(XII) HISTORY - 21ST CENTURY ASTROLOGY

Since Aristotle's time it has been commonplace to poke fun at representations of myth, which are labelled as products of an infantile or archaic humanity in the name of rationalist, long-winded thinking -- such is the attitude as late even as Hegel and the Positivists at the end of the 19th century -- as if myth did not itself proceed from an ordered coherence, which often leaves far behind it the rickety constructions of modern thought. It is commonly believed that mythic representations are no more than the stutterings of thought. Quite to the contrary: it was after long periods of sterile debate and exegesis that the human spirit, fatigued of "giving reasons," forged mythical thought.

Astrology developed as a philosophical conception within the universe of the Stoics, and possibly of the first Pythagoreans, as well. It was the inheritor of the logos as well as of the mythos. Its object has never been the specific significations of astrological operands and figures, but rather, the search by means of those significators of their underlying structures and archetypal forms, psychic-astral in nature, experienced directly and inwardly by consciousness. Specific contents derive from the framework which produces them, harmonizes them or gives them meaning. This is why there are no typologies in astrology, but rather archetypologies.

These operative structures, inscribed on the psyche and animated by the periodicity of the planetary cycles, render possible the formation of "transcendental" ideas and give birth to ideational, symbolic and mythical representations, usually repressed by reason, the organization of which remains only at the surface of discourse.