambition". Focussing on the word, considered valid in its association with Saturn regardless of meaning, enables him to justify a meaning Lewi didn't observe. He could just as easily have made Saturn refer to gluttony (gustatory ambition), meanness (an ambitious practical jokester), or even laziness (an ambitious malingerer).

      But Tyl's analysis illustrates more than mere silliness. [8] It shows how symbolism can subvert empiricism. Lewi felt he had seen a pattern in which people with Saturn square or opposite Neptune have difficulty succeeding in life due to a sense that "I can do it if I want to", which obviates the need to try. The paragraph as a whole and his book as a whole make it clear that by "ambition" he means getting ahead in life - career success - not all of the other things "ambition" might be made to mean by using it figuratively. It does not occur to Tyl to look for this quality in his client's life, to see if he's not as successful in his career as he should be because he knows he can do it if he wants to, because he's not using words the way Lewi is. Lewi is using "ambition" and the other words in his description pragmatically, to convey what he thinks he's observed. Tyl is using "ambition" to represent Saturn and validate an assumed connection, which it's made to fit by figurative word usage. He neither confirms nor denies the accuracy of Lewi's observation, and makes no attempt to apply it.

      This accounting function is a key characteristic of symbolism. A multiplicity of factors and methods, figurative word usage, and looseness of logic all lead to the same end result, an ability to account for virtually any outcome at any time using any chart. When astrologers predict it's along the lines of something important will happen to somebody somewhere this month. If we feel that part of the order in nature is astrological we need to identify the nature of that order. We need to be able to say what will consistently happen or be true if a configuration is present, not simply make it mean whatever it needs to mean to account for the event or situation we're interested in. We need to have expectations that can be wrong (falsifiable, in philosophical terms), so that when they are we can adjust them. This is difficult to do when meanings are fluid, when this enables us to get the "right" answer even with the wrong event or birthdata, and when being spuriously "right" simply reinforces our faith rather than effectively applying a reliable body of knowledge. That's how symbolism subverts the empirical impulse. That's the ultimate outcome of Tyl's misunderstanding of Lewi's description (not interpretation!) of Saturn square or opposite Neptune. If we want an effective astrology, if we want to move to a higher level, we need to learn a new way of thinking.
 

2. The Empirical Alternative

  In Chapter 4 of Relationships and Life Cycles [9] Stephen Arroyo contrasts two ways of approaching transits. He writes:

"Say transiting Saturn right now is squaring your natal Venus. . . . If transiting Saturn is at 15 Libra now and you have natal Venus in 15 Cancer, there is obviously a square between those two planets. Whatever is going to be happening then, you can probably interpret it quite accurately, in a traditional sense, just by knowing what Saturn means, what Venus means, what houses are involved, etc. . . . But "interpretation" is often different from understanding. So, with your own chart or for people . . . whose inner experiences are well known to you or for those few clients who do care about the deeper meanings of life, it may be worthwhile to look back 7 years and see what was happening when Saturn was conjunct the natal Venus. What was happening then is very often related to what is happening now, because both transits are part of one cyle that symbolizes the total interaction between Saturn and Venus. And if you look at transits that way  . . . you'll then see those aspects as change or development periods within the context of an entire cycle, even if they don't coincide with striking "events". You'll just understand your current experiences more thoroughly.

      "Interpretation" is symbolistic, "understanding" empirical. That's the difference between traditional astrology and a modern alternative that has not yet fully emerged. Should we simply "explain" what's already happened by playing wordgames, and make open-ended, vague predictions in which we have to wait until after the prediction has "come true" before we know "what I meant"? Unlike Arroyo's "interpretation", in which handed-down verbal associations are flexibly connected with the developments at hand to justify the astrologer's belief that astrology really works, his "understanding" involves observing and comparing two different periods whose functional similarity, if there is one, suggests that there really is a predictable "effect" associated with the transits of that cycle. Since transiting Saturn in hard-angle aspect to natal Venus is common to both periods, whatever is similar about them is at least tentatively attributable to it. We don't expect the periods as a whole to be similar. We expect them to share a similar part, even though the periods as a whole will be different. That similarity is the contribution of Saturn/Venus to the whole. It's what the effect of this transit rhythm actually is, which can then be projected into the future as part of a larger totality. If Jupiter square natal Jupiter, for instance, coincides with one of these periods, we look back three, six, and nine years for a recurrent similarity, and if we see one it is presumably this rhythm's contribution to the totality of what's going on during this period.

      This suggests the importance of pattern in astrology. When we consider an event or development in isolation, any astrological configuration that coincides with it could, on the basis of observation alone, be considered its signifier or cause. That's why the astrologer makes the choice on the basis of symbolistic plausibility, not observation. But if she's wrong observation will not correct her. Whichever factor she thinks ought to fit can be made to fit since she chooses the wording of both event and symbolism, not realizing that doing so enables her to make them fit each other. The factor that is chosen, however, will not usually be accounting for the same thing as the last time it was used, nor will it be used the same way the next time. Because the astrologer does not track the recurrences of a given factor but rather draws on whichever one coincides with the event this time, she doesn't notice the lack of consistency in the effect of that factor from one application to the next. Nor does she realize (only students do) that before the fact she has no clear idea of what should coincide with a given factor, but is instead confronted with a multitude of possibilities.

      When we look for pattern the situation is different. If we notice that a development has recurred four or five times in a row at regular intervals, that enables us to predict what will occur at the next interval. If a particular transit has recurred at those intervals and times, we can suppose that they might be related. We can then look for comparable developments in other people's lives during that recurrent transit. If there is some variability from person to person in terms of what regularly recurs during those recurrent transits, but nonetheless a sense in which they're more or less the same, that sense is what's predictable for people in general. If we encounter someone who doesn't quite fit that pattern, we can look for a deeper pattern that fits the previous cases and the newest one, and in that fashion modify and clarify our original approximation.

      Sigmund Freud's life is a striking example of astrological rhythmicity. His trajectory as a thinker is marked by a series of turning points. In 1875, while at the University of Vienna as a medical student, he began a survey of the sciences, studying zoology proper, for instance, not "zoology for medical students". The following year he pursued his first research project as a biologist, dissecting over four hundred immature eels to determine the origin of the testes. In 1883, moving from department to department in his training as a physician, he began to feel the need to specialize. He had a knack for diagnosis and an interest in disorders of the nervous system, and by September had decided to specialize in neuropathology. In 1890 his interest shifted towards mental rather than physical disorders. In four years of private practice he had seen few cases of nerve damage or disease. Instead, as with many of his colleagues, the patients he saw tended to have vague physical complaints traceable to no ascertainable physical cause. Was it all in their heads? He was beginning to think so. He began to doubt the validity of the therapeutic models he had been taught. Remembering the curious case of Anna O. (which he had learned about seven years earlier), the girl who under hypnosis relived her trauma and relieved her symptoms, and having recently visited an hypnosis clinic which made him more conscious of the existence of hidden mental forces, he began using hypnosis as a tool to explore "neurotic" behavior.

      1997 marked another important turning point. Traumatized by the death of his father the previous year, Freud had begun probing the depths of his own psyche. Concurrently, he had begun reconsidering one of his ideas. In every case in which he had psychoanalyzed an hysteric he had uncovered the memory of an early childhood seduction. Therefore, he had for several years maintained that all cases of hysteria involved the seduction of an innocent child by an adult. Now he began to have doubts. In September he told his correspondent, Wilhelm Fleiss, "I no longer believe in the neurotica." Yet he was not dismayed: "Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askalon, but between you and me I have the feeling of a victory rather than a defeat." [10] Having abandoned his seduction theory, he was able to view his findings in a different light. He began to realize he was seeing evidence not of infantile seduction but of infantile sexuality, other insights began to break through, and he was at last able to begin work on his masterwork, The Interpretation of Dreams. In 1905 he was again questioning his earlier ideas and coming up with new ones, and a remark by Ernest Jones, his biographer, shows that he was aware of this pattern: "The year 1905 was one of the peaks of Freud's productivity, which, as he once half-jocularly remarked, occurred every seven years." [11] And continued to do so, in 1912, 1919, 1926 and 1934.

      During each of these periods Saturn was moving through late fixed and early mutable areas of the zodiac. When Freud was born Mercury was at 27° Taurus. [12] Ergo, Freud was especially creative at seven-year intervals [13] when transiting Saturn was conjunct, square, or opposite his natal Mercury. But why should Saturn be associated with creativity? Doubt is the clue. Close reading of the biographies on which the above account is based suggests that Freud's certainties weakened at about seven-year intervals, when Saturn was transiting hard-angle natal Mercury. By loosening his existing conceptual commitments, his doubts cleared the way for new insights. In studying such sequences in other lives it has seemed to me that doubt, and more generally a kind of intellectual sobriety, is characteristic of this rhythm. This enforced sobriety doesn't sit well with everyone. For most people, if they feel this rhythm at all, it manifests as a period of mild or acute depression and a lack of self-worth. But for people like Freud, for whom the search for truth is a driving need, and who are relatively comfortable with doubt, Saturn/Mercury transits are the best of times.
 

The Dynamics of Experience

      This description of the Saturn/Mercury rhythm in Freud's life accords with Arroyo's assertion that observed (rather than interpreted) transits coincide with "change or development periods". It is no accident that the empirical transit descriptions I've offered and quoted have been psychological. When I look for astrologically based regularities in people's lives I see psychological recurrences, or internal events. To the extent that external events appear to be regular they are the result of psychological developments. For instance, a student born January 10, 1951 had a falling out with her parents and moved in with her sister in the latter part of August, 1970. In March, 1972, they moved together to a new apartment, a move she instigated. In February, 1974 she moved into an apartment of her own, and she moved again on August 18 of that year. Her natal Mars is at 20° Aquarius, and Mars was in that area of a fixed sign during each of her first three moves. It was, however, at 14° Virgo at the time of the fourth one. It turned out that she had grown up in the ghetto, that each of the first three times she stayed in the same general area, and each time just decided to move and did it, with little or no time lag. By the middle of 1974, however, doing well in a new job and feeling prosperous, she was looking for a nicer place in a different part of town. It took awhile. It turned out that she had given notice on July 15, with Mars at about 221/2° Leo. Hence it was the decision to move that coincided each time with Mars in hard-angle aspect to its natal place.

      But those decisions, although closer to the core of the observed rhythm, were still not the direct effect of her Mars transits. After all, she didn't decide to move during every hard-angle transit of Mars to its natal place. In fact, the last time I saw her she had just gone through another one. She didn't move, but she did say that she had been very restless. This restlessness, which sometimes comes to a head as a need to resolve whatever issues in our daily life have been bothering us, seems to me to be closer to the essence of Mars conjunct, square, or opposite its natal place. The result might be a new route to work, a change in the bank or grocery store we frequent, a new exercise regimen, the beginning or end of a love relationship, whatever alters the pattern of our day to day existence. It is this restlessness, this awareness of discomfort with our day to day existence, and not the events that flow out of it, that is the predictable "effect" of this transit cycle.

      Different psychological effects occur at different levels. A colleague, born November 2, 1930 with the Ascendant at about 27° Gemini, decided in September, 1973 to turn professional as an astrologer. His Mars is about 6° Leo. At the time Mars was transiting square its natal place within the longer period of Saturn's transit over the Ascendant or, as I prefer, square the Nonagesimal. [14] During the Saturn transit his self-image changed. He now began to see himself as an astrologer. The Mars transit, on the other hand, was a more immediate manifestation of his new role-identity. It's easier to take on a new identity when we begin to do what's appropriate to it. During the Mars transit he arranged for an ad in the telephone book as an astrologer. This led to a change in his daily routine. Now he took phone inquiries, made referrals and appointments, met with clients and worked on charts in preparation for those consultations. Now he was doing the things a consulting astrologer does. The Mars-timed changes in his daily routine were a manifestation of his new identity, and the latter was in turn the background against which his decisions made sense. The Mars transit outcome as an event was an episode within a larger event timed by the Saturn transit. That event, in turn, was an episode in an even larger event timed by the transit of Uranus opposite its natal place. Over a several year period, from about age 38 to 44, astrology went from an absurdity, in the light of his scientific belief system, to a reality that became the basis for a career change. What was changing, during this several-year Uranus-timed transition, was his sense of reality, of what's possible in the world. His shift in identity, which was the background against which his decisions made sense, was in turn a more immediate manifestation of his changing orientation to reality. And that reorientation was itself the background against which his identity shift made sense.

      The multiple-level interactions delineated above are, I believe, indicative of a general pattern. An event is not an all-at-once thing but a structure constituted by different temporal levels of change. These levels of change exist in both the individual and society, because society is the individuals that comprise it. This perspective enables us to understand why, for instance, universities are so often the locus of social change. A relatively high percentage of the people attending a university are between the ages of 18 and 22, the period during which Uranus is squaring its natal place. A man experiencing this transit is idealistic relative to his own norm, and has a tendency to break rules and behave in (previously) unthinkable ways as part of a process of psychologically differentiating himself from his parents by developing his own values and sense of right and wrong. Shocking behavior often results, but is normal and healthier than suppressing these "antisocial" urges in order to remain a "good boy". (This tendency to kick over the traces is probably less overt in women, but no less significant.) People this age are often on the road, literally or figuratively, discovering other people and places, other ways of thinking and believing. It is arguably a good time to go to college, since at this time we are especially receptive to new modes of thought, such as the specialized ways of reasoning the various disciplines have evolved and which in many ways contravene our existing commonsense view of things. Since evolution, whether biological or cultural, tends to move towards and preserve what works, it is perhaps no accident that "the college years" have come to occupy the age period when we are most receptive to the kinds of change universities foster (and channel). And, with so many students simultaneously going through a phase when they are relatively idealistic, socially conscious, and politically active, it is not surprising that universities are such hotbeds of idealistic social dissidence and change. In this way we can see how different levels of change occur in the individual, and simultaneously in the society she and countless others are a part of.
 

Transit Patterns and the Evolution of Personality

      Change in the individual can also be seen as a source of personality, those relatively stable attributes by which we differentiate one person from another in terms of what each is. If a given configuration says something about what the person who has it is like, what's the connection between that configuration and that fact? How did the person come to be that way? For instance, I have Saturn and Mars at 24° and 27° Cancer, respectively. [15] What does this mean? It means that everytime Mars transits conjunct, square, or opposite its natal place it also transits conjunct, square, or opposite natal Saturn. During Mars/Mars hard-angle transits matters tend to come to a head with regards to our daily routine, including not only what we do throughout a normal day but also who we interact with. (It seems we often initiate or terminate personal relationships, including love affairs, during Mars/Mars hard- angle transits.) But we don't experience an obvious external event during every transit. The actual predictable "event" appears to be a kind of restlessness, which is itself indicative of a part of the psyche being temporarily in the forefront of consciousness, thereby making us aware of whatever latent dissatisfactions we have. This awareness of discontent sometimes rises to the level that we feel we have to do something about it. In developmental terms, the first Mars Return (22-23 months) coincides with the transition, in the Piagetian system, from the sensorimotor to the preoperational period. This is when we "get it" about how names apply to things. This and other developments suggest a motivational "force" that is itself the same during all Mars/Mars transits, regardless of age, albeit the life outcomes differ.

      My account of Mars/Saturn transits will be sketchier and less certain. It essentially times a period of inhibition during which we're more than usually aware, but not necesssarily in a fully conscious sense, of the consequences, particularly the social consequences, of whatever we're thinking about doing. In a sense we manage to bring those consequences down upon our heads, a kind of what-I-have-feared-has-come-upon-me situation. Grant Lewi viewed the squares and the opposition in the Saturn/Mars cycle as periods when we're likely to meet disaster if we push our luck too far, and the same might apply to Mars/Saturn.

      Now imagine the developmental consequences of always having the turning points in these two rhythms coincide. Everytime I feel the urge during a Mars/Mars transit to resolve issues that have been bothering me, that I now can't ignore, a simultaneous Mars/Saturn transit is causing me to feel inhibited, which presumably not only keeps me from doing some things but even more likely gives a characteristic shape or psychological spin to what I actually end up doing. Year after year, transit after transit, a set of propensities, a personality pattern, builds up. Dealing with the same issues won't necessarily cause people with the same aspect (and pattern of simultaneous transits) to develop the same specific behaviors, but their characteristic responses to situations, even though different, stem from the same recurrent psychological challenges. Behind different coping behaviors we may find the same thing being coped with, for instance an exaggerated fear of humiliation. One person might cope with such a fear by being evasive and hard to pin down, so that he can never be shown to have been wrong, whereas another might go to exaggerated lengths to eliminate errors, to avoid being wrong.

      By noting the timing patterns natal relationships imply, we can use transit dynamics to make sense of the natal chart. Rather than expecting a Mars conjunct Saturn, or a Jupiter square Sun, to magically confer the qualities we associate with it, we can see those qualities developing over time via the patterns of simultaneity resulting from that particular natal setup. The natal chart has other timing implications as well. If, for instance, Saturn and Uranus cross the Ascendant (ie. square the Ng) together at age 25 in a given person's life, they means that at birth they were the right distances from each other and from that point to arrive together at it at age 25. There are many such timing statements in the natal chart. While this takes natal traits out of the realm of the magical, by relating them to transit effects, that doesn't explain how transit effects can occur. How is it possible that a recurrent transit can run parallel to and thus predict a recurrent "effect"?
 

3. A Mechanism for Astrology

      Many astrologers have rejected science and retreated into obscurantism because it is difficult if not impossible to reconcile traditional astrology with the findings of modern science. Astrologers who value science and who think astrology will some day be proved valid tend to assume that this will cause a revolution in science, since it can't in its present form account for how something like astrology could work. Conversely, many of astrology's critics reject it for precisely the same reason. From a scientifc perspective they don't see how it could work. Nor do I if we stick to the traditional notion of "works". I don't see how Jupiter could possibly beam down a marriage. I think this notion of causality is in the backs of astrologers' minds when they deny that astrological influences can be accounted for in terms of physical forces, and I think this is why so many thoughtful astrologers have rejected causal explanations. However, the alternatives lack substance. Synchronicity, for instance, is just a fancy way of saying we think two factors go together even though we can't say why. It's treated as an explanation but is actually an indication of what needs explaining.

      A consideration of the diurnal cycle might help clarify the question of causation. Does sunrise cause us to want to get up? In a way it does, but would we want to say that the sun beams down wakefulness or would it not make more sense to say that we've evolved a pattern of wakefulness and sleep that follows a 24-hour schedule? (After all, the lion sleeps while we're awake, and vice versa.) The sun can be said to time the cycle but is not the source of its content. The source of its content is biological evolution.

      We like to say that astrology is about correspondences between earth and the heavens, but there are two kinds of correspondences, inorganic and organic, and only the latter is relevant to astrology. When we want to predict the next high tide, for instance, we don't set up a chart and interpret the symbolism. We simply note that the tide comes in as the moon passes overhead (or over the point 180° away), and ebbs as it passes on. What the moon means is irrelevant. Likewise for the seasons. To explain summer we don't have to have a symbolic meaning for the Sun. We need only know that we get more solar radiation is summer than in winter. With organic correspondences, in contrast, material effects don't determine the specific nature of the regularity. As the moon passes overhead the tide comes in and the oyster's shell opens, but the moon doesn't pull the shell open the way it pulls on the waters. Rather, the oyster uses its material interaction with the moon to reset its clock, and it's this clock that times the opening of its shell. [16] The clock has evolved to approximate the moon's regularity. Life has used the planetary periods as templates for the evolution of functional systems whose timing corresponds to them but whose content, the recurrent function or behavior, has been determined by evolution, not the planets.

      The oyster's program directly causes it to do appropriate things at appropriate times, whereas ours accomplishes more subtle ends with motivations rather than automatic responses. Motivation is the psychological equivalent of force in physics. It helps get things done. Both automatic behaviors (in lower organisms) and motivations (in higher ones) enable things to get done that need to get done if the organism is to exist and move through life, but the latter allows for a vastly more complex repertoire of behaviors and the possibility (indeed, necessity) of choice. It doesn't determine a specific outcome but requires that the organism create a response to satisfy a felt need, with the need, not the response, being predetermined (although we can of course note which responses are common or positive or negative). Motivational rhythms enable us to tie together planetary rhythms, human change, and personality (via simultaneity patterns in transits) in a way that does violence neither to astrology, if approached empirically, nor to natural science.

      The preceding illustrates how an external rhythm can time a recurrent effect without being the cause of it, but is misleading in another respect. The sun's light is not only the means by which the rhythm times itself, but is also a condition life has adapted to. Just as bats use reflected sound, our eyes use light which has bounced off objects to obtain information about our environment and more easily move about in it. We don't appear to use any kind of radiation or physical manifestation of Mars or the other planets in a similar fashion. Yet I believe that we manifest rhythms that correspond to their movements. With this in mind it's worth postulating that life needs rhythm in order to live. We're made up of complex processes that are coordinated with each other in time. How can they dovetail with each other unless they're organized in time? But if they are, how does life know when its cycles are supposed to turn? How does life keep time? My supposition is that life has used planetary rhythms as temporal templates around which to organize its constituent processes. Thus we have not only 24-hour, 28-day, and one-year rhythms, but also 221/2-month, 12-year, and 291/2-year rhythms.

      From this perspective Saturn's "effects" aren't intrinsic to Saturn itself but are simply the result of the evolution of processes which match that wavelength. If the planetary periods were different the periods which characterize life on earth would also be different. Conversely, the rhythms that have evolved to match the periods the planets do have aren't the only ones that could have evolved. If the evolutionary clock were set back to zero life would again evolve a temporally and functionally coordinated set of processes, but not the ones we have now. Finally, this view assumes that organisms have the means to "know" where the planets are at least part of the time, but is agnostic with respect to how.

      I believe that those facets of astrology that are empirically viable can be understood in terms of biological clocks, and thus need not stand outside the explanatory universe of modern science. Conversely, much that is inexplicable in terms of modern science is, in my opinion, not valid. Assimilating symbolistic thought-patterns has caused us to think in terms of what we would like to know rather than in terms of what we can know by observing the pattern of natural occurrences. How can we adequately explain astrology if a large part of the "facts" we're trying to explain don't actually exist? We need to differentiate between what happens to us, which is generally not as predictable as we think, and what we cause. Part of the difficulty in imagining how astrology could work is our habit of associating with the chart those events and developments that affect the person rather than those that in some sense come from her. It's absurd to think that my chart should have something to say about Uncle Fred's death or the closing down of the factory at which I work. But if I caused that factory to be closed, or had something to do with Uncle Fred's death, both events would have come from me and therefore my transits and the rhythms they time might be relevant. If we assume that the developments relevant to a given chart are those developments, and only those developments, that can in some sense be said to derive from the person whose chart it is, then we can imagine a way astrology could work that doesn't do violence to common sense and existing canons of causation.
 

4. Post-Symbolistic Research and Theory

      The causal mechanism sketched above necessitates a research orientation radically different from the existing norm. Most research in astrology is still based on a symbolistic orientation. Much like Ptolemaic astronomers offering new schemes utilizing epicyles and deferent circles, we see astrologers coming up with "new" factors and interpretations that are merely variations on existing themes. For a post-symbolistic empirical astrology based on observation rather than wordplay, we need more effective ways of making observations and translating them into theory and practice. Within this empirical framework, there are four especially promising avenues of astrological research: biographical, historical, developmental, and statistical.
 

Patterns in Life Stories

      Biographical analysis involves looking for regularities in people's lives. It doesn't mean considering each event or development by itself. It means finding a development that is part of a pattern, either between lives (ie. the Saturn Return for different people) or within a single life (ie. Saturn opening square, opposite, closing square, and conjunct its natal place). Having (normally) no astrological biases of his own, the author of a biography is the best source of such regularities. The table of contents can be a goldmine. In Ernest Jones's Life and Work of Sigmund Freud [17] chapter 4 ("The Medical Student [1873-1881]") corresponds to Saturn opening square to opposite the Ascendant. Chapter 10 ("The Neurologist [1883-1897]") corresponds to Saturn conjunct Mercury to the opposition. Chapter 12 ("Early Psychopathology [1890-1897]") corresponds to the opening square to the opposition. All of the above are in "BOOK ONE: The Formative Years and the Great Discoveries [1856-1900]", which corresponds to the period from birth to the end of the Uranus opposite Uranus Midlife Transition, which effectively (as is so often the case) closes with Saturn opposite Saturn at 43-44. "BOOK TWO: Years of Maturity [1901-1919]" takes us from Uranus opposite Uranus to the closing square, and "BOOK THREE: The Last Phase [1919-1939]" takes us back to the conjunction. (It's striking how often in biographies books one, two, and three correspond to phases of the Uranus age cycle.)

      Not only the chapter headings but also the contents can be intensely revealing. Grant Lewi, in Astrology for the Millions, [18] his book on transits, coined the term obscure period, which he illustrated in a number of famous lives, most notably Adolf Hitler's. This period, running from Saturn conjunct the Ascendant to the opening square, is less public and overtly successful than the preceding periods. Progress "is slow but sure . . . success will not flash out spectacularly but must be courted by patience and the firm building of foundations." [19] Hitler's Ascendant is about 27° Libra. [20] This period in his life ran from the end of 1923, the infamous Munich beerhall putsch, to about 1931, when industrialists began taking him seriously and money began pouring into the party's coffers. Alan Bullock's Hitler, A Study in Tyranny [21] captures this periodicity in the heading of chapter 3, "The Waiting Years, 1924-31". But the two periods when Saturn is below the horizon, obscure and first rise, are also similar in ways that contrast with the two periods above the horizon. Joachim C. Fest's Hitler [22] captures the psychological essence of the entire period when Saturn was below the horizon in one of his between-chapters discussions, "The Wrong War". Speaking of Hitler's state of mind in the days preceding the attack on Poland, he notes: "One of the striking aspects of his behavior is the stubborn, peculiarly blind impatience with which he pressed forward into the conflict. That impatience was curiously at odds with the hesitancy and vacillations that had preceded earlier decisions . . . the wary, circumspect style with which he had proceeded in the past. We must go further back, almost to the early, prepolitical phase of his career, to find the link with the abruptness of his conduct during the summer of 1939, with its reminders of old provocations and daredevil risks."

      "There is, in fact, every indication that during these months Hitler was throwing aside more than tried and tested tactics, that he was giving up a policy in which he had excelled for fifteen years and in which for a while he had outstripped all antagonists. It was as if he were at last tired of having to adapt himself to circumstances . . . and were again seeking 'a great, universally understandable, liberating action.'

      "The November putsch of 1923 . . . was also an example of such a liberating action. . . . it marked Hitler's specific entry into politics. Until that point, he had made a name for himself by the boldness of his agitation, by the radical alternatives of either/or that he announced the night of the march on the Feldernhalle . . . Until that time he had recognized only frontal relationships, both inwardly and outwardly. His thrusting, offensive style was matched by his rude tone of command as party chairman. . . . Only after the collapse of November 9, 1923, did Hitler realize the possibilities of the political game, the use that might be made of tactical devices, coalitions, and sham compromises. That insight had transformed the rude putschist into a politician who played his cards with deliberation. But even though he had learned to play his new part with sovereign skill, he had never been able entirely to conceal how much it had gone against the grain and that his innate tendency continued to be against detours, rules of the game, legality, and in fact politics in general.

      "Now he was returning to his earlier self. . . . Hitler had behaved like a 'force of nature,' Rumanian Foreign Minister Gafencu had reported in April, 1939, after a visit to Berlin. That phrase would also describe the demagogue and rebel of the early twenties. . . ."

      Now he was returning to his earlier self. For fifteen years, while Saturn was below the horizon, moving from the Ascendant to the Descendent, Hitler was forced by an inner constraint to play the political game, to settle for small gains, to bide his time. He was indecisive and indirect. Before that period, when Saturn was above the horizon, he was a "force of nature." Fifteen years later, when Saturn reemerged above the horizon, he became his earlier overt, decisive, uncompromising self. His potential enemies were no longer fooled by his no longer ambiguous "political" speeches. Lewi, in studying the lives of a number of famous men, saw a common denominator in the quarter cycle beginning with Saturn transiting over the Ascendant. He used the term "obscure period" to encapsulate what he thought he saw that was common to all and therefore predictable. If we treat the words themselves as talismanic, able to stand for Saturn no matter how they're used, our adherence to symbolism will undermine our ability to learn from observation. What we need to do is treat them as a clue to what he thought he had observed, and to use other observations to clarify, improve, or correct his description. Fest's discussion is a marvellous resource. Although it doesn't by itself enable us to differentiate between the obscure and first rise phases, it makes it easier to recognize the psychological characteristics common to both of them, and more generally the characteristic urges during the hard-angle transits/transitions that lead into the different phases. It makes it easier to understand why, during the obscure period, whatever the size of the stage on which we act, "success will not flash out spectacularly, but must be courted by patience and the firm building of foundations."

      In this fashion we can learn from the observations of others. If a biographer, with intimate knowledge of his or her subject's life, feels that a certain period hangs together as a whole, that's information we can use. If the period is a transition period, corresponding to a hard-angle transit, it gives us a chance to learn something about the nature of the psychological "force", starting and ending imperceptibly and intense in the middle, behind that kind of transition. If the unitary period is not the period of a transit, but is the period between hard-angle transits, such as from Saturn square to Saturn opposite Mercury, and is unitary with respect to a life structure that remains more or less the same from the beginning to the end of the period, it gives us a chance to learn more about what kinds of structures are likely to result from a given transit-timed transition. Rather than merely illustrating what we think we already know by taking each individual characteristic or development by itself and showing how it fits (what we assume to be) the relevant symbolism, we can use biographies to learn what predictably accompanies a given transit, not just for a particular person, not just for a particular instance of that transit, but in general.
 

Historical Patterns

      Symbolism has less of a pull on us when we deal with historical rather than individual change, but is still almost universal. The usual tendency, when working with the Uranus/Neptune cycle, for instance, is to scan the period that the astrologer assumes corresponds with a particular conjunction, picking out the events or developments that seem to fit the combined symbolism of Uranus and Neptune, and perhaps also the sign that they're in and the conjunction aspect. Thanks to figurative word usage the astrologer will have no difficulty in coming up with a fairly extensive list. However, the events she lists will not resemble one another. The events that she collects for 1650, 1821, and 1993 will all fit the symbolism, but doing so doesn't require that they be similar in a functional sense. Comparing them will not reveal a shared set of characteristics that will give her a sense of what the the next Uranus/Neptune conjunction period will be like. Nor will she easily see that a similar list could be culled from any period, not just Uranus/Neptune conjunctions. That's because so many different kinds of developments can be made to fit the symbolism, thanks to figurative word usage and the fact that she gets to word the description both of the symbolism and the development. Accounting for historical developments via symbolism tells us almost nothing about what the next transition period (in a given cycle) will be like. It doesn't tell us which developments or characteristics recur regularly and only at Uranus/Neptune intervals.

      If we want to discover what is reliably predictable about Uranus/Neptune conjunctions, we have to accept that we don't already know. If we want to insist that we do know, because we know the individual "meanings" of Uranus and Neptune and how to combine them, it is fair to ask, How do we know? If we have no satisfactory description of how these "given" meanings were discovered, and therefore no means of replicating the process, it seems not only fair but wise to discount them. In order to ascertain if a given configuration has a predictable effect or outcome, and if so what it is, we have to look for recurrent developments without knowing what we're looking for or what we need to study in order to find it. That's what I've tried to do. Wishing to study the Uranus/Neptune historical cycle but accepting that I did not know in advance the nature of that rhythm, it took me many months to gain a foothold. The key insight came one day while reading a Thomas Kuhn article, "History and the History of Science", [23] in which he refers to "a second scientific revolution which centered in the first half of the nineteenth century . . ." It would therefore have been centered on the Uranus/Neptune conjunction partile in 1821, just as "the" Scientific Revolution was centered on the conjunction of 1650. These upheavals occurred exactly one Uranus/Neptune cycle apart.

      That suggested that the history of science at least approximates what the cycle is about. Subsequently, thanks in part to Thomas Goldstein's Dawn of Modern Science, [24] I discovered that Gothic architecture and Scholaticism emerged simultaneously during the 1130s and 40s (conjunction partile in 1136), and that an artistic breakthrough, led by Giotto, coincided with the conjunction of 1307. Giotto brought a startling realism and three-dimensionality to painting, so that the viewer seemed to be looking through a window at an actual scene rather than at a picture within a frame. References led me to art historian Erwin Panofsky's Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism [25] and other books on visual perspective and the history of church architecture. Through especially Panofsky's Perspective as Symbolic Form [26] I was able to follow the evolution of visual realism from its impressive but imperfect realization amongst the Greeks, its gradual disappearance during the dark ages, and its reemergence in a more mature form during the high middle ages, and the turning points seemed clearly to fall at Uranus/Neptune intervals. But visual realism is only one of several developmental threads that seem to follow a Uranus/Neptune schedule, others being nationalism and its antecedents, cultural exclusivity and intolerance; the interpenetration of art and science or technology, most notably in the simultaneous emergence of Gothic architecture and Scholasticism; and shifts in communication patterns, for instance the "invisible colleges" of mid-seventeenth century England, two cycles ago, and their equivalents today on the internet.

      In Panofsky's Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art [27] these developments could be seen as part of a larger picture, a series of cultural efflorescences at Uranus/Neptune intervals: the Carolingian Renovatio centered on the conjunction of 794; the Feudal Revolution on the conjunction of 965; the Twelfth-Century Renaissance on 1136; the Proto-Renaissance, featuring Giotto, on 1307; the High Renaissance on 1479; the Scientific Revolution on 1650; Kuhn's second scientific revolution (and the nationalistic revolutions in South America and Europe) on 1821; and the emergence of the internet in the years around 1993. The transitions these conjunctions coincided with appear to have lasted around twenty years, with a central crisis phase lasting five or six years. (I have elsewhere provided a more detailed account of these developments.) [28] The English Revolution and the Fronde in France during the late 1640s and early 50s, and the South American and European revolutions during the late 1810s and early 20s, are earlier examples of the crisis phase. The fall of communism and dissolution of the Soviet Union, the savagery in Bosnia and butchery in Rwanda, but also desktop publishing and the spectacular rise of the internet, are aspects of the most recent one, which appears to have lasted from about 1989 to 1995.

      While pattern-based historical research can suggest, for instance, that major theoretical developments will occur in science during Uranus/Neptune conjunctions, it can't specify what those developments will be or even which fields or subfields will be most strongly affected. New departures are invisible to the world at large, because they begin with one or a few people and are initially unknown even to others in the discipline. A successful departure becomes more visible as it gradually widens its circle of adherents (at the expense of its more established competitors). It can do so, however, only if potential adherents become aware of it. For fields like astrology, which lack the tight organizational and communicative structure of established disciplines, the internet is a medium in which people who share a relatively rare orientation, who otherwise would never know about each other, can meet, interact, and reach critical mass as a research community. [29] Specialized discussion groups such as Exegesis, which focuses on theory and the foundations of astrological knowledge, or a website such as CURA, which brings together scholarly efforts and resources, might in historical hindsight turn out to have been the locus of new departures in astrological theory and practice. Pattern-based historical research can illuminate the present and future as well as the past, by indicating in which spheres of activity new departures will likely occur, and the conditions (ie. the communicative structure of the internet) that favor change.
 

Developmental Psychology and Age Transits

      At its most basic developmental psychology tells us what happens at what age. Astrology also has something to say about what happens at what age. Age transits - Mars conjunct, square, or opposite its natal place, Jupiter and Saturn transiting their natal places, likewise for Uranus and Neptune - happen at about the same time for all of us. If Saturn opening square Saturn, for instance, coincides with a predictable effect, that effect should be in evidence in 7-year-olds in general, because they're all experiencing the same age transit. Developmental psychology supports this premise, as the sequence of developments posited by its most influential theorists occur at specific ages. Jean Piaget posited a sensorimotor period lasting from infancy until shortly before the second birthday, a preoperational period lasting until age 7, a concrete operational period lasting until about age 111/2 or 12, and a formal operational period thereafter. [30] The boundaries of his periods thus coincide with the first Mars Return (Mars conjoining its natal place), Saturn squaring its natal place, and the first Jupiter Return. L. S. Vygotsky emphasized crisis periods in development, and spoke of the crisis at age 1, the crisis at age 3, and the crisis at age 7, which coincide with the first Solar Return (not a chart, but the period of the Sun conjoining its natal place), Jupiter squaring its natal place, and Saturn squaring its natal place. [31] Adult Life Cycle theorists Daniel Levinson [32] and Gail Sheehy [33] posited major life phases running from about 0 to 20, 20 to 40, 40 to 60, and 60 on, separated and connected by transition periods running from about 18 to 23, 38 to 44, and 60 to 65. These coincide with Uranus square, opposite, and again square its natal place. Other theorists such as Erik Erikson and Carl Jung have also seen major transitions occurring in the years around 20 and 40.

      We can treat such observations as confirmations of long-held astrological doctrines, but we can more usefully treat them as resources to enable us to clarify, correct, and extend those doctrines. A theoretical disagreement between Piaget and Vygotsky, for instance, clarifies the natures and differences of the Jupiter and Saturn rhythms. Piaget was intrigued by "egocentric speech", in which the child trying to do something mutters things like, "She want me turn it . . . it go there, now", but fails to specify who "she" is, what "it" is, and where "there" is. In egocentric speech the child not only fails to communicate effectively, but seems oblivious to the fact that others can't understand her. By about age 7, however, she's able to put herself in other people's shoes and provide the necessary verbal cues, and egocentric speech is no longer evident. As Piaget saw it the child's communications become more coherent as she becomes less ego-centered and better able to anticipate what others need to know in order to make sense of what she's saying. Fully socialized speech and thought thus take the place of egocentric speech and thought, just as the latter displaces an initial phase Piaget termed "childhood autism", in which fantasies and wishes (rather than reality) predominate.

      Vygotsky agreed that egocentric speech is no longer evident after 7, but offered a strikingly different theory of its genesis, function, and fate. He argued that the child's speech doesn't become social but is social from the very beginning. This changes at 3. At that point speech splits into two streams, the original, social speech-for-others, and a new function, speech-for-oneself. When the child talks her way through a task she's using speech to plan and regulate her own actions. She's learning to tell herself (ie. decide) what to do. When we talk to ourselves without talking out loud we normally call it thinking, and the child learns to "think" in that sense at age 7. Egocentric speech doesn't die out at 7, as Piaget thought, but goes underground and becomes Silent or Inner Speech, the familiar thinking-in-words that we often associate with thinking per se. What characterizes "egocentric speech", Vygotsky noted, is that it's more telescoped, less formal than speech-for-others. The child knows who she means when she says "she", and she knows what she's talking about, so many things that would have to be spelled out for others don't need to be made explicit when she's talking to herself. The shift to Inner Speech at 7 completes this line of development. Not only does speech-for-oneself not need to specify contextual details, it doesn't have to be out loud, either. Adults sometimes "think out loud", but apparently 3 to 7-year olds always do. Learning to keep our "thoughts" to ourselves is part of what we accomplish at age 7.

      Being able to talk to ourselves is an aspect of the emergence of will. In his lectures on the age 3 crisis Vygotsky lists the main symptoms - negativism, stubbornness, obstinacy, willfulness. All of them involve a clash of wills. The child displaying negativism refuses to do something not because she doesn't want to but because she was told to. The child who's being stubborn is more specifically refusing to be swayed from what she decided. This clash of wills can't happen before 3 because the younger child doesn't have the kind of consciousness to enable her to have and pursue ongoing wants that differ from what her parents want. She can't voice a narrative that comprises what she wants to do. She can't want something sometime in the future. Her wants are satisfied moment by moment as they arise in her immediate environment. She sees a ball she rolls it, she sees a door it gets opened or closed. When she finishes with one thing she heads for whatever attracts her most strongly. She's a slave not only to her visual field but to words themselves. She can't say, "Lena is walking across the room" while seeing her sitting in a chair. She can't pretend a stick is her baby. Her behavior isn't controlled by what she wants to do but by the environment itself.

      New desires arise at 3 that can't be satisfied immediately but which the child is now capable of remembering. Vygotsky suggests that "when desires that can't be gratified immediately make their appearance and the tendency to immediate fulfillment of desires, characteristic of the preceding stage, is retained, the child's behavior changes. To resolve this tension the child enters an imaginary, illusory world in which the unrealizable desires can be realized, and this is what we call play. Imagination is a new psychological process for the child; it is not present in the consciousness of the very young child." [34] Thus the 3-year old playing with her doll imagines herself to be a mother who's taking care of her baby, and she does so in an imaginary situation in which she goes somewhere with her baby, asks the doctor to come see her, etc. Emergent with these new, more complex kinds of wants is the self (the id?) that wants them, that is capable of opposing parental wants. The child is becoming an independent being who wants to associate with others, but who must balance what she wants against what they want. If she's unable to differentiate her wants from those of others she'll be easily deflected in the future, with no will of her own, no sense of direction, no ability to make decisions and run her own life. The negativity, stubbornness, obstinacy, etc. that are signs of the age 3 crisis are side effects of her attempt to differentiate her will from that of others. If the child is stubborn and refuses to change her mind even when it would be reasonable, it's because she's trying to have a mind of her own, capable of maintaining its own direction without being swayed from moment to moment.

      Fantasy is not, as Piaget thought, the earliest stage but something new that emerges at 3 and reaches its fullest flowering at the first Jupiter Return at 11 1/2-12. Will is an outgrowth of fantasy, of the ability to imagine alternate possibilities and prefer one of them, the possibilities themselves being narratives containing a number of specific actions that comprise a whole, for instance going-to-the-store. Roll-playing, which I once associated exclusively with Saturn, I now see as an attribute of the Jupiter rhythm. The girl playing with her doll is playing the role of mother, the boy chasing across the wild west in his back yard with a stick for a horse is playing the role of cowboy.

     Roll-playing does, however, eventually serve the purposes of the Saturn rhythm. Speech-for-oneself becomes silent at 7 not because the child has mind of her own (which in a sense she got at 3) but because she is now aware of having a mind of her own. She now has a sense of self, a persona, a self-image. She may learn to play many roles in her life, but the ones she plays for real will be in the service of her self-image. If she comes to see herself as a teacher, thus becoming one, she will play the roles that a teacher normally plays, but she won't be playing in the sense that she was before. What changes at Saturn intervals is our sense of who we are, but what emerges at 7, and is perfected during subsequent Saturn age transits, is the ability to have a self-image in the first place. That's why we can only lie after the age 7 square. Only then do we have private thoughts and our own purposes. Only then do we seek to make an impression. Only then do we begin to discipline ourselves, to hold ourselves to actions that support our self-image. Only then can we do productive work. That's presumably why the Spartans sent male children to the barracks to become soldiers at age 7, and why, in medieval society, children became apprentices at 7. Seven is the earliest age at which they could have done so, because that's when psychological developments occur that make self-discipline and productive work possible.
 

Statistical Research: the Gauquelin Approach

      The fourth promising avenue of astrological research is statistics, which is best exemplified by the work done by the husband-wife team of Michel and Francoise Gauquelin. They studied the distribution of Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Moon, and Venus in the horoscopes of successful professionals in a number of fields, and found that for certain fields certain planets clustered just above the Ascendant and just to the right of the Midheaven, [35] or else avoided those areas. Their findings have, however, been widely misunderstood. A common misconception is that they say something about career choice. However, the Gauquelins pointed out that ordinary sportsmen [36] do not have Mars clustered in the key sectors. Only highly successful sportsmen show the "Mars effect". Thus, the implication of the Gauquelin work is that having Mars in a "key sector" is advantageous if you happen to be a sportsman but has nothing to do with whether or not you want to become one. The nature of the Mars effect as revealed by the character-traits method is will-power, which in this context means the ability to get going and keep going, essentially the opposite of laziness. This quality is advantageous if you happen to be a sportsman, because individuals who work hard in practice and in games, and who don't put things off, will do better than equally gifted teammates who lack this quality.

      Another misconception is that the Gauquelin findings apply to groups rather than individuals. After all, even though 24% of sports champions have Mars in one of the key sectors, as opposed to the 17% expected by chance, that's still only one-fourth. And if we asked what percentage of people with Mars in a key sector are sports champions, the percentage would be even smaller (because most of them wouldn't even be sports professionals). In that case, the argument goes, being a sports champion doesn't necessarily mean you'll have Mars in a key sector, and having Mars in a key sector doesn't mean you'll be a sports champion. But that argument misses the point. Since multiple factors contribute to being a sports champion, no one factor determines the outcome all by itself. Having will-power in the Gauquelin sense contributes to rather than determines success in sports. What Mars in a key sector directly predicts, if the Gauquelin findings are valid, is not success per se but the ability to push oneself, to work hard and ignore fatigue. If we want to know how to apply the Gauquelin results in individual cases, it means telling clients not that they'll be drawn to sports, or even that if they happen to be in sports they'll be successful. Rather, it means telling them that they're go-getters, that they don't put things off, that they can push themselves harder than most people can, and that this is an advantage in some professions (sports, business, the military), irrelevant in others, and even a disadvantage in a few (writing). To the extent that the Gauquelin findings are valid and the key sectors are where we think they are (not a certainty), they're individually applicable.

      From this perspective prominence in sports is just a window through which we can view the Mars effect. If that factor is the opposite of laziness, then any endeavor in which that trait is advantageous will have a nonrandom Mars distribution for the most successful individuals. In principle, it should be possible to come up with other categories in which having Mars in a key sector should be an advantage. For instance, a gardener with this position should have a more weed-free garden than most gardeners, since he or she won't put off weeding. Imagining and testing other categories based on our current understanding of the Mars factor should enable us to refine our knowledge both of the effect and of the position of Mars that predicts it. That's the sense in which Gauquelin-type research might help determine the content of astrological knowledge, rather than merely justifying what we think we already know.
 

5. Twenty-first Century Astrology

      For empirical research to flourish, it must both nourish and grow out of empirical practice. Symbolistic astrologers will simply add empirical discoveries to their interpretive grab-bag. It won't affect how they do astrology, or make their predictions more accurate or relevant. If everything works such findings can hardly help differentiate between fact and fancy. An empirical astrologer, however, approaches the matter differently. As Stephen Arroyo does when he talks about "understanding", she compares different periods looking for recurrences. She looks for patterns in the past in order to make sense of the present and future. A few North American astrological writers - for instance Arroyo, Cunningham, Forrest - and no doubt a few astrologers in Great Britain, France and elsewhere, while not abandoning symbolism, are at least partly empirical in this sense. In years to come I expect more astrologers will be more fully empirical. Having a sense of the material reality of astrology makes the urge to discover compelling. There are organic rhythms, including motivational rhythms, that correspond to planetary periods. These rhythms are actually existing phenomena that can be the basis for meaningful research that obviates the need for elaborate wordgames and torturous apologetics. What we need to know is what recurs at what intervals, what that tells us about human functioning, and what that tells us about what is actually recurring at those intervals.

      But how do we do that in everyday practice, assuming we don't want to set astrology aside while waiting for the empirical revolution to be completed? I can't speak for other would-be empiricists, but here's how I do it. First, ask the client to compose a brief biography: job changes, first sexual experience, changes in relationships, changes in activity patterns, career changes, moves and relocations, spiritual crises, insights and discoveries, attitude changes and reorientations, new hobbies, activities and enthusiasms. Try to get an detailed picture of the last two or three years, so you can pick up the Mars rhythms. Study the biography and in a follow-up session elicit clarifications and details. For instance, When did you and Jim get married? When did you first sleep together? When did you start living together? When did you decide to get married? Encourage your client to go into detail about how each came about. Encourage her to go into detail on the other changes and turning points mentioned in her biography. If this seems intrusive and personal, that's because astrology is personal. The things that are the most personal, if they are caused or elicited by us, are the most likely to correspond to planet-based rhythms.

      Using the information provided, look for patterns. Changes that affect our daily routine - a new route to work, a different grocery store or bank, rearranging the furniture, a new morning or evening exercise routine, the beginning or ending of a love affair, deciding to get married, separating from a partner, starting a project - should correspond to Mars conjunct, square, or opposite its natal place. If the change requires courage, for instance standing up to a superior or ending a relationship, we might make the decision during Mars/Mars but initiate the confrontation during Mars/Sun. New hobbies, enthusiasms, and creative endeavors are likely to follow a three-year rhythm, one of the Jupiter cycles. If the client is a writer, you might see a Jupiter/Mercury rhythm timing the most effective writing periods, for example. Career changes, and more generally changes in self-image, should follow a Saturn rhythm, usually Saturn/Ng or Saturn/Saturn. Sometimes relocations facilitate identity change, because the people we meet in that new setting don't have preconceptions about who we are and what we're like. In that case the relocation will tend to occur during Saturn/Saturn, Saturn/Ng, or Saturn/Sun. Larger changes in ideology and sense of community will correspond to Uranus rhythms. These are more subtle changes that take place over a several-year period, in which we become politically involved, or active in the community, or experience a shift in values and priorities.

      Rhythms based on different temporal wavelengths - six months, three years, seven and a third years, twenty-one years - interact with each other. A Mars transit-timed decision or commitment will manifest a Saturn transit-timed identity shift, and will be an episode in that longer, more gradual "event". The latter might in turn be an episode in, and a manifestation of, a Uranus-timed several-years-long transition in values and orientation towards reality. Each rhythm has to be understood both on its own terms and in terms of its relationship with other rhythms. By analyzing a biography into its constituent rhythms we can then extend them into the future. If a certain kind of development has occurred several times in a row at three-year intervals, have the client focus on what was going on each time and expect the same impetus during the next turning of that cycle. It doesn't mean that the same event has to happen. I once had a client whose Mars was almost exactly square her husband's Mars. They had been married three times and divorced twice. Each of their blowups coincided with Mars transiting Mars in both of their charts. Were the blowups fated? No. I told them which episodes went together as part of this pattern and asked them to meditate on them, to try to see what was going on between them during these times. No doubt they were each feeling the need to do something, but I felt that by seeing the pattern they might also be able to see how to pull together rather than apart during these periods.

      Practicing astrology this way doesn't require that we already know what we (historically) haven't had the means of knowing. We can simply look for patterns in the individual biography and in that way factor in the uniqueness of that person's chart and transit timings. At the same time, solid research can make it easier for us to see these patterns. To the extent that our knowledge of what generally occurs during a given rhythm's/cycle's turning points is valid, it helps us to see the special-case version of that general pattern in the life we're analyzing. Empirical practice makes empirical research easier (possible?) to do and easier to use.

      A new paradigm often emerges imperceptibly, beginning with but a few advocates. Only as it widens its circle of adherents does it become publicly visible and eventually dominant. The astrology described above, based not only on observation but also on the image of astrology as a coherent set of phenomena, already exists in a diffuse form. It arguably came into existence during and partly thanks to the emergence of the internet, which is to say during the late twentieth century Uranus/Neptune conjunction. The internet will likely be the locus of its continued growth and development, via specialized websites and discussion groups. At the end of the twenty-first century we might well look back on these last two decades and say that this was when the revolution began.
 
 

Notes

[1] Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970 .

[2] Polanyi, Michael. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.

[3] Kuhn, Thomas S. "The Function of Measurement in Modern Physical Science." In Kuhn, The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change, pp. 178-224. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.

[4] The reason I use the words of two widely admired astrologers as examples of the fallacies of symbolism is to emphasize that the problem is symbolism, not their (or anybody else's) misuse of it.

[5] Tyl, Noel. The Horoscope as Identity. Saint Paul: Llewellyn Publications, 1974.

[6] Lewi, Grant. Heaven Knows What. Saint Paul: Llewellyn Publications, 1969.

[7] "The Mercury Hour" was essentially a snail-mail discussion group, a precursor of the internet discussion groups we have today. It simply printed what its readers sent in, and was published as a quarterly for many years by Edith Custer out of Lynchburg, Virginia. A few years ago it went online (http://www.starflash.com/mercury-hour/). I don't know if the original snail-mail publication still exists.

[8] I want to reiterate that any apparent silliness found in Tyl's and Rudhyar's arguments are a consequence not of their personal failings but of the inadequacies of the existing symbolistic paradigm. Their arguments make perfect sense in terms of that paradigm. It's the paradigm that ultimately doesn't make sense.

[9] Arroyo, Stephen. Relationships & Life Cycles: Modern Dimensions of Astrology. Reno: CRCS Publications, 1979.

[10] Jones, Ernest. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. New York: Basic Books, 1961.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Freud's birthdata, from Jones, is May 6, 1856, 6:30 pm local time in what is now Príbor, the Czech Republic.

[13] Freud's earlier reference was to "every seven years", and astrologers speaking of Saturn cycles commonly refer to seven-year rhythms. This is okay as long as we realize it's an approximation, that the actual period is seven and one-third years. If we simply keep adding seven-year intervals to our starting point, though, as some astrologers do, we end up with the second Saturn Return starting at age 56, about a year and a half or two years early. Those one-thirds do add up!

[14] The Nonagesimal, or Ng, is that point on the ecliptic cut by a line drawn from the birthplace to the ecliptic that's perpendicular to the ecliptic. The planets are located on the ecliptic the same way when we speak of their zodiacal position. Since the birthplace and its projection onto the ecliptic, the Ng, circles the zodiac regularly (once every twenty-four hours), just as the planets do, I think of it as the body's zodiacal position. That's where you were at the moment of your birth. The Ascendant and Descendent, in this view, are not independent factors but merely aspect points to the Ng, the closing square and opening square, respectively.

[15] Birthdata: November 2, 1945, 12:55 am Central Standard Time, at home in rural Kentucky, coordinates 88W06, 37N41 (at the junction of highways 56 and 60). Time is Mother's memory. She was fully conscious, watching the clock on the wall above the foot of the bed, which was reset daily, and made a mental note of the time I was born. She was surprised when she subsequently discovered that the birth certificate said 1:05 am. No doubt it was because the doctor finished up, washed his hands, etc. before looking at the clock and writing down the time.

[16] Until recently I felt that it was the planet that timed the opening, even though I realized that it didn't actually pull the shell open. I now see that an internal clock times everything, including physiological changes leading up to and proceeding from the feeding (shell open) phase. The Moon merely resets the clock, or rather the oyster uses the Moon to reset its clock(s), probably once or twice each cycle. If true, this has implications for transit timing. Internal clocks need not be precisely the same length as the planetary cycles that serve as their templates - our diurnal clock isn't - nor need they share the vagaries of retrogradation. Thus the clock for a given rhythm might reach the three-quarter point, equivalent to the closing square, at a different time than the actual closing-square transit. The two ways of timing turning points will approximate each other, since the overall cycle length is almost exactly the same, but at times will diverge considerably.

[17] Op cit. See note 10.

[18] Lewi, Grant. Astrology for the Millions - fourth revised edition. Saint Paul: Llewellyn Publications, 1970.

[19] Beware later editions, the sixth at any rate. In it the quoted passage is rendered in the past tense, thus revising out of existence Lewi's tacit claim that this is what normally happens during this transit, not merely what happened in a particular instance. There is much other editing, including the addition of whole passages, making it unreliable for the reader wishing to know what Lewi actually said. The fourth edition is okay, I don't know about the fifth.

[20] Birthdata: April 20, 1889, 6:30 pm, Braunau, Austria. Maser, Werner. Hitler: Legend, Myth & Reality. Maser cites "Braunau parrish register". Local mean time wasn't replaced by Central European Time in Austria until October 1, 1891, so time must be LMT.

[21] Bullock, Alan. Hitler: A Study in Tyranny. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.

[22] Fest, Joachim. Hitler. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974. Translated from the original published by Verlag Ullstein, 1973.

[23] Kuhn, Thomas S. "The Relations between History and the History of Science." In Kuhn, The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change, pp. 127-161. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.

[24] Goldstein, Thomas. Dawn of Modern Science. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980.

[25] Panofsky, Erwin. Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism. New York: Penguin Books USA, 1976.

[26] Panofsky, Erwin. Perspective as Symbolic Form. New York: Zone Books, 1991.

[27] Panofsky, Erwin. Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

[28] I shared my findings on the original festival mailing list in three long posts (about 10 ks apiece) during February and March, 1995 . In December I posted a brief summary on alt.astrology. I'll be happy to email copies to anyone who asks (spock@evansville.net).

[29] Kuhn felt that science is irreducibly a group product. Since knowing, as argued by Polanyi and seconded by Kuhn, is personal, our personal idiosyncrasies are part of the process. In a large enough group, however, those idiosyncrasies, while not disappearing, do average out. How large a group? Evidently between twenty-five and a hundred individuals, the size of the specialist groups that are the locus of day to day scientific work and the cells in the scientific body.

[30] There are many fine books which attempt to summarize and explain Piagetian developmental psychology. One of the most interesting, from an astrologer's viewpoint, is Henry W. Maier's Three Theories of Child Development, Third Edition (New York: Harper & Row, 1978). Maier compares Piaget's cognitive theory, Erik Erikson's affective theory, and Robert Sears' behavioral theory in order to show that, despite their theoretical differences, the timing of the phases they posit is remarkably similar. In pursuing his point Maier provides tables which show in great detail the timing of the phases in each theorist's developmental scheme, which is very useful to the astrologer interested in comparing this timing to the timing of planetary cycles.

[31] Rieber, Robert W., edited. The Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky; Volume 5, Child Psychology. New York: Plenum Press, 1988. Translated from the Russian by Marie J. Hall.

[32] Levinson, Daniel J. The Seasons of a Man's Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978.

[33] Sheehy, Gail. Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1975. Although Sheehy published first, Levinson's work preceded and was the inspiration for hers.

[34] Vygotsky, Lev Semenovich. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.

[35] I suspect that the position of the peaks just past the rising and culminating points is due to a lateness factor in the reporting of the birthtimes, just as my own birthtime as written down by the doctor was ten minutes later than the time observed by my mother, due to the doctor tying up various loose ends before getting around to noting and writing down the time. In Recent Advances in Natal Astrology (1977) argues against the possibility of there being an average lateness in the reporting of the Gauquelin birthtimes (and thus against the possibility that the peaks are actually on the angles when this lateness factor is corrected for), but his argument seems flawed to me.

[36] Sportsmen, or athletes, is the Gauquelins' best-known category and the Mars factor is their best-known finding. For the sake of familiarity and clarity, therefore, I refer exclusively to that aspect of their work in my arguments. The points I wish to make, however, apply also to their studies of successful doctors, scientists, musicians, politicians, etc.


 
Reference of the page:
Dale Huckeby: After Symbolism
http://cura.free.fr/xxx/27dale.html
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