In the 18th century ‘Enlightenment’, science deconstructed astrology as superstitious because, in its failed attempt to understand God, it lumped everything together into the category of supernatural causation; the Gods.
Hello everyone,
I was speaking to a long-time astrologer friend the other day who was afraid to admit to others that they were fascinated by, and spent a lifetime exploring, astrology. Have you, or are you, in a position where this has been the case? Do you feel like you will be ridiculed for your interest in “archetypal mythology” (the term used by my friend when explaining to strangers what they do)? It’s the perennial problem for astrologers, isn’t it: to be accepted by a culture that has missed the point; a culture informed only by sun sign newspaper columns that, because of their nature, generalise to the nth degree – here in the UK that degree would be 5.5 million people per Zodiac sign. In the US that would be c.27million per zodiac sign!
According to a very famous tabloid mystic here in the UK, all Taurean’s this week would be experiencing this incredibly vague synopsis:
“Your standing in a family may have felt shaky these last few weeks, but now you can firm things up. You know the role you want, and only you can spell this out. The Jupiter effect on your cash chart is noticeable by its generosity and luxury – the more you give away this week, the more you can receive. Try it and see. The luck factor waits in a room of “W” candidates.”
Is it any wonder that astrology has such a poor reputation when the general populace only experiences this level of astrological “insight”? It’s because of this that science takes its belief that astrology has been debunked; as if the great scientific minds have plumbed the depths of the archetypal cosmos and found the true nature of reality – through science.
So, here’s the reason why they think they have debunked astrology – notwithstanding the poor record of tabloid sun sign columns.
It has been debunked because of the idea of explaining the god of the gaps.
In a primitive era, pre the modern causation of science, no-one knew why certain phenomenon were occurring, hence the need for gods (according to the modern imagination). We place an issue of supernatural agency at the heart of the cosmos. So, the god of the gaps becomes the explanation for the Nile flooding, the explanation for the Tornado or Hurricane. The god of the gaps is that which we fill-in for the world that we do not understand – the gaps in our limited understanding.
Owen Barfield, the great friend of C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien, whose archive I visited in the Bodleian Library last year, (https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/home) in an excellent book called Saving the Appearances, argues there was a much more profound participation in the ancient consciousness than we give credit for. He suggests that they were not seeing themselves as separate from the world when they made these imputations. The modern mind assumes that it is more intelligent because it has explained the gods away as ancient superstition. The brilliance of the human mind has separated itself from God/The Great Spirit/Brahman/Jehovah/Allah etc, and in so doing, has become its own false god.
The key point here is that science believes it has explained the god of the gaps. So, once you have done away with the god of the gaps, then you do not need the god anymore. Once you have said that the water cycle creates storms and tornadoes, not the thunder god, not Zeus and his lightning bolt, then you do not need any of it anymore.
It is rather like the fallacy that Richard Dawkins believes he has explained the mystery of Christianity when he uses a literal interpretation of the bible as the main counter-point to his argument; like arguing with a creationist who believes that the world was created in 4000 BC because 17th century Bishop Ussher counted through the patriarchs in the bible to arrive at that date (to be precise: 6 pm on the 22nd October 4004 BC, per the Julian calendar). It is explaining away Christianity by arguing with the lowest common denominator of the most literal interpretation of it; as if the mystery of Christianity could be reduced to the most narrow take of it. The reductionism of this mindset easily reduces the mystery of things, including astrology, to the lowest common denominator and from there, claims its authority. Astrology becomes just another tool that we used to explain things that we now know how to explain properly – through science.
In his book The Science Delusion by scientist and Christian mystic Rupert Sheldrake you see a much more respectful take. Why is he respectful? Because he’s a scientist who respects the bigger picture.
Whilst Richard Dawkins hired red double decker buses to parade his “God is dead” slogans around London, Rupert Sheldrake is more respectful of religious belief and points out sciences’ own limitations. I want to take you through a couple of those as I think it might be important as we try to contextualise what astrology is to us.
Firstly, we can note, that this take on primitive thought is primitive itself. It is simply a reduction of a more powerful, religious, mythopoeic world view. To say that this religious mythopoeic world view only existed to explain physical, mechanical phenomenon that we can now explain differently, is a gross over-simplification of the embedded reality of those past cultures and religions. Deconstructing primitive man’s concepts of the divine, as having agency for anything in the world they don’t understand, doesn’t address ‘the presence’ of anything.
We see that the Enlightenment pushes all superstitions aside. The great triumphant of reason splits the world with the cogito ergo sum, (I think, therefore, I am) of Rene Descartes becoming the slogan for this modern world view. As astrologers, we can understand a statement like this when we see Descartes’ chart – five planets in Aries clustered around his Aries north node. You can feel the I amness!
Astrology is perceived by science as superstitious bunkum, as living in that magical, primitive realm, of superstitious causation – attributing supernatural causes to phenomena that we now understand. And yet, in attempting to define the mysterious using its own limited understanding, all science has done is redefine the border of the mystery.
The Scientific World View
I was at a lecture in Bristol with the esteemed astro-physicist Brian Greene, the author of The Multiverse Theory, where I asked him what science knew about prior to the big bang. His answer: “We do not look at that.” What is the point of the big bang if science has no sense of where or why it happened, abdicating any need to look at the deeper sense of meaning in the origination story? He was also quite aware of this limitation and openly acknowledged it.
If we switch from physics to biology, we encounter the Darwinian problem. Science cannot explain how or why there is life. Using the Darwinian idea of the ‘missing link,’ I think there are two prior missing links in the Darwinian theory. Can we explain everything just through random mutations over long periods of time? Increasingly, people within the scientific worldview itself question this idea. Sheldrake clearly questioned this and Sheldrake created a vision of memory that he called Morphic Fields and Morphic Resonance: subtle fields of energy that contain the memory of an individual and potentially a species contained within a phenomenon. The relevance of this, I will try and lead us back around to later.
Even more disappointing is the scientific worldview from the perspective of chemistry – that basically everything that you are, that you hold dear, that you love and value, is an accidental by-product of your brain soup. The technical term is epiphenomenon. Your consciousness is just an epiphenomenon of organic biochemical processes within your brain. That is it! Your hopes, dreams, your greater life, your greater values – all simply brain soup. I fundamentally disagree with the idea that everything meaningful that ever happened to you, all the great love and truth and joy in your life is explained by epiphenomena.
Chemistry’s attempt to explain life is so reductive, we could compare it to viewing the cosmos through the wrong end of a telescope. From this perspective, all the world’s visionaries, mystics, prophets and seers are mentally ill or, at the very least, emotionally over-wrought.
And I think astrology fundamentally disagrees too. What is the natal chart, if it is not a symbol, in the moment, of something coming into being? What is that something? Remember, a natal chart is just a space time moment. Anything could be born. Look at the date and time of your birth; a blackbird could be born in a tree, a rodent could be born in the basement of the hospital. They would have the same chart as you. It is not the chart that is unique, it simply exists at the same time the unique thing that you are, came into being. It is the complex alchemy of those two things together.
So, in conclusion, I would say, on the scientific front, there is an awful lot of things that science has not explained: the Big Bang, the mystery of birth, gravity, the Egyptian pyramids, the number of planets in the Solar System, the Placebo Effect etc and a quick online search reveals plenty of surprising facts that we might ordinarily assume science has cracked: why we sleep, why we dream, why cats purr, animal migration, how bicycles work, why ice is slippery, glass, fingerprints… let alone humanity’s relationship to truth: existential truth, moral truth, logical truth, historical truth and experiential truth.
I am not being critical. Sheldrake is enormously respectful of science in his book The Science Delusion, but he still points out all the areas it has failed to address. Science is not even necessarily trying to address some of these things. Should science be trying to address higher value? Sometimes I think our entire culture is driven by a scientific materialism that is akin, philosophically, to a teenager trying to read Sartre.
We are on a chunk of rock hurtling through space at 67,000 miles per hour. So, what’s the point to anything? We wonder why people are anxious and pop pills and come to astrologers. Something is crying out within people for something more. Something is crying out within people for them to engage in the deeper sense of meaning of their life.
And so, I say to my astrologer friend, take heart in the passion of your interest and trust in your vision of faith that your therapeutic presence could radically shift another person’s life from one of potential despair to a new hope and direction, all through the lens of astrology.
If you’re interested in becoming one of these new astrological healers then perhaps you might consider my Psychosynthesis Coaching Training – an 18-month online course, learning from experienced practitioners the art of holding this presence for other human beings, to facilitate change in another person’s life; the perfect adjunct to your astrological insight. Here’s what people have been saying:
If you have questions about the course then please contact me directly – [email protected]
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