(XII) HISTORY - 21ST CENTURY ASTROLOGY

The principal argument of Origen concerns the impossibility for the mind of forming synthetic judgments, which is to say, of interpreting the chart, unless it be by an accumulation of dualistic combinations that fail to satisfy but are the only things accessible to analytical thought. What astrologer, for example, is really able to synthesize the entire range of implications present in a conjunction of Sun and Saturn in Leo in the Second House, with a square to Jupiter in Scorpio? Origen uses the term syncrasis to designate this "mixture of astral influences that appear in such and such schematics, the complete meaning of which they themselves [the astrologers] by their own admission cannot grasp." [59] 

A truely global comprehension of a partial configuration, and a fortiori of the totality of a natal chart, exceeds the capacity of astrology as much as of the faculties of mind themselves. Moreover, a natal configuration needs to be rooted in a personal problematic that keeps in mind the individual's social, cultural, familial and mental contexts in which he develops (even if one astracts from genetic and earth-based influences). This is why the astrological reading of human reality must remain an impractical ideal. Astrological knowledge, beyond the reach of the human mind, would in its fullness be only accessible to the "angels."

      The discovery of Uranus in the year in which the first Kritik of Kant appeared, of the asteriods beginning in the year 1800, then of Neptune and Pluto, destabilized the planetary model -- already twenty centuries old -- as well as the logic of rulership. The Seven of the Ancients broke apart and were replaced, first among English astrologers, with Planetaries numbering 8, 9 and finally 10 elements.

An abbott of Castelet mentions in 1681 as an "incontrovertible proof" against astrology, i.e. exactly 100 years before the discovery of Uranus, the probability of the existence of an infinite number of "invisible" planets after Saturn, and thus the possibility of being influenced by a whole host of factors that the astrologer is not even in a position to recognize: "Astrologers will claim that if in the space between Saturn and the center of the Earth there can exist an innumerable multitude of planets as large as Saturn, that rotate around the Sun as principal planets just like Saturn and Jupiter, they will also claim, I maintain, that if the possibility of this notion is accepted, it spells the end of astrology." [60] 

In point of fact the argument is nothing new: it is mentioned by Favorinus of Arles and taken up again at the beginning of the 8th book of the famous treatise by Pico della Mirandola, Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem [Arguments against divinatory astrology]. [61]