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Post by arth_frown on Dec 2, 2009 21:03:20 GMT -1
Alternatively, the attention-seeking soap opera virus is at play. Being a cynical old bastard, there might be some attention seeking going on. I do try and fight such thoughts, honest!
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Post by Heron on Dec 2, 2009 21:28:55 GMT -1
Astrology's a tricky one: you have to be familiar with it deeply to be able to grasp its value, and most people who are anti-astrology for whatever reason are understandably not prepared to make the effort. It's a hugely complicated and very rich symbol-system: the only thing comparable to it in terms of sheer extent of recorded history and cultural ubiquity would be religion itself. Elsewhere I've called it a 'poetics of the human', and I use it every day (as well as having written a book about it). It works in much the same way that Jungian psychology works and gives insight into the psyche: no, Saturn doesn't send down literal rays that affect your life, and no, inside you there are not literal homunculi labelled 'Anima', and 'Shadow' etc. Nevertheless, in my opinion and experience, both systems---if correctly and ethically used and understood---are of immense value as tools for self-understanding and for understanding other people. They also depend on a symbolic and mysterious congruence of the outer and inner worlds---of cosmos and psyche---that I find grand and beautiful, as well as experientially functional. That is, in my experience, it works as a generator of insight. Consistently, and usefully---again, just like Jungian psychology. Things can be true without being literal: this is the whole point of myth---after all, we all know that pigs didn't literally come from the underworld, but are a type of ungulate that evolved from other mammals. That doesn't mean we don't find meaning in the story of Gwydion stealing the swine from the south. Astrology is similar: I know the sun is a big ball of superhot gases in which hydrogen is continually being fused into helium; nevertheless, when i was born it was in 4 degrees of Taurus, conjunct Chiron and trining the Moon, Mars, and Jupiter in Leo, and that the astrological information associated with that placement very accurately describes the most important aspects of my personality. I wholly endorse this with reference to Jungian psychology and myth, but I've never really 'got' astrology except in the sense of appreciating the symbolic use of astronomical constellations as markers of the turning year etc. Anything you can recommend to convince me otherwise? (in lieu of waiting for your book of course )
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Post by megli on Dec 2, 2009 23:25:31 GMT -1
The works of Liz Greene: they are numerous. She's a Jungian analyst as well as an astrologer; in person she's unpretentious and impressive at the same time. the problem is you have to be able to read the language before you can appreciate the poetry, as it were: two of her books, 'The Astrology of Fate' and 'The Astrological Neptune' are among my favourite books ever, but she has written in depth psychological work on all the planets and on astrology generally. If you're intertested, it's probably worth getting Clare Martin's two introductory volumes to psychological astrology and then moving onto Greene, though she can be read independently. www.amazon.com/Astrological-Neptune-Quest-Redemption/dp/1578631971www.amazon.com/Astrology-Fate-Liz-Greene/dp/0877286361/ref=pd_sim_b_2
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Post by megli on Dec 2, 2009 23:36:47 GMT -1
Astrology's a tricky one: you have to be familiar with it deeply to be able to grasp its value, and most people who are anti-astrology for whatever reason are understandably not prepared to make the effort. It's a hugely complicated and very rich symbol-system: the only thing comparable to it in terms of sheer extent of recorded history and cultural ubiquity would be religion itself. Elsewhere I've called it a 'poetics of the human', and I use it every day (as well as having written a book about it). Details of the book, please. Either here or PM I always look forward to your imput, Megli as it's always reasoned, researched and precise. I also respect your superior interlect to mine. Having read your blogs on such matters, I have to really take note, especially considering your profession and learning. I just can't see how - and this is where I clearly show my ignorance of subject once again - how planetary positions etc can have an impact on little ol' me. Whether it be at my birth or other such times Superior intellect!! pshnshr. I think the answer---or part of an answer---is that astrology isn't a causal thing. It's not a matter of *effect*: that a causes b. One can be brutal and say; I'm not going to speculate about the metaphysics, it just *works*, and that's all I'm interested in. For me, on the other hand, the validity of astrology grows from a mysterious semiotic unity of the universe: that somewhere, *between* our minds and the cosmos, readable meaning arises, which is neither physical nor psychological but somewhere between the two. It's like metaphor in language: my love is clearly NOT much like a red, red rose, being a sloshing of my glands and not a plant of the genus rosa, with thorns and scarlet petals; nevertheless, the statement is rich with meaning. And the universe is like a text, in that it presents a readable surface to the human mind which has evolved within it. That that may be a projection of our minds upon the cosmos doesn't lessen its power: so after all is all our perception of beauty and meaning.
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Post by Adam on Dec 3, 2009 9:16:04 GMT -1
That that may be a projection of our minds upon the cosmos doesn't lessen its power: so after all is all our perception of beauty and meaning. I would say it goes deeper... simple projection implies a binary relationship between subject and object... whereas an element of co-creation, in which the meaning becomes reflexively manifest, would perhaps reflect a more intersubjective perspective. What, if anything, was your opinion on Ward's whole CS Lewis "The Narnia Code" thing?
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Post by megli on Dec 3, 2009 9:19:20 GMT -1
I think he's right, for what it's worth: he makes a good case for it. (He was chaplain at my venerable place of employment btw.) Lewis was so concerned with the planets in his sci-fi and with medieval astrology as a medieval/renaissance scholar, so the material was right at the forefront of his consciousness.
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Post by Francis on Dec 3, 2009 10:36:19 GMT -1
it works as a generator of insight. I'm sure that's pretty much the whole of it put very succinctly in a very small nutshell. For us the language of the symbology is of course more resonant (whether you explicitly know the meanings/mythical associations behind a given symbol or not - just through a sort of non-consciously deliberate osmotic accretion of the poetic/legendary gubbins of our culture!) than say using an Eastern system such as i-Ching. It's gained a level of sophistication only possible through masses of time spent over the millenia by an 'idle' (Sorry Megli ) urban elite. I think this history, its development by time rich urban intellectuals, has given it a potentially high level of resolution as a compass indicating a direction of appropriate 'insight' - but possibly more relevant to some lifestyles than others? (Although I appreciate that perhaps at this level of 'resolution' probably all of us living in Britain may be essentially 'urban'!) I think it's probably fair to say that watching patterns in the flight of birds, or the flocking of sheep - whilst perfectly valid and useful 'generators of insight' themselves (and possibly more Brythonically appropriate) - are never going to offer the modern western town dweller the sort of guidance to insight (relevant to their experience) that Babylonian derived astrology can. But for all its sophistication, and the detailed map of its mythscape, how much practical benefit/direction to valuable insight does it offer over the reveries of a solitary walker meandering through the landscape they know best and most intimately?
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Post by megli on Dec 3, 2009 13:24:54 GMT -1
Well, it's a total and totalizing system: that is,*any* human experience can be described through its language. It gives a particular type of insight, which I find compatible with a metaphysical view of the universe. I don't see any conflict between astrology as a system---and incidentally astrology has been practised in wales at least since the high middle ages, including by professional poets, and astrological almanacs in welsh were popular in the 17th and 18th centuries---and other more discursive ways of gaining insight. I don't see 'solitary reverie' (which is equally as important to me personally, being very much a country boy) as in competition with the kind of insights I get from astrology personally, although the latter is not in the least brythonic of course. (Bovvered?) So it's like asking what value art has over gardening, or depth psychology over poetry, or language over music. In each case, I'll take *both*, please!
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Post by Midori on Dec 3, 2009 15:03:16 GMT -1
Well, In my view, and speaking as a former nurse, If one is in hospital for an operation, then they are in the right place for replacement blood. Whether the astrology bit is true or not, she shouldn't be scaremongering.
Even JW's have operations, their scientists have developed non-blood substitutes for transfusions, and they work well, in fact many of us may have already benefitted from the JW research.
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Post by Francis on Dec 4, 2009 10:36:52 GMT -1
I don't see any conflict between astrology as a system I didn't mean to give the impression I thought there was any conflict between the two! I do believe though that whilst both may be able to inform on the great majority of the whole set of human experience, they each have different subsets of human experience that they are either more amenable to or more appropriate for. Are you systematic in your choosing of one over the other for a given circumstance? Sorry to bang on again about the urban/rural thing - I just feel the difference to be more substantial and profound than most folk do. I see it as an attitude/foundation of mind, not necessarily a geographic location of dwelling. Obviously it's not as polarised as I lazily sometimes seem to imply - and certainly in no way directed at you - but I firmly believe there are mutually exclusive subsets of human experience simply not available to those whose mindset resides towards either end of the spectrum.
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Post by megli on Dec 4, 2009 11:32:44 GMT -1
No, I quite agree---I didn't mean to be touchy! yes, I agree about the attitude of mind: personally I feel that having being brought up very rurally with animals and woods literally out the back door is the most important factor in my orientation towards life, for all that I now life in a city (which i hate). I'm not systematic; the kinds of knowledge are different, but I suppose I find astrology psychological and inward, and to do with timings. I had my Saturn Return over most of this year and last, which is supposed to be a period of finally leaving 'childhood' and attaining a kind of fixity which serves as a foundation for the next thirty years; as a result, the ego often tries to hang onto things thant really need to be let go, and if it has identified itself with things which are not 'right' for the development of the Self (in jung's terms), then those elements will usually be ruthlessly broken down during the Saturn Return. It's usually a time of important achievement and uncomfortable change combined---many people get married or have their first child during it. I wrote my first book, which in true Saturnian style was like wading through treacle, got my first academic job, left my partner, left the place where I'd lived for a decade, and went to the funerals of both my remaining grandparents, amongst those of others. Dark and dramatic and gruelling! But I had a pretty good idea what to expect.
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Post by Adam on Dec 4, 2009 14:12:30 GMT -1
I'm not systematic; the kinds of knowledge are different, but I suppose I find astrology psychological and inward, and to do with timings. Set my mind a chunterin'. Never a good thing... I was thinking that this psychological perspective is quite a modern, post-jungian thing. Most peeps before, as I understand it, and indeed most I come across now, are using it to "get an edge" if you like... the propitious time to do something, or the times best not to... What really makes it more interesting than that though to me, is the way in which astrology combines both a full cosmology and a reflection in that of social and natural order... as above so below I guess... from the ordering of the planets and their associations through to God, Angels, Popes, Kinds, and all the subsequent classes. Reminded me of this www.metmuseum.org/explore/oracle/soafBowl.htmlSo the idea of representing the natural and social order in some form of representational system or model, and then using that for divination, could be common to people the world over... the I Ching is a model of the forces believed to come together to create the manifest universe (I actually quite like the I Ching... I get that feel of chatting to an old friend) and I suspect, though no scholar, that these cosmological relationships were also patterned into the social hierarchy in some way. I suspect augury from natural phenomena doesn't deviate too far from this pattern, since it (by definition) takes place in context of and in reference to the landscape and season. And listening to some of the remnants of old stories, and wondering about how those stories were told in days before, I suspect that they wove people, animals, landscapes and seasons into what megli called a total and totalising system representing all natural and human interaction and relationship. So that system itself becomes the direct manifestation of revelation through divination I'm burbling now... too early for a whisky?
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Post by dreamguardian on Jan 5, 2011 10:57:09 GMT -1
Just bumping this thread again as astrology has re-entered my thoughts after enjoying Prof Brian Cox astronomy on BBC2 at the mo. I still really struggle with the concept and so I've re-read Megli's above posts to gain a better insight.
Am I correct in that:
It would appear to be more reliant on the interpretor of the charts than being an exact science that can be learnt by anyone?
Although horoscopes give the impression that it is causal, it's important to remove the idea that it is so ie. The moon, saturn and venus are plotted here so this & that will happen?
Can't quite justify the pennies for your book just yet magli but I will gonna copy!
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Post by potia on Jan 5, 2011 13:32:29 GMT -1
Just bumping this thread again as astrology has re-entered my thoughts after enjoying Prof Brian Cox astronomy on BBC2 at the mo. I still really struggle with the concept and so I've re-read Megli's above posts to gain a better insight. Am I correct in that: It would appear to be more reliant on the interpretor of the charts than being an exact science that can be learnt by anyone? Although horoscopes give the impression that it is causal, it's important to remove the idea that it is so ie. The moon, saturn and venus are plotted here so this & that will happen? Can't quite justify the pennies for your book just yet magli but I will gonna copy! There is an asepct of astrology that is very much reliant on the interpretor yes although anyone can learn to cast a chart. I guess it's a bit like gardening in a way. In theory anyone can learn to plant stuff and get things to grow. Anyone can learn that some plants grow better in certain types of soil or with certain other plants but not everyone has an eye for the overall effect of the garden. I used to be able to cast astrology charta but I have never been able to interpret them. My mum on the other hand has problems casting charts and relies on software these days but is amazing at interpreting them.
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Post by megli on Jan 5, 2011 14:27:36 GMT -1
It's like learning a language and being adept at understanding metaphor---or being able to think symbolically and metaphorically. But there is a core of knowledge that simply has to be learned. It's a combination of intuition and knowledge.
For example, you might have a 'difficult' aspect between mercury and pluto in your chart. My *knowledge* of astrology tells me that this is likely to suggest a capacity for penetrating thought, fierce, ruthless insight, and a scalpel-like articulacy, interested in peering beneath the harmonious surface of life and articulating the sordid or repressed depths. My *intuition* thinks of Lisbeth thingy in the Girl with a Dragon Tattoo books and of evil queen Jadis's 'Killing Word' in C. S. Lewis's 'The Magician's Nephew', which are *symbolic* ways of capturing the tonality of Mercury~Pluto. You can learn the knowledge; the intuitive symbols and associations come from familiarity.
Similarly, anyone can learn the hermeneutic, literary-critical skills to close-read a poem---it's not some kind of 'psychic' talent, it's something you LEARN rationally---but the more you read and know the deeper your reading will be, and no two critics' readings will be wholly identical. Also, some people just are more articulate and intuitive than others, and their readings will be more than superficial. The great A D Nuttall (who taught me) interpreted Shakespeare better than anyone else I've ever read, and certainly better than the A-level essays on 'King Lear' I'm currently reading----but not because he was some kind of psychic or visionary intuitive. He was just both incredibly clever and very, very well-read and trained as a literary critic.
Does that make sense?
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Post by dreamguardian on Jan 5, 2011 14:56:41 GMT -1
Yes, thank you and more so than before.
I think that I have associated it with tarot readings, new age crystal healing and pyschics etc, therefore lumping it with dream dictionaries and mumbo jumbo nonsense.
The key, therefore is to source a good astrloger (as in your eloquent description). I wouldn't want to part with my hard earned cash on a fake or con artist.
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Post by megli on Jan 5, 2011 15:12:40 GMT -1
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Post by dreamguardian on Jan 5, 2011 15:19:51 GMT -1
I shall pm you in a mo
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