Über die Sternzeichen

"Cosmos and Psyche" von Richard Tarnas

"The Geometry of Meaning" von Arthur M. Young

"The Reflexive Universe" von Arthur M. Young

Hier ein Auschnitt aus dem Essay "Astrology as Cosmology" von Young, der für die Astrologie als Grundlage einer neuen integrativen Wissenschaft plädiert:
"The duration of the life span fits perfectly with the periods of the planets, and if it does not afford a confirmation of their influence, at least it provides, as we said, a way to define their influence -- Uranus, with its period of 84 years, defining the longest cycle of change that can be encompassed within the life expectancy of a healthy person; Neptune, with double that period, correlating with the unconscious, and so on.

But it's time we stopped borrowing bits and pieces from this ancient "science" of astrology. I feel rather guilty, in fact, about this borrowing. Like a person who takes the limestone facing from the Great Pyramid to construct modern buildings, or columns from a Greek temple to erect a railroad station, I have borrowed from the zodiac the concepts for the construction of The Geometry of Meaning -- from the Table of Houses the concept of kinds of relationship not possible to consider in science, such as that to an equal and that to what is above oneself -- and I've borrowed from the planets for the definition of the powers which characterize the stages of process.

Because of the disrepute into which astrology has fallen in modern times, I omitted reference to the subject in my first books. I hoped to show the same conclusions from a candid appraisal of the sweep of evolution plus arguments from first principles.

On the other hand, when I do claim the authority of astrology I am told that the subject does not support my interpretations. The double bind reminds me of how Chinese artists in the past used to follow the manner of more ancient artists to lend prestige to their own work, while modern artists go out of their way to invent an "original" style. To add to the confusion we have parapsychologists following the protocol of science to gain credibility.

I think I understand the intelligent reader's hesitancy about astrology, and I share with my reader an even greater bias against religion -- at least insofar as the church has distorted Christ's teachings. On the other hand I want to share with my reader the disenchantment I have come to, by long study, with the credo of science, which I come increasingly to realize is at odds with its own findings.

Science has been the great venture of modern man, but I am deeply disappointed that it has stopped short of its goal. It has become political, adhering to a materialist dialectic. The cult of calibration and measurement has dispensed with consideration of first principles and produced tons of facts tied together with bits of fragile string. The consistency and clarity, even of classical determinism, has been lost and its blundering prejudice retained. The stimulating challenge of ESP is ignored and made ridiculous; even the nineteenth-century recognition that perception was only partially based on sensation, and had components of value and image carried over from earlier experience, is set aside in obeisance to a reductionism based on a physics long since obsolete.

Science, in short, is a motley of fragmented special disciplines, each encrusted with its own jargon and incomprehensible to its fellows, rallying under a common policy of objectivity -- valid enough as applied to method, but downright misleading when applied as it is and without justification to require that the world be exclusively objective and physical.

This despite the recognized fact that the fundamental particles are without identity and the photon, so ubiquitous in that it is the source of all changes in matter -- chemical, atomic, and otherwise -- is not recognized for its primary role, and is non-objective, impossible to observe.

When I then find that the most fundamental entity in physics, the quantum of action -- "more basic even," as A. Wheeler says, "than particles or fields of force or space and time themselves" -- is nonphysical, non-objective, should I remain silent? I can at least say so and leave the layman to draw his own conclusions.

And so I could leave it. But when it comes to constructing a cosmology based on the nonmaterial, and I find that the discredited astrology, the divine science of the ancients, is founded on the same vocabulary of elements that is the basis for the measure formulae of physics, I am, like John Dean,* impelled to turn state's evidence and expose the cover-up.

But there is no court of inquiry to hear the evidence.

It is only when the cosmology I have set up, based on scientific evidence, itself calls out for the importation of something of larger import than the ingredients of science per se, that I turn to astrology.

At this juncture I can no longer say as before, "Ignore the popular usage of astrology, ignore its employment by fortune tellers; consider only the remarkable vocabulary it uses." Why? Because I find it not a relic of ancient custom, a temple built to an unknown god, not even an occasional revelation such as inspired ancient prophets or modern-day persons who have seen flying saucers -- it is an ever-present influence as real as were the Greek gods to Ulysses. The arcs and transits of planets do precisely correlate to important events in my life.

Proof of this I cannot supply here -- for its province is not in the objective that can be calibrated and measured; but it can be verified by each person in his or her own life.

Nevertheless some statement of its scope and manner of working is available from Eric Schroeder, a close friend who like myself was converted to astrology in his forties and who worked with it almost to the exclusion of all other occupations until his death in 1971:
The proposition suggested for belief before entering upon the unfamiliar matters before us is threefold: that a special and (for lack of a better word) poetic symbolizing power pervades nature while evading or transcending (but not contradicting) the known laws of material behavior; that this power uses material and mental events as repositories or vehicles of diagram, and apparently of metaphysical or ontological diagram, in conformity with a sort of imaging which can be traced very far back in the religious or metaphysical concepts of mankind; and that, while astonishingly free with disguise, using here a beetle and there a bishop for the same symbolization, this power is rhetorical in method, relying much on formal predominance, on what might be called rhyming emphasis, and working on feeling.
-- Zodiac, An Analysis of Symbolic Degrees, preface, p. 10"