Astrology is about Time, about correlations of events in time, about relationships between earth events (including mind events) and natural symmetries in the solar system environment.
Hi Sonia,
Here are my thoughts on the matter, for what they are worth.
It is true that astrology concerns time, or rather the experience of temporality and change. However, it is not simple to define what one means by time. Similarly, and despite this difficulty, there seems to be many different versions of 'time' (psychological time, mathematical time, space-time, 'the arrow of time', cyclic time, chronological time, etc).
As I understand it, chronobiology mainly refers to the entrainment or adaptation of living organisms to diurnal, lunar and solar rhythms of various kinds. These very rhythms are the ones used to calibrate our experience of duration, primarily because they are the most uniform and reliable recurring phenomena in the experienced environment.
Thus we are talking about clock and calendar time. These have a potentially objective universal quality, even though there are cultural variations in calendars and so on. The point is that the diurnal cycle, for example, has the same interval of duration for everyone.
On the other hand, there is the individual subjective experience of time, which is a very different matter. This includes a linear sense of duration, which can be expanded or contracted depending on one's cognitive state (bored, intensely focused on an activity, asleep, stoned, etc.). This is associated with transience, or the experience of 'time passing'.
It also includes the concept of a moment, which has no strict definition, but which we associate with the simultaneity of events in the experienced present (such as first independent breath and corresponding clock time). We also have a sense of rhythm, which relates to the recognition of pattern in the sequence of events that mark out the experience of change.
The events which are conventionally used to mark time, such as sunrise, can be given a number or quantified. So sunrise happens at the same clock time on a given day in the year at a particular place. January 27th always has the same place on the wall calendar, and each year it is identical to the next.
On the other hand, each sunrise in a given place on a particular day is actually unique, both in itself, and in how anyone might experience it. No sunrise ever repeats itself, except in the abstracted idealised form of clock time, calendar time and ephemerides.
Astrology is in my opinion not only about the experience of events 'in time', but more importantly is about <i>unrepeatable</i> events 'in time'. This is why astrology can never be called a science, because science only deals with repeatable phenomena, or at least places a fundamental emphasis on the criterion of reproducibility.
Chronobiology deals with <i>repeating</i> cycles of entrainment and adaptation, and so is quite different to astrology. Because astrology concerns qualitative experience, no two cycles are experienced the same way. You cannot repeat last year's solar return cycle. The fact that it is a cycle which will happen again next year is the least important thing about it.
Apart from anything else, astrology is not about physical planets, but about symbols derived from planets. Leaving aside the important question of where the prototypical meanings of the symbols come from, their interpretation is only possible when one takes the context into account. And the astrologer is part of the context.
All this tends to separate out astrology from the more scientific disciplines of chronobiology and cosmobiology.
The relationship between astrology and the experience of time is far more sophisticated and mysterious than any scientific or historical discipline's take on the subject. Astrologers have in a sense invented their own way of calibrating time, one which is designed to attune to qualititative and subjective aspects of the experience of change. It of course includes symbolic diurnal, lunar and solar cycles, but also those derived from the planets orbits, as well as their progressed versions which are essentially a metonymic extrapolation from the solar or lunar cycles, depending on the type of progression (one day of the cycle 'stands for' the cycle). There are even converse progressions, and other forms of directing the planets which are completely disconnected from physical celestial reality.
So I would not agree that astrology is about earthly events and natural symmetries in the solar system environment. Much of astrology is about imaginary/imaginal symmetries, whether talking about those derived from planetary cycles, or the symmetries built in to the zodiac (which itself has no physical reality). The symmetries are projected onto the heavens by humans, and are not intrinsically there, any more than Mars is intrinsically red.
In a post on another thread you mentioned that you felt it was very important to realise that astrology is not about celestial influences. I agree with you completely on that. The study of celestial influences is called astronomy, or astrophysics, or maybe geophysics, and maybe it also includes chronobiology, or is a mixture of all these. Whatever, its not called astrology, which has a completely different purpose to those other subjects.
On the other hand, the way astrologers talk about their subject is full of the language of causal influences, even from those who would also agree with your comment. It's very difficult to not slip into talking about 'the energy of Saturn', or 'the effect of Mars' or 'the influence of Mercury'.
Although this is commonly an unconscious metaphorical use of language, it is not always so. Some astrologers feel far more comfortable with the celestial mechanical model of astrology than any other. Whatever, it can be very confusing for the novice, who usually comes to astrology educated to some degree in the mechanics of the solar system, who know about gravitational planetary influences, that the moon pulls the tides, and so on. It is natural to assume that astrology must be some sort of extension of this way of looking at the influence of the heavens on earthly experience.
From this perspective, chronobiology and cosmobiology have a comforting ring to them, as they seem to be covering the same territory as astrology. This simply isn't the case, and I think it is important to distinguish between the terms, as names carry power.
Anyway, that's my opinion on the topic.
All the best (and your English is very good, by the way!).