If we exclude the approximately 990 generations of pre-literate, astrologically aware humans from the ranks of astrological 'practitioner', as today's astrological historians tend to do because there's no written record for them to study, and include only the 110 or so literate generations, then one simple question needs to be asked. Exactly what was it that all those people were doing for the initial 90% of the time that astrologically-interested persons have been contributing to the development of human culture?
The short answer from the same historians is that they were generating ‘omens and portents’. Now it is true that the oldest material in the literate astrological record consists of aphorisms such as: ‘When Mars rises in the east at dawn, and the Moon is dark, the king should watch his back’. But come on! The so-called 'omen material' is just the first literate astrologers’ memory of what the 90% were doing. It's what was left when all was said and done; more akin, therefore, to a desiccated husk rather than the living kernel.
Gloria Steinem once quipped that we today call the entire body of human experience prior to the literate record ‘pre-history’ so that we don't have to study it. To distill 20,000 years of human astrological awareness down to two words is hardly an acceptable answer to my question. And yet it's entirely understandable, because a formidable barrier really does stand between us and our archaic ancestors - a consciousness divide of sorts. For our purposes here, let’s call it: the ‘Literacy Divide’. The invention of the Semitic alphabet in 1600 B.C.E., and its gradual but relentless dissemination, changed the paradigm of astrological consciousness by changing the paradigm of human consciousness.
For us the term ‘consciousness’ will mean: an individual’s, or a group’s, qualitative manner of being-in-the-world. Human consciousness and mass communications technologies co-evolve in a complex symbiosis, with technology determining the cultural matrix or environment of consciousness. When alphabetic literacy became the new environment, consciousness adjusted by adapting its form. You can find the supporting argument for this momentous change spelled out in great detail in Leonard Shlain’s The Alphabet Versus the Goddess (1992), and in David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous (1997).
If the 10% of us on this side of the Literacy Divide are a different kind of human being, and a different kind of astrologer, why should the the 90% on the earlier side’s manner of practice be of any interest to us? Because we today find ourselves standing at a second great divide: the Digital Divide; and the form of consciousness now emerging in response to the inclusive, electronic environment of the global techno-culture is more closely aligned with the original pre-literate form than with the more recent literate.
This is why techno-culture finds the indigenous world so fascinating; and if this structural congruence between the pre-literate and post-literate forms of human consciousness is news to you, perhaps you should visit (or re-visit) Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964), or Edmund Carpenter’s They Became What They Beheld (1970).
But here's an analogy that will help you put all this in context...
BACK TO THE FUTURE
Imagine for a moment that the collective consciousness of all the generations of astrological practitioners in the last 22,000 years – what we might call the ‘long body’ of astrological awareness - is a rambling old house. The main floor has many rooms, each furnished in the style of a recognizable historical period. These rooms represent all the diverse schools of 'Western' (or literate) astrology – from its beginning 2,200 years ago, right up to the present day.
The current residents of the main floor are well aware that their whole domicile sits on the foundation of an old stone cellar - which symbolizes astrology’s pre-Western, or pre-literate, origins. But they’re not really sure what’s down there because a profound perceptual difference separates the astrologers of the book from their archaic ancestors. Their literate conditioning is so deeply ingrained that they simply assume that their particular form of human consciousness, the literate form, has been a constant throughout astrology’s long history. If any of them even make the effort to peer down the dimly lit stairway, which they rarely do, all they see staring back at them are primitive reflections of their own selves – youthful, naive Western astrologers in face paint and feathers, if you will.
For exactly the same reason, it’s difficult for the current residents to appreciate the emerging post-Western paradigm of astrological practice, symbolized by a brand new second-story addition that’s still under construction. This unfortunate situation is further exacerbated by the fact that the house has a rather odd architectural detail. The stairway to the new upper-story addition doesn’t begin on the main floor, where one might expect it would, but in the cellar. So if anyone wishes to visit the new addition, they can only do so by first passing through the old cellar.
In other words: the only way to appreciate the emerging post-Western paradigm of astrological consciousness and practice is to understand its pre-Western ancestor. Why? Because the forms of consciousness associated with the old cellar and the new addition are more structurally congruent with each other than either is with the form that currently dominates the main floor.
Just as the Western tradition of astrological practice is an expression of the literate paradigm of human consciousness, the pre-Western practice was an expression of an earlier paradigm - the core feature of which was an instinctual at-one-ment with the natural world.
The First People were aware of their world and aware of each other, but we suspect that they were not self-aware, or self-conscious, in the individualistic way that we are today. We know, for example, that the pre-Classical Greeks did not experience their bodies as integrated units, nor themselves as the source of their own decisions; and that: “When the Homeric hero, after duly weighing his alternatives, comes to a final conclusion, he feels that his course is shaped by the gods.” (Bruno Snell,
The Discovery of the Mind.)
The community was the matrix of archaic thought, emotion, and consciousness — not the individual. Certainly there were unique human beings, with singular capabilities and talents. However, personal identity was not based on these distinguishing qualities. It was based on experiences of community. Prior to the Literacy Revolution, individuality in our modern sense, private point of view, and personal opinion simply did not exist. In the traditional language of the Tzutujil Maya, for example, there is no verb “to be.” So, the only way someone can say “I am” is to describe to whom, or to what, they belong.
The archaic at-one-ment translated into a cultural context that we'll term ‘shamanist’, meaning: constructed around the institution of shamanism. 22,000 years ago, when First Astrologer was already deeply in love with the Moon, the affair took place in the shadow of an unprecedented burst of shamanist creativity. 13,000 years earlier, cave artists had suddenly stopped drawing simple geometric shapes, and had started to produce more sophisticated animal and human figures. No one is quite sure what precipitated this change, or why First Shaman seems to have been the driving force behind it. But the discovery of psycho-integrative plants may have been an important contributing factor.
So it would seem that First Shaman was already there and waiting for First Astrologer to arrive; and that the two paths became intimately entwined early on. In Shamanism: The Neural Ecology of Healing and Consciousness, the anthropologist Michael Winkelman argues that the world-wide distribution of shamanism is not simply a result of cultural diffusion, but an indication that shamanic awareness is an adaptive biological response hard-wired into the human brain. Perhaps the same could be said for astrological awareness, since First Shaman may not have always been First Astrologer, but First Astrologer was always and everywhere First Shaman.
The mythical image of Chiron - the half human, half horse, king of the Centaurs - can help us appreciate the nature of this time-honored bond between astrology and shamanism. For the indigenous tribes of archaic Greece, as for shamanist peoples everywhere, humans were but one small evolutionary step beyond their animal origins. When asked what she had learned from a lifetime spent living amongst the orangutan population of Borneo, the paleo-anthropologist Birute Mary Galdikas replied: serenity. First Astrologer, and First Shaman both would have agreed, since the animal at-one-ment had to have been the prototype for the human at-one-ment.
Still half animal, First Astrologer was totally immersed in sensory experience. There is no reason to suspect that her or his senses reported anything significantly different to the archaic brain than ours do today; but the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter thinks that the archaic brain processed the report quite differently. No one sense dominated all others in the way that - because of literacy - the sense of sight does today. In Carpenter’s terminology, our senses today are ‘synchronized’ to sight, whereas First Astrologer’s were ‘harmonically orchestrated’. It is not exactly the same, but our closest equivalent to orchestration would probably be the sensory synesthesia that can sometimes occur under the influence of psycho-active agents.
Immersed in sensation, First Astrologer thought as all animals think: in images, impressions, sounds, and smells, rather than in the concepts and language-conditioned abstractions that we are accustomed to. When Venus rises as the morning star, astrologers today rarely take the time to enjoy the visual opportunity it presents, much less attend to any associated sounds, smells, or tactile impressions. For us it’s predominantly an intellectual exercise, mediated by an ephemeris, and filtered through habituated linguistic frames.
But First Astrologer did attend to the actual event; and then used the information gleaned from her or his bodily awareness to organize the First People’s experience as effectively as we today use the conceptual information we’re interested in to organize ours. For example: Mayan astrologers called Venus the 'Deer Star' - not only because of its gentle beauty; but also because at the times of day when Venus is visible, as either the morning or evening star, the deer are up and moving around.
First Astrologer’s neo-cortex - the thought and higher function area of the brain – was probably fully developed but she or he lived more consistently in the paleo-mammalian emotional and the reptilian instinctual centers. This preponderance of sensation and emotion is why the 17th century historian Giambattista Vico argued that the First People were more like passionate ‘poets’ than wise philosophers; and why First Astrologer’s emerging skills of pattern-awareness consisted more in ‘participation in’ rather than ‘observation of’. And because the reptilian brain is the seat of ritualistic behavior, First Astrologer channeled all this participatory sensuality and emotion into shamanist ritual rather than intellectual constructs.
WITH HALF OURSELVES IN THE SPIRIT-WORLD
There is another way that the image of Chiron can help us understand the psychology of First Astrologer. In the shamanist world-view, the Human-world communes with the Spirit-world through the Animal-world. So a creature half human and half animal is a being in intimate contact with with the Spirit-world. This is a dimension of human experience that is difficult for us today to appreciate, because everything that the First People attributed to ‘spirit, we attribute to ‘mind’ or ‘energy’.
For example: practitioners of Chi-Gung today think of ‘chi’ as a subtle form of energy. 5000 years ago, people believed that the same practices nourished the spirits of the body and made them happy. These two terms may not be so very different after all. The spirits were known through their effects. But we could say exactly the same for energy, because no one has ever seen ‘energy’ either.
Anthropologists call this spirited, energetic way of being-in-the-world: animism. As the term denotes, the ‘spirits’ were the animating principles of life, not airy citizens of some disembodied or ghostly realm. This kind of etherealization is our experience, not theirs, and another consequence of literacy. For example: our word ‘mystic’ comes from the Greek mystes, the term for initiates of the Eleusinian Mysteries.
We today associate the term with transcendent experience and ideas pointing away from the sensory world. For the Greeks, however, even as late as the Classical era, it was exactly the opposite. In Aristophanes’ play, The Frogs, the “mystical aura” is the odor of a burning torch. “It is this atmosphere, the sensuous quality of a nocturnal festival, that this word ‘mystical’ here evokes for the Athenian of the 5th century: his ‘mystical’ experience is a specific festive rite.” (Caroly Kerenyi, “The Mysteries of the Kabeiroi,” in The Mysteries: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, ed. Joseph Campbell.)
Owen Barfield calls this at-one, embodied, and communal way of being-in-the-world: ‘the Original Participation’. The form of astrological awareness and practice birthed by the OP remained remarkably stable for thousands and thousands of years; and then everything changed. Why?
THE LITERAL INTERPRETATION
The alphabet was invented by Semitic scribes in 1600 B.C.E., and carried to Greece by Phoenician traders in 800 B.C.E. Just three centuries later, Greek culture exploded in the flowering of intellectual creativity that it’s long been famous for.
The dissemination of alphabetic literacy fundamentally altered traditional patterns of human brain activity. Earlier forms of literate expression - such as the hieroglyphs native to dynastic Egyptian – tended to engage the holistic and imagistic capacities of the brain. The sequential nature of the alphabet, however, began to utilize the brain’s more linear proclivities. This significant change in brain function changed the form of human consciousness.
Alphabetic literacy undermined the archaic paradigm of human consciousness by conditioning a brand new paradigm. Martin Heidegger calls the defining characteristic of this new paradigm ‘the subject/object split’: a polarizing of human experience into a ‘subjective’ perceiving self and a perceived ‘objective’ reality. Learning to stand back from the letters on the page taught humans how to stand back from the rest of the world.
The alphabet transformed the practice of astrology as well, but not in the slow evolutionary way one might expect. The new form of practice appeared quite suddenly, as if something had jump-started it - and something definitely had! Traditional Egyptian astrology coming up from the south had collided head-on with the Greek alphabet, brought down from the north by Alexander the Great. The result was ‘Hellenistic' astrology, the world’s first literate form of astrological practice.
“Within the short span of a hundred years or so, the rather minimal legacy from Babylonia and Egypt was totally transformed, and an entirely new body of astrological doctrine came to light. This fervent period of intense astrological concentration resulted in a veritable cornucopia of new astrological concepts and practices. These included such basic matters as aspects, the concept of rulership, the meanings of the houses, transits to the natal chart, and synastry…. We can assert that Hellenistic astrology effectively constitutes the birth of Western astrology.” (Robert Schmidt, “The System of Hermes: A Report From Project Hindsight,” The Mountain Astrologer, June/July 2004, emphasis mine.)
In his manuscript entitled On The Mysteries, the Neoplatonist Iamblichus tells us that the astrologers who first translated the traditional Egyptian understanding into Greek were all trained in Athenian philosophy. The literacy-based education they received in the academies left in the wake of Alexander’s conquests dramatically transformed the way these astrologers thought, languaged, and practiced their ancient art. The Greek alphabet began the destruction of the archaic ritual, and laid the foundation for the prototypical modern astrologer: the astrologer of the book.
Today the subject/object split has become so pervasive, and its psychology so deeply ingrained, that we tend to equate it with consciousness itself. The phenomenologist Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) argued that it’s no longer possible for anyone educated in the Western manner to think in any other way. And since most contemporary practitioners of Jyotish (Vedic astrology) have also been ‘educated in the Western manner’, the literate paradigm is now firmly entrenched in this and most other forms of Eastern practice as well. Vedic techniques may have the thousands of years of undisrupted continuity that Western astrology sorely lacks; but it's not accurate to say the same for the consciousness of its practitioners.
When we think objectively we formulate concepts and create representational systems. In other words: we re-present our experience to ourselves in an orchestrated construct of ideas, and then assemble those ideas into ‘systems’: conceptual integrations of specific parts into functional wholes. We think conceptually and systematically about the physical world when, for example, we propose a scientific hypothesis. We conceptualize or systematize meta-physically when we devise esoteric, philosophical, or astrological explanations of the world, or when we articulate psychological typologies.
The content of physical and meta-physical systems may differ profoundly; but the objectifying manner in which each is thought is exactly the same. Thus when we today think astrologically, we do so by fashioning objective models of reality. Whether we’re presenting a portrait of a client, a profile of a business, or making generalized predictions for the coming year, we all think, language, and practice our astrology in the manner determined by the subject/object split.
Whenever I discuss the psychology of literate practice with other astrologers, the most common reaction I get is: well, what else is there? As long as we stay within the literate paradigm, there is nothing else. And if our history were confined to the literate paradigm, there would be nothing else. But as we’ve already glimpsed, there’s so much more to our past than we currently understand or appreciate!
The Literacy Revolution transformed the practice of astrology by transforming the astrologers themselves. ‘Homo sapiens’ became ‘Homo literatus’. This remarkable mutation would be of no more than historical interest if it were not for the fact that the Digital Revolution is right now changing us as profoundly as the Literacy Revolution changed our ancestors. ‘Homo literatus’ may still not get it; but she or he has already become ‘Homo technologicus’.
Information technologies functionally extend the human brain, and interact with its plasticity, in ways that reconfigure both personal and collective consciousness. Exactly as the Literacy Revolution was responsible for the demise of the archaic paradigm, the technology of the Digital Revolution is, right now, undermining the literate paradigm.
"The computer and the Internet will once again reconfigure the brains of those that use them. Typing is a two-handed activity that requires input from both sides of the brain. Writing requires only the dominant hand. The use of a mouse by the right hand necessitates the activation of right-hemispheric visual-spatial skills. The World Wide Web and the Internet are not linear, they are holistic. All ancient deities associated with webs and nets were goddesses. Many of the processes we use to operate a computer are inherently feminine." (Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess.)
The subject/object split is rapidly breaking down because the perceptually-entangled nature of our digital environment no longer supports it. Philosophy is completed; and science is being forced to move beyond objective thinking in order to deal with the paradoxes of quantum reality. Teachers are stretched beyond their resources dealing with students who read poorly, can barely write a coherent sentence, and could care less. The sequential, in-depth thinking characteristic of literacy is giving way to multi-dimensional, associative hyper-linking. In a New York Times op-ed, the humorist Garrison Keillor observed that young minds today range across the info-sphere: “like a hummingbird in an endless meadow of flowers.”
Many today see nothing but disaster in literacy’s awkward demise. But not everyone applauded literacy’s debut either! Socrates, for example, feared that the written word would stifle his students’ ability to internalize his oral teachings. So given the radical implications of the Digital Revolution, might not a new understanding of astrological practice be called for once again – a post-literate understanding that’s as different from the literate as the literate was from the original pre-literate?
It's becoming increasingly clear that, for all its gifts, the psychology of the split is directly responsible for our mushrooming ecological crisis, our disconnected commodification of the natural world, and our societal sanctioning of predatory capitalism. And now it's just as clear that there will be increasingly serious consequences if we don’t re-learn to experience our selves and our world as a unified field.
This doesn’t mean that we have to abandon our hard-won ability to think objectively; but that we train ourselves to step in or out of the split at will. Ever since his death in 1977, philosophers in the West have been discussing Heidegger’s urgent call to ‘overcome’ the split by learning to think without objectifying.
But learning to do this requires a practical vehicle; and few have comprehended how to actually do this for lack of an appropriate one. The practice of astrology, I believe, is a natural! Because it was done in a unified way once before, why couldn't we use it to learn how to practice this way way again?
Therefore, to antidote the toxic side effects of the split the digital astrologer thinks, languages, and practices in a way that's consciously designed to re-member the unconscious at-one-ment of the Original Participation. Barfield calls such an intentionally undertaken effort at reunification: ‘the Final Participation’. This is more a matter of new form rather than new content. As our own history demonstrates, any new form of practice uses the form it’s replacing as it’s content. Just as the literate form employed the archaic practice, the digital form uses the literate practice as its content.
A new form of practice means a new way of encoding and communicating astrological information. This is why the emergence of experiential astrology in the same 30 years has been so important and so prescient. And because we still have such an unconscious and vested interest in our accustomed literate forms, the reason why it's also been so very misunderstood.
In response to a question posed to him personally as to why humans always seem to resist new paradigms, the neuroscientist Karl Pribram pointed out that survival requires that we protect our accustomed operational frames. But then, in a sort of ‘let-him-who-has-eyes-see’ aside, he adapted a quotation from the physicist Max Planck: “No one convinces anybody of a new paradigm,” he said. “The old generation dies, and the new generation takes over.”
The classical Greeks believed that philosophy, science, and the literate arts were all a gift from Apollo, god of the sun. As their cultural brilliance intensified, the practice of astrology paled - like a planet approaching conjunction to the sun. According to traditional Western astrologers, such a planet was said to be ‘disappearing in the beams of the sun’.
Obscured by the bright lights of the literate paradigm, Western astrology spent 2000 years trying to adapt itself to alphabetically mediated experience and the psychology of the split; but the results have been marginal at best. No matter how carefully we try to package our practice in a way that appeals to the literate intellect, we cannot get past the objectifying bias of the split.
There is another traditional phrase that astrologers sometimes use to describe how a planet becomes visible again as it leaves conjunction to the sun. I’ve chosen this phrase for my blog title because it so concisely sums up astrology’s current position, and the unprecedented opportunity the Digital Revolution is now presenting its practitioners.
Liberated from the objectifying pressures of philosophy, and from any lingering need to prove itself a science, the astrology of the Final Participation – a practice that's neo-shamanic in consciousness, ritual in form, digital in environment, co-creational in execution, and intentionally at-one - is already ‘emerging from the beams of the sun’.
