A Voice In The Wilderness

Sometimes it’s really frustrating to be putting out ideas before their time has come – worse than that, you often don’t get credit or profit (if at all) until it’s entirely too late. In my case, composite charts are a good example. I introduced them (in The Composite Chart: The Horoscope Of A Relationship, Weiser 1973) and despite my introduction to the contrary, Rob Hand’s subsequent and better-promoted book on them (Planets In Composite) got him all the credit, and the profit, for twenty years, until the definitive Composite Charts came out. Similarly with cycles, the general concept and the parts and pieces of which were around and discussed by the likes of Charles Jayne, Dane Rudhyar, and Grant Lewi. The next step – the idea of plotting cycles and their relations, intersections, and dynamics on graphs – was obvious and pinpoints times and events no other method can, and it was introduced in Astrological Cycles and the Life Crisis Periods and later Dynamic Astrology.  Thirty years later, there has still been no accessible computer program that does these, despite hundreds of requests and a couple of failed programming attempts on both sides of the Atlantic. I did it better on my Apple II back in 1979. What gives?

Similarly, the idea that planetary effects are part of a larger picture of similar proportions at all scales, with all phenomena, large and small, has been around since Classical times, even flourished briefly in the late Renaissance, and yet modern astrologers still fail to get their heads around it, to their continuing discredit. The temptation to sell astrology as some sort of instant amateur psychology (which it does well enough) or fortunetelling still obscures the larger picture. Sometimes I wonder what it takes to bring the obvious to the fore, when the stagnant present has no ears to listen or eyes to see.

When I was growing up in the 1950s, my dad pointed out on a globe how neatly Africa and the Americas fit together and said they must have been joined in the distant past. He was describing plate tectonics, which was still totally ahead of its time then (my dad got it from reading Alfred Wegoner in the 1920s), but it made sense to me, indeed it was obvious. And now, generations later, it’s finally gospel, far too late for Wegoner to benefit.

In similar vein, I often feel like a voice in the wilderness. The hows and whys of where astrology meets science (or just reality, how things work) are barely being debated while one side misses (or arrogantly denies) the legitimacy of the other. I see a lot of astrologers, and scientists, who don’t know better but who should, since they all claim to be seeking the truth of the matter, not fighting over control of some myopic, proprietary version of it. I also see a small core of both trained scientists and astrologers who are on the right trail, but are ignored or even ostracized for their views, when they express them, in their own communities. Not that I know where all the answers lie, but I can point, and it’s generally not where the rest of the world is pointing in the specific areas of science and astrology – though it’s often where world movements of eco-psychology and “theories of everything” are treading fearlessly, without every thinking to include astrology.

Go back and look at the signs, folks. It’s all of a piece, and planetary rhythms are integral reflections of the rest of the proportions of most scales large and small. They all resonate with, and within, each other – from the ages to the micro-moment, from mega-macro to mini-nano.  A little willingness to look outside of each profession’s own limitations would go a long way to remove those limitations and bring us to a united physical world view that includes physics, chemistry, evolutionary biology, and cosmology, with real planetary effects included. Since the 1960s, a period when hopeful uniters briefly flourished, the world has been at the mercy of dividers and deciders on a roll to separate and individuate the post-modern arts and sciences, in an individualistic and separatist illusion with dreadful political and economic results. It’s about time the pendulum came back the other way. When it does, we’ll see it’s all of a piece, and we’ll all get a bigger piece of it. I’ve seen (and often articulated) the vision, and I only hope I see it come to pass in time to benefit personally. Posthumous glory has little appeal to the living…those of my “certain age” understand it better than most, but it transcends generations, as only lengthy periods of ignorance (and, occasionally but briefly, wisdom) can…