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On the Use of Mythology in Astrology Posted by Chris Brennan on March 6, 2008 at 5:23 Am5 Comments Home About o Disclosure Page Astrology Courses Astrology Dictionary Saturn Return Stories Astrology Podcast Search the blo featured article » 10 Tips For Learning Astrology October 19, 2007 – 3:23 am | 62 Comments So you want to learn about astrology? Not the generalized Sun-sign stuff that you find in newspapers and magazines, but serious astrology. The advanced type where you can actually determine specific information about a person’s life through the observation of the planets and other celestial phenomena. Here are some tips to help you get started. Read the full story » book reviews Reviews of the latest books on or related to astrology by Chris Brennan. astrological techniques and concepts Articles related to specific astrological techniques, including basic concepts. astrology news News and information about what is going on in the astrological community, and in the world in general from an astrological perspective. history and philosophy of astrology Articles focusing on the history and/or philosophy of astrology. astrological tips and guides Lists of tips and guides for learning astrology or becoming more familiar with the world of astrology in general Home » history and philosophy of astrology On The Use of Mythology in Astrology Posted by Chris Brennan on March 6, 2008 at 5:23 am5 Comments I wrote this paper on the use of mythology as a device in astrological delineations a few years ago while I was still attending Kepler College . I think that I initially wrote the paper because I was kind of annoyed by the subject matter and I wanted to focus on more precise techniques, having just had my first introduction to Hellenistic and Indian astrology a few months earlier. At the time I was also rather excited by some of the arguments that Robert Schmidt was making about the conceptual origins of the Hellenistic tradition and the possible the influence of Plato’s Timaeus on the original cosmological model of the astrologers, as you can tell in the paper. The paper is pretty amateurish, and I would probably write it a bit differently now, but I’ll present it in the original form with only a few slight modifications since gist of the argument towards the end is still essentially the same as what I would make at this point in time. This isn’t a technical paper on how to delineate charts using mythology, but it is actually more of a theoretical argument against using mythology as a core tool in delineations. I should point out that I’m not trying to denigrate anyone who is a proponent of such an approach, and I have a number of good friends who regularly employ mythology in chart delineations, but this article is more of a rationalization of my own reasons for not doing the same as the basis for my own practice. The Place of Myth in Astrology Horoscopic astrology appeared in the Mediterranean area sometime around the 1st or 2nd century BCE and it was heavily influenced by the philosophy of the earlier Athenian and Hellenistic philosophical schools, particularly that of Plato (437-347 BCE). Robert Schmidt has recently proposed that the entire apparatus of horoscopic astrology was a theoretical construct devised by one person, or one group of people, over the course of one or two generations based off of the Platonic notion that the cosmos is a living, sentient animal, with a body and a soul.[1] Furthermore, Schmidt argues that this cosmic animal possesses a rational consciousness that is capable of knowing the events that befall individual human beings, and the observable astronomical phenomena that are studied by astrologers are actually believed to be expressions of thoughts that take place in the cosmic consciousness of this animal. Following this basic premise it is thought that the preexisting astrological traditions derived from the Babylonians and the Egyptians were synthesized and used as the basis of an intricate and precise construct which could be used to read, translate and interpret the thoughts of the cosmic animal as they occur relative to individual human beings or events. The technical language of astrology was based upon the attempt to use the multifaceted nature of the Greek language to convey concepts of a universal character in a very specific way. Schmidt argues that the meaning of the astrological concepts were implicit in the language and grammar used, and much of the significance derived from the system was indeed inseparable from the language itself. It appears that the language used in the surviving texts from the Hellenistic astrological tradition was grounded in a concrete theoretical structure that was multivalent enough so as to not warrant the use of analogy, similes or mythology because the words used were able to convey a very precise message through the complex linguistic wrangling of the ancient Greek language. While the planets themselves were named after the gods of the Greek pantheon centuries before horoscopic astrology came out of Alexandria, nowhere in any of the Hellenistic astrological texts is there made a direct correlation between the mythology of the gods and the significations of the corresponding planetary bodies that bare their names. The connection between the names of the celestial bodies and their corresponding myths in an interpretive astrological context does not appear to have been made in the western astrological tradition until sometime in the 20 th century, and thus it is a relatively new innovation with respect to the history of horoscopic astrology as a whole. As a relatively recent development in the western tradition, this method of chart delineation should be reexamined within the context of ancient and contemporary astrological system alike in order to determine the applicability of mythology to the astrological construct as a whole, from both a theoretical and a practical standpoint. Origins of the Use of Mythology in Modern Astrology According to Demetra George in a lecture given to the Washington State Astrological Association at their meeting in March of 2005, the first modern astrologer in the west who seems to have explicitly used mythology to glean information about the nature of the planets was Liz Greene. In the opening paragraph of her first book, Saturn, a New Look at an Old Devil, Greene states …the stuff from which myths and fairytale are composed is a symbolic portrayal of the values of the collective unconscious psyche of man. [2] From this basic premise Greene goes on to make analogies between the various myths and ‘archetypes’ of the Saturn/Kronos character in Greek mythology, with how the planet Saturn can be interpreted by astrologers in a horoscopic chart. She says in her closing remarks that …a symbol cannot be comprehended by words but must be approached though the intuitive facility… Thus the use of mythology in modern astrology from its introduction was a tool used to emphasize the intuitive function of the art so that broader concepts could be conveyed, and it was done largely in order to makeup for the limitations of modern language and to convey the full complexity of certain astrological concepts. In Greene’s book she draws heavily on the work of one of the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), particular some of the main concepts that he proposed during his lifetime such as the notion of archetypes, the collective unconscious, and the theory synchronicity. In his 1917 work On the Psychology of the Unconscious Jung explains the collective unconscious and archetypes in the following manner: The unconscious contains, as it were two layers: the personal and the collective. The personal layer ends at the earliest memories of infancy, but the collective layer comprises the pre-infantile period, that is, the residues of ancestrial life. Whereas the memory-images of the personal unconscious are, as it were, filled out because they are images personally experienced by the individual, the archetypes of the collective unconscious are not filled out because they are not forms personally experienced. On the other hand, when psychic energy regresses, going even beyond the period of early infancy, and breaks into the legacy of ancestrial life, then the mythological images are awakened: these are archetypes. [3] Demetra George elaborates on the matter of the archetypes in her book Asteroid Goddesses Archetypes are the essential universal thought forms available to human consciousness during all periods of time. [4] By incorporating these definitions of the collective unconscious and the archetypes with Schmidt’s argument that the Hellenistic astrologers considered the universe to be a living creature whose thoughts could be read through the movements of the celestial bodies, perhaps we could speculate that the collective unconscious that we draw upon is somehow connected to the consciousness of this living cosmos that we reside inside of. Perhaps the archetypes or concepts inside of that consciousness are available for all of humanity to draw upon and they are somehow intertwined with the thoughts of the cosmic mind, as expressed by the movements of the celestial bodies. The archetypes are somewhat general in character though, because they are essentially broad, undirected concepts, of a universal nature and they are not as specifically focused because they occur everywhere in our world and not just through the specific language of astrology. One could argue that astrology itself is a structured, or systematic attempt to translate the multivalent conceptual cognitions of the cosmos into a language in order to reveal precise ‘thoughts’, and thus the use of mythology to further illustrate certain broad archetypes would be something that would be an addition to an already complicated system, since by nature mythology is general in its character and meaning, whereas astrology can be more specific insomuch as it is a language.
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