Message #33820

[Bianca]

At the beginning of the 16th century astrology and astronomy were still both tributaries of the rationalization proposed by Ptolemy.

In 1543 Copernicus reoriented the astronomical perspective of his contemporaries (and it is unfortunate that his recommendations for economics did not meet with the same fate). A veritable "astrological revolution" occurred in the same period with the publication, five years before the appearance of Copernicus' treatise, of the Astronomia magna of Paracelsus, but the work passed unnoticed.

Philippus Bombastus, who died two years earlier than his elder colleague, was the instigator of this renaissance through his development of the doctrine of the inner star with its sky or firmament at once visual and invisible [3] , the existence of interior myths within each person, and the impressio, produced in each person through planetary influxes, an inward mark of the presence of the stars, and no longer a sign or cause deriving from the visible, factual exterior world.

In the manner of Copernicus with heliocentrism, Paracelsus did not invent his model, but rather discovered it anew. It is not improbable that Christianity's first intellectuals were especially intent on the extirpation of pagan writings, Pythagorean and Hermetic ones particularly, which appear only in a few very altered traces in the Adversus of the Fathers of the Church. And, just as in the case of Copernican heliocentrism, the astrological concepts of Paracelsus did not separate themselves entirely from their roots in antiquity (e.g., the circular orbits of the planets with Copernicus, and medical astrology with Paracelsus). Hard to break free from the hold of models nearly two thousand years old!

    Astrology's function is to determine the structural laws of interiority. In its practical application in horoscopy it is a tool for the comprehension of lived experience; like the Yi King (I Ching), it infuses experience with consciousness. It does not give an immediate effect of a visionary or divinatory nature, in the first instance because the practitioner is in no position to evaluate with certainty the weight of extra-astrological factors (e.g., biological, socio-cultural, familial, professional, climatic, etc. etc.), but more importantly because astral incidence does not operate at the level of fact, of events, of the existentially concrete, but rather at the level of their interior substrate.

Astrology acts on the relationship between what is felt and what is manifested. This is why a psycho-mental interpretation and a psychological explanation do not give a sufficient accounting of its nature. The notion of the pre-conscious awareness [impressional] liberates astrology from its servitude to an exterior psychology, be it psychoanalytic, behaviorist, phenomenological, gestaltist, existentalist or reflexologic. It is time for astrology to forge its own concepts.