Hungry ghosts - a ha-penny's worth. (Occult executive summary follows for non-"initiates").

The "hungry ghosts" of Buddhism are souls of people trapped on the astral plane as a result of having created for themselves an astral body - and only an astral body. They can reasonably be called "hungry" because the astral body is a crystallization of the capacity to desire things in life, and in accordance with occult laws, the greater the desiring, the more resources available for the formation of the astral body. But once dispossessed of the corporeal body, there is no way to satisfy those desires from a disincarnated state. Thus the ceremony of dedicating meals to them is an implicit acknowledgement that we the living are cognizant of their pitiable condition.

In my view, tho, in eating as in dying, the focus should be on the living, not on the departed, so we may best help ourselves while still we are able. (And while the grand infantilization of developed societies, a large-scale enterprise focussed on promoting desire, has not debiltated beyond retrieval everyone's capacity to reason). The Gospel narratives about Jesus seem to be full of metaphors which contrast food and eating on one hand, with desire on the other.

Well, yes. You can get stuck on the astrals if you've not been careful.

The Leadbeater version of the Theosophic myth says that we each put down this long thread of successively heavier & heavier bodies, from some unknowable great beyond, until a hard landing on the distant planet is achieved with the physical.

At death there is blast-off. The first stage blows up & remains on the launching pad while the second, or astral, is propelled into the atmosphere. But sometimes instead of successful orbital insertion, the dang thing just flies around like an out of control 4th of July skyrocket. When this happens, sometimes the only solution is a giant flyswatter. Better that than letting it run into tall buildings & kill people.

In my view, tho, in eating as in dying, the focus should be on the living, not on the departed, so we may best help ourselves while still we are able.

The focus is always on those who need help, because if you don't they're just going to sit there until you do. This is why cops give tickets for loitering.

Sorry, I just couldn't resist.

Dave

[quoteThe "hungry ghosts" of Buddhism are souls of people trapped on the astral plane as a result of having created for themselves an astral body - and only an astral body. [/quote]

Human beings have astral bodies too. The way I'd put it about the above quote made by Coder is that their consciousness is focused/trapped on the lower astral plane, as our human focus is predominantly on the physical/material plane though we're capable of raising our conciousness to higher realms. Those entities do have the mental body, however twisted and murky, as the cause of their ending up there is a result of misconceptions(the mental body--- thoughts/beliefs preceed emotions). They are also part of the Source/ the universe/ All-That-Is/God or whatever you name it, and are capable of moving onto a higher sphere.

Hi Mark,

You?ve homed in on what is perhaps the central problem that the divinatory perspective leaves us with, namely, it seems as if it would open the gates for an ?anything goes? approach where not only does it not matter which system the astrologer follows, but ? taken to its extreme - it might not matter whether they follow any system at all.

The ?anything goes? thing just doesn?t seem to work though. It seems that we all find it necessary to spend time honing our technique ? even though there are different techniques which seem to give more or less equally good results.

It?s perhaps worth quoting Geoffrey Cornelius?s response when I raised this with him:

Symbolic perception appears to me to be a natural human faculty, or faculty of mind; and all the technical superstructures that then are built up around it advance that perception not one inch. It?s like saying, ?how can you improve your sight?? One sees, and everything we do around that might complicate the act of seeing. It?s like consciousness itself ? there can be no technique of that. Of course we then, for ourselves, articulate our understanding ? because we have to ? and that is where a model of what we do builds up, and one builds up one?s technique and one?s theories.

But astrology isn?t, fundamentally, a technical problem. I know that?s a very radical position. When techniques are employed in astrology and something becomes illuminated, one has found a way of giving a vessel to something that is already there; but this ?something that is already there? ? it?s that that is required, and any amount of techniques aren?t the same as that. So there is, then, the awareness of the astrologer of this very thing, when the astrologer is using their technique, and that is required. So I?m not saying ?remove all technique?, because technique is a human construct; it would be like saying, ?don?t be human any more, just be pure mind?. You live in circumstances, and the circumstances produce the things that you do, and you articulate yourself in that circumstance. The technique is an articulation of yourself in some way.

In fact, all the technical structure of astrology ? doing progressions, organising things ? could be better seen as a ritual form than as a technical form. So I read the sixth house as ritual, a craft, rather than in the modern sense of ?a means to an end?. So when one asks ?what is the correct ritual I should use in a particular circumstance?, the answer is, ?whatever seems to you to be the right thing to do?.

When one studies the working of astrologers and astrology, one sees that the technique cannot answer for it. It is what the astrologer is doing ? which they then articulate through their technique ? which is the key. So I don?t make the separation.

In my view, a fall occurs in astrology where the technique becomes seen as the carrier of the truth of whatever astrology is; it?s the other way round.

I?ve got a particular problem with all of these things, because even saying that isn?t appropriate all the time - I don?t teach basic classes in astrology and say this! I teach classes and say, ?You do your progressions, do this, this, and then you will achieve this result?. I say that, even though it isn?t the ultimate truth of the thing; it is the necessary thing to say in those circumstances.

Cheers,
Garry

Hello Garry,

Thanks for your reply and the Geoffrey Cornelius exert. What he is saying makes a lot of sense to me. It reminds me of a Buddhist Sutta where the Buddha describes his teachings as a raft to cross a stream. Once we have crossed the stream we need to leave the raft behind and not carry it on our backs.

No approach to astrology has a monopoly of the truth. It is more helpful to see them as vehicles or tools to assist the astrologer to reach the moment where their consciousness can creatively connect with the signs and symbols presenting themselves. For me the chosen system is traditional. However, for someone else Uranian astrology may be a system that works better for them.

It seems this approach brings astrology very close to a religion. I see religious traditions operating like this too. A person chooses a particular spiritual tradition but it is only a vehicle to the truth not the truth in itself. Unfortunately, in astrology and religion people tend to cling to their chosen approach as the true, authentic path. Its a confusion of ends and means as I see it.

I agree about the necessity of having rules to work with. Without that element of focus it seems the magic cannot work. Astrology is also arguably different from other divinatory systems due to the precise timing it can sometimes offer. Although, I know there are Tarot techniques that try to do this they are far less precise than what astrology offers. However, the sense of a consulatation/reading being a ritual is something better preserved in Tarot and I Ching than astrology.

I don't know if you have read Colin Wilson's book 'The Occult' but he comes up with a very interesting concept he describes as 'lunar knowledge systems'. He applies this to divinatory systems like the I Ching, Tarot , Astrology etc as well as spiritual teachings such as the Egyptian and Tibetan books of the Dead. He contrasts this to 'solar knowledge' which we could typify as empirical scientific knowlege According to Wilson lunar knowledge systems have their own internally consistent 'rules' but do not work on the same basis as solar knowledge. An example might be palmistry. Its harder to explain this through Jung's theory of synchronicity (unlike the above systems) but it conforms well to Wilson's model of a lunar knowledge system. Unfortunately, Wilson never develops the idea much but I think it has a lot of potential.

Mark

Buddha describes his teachings as a raft to cross a stream. Once we have crossed the stream we need to leave the raft behind and not carry it on our backs.

Or like the Wittgenstein's 'Tractatus' describing itself as a ladder that one must throw away once one has ascended it (i.e. reached the last page). And the problem with tautologies as reasons is that anything follows from them.

The element I see missing from the Cornelius quotation is that of meaning. It's as if you were to take a native of say London and made him a spectator at a voodoo ritual and said when you get back home see if you can raise a hex. Well, the Londoner is going to see the trance state, the dancing, the despatched chicken. But somehow we don't expect our Londoner to be able to get the right effect back home simply by repeating the actions s/he saw, and even if the ritual was enacted perfectly.

So we can say that what makes the voodoo "work" is in the network of meanings surrounding the acts. This network does not have to be an extensive social or communal one; indeed the shaman would rather you weren't looking over his shoulder. But equally we have to allow the meanings in the activity of shamanism are not private - they must be communicated at least to the sorcerer's apprentice.

Now it seems when it comes to "meaning", the astrological community (to indulge the debased c-word) interprets this in a somewhat narrow, phenomenological, sense. As if to distinguish itself from "meaning" as used by (physical) scientists and (linguistic) philosophers in the post-logical positivist epoch, and as if it needs to create a self-conscious identity for itself apart from that social grouping, which treats astrology as marginalized.

But while the meanings of shamanism remain obscure, the meanings of activities in the wider cultures they occupy have been studied extensively, and the work of Levi-Strauss shows that the meaning of activities and rituals in so-called primitive peoples is mapped to extensive networks of myths. So to ask them why they are performing some activity like hunting in the way they are, is likely to receive a response in terms along the lines of: well, you see there was this jaguar once, and he had a spat with a vulture in which... At which point an educated mind in the developed world starts to wonder how it is possible that anyone could conceive that anthropomorphized jaguars and vultures (in the myths they talk if not walk like real people ) could possibly be a justification of a particular way of hunting.

It seems the program to locate astrology as divination is in much the same position. Astrology "works" as effectively for its practioners as does hunting in the rain forest to those who do it. But to the scientistic mind it doesn't work well enough (as Big Science), and to boot seems to be justified with as bizarre logic and comparably bizarre ontologies. Yet to explain the continued existence of both astrology and hunting (and shamanism) in terms of rites and rituals is to be peering out of the frying pan of scientism and wondering if the fire of religion might not be a better place to be.

In the week that saw the death of Jean Baudrillard, I wonder if it might not be better to locate astrology in the broad context of myth - properly understood as the product of an innate faculty of mind, and as a way of mediating between the ineffable complexity of everyday life and the need to interpret it as containing some sort of regularity in it. Apart from what some might feel about modern astrology being a simulation of the real thing , it does seem to me that there is a dearth of understanding of the century or so of work that has been produced in Europe, and in which both Levi-Strauss and Baudrillard participated, on the social use of signs and symbols, and which might form the basis of an acceptable social rationale for astrology. (Tho judging by the amount of hack undergraduate-type barely comprehensible summaries of continental sociological thought I have encountered on the internet, I for one won't be holding my breath).

Increasingly abstract.

Hi Coder. About this myth business...

On p.11 of the Modern Science paper I quote Vaihinger:

?It must be remembered that the object of the world of ideas as a whole is not the portrayal of reality ? this would be an utterly impossible task ? but rather to provide us with an instrument for finding our way about more easily in this world.?

It seems to me that myth could fit in quite neatly here, if we take myth as being a story about the world that one takes on and acts 'as if' it is true.

If we started describing astrology as a myth, sceptics everywhere would no doubt take this in the sense of 'something which isn't true'. But if it's taken in the sense of 'something which becomes useful - and to that extent true - when it is believed in', then I think it's a good way of characterising our craft. As Mark put it a few posts back, there is a leap of faith involved.

To be frank, whenever I see a new astrology book that has "myth" anywhere in it, I just want to flee. As a bookseller, I have in the past & probably will in the future, avoided such books. Every now & then I am pleasantly surprised to find I was wrong.

Myth is a Pandora's Box (itself a myth) into which we can put anything & out of which we can take anything. If we use a main-line myth - Jupiter throwing thunderbolts, for example - then we have probably not said anything new. If we use some new super-wonderful analysis of a myth - say, the archery contest where Venus was given the apple - then we risk talking only to ourselvers, or to our personal fan club.

Abstract writing is the hardest writing I ever tried. Most of my attempts result in gibberish. In my view, the solution for this & all Neptunian afflictions, such as myth, is more Saturn.

Dave

PS: We're not the pseudo-scientists, by the way. Astronomy is, by any fair definition, drenched in pseudo. As I get around to it, I want to post at Skyscript my analysis of three great astronomical myths. And yes, you know every one of them. The refutation of two of them is so simple a schoolboy could do it.

It occurs to me that although we are using the term'divinatory astrology' we may have quite different interpretations of what we mean by this.

Like Dave I am rather uncomfortable describing the practice of astrology as simply working with myths. This seems a very safe ,academically respectable way to place astrology in terms of post-modern philosophy and sociology. I have not read Patrick Curry's book 'Astrology, Science and Culture' but I understand his view of divinatory astrology comes very close to this. It is noteable Curry doesn't actually practice astrology.

I might go along with the argument that different astrological traditions/techniques all could be described as 'myths' or simply a paradigm we choose to work with. However, the real issue is if that is all that is happening in astrology?

I would suggest it is not. Rather in an effective consultation we are doing nothing less than communicating with the divine. That is undeniably an old fashioned view and more difficult for academics like Curry to accept. How you interpret 'communicating with the divine' will depend on your spiritual world view. Many traditional authorities felt they were coming closer to God in a monotheistic sense. For ancient Greek astrologers like Vettius Valens to be able to be effective astrologers we needed the guidance of our guardian spirit or 'daimon'. Perhaps this is too way out for some 21st century academics but that is possibly more a comment on the materialist assumptions of our society than the intrinsic worth of this traditional idea of divination.

I think going down the mythic/post-modernist approach exclusively marks a total retreat from the spiritual roots of astrology. Without that basis it will perish in the sterile intellectualism and materialism of modern western philosophy.

Hi Garry, Dave & all,

I appreciate your article, but it does puzzle me as to why modern science needs to validate astrology when astrology was based upon the sciences, that which was observed in the natural world.

What does this mean? That scientists need to revisit the areas of synthesis and integration instead of focusing on dividing, and that astrologers need to study the various branches of science, as they once did?

"Increasingly abstract."

I was pondering this earlier and somehow ended up on the path of "irrational".

Mathematics has both it's rational and irrational numbers, and numbers are attributed to many things - both seen and unseen.
Astrologers having been (some still are) mathematicians who sat quite comfortably in the fields of both the rational and irrational ... perfectly natural.

But it did lead to thinking about how once what was aster-ology has become more focused on the inner sphere of planet-ology and asteroid-ology and why this lateral proliferation, which many find confusing - confusion also in some circles considered irrational.

Pi's both a constant and irrational ... so "irrational" may also be considered a description for the apparent circular passage of the sun.

But the sun's apparent motion is in reality the manifestation of an attachment to the physical, Earth, therefore it's Earth passage that's "irrational".

It seems that which is real has become a growing subset underlying artful and artificial constructs, which appear to have proliferated during this Age of Pisces ... the seed planted a couple of thousand years ago.

With all this I wonder whether there also hasn't been some confusion in terminology between "signs" and "sines" (the trigonometric functions).

Positions have and often are adopted opposing all that which may be considered as "irrational" because it runs contrary to empirical rule, such as opposing the fact that Earth is in motion as evidenced by the equinoctial point regressing through the Zodiac which is contrary to aspirations of succession.

And that as a result, due to certain prevailing conditions, this has manifested by way of misaligning the stars so that they've been confused and attached to a function of an earth angle, sine.

This artificially constructing the appearance via another medium (computers) that the earth-point (equinoctial point/vernal crossing) drags the constellations around with it, which it doesn't.

This attachment reveals a certain attachment of and to the past, but it also may mask earth-bound attachments of other kinds that have lost their way (the crossing has been occuring in Pisces, afterall).

This perhaps giving rise to the Tropical Zodiac ... instead of being the tropical earth-angle of the seasonal calendar, which I think up until the conflation of the vernal crossing's alignment in the last days of Aries, was considered a wandering seasonal calendar and a crossing which was used to measure the age & season upon earth.

The Sun's ingress into Aries appearing to be a point from which to judge the Sacred (religious) calendar, the Sun's Ascension, and the point from which the actual season (vernal crossing) was measured in relation to.

This year the Sun's ingress into Aries occurs on 14 April, a few days after Easter (think they're still to reach agreement on the Moon) and also marks Hindu celebration of Mesha/Vishnu.

It simply occurs to me that if seeking to bridge the gap with science, then we also need to continue reviewing ... so much information is in the process of being rediscovered, interpreted etc.

In aligning what we see these days on screen (what we're seeing being the result of human input, humans not being infallible) with what's actually occurring in the heavens above in visible reality, ie using sidereal, doesn't necessitate a transition to Vedic technique etc ... although being versed in other systems can help expand the knowledge bank. But it does align us with a celestial reality visible and apparent ... which the ancients also observed.

When aligning back with sidereal positions (the relatively real positions of planets as aligned against the back drop of stars and reduced to the longitude of the ecliptic), the Saturn-Jupiter conjunction occurs at around 6 degrees Capricorn in 2020.

These 20 year conjunctions (the lesser conjunctions) continue for an extended time before really transitioning to air in a couple of hundred years ... at an overall level, we're entering a cycle of mindful responsibility concerning Earth (Capricorn) and how we conceive of administrating its natural resources.

This protracted earth period followed by transition to air, and issues concerning air, when the Saturn-Jupiter conjunctions transition in a couple of hundred years into air (Libra), which is accompanied by the equinoctial point/earth point's transition into air (Aquarius).

The direction we implement for administrating and managing natures resources in the next 15 years I think will have a direct impact on how freely society breaths and circulates in a couple of hundred years time. Another to observe is usually the Mars-Saturn conjunction in Cancer, occurring every 30 years ... next one in 2036 (correlates with mini ice-age mentioned in another thread).

If we cease to take our alignments from the fixed sphere, then it seems almost akin to bringing earth to a standstill.

If motion contrary to the apparent order of the Sun is considered "irrational", then the Moon's passage at certain times in relation to the point where the Sun rises may also be considered as 'irrational', and the rotation of Venus which is contrary to the rotation of the other planets may also be considered 'irrational' ... and any other planet which turns retrograde may be considered "irrational" too, intensifying real experiences, heightened sensory abilities, in physical reality.

Interpretively ... peace (Venus) of mind (Moon-Mercury) in the physical (Earth) is "irrational" - perhaps, but it's also real and attainable.

The pilgrimage back through the month of Pisces in the World Year which has taken place over the last couple of thousand years seems to have foreshadowed a loss/occultation of these initial principles, as the function of this earth angle became conflated with other things.

The divergence in paths from the "knot" that binds the two strings being a divergence between one path of "ascension" (upwards fish) vs the lateral expansion and literalisation via a longitudinal focus (the horizontal fish).

This reduction to the horizontal accompanied by a lateral expansion bringing into an awareness an abundance of other bodies (eg. asteroids and the like), a reduction from aster-ology to planet-ology and what would seem to be something of a lateral expansion also of disincarnates that have been spoken of here.

As for modern science validating astrology, for all its modern day advances, as far as I'm aware science still does not know the origin or cause for creation of the Moon (there's theories) ... it still grapples with the lunar dimension ... but it is aware of some of its properties.

And there's divisions within the sciences just as there's divisions within astrology ... we've all become quite good at drawing lines of division.

While there's divisions at the cross quarters this simply seems to indicate it's going to take a while before full awareness leading to reconciliation between opposing parties kicks in.

Certain areas of science point a finger at cellular memory being a pseudoscience, however all cells contain hereditary information, which in itself is "memory".

Many contradictions seem to involve manipulating semantics in such a way that overlooks the obvious.

But I actually think developments occurring in science are corroborating astrological truths.

For example, astrology as a study of the transmission of light it may be of interest concerning psychic phenomena that red blood cells collect light and magnetic information, integrate it in real time, and report it to the pineal and other parts of the brain - centrally important to the real-time integration of sensory and cognitive data, such as form, vision and sound.

And neural cells can be retrained to become red blood cells ... it is possible to ascend to different states via training.

http://www.biophoton.com/trbc/trbc.htm

Ancient cultures long held blood to carry psychic qualities, finding a correspondence in blood as signified by Algol and other stars with the "red" coloration, their visible appearance in relation to the body of earth denoting the possibility of an external manifestation, increasing by magnitude and actively enhanced by Mars (also a signifier of blood, lord of the water triplicity and Aries).

And while we often view artistic renderings of the star charts as representative of mythological beings, have the corresponding anatomical points illumined by stars in these artistic renderings been considered directly as diagrams relating to body parts in context of medical astrology and anatomy?

Imagery and myth is easier to retain in the collective memory via artistic renderings and word of mouth, mathematical calculations etc a bit more difficult.

Kind regards,
TS.

I would like to add a few additional comments to my earlier post.

I do not discount the mythic interpretation as an attempt to explain astrology in sociological terms.

Although I focused on the classical view of divination in terms of 'communication with the divine' I would like to expand this a little further. In simplistic terms there are 3 possible theories to explain 'the moment of astrology'. In essence:

1 Unintentional cold reading by the astrologer/Tarot card reader

2 Creative participation/co-operation by the client /astrologer generating meaning from the signs/symbols that present to their consciousness.

3 A use of psychic ability / sharing of auras.

However, (1) seems irrelevant if we look at oracles like the I Ching which is usually consulted individually. In my view (2) undoubtably happens in all systems of divination. The question is does this simply represent humans creating meaning from random forces or a 'communication with the divine'?

Psychic factors can occur but again seem irrelevant to a system like the I Ching. They perhaps play a stronger part in the Tarot with astrology standing somewhere in the middle.

This underlines the fact that 'divination' may have both generic and specific features depending on the system utilised.