Two Books on the Culture of Medieval Islam

Griffith, Sidney H. The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam (Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Gutas, Dimitri. Greek Thought, Arabic Culture : The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early Abbasid Society (2nd-4th/8th-10th Centuries). London ; New York: Routledge, 1998.

I believe that, if the astrological community is to be viewed seriously on the outside, it has to collectively learn how to behave critically. This means thinking about thinking, among other things. And this means that we have to learn how to critically examine our own authors. Which is a short-hand way of saying that what we should not be doing is praising those works which “agree” with our personal viewpoints, while dismissing or trashing those that don't.

Until we can achieve this level of understanding, we look like a cluster of Christian heresies from the 4^th or 5^th century CE, each lovingly transmitting its own opinion of the nature of Christ and God, while condemning all other beliefs to Hell and damnation.

As an exercise in presenting this idea of the critical approach, I'd like to contrast two books that cover roughly the same historical period: one of interest to astrologers, as you will shortly see.

The period of the Abbasid Dynasty (750-1258) marked the consolidation of Islamic power after the first political dynasty, the Umayyads, who had ruled since the Prophet's death. The first century and one half of the Abbasid period included the great period of translation of Hellenistic material into Arabic from Syriac, and then Greek. This material included virtually the entire corpus of Hellenistic astrology, as well as massive quantities of other Greek natural philosophy and medicine. This translation movement then sparked a highly creative and productive period of commentary, as Arabic-speaking philosophers (Muslim, Christian and Jewish, as well as some remnant Zoroastrians) digested the material, commented upon it, and then developed new ideas of their own. This period also significantly opened up transmission of Indian ideas to the West, as Muslims increasingly became involved in the wars and politics of the Indian subcontinent. From an astrological standpoint, the Abbasid period marks the transition from The Hellenistic and Sassanian forms of astrology into what is first called Arabic astrology, then Medieval astrology, the latter especially as the Arabic works in turn are translated into Latin primarily in Spain and Italy, especially from the time of the 12^th century.

Gutas' work has taken barely ten years to become a classic. I am not saying this because I “like” it, but because it has become an extremely influential work to historians of this period. This means that any subsequent work about this period would be considered suspect if it did not refer to Gutas' work. I should add that Gutas covers the translation of astrological works quite overtly. As is typical of the period (of historians of science) , Gutas does not attempt to minimize the role of astrology in the society and natural philosophy of the time, although neither does he discuss the content of the works in the way that a practitioner would.

One of the things which is so intriguing about this particular time and place is that Muslims, Christians and Jews were able to work together so cooperatively. While politically, there was no question the Muslims were at the top of the heap, their fellow Monotheists were able to contribute substantially to the intellectual life of their shared culture.

Having said this, what is also intriguing is that the Muslim political policies made conversion to Islam desirable – but not compulsory. This was way more of a carrot approach than the stick employed by the Christian monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella and their successors in Spain. The net result is that, from the time of the Umayyad conquests through the next five centuries, the Muslims went from being a tiny minority in their conquered lands to a huge majority – and largely through the voluntary conversions of individual Christians.

Gutas did not cover that issue within his work: it simply wasn't the subject of his study. It was to address this political dimension that I wanted to read Griffith's book.

The contrast of writing styles could not be more extreme. Gutas has a clear, factual writing style that is easy to follow. By contrast, Griffith' writing is filled with run-on sentences and hyperactive footnotes that seriously mar the readability of the text.

Further, I cannot say I really know that much more about the transition of the Islamic Empire from a numerically Christian-dominated zone to a Muslim one. Griffith's major development is to emphasize the development of apologetic writing – an odd name to someone outside the field, but a technical term for the “defense of the faith” writing of the Christian hierarchy to defend the spiritual superiority of Christianity. These writings were meant to discourage conversions to Islam – which we know statistically they failed to do. He does present some evidence that the different Christian sects managed to cobble together an entente of mutual interest – and that is something worth noting. However, I came away from his work still wondering how significant these apologetic writings really were to the intellectual life of the time.

Will Griffith's work become a classic like Gutas'? I seriously doubt it. I think its major flaw – apart from stylistic – is that it actually represents a rather narrow study masquerading as a larger topic. Had the work been clearly labeled as a study of Arabic-language Christian apologies, it would have had the benefit of matching its title. But the implication of a broader river instead of a deeper, but smaller stream, leaves the reader unsatisfied.

The Alethiometer and Horary Astrology

So I admit it – I was quite intrigued by Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials – the books, not the movie. Frankly, I fail to see how any movie version of these books – especially book three – can even begin to do the book justice, because the anti-clerical, anti-Christian tone is simply too dicey for a Hollywood production: unless they grasp the essentially gnostic tone of the story, and understand that the Authority is a stand-in for the Demiurge, and not necessarily any statement on higher reality.

But apart from religious scruples, I was fascinated by the alethiometer. The alethiometer stands in as the perfect form of divination: divination that is the truth, if only one knows how to read it. Further, we note the fascinating change – Lyra can read it perfectly as a child, but at the change to adolescent - which is such a huge factor in this series – strips her native ability. After the change, she must rely on books and a painfully long learning curve to achieve the result that came naturally such a short time before.

What is the lesson here? I think it may actually be the same lesson as why each individual's daemon assumes one single form upon entering adolescence: the truth that the alethiometer reads is parallel to the truth one sees about oneself.

To children, adults are arbitrary beings doing arbitrary things. Adults are, so to speak, forces of nature. Meanwhile, children are beings in the process of becoming. Adolescence and early adulthood is the time that a child becomes “fixed” into an adult. And it is in the period of early through middle adulthood that the personality is the most fixed. And here in lies the key to the alethiometer.

Lyra's questions to the alethiometer either ask about what has already happened – or what will happen. In this sense, the questions she asks (and the others ask other alethiometers) are exactly analogous to those horary questions I encounter daily. Divination is about what you don't know – and you may not know about it even though it has already occurred – or because it hasn't occurred yet. The past you don't know is exactly like the future that you cannot know.

But there's the machine – and then there's the diviner, or reader. As a child, Lyra is free to associate symbols, and intuit the meaning. And she obviously has a talent for this: that's what makes her so special. With maturation come passions – passions unlike anything she experienced before. Emotions become complex. And in that complexity, she loses this native ability, just as Pantalaimon loses his ability to change shapes. And I believe this happens to the daemons not because they cannot change, but because their humans cannot bear the fluidity of change.

It is into this universe of fixed personalities that adults learn to read the alethiometer using books and fixed methods. It is described as a lifelong process. In teaching many students horary astrology, I am struck by how hard it is for many to creatively break the rules. It's an odd universe, the process of divination – one is constantly confronted by the curious juxtaposition of needing to have a really good rule book – but the also the ability to know when to transcend those rules. It was this conundrum that I attempted to address when I titled my book The Martial Art of Horary Astrology – because, like the good horary astrologer, the good martial artist has to practice the rules until they are absolutely instinctive, because only then will one be able to know when to ignore them. Slavish following of the rules produces a fighter who is completely predictable, or a pedestrian interpretation.

Curiously, this flat-footedness seems to most be a part of early to middle adulthood. One is too caught in trying to look good, and so one over-asserts oneself and one's ego into everything. It is only as one gets older that one truly begins to see the commonalities within the fierce assertion of individuality – and then one's interpretation becomes more fluid.

So if it takes a lifetime to “learn” the alethiometer, is it because it takes a lifetime to break down the mask that one so carefully builds up? What does that say for the mask that fractured that “childish” native talent in the first place? And what does this say for prediction in general? It has been my contention that horary operates in the reality that, while we always have free will, it's simply easier to not exercise it. It's always easier to do what comes "naturally" than to have to consciously think about alternatives. I would suggest that therefore horary - or the alethiometer - works best for young to middle-aged adults. Because that represents the life-phase where the armor is hardest - and I don't mean armored bear here! As to older adults, the question is really whether that person is clinging tenaciously to the armor, or accepting its inevitable dissolution.

Harry Potter from a Feminist Perspective

Yes, I admit it. My partner and I took turns reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows aloud to each other the weekend of its release. It seemed both fairer, not to mention more fun, to savor that last piece of the story together.

I do not propose to justify my particular interests from a feminist perspective: frankly, I’m long past that dubious exercise. What I would like to address is the Harry Potter phenomenon, and what it can tell us about the status of women in the 90’s and ‘00’s, when these Books were written, and in which they are also set.

J.K. Rowling – Jo to her fans – is said to be the wealthiest novelist ever from this series, having grossed over $1 billion in royalties. Almost as much as the Books themselves, part of this story is also the story of Jo and her fans – and how she has set the agenda for the discussion and review
of these Books in a post-Internet world, a highly instructive process by itself.

So let’s lay the groundwork. The Harry heptology is the blockbuster fantasy series of our time, supplanting the Lord of the Rings (LotR ) series for this crown, despite the stunning Peter Jackson movie renditions of the Ring Trilogy. Thus, it is worthwhile to compare elements of both. Both series drew upon rich sources of Western mythology to create vivid and varied worlds. Magic is a hallmark of these fantasy worlds, like so much of the fantasy genre which LotR could be said to have seeded. Within different fantasy universes, magic works differently. In LotR, magic is a specific province of particular races, like the Elves (Elder). Magical objects – most notably the rings – can achieve a kind of sentience: a plot mover in LotR is the desire of the One Ring to return to its master, and its ability to actually make events happen that will move toward this goal.

Magic in the Potter (HP) series is congenital: one is born either magical or muggle, with magical ability usually manifested by the age of seven, and with non-magical offspring (squibs) possible within magical families, and magical offspring possible within muggle families. In this, Rowling’s universe more closely resembles psi ability in the sci-fi television series Babylon 5, although it could also be said that both of the latter series are reflecting the post 1950’s scientific outlook of DNA and genetics.

Two of the great religious-philosophical issues are shared by the two fantasy series: Fate, and the problem of Evil. In LotR, evil is incarnate in Sauron, the current Dark Lord, who was lieutenant to the previous Dark Lord of an earlier age. Sauron crafts a ring of power – the One Ring which will rule over all the magical rings of Middle Earth. In the Potter series, the Dark Arts can be studied by any magician, and in the modern period in which the Potter series takes place, a dark-magical expert named Lord Voldemort emerges. HP is the story of the entwined fates of Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort. When Harry was one year old, Voldemort murdered his parents, and then attempted to murder Harry. Instead, when he tried, the killing curse rebounded on Voldemort, disembodying him, while Harry was left with a lightning-shaped scar. Harry was henceforth called, The Boy Who Lived, because nobody previously had ever survived a killing curse. Evil is a bit more relativistic in Harry Potter: one becomes evil by doing evil deeds.

As for Fate, the Fate of LotR is multi-layered and inter-generational. It is clearest in the character of Aragorn: the descendant of King Isuldur, who defeated Sauron and then failed to destroy Sauron’s ring, thereby allowing Sauron to eventually return to power. It is Aragorn’s job to fix the mess, if the new age of men is ever to dawn.

In HP, Fate is personal: the whole series of events leading to Harry’s parents’ murders and Harry’s survival sets him up as the Chosen One – the one who ultimately must go toe-to-toe with Lord Voldemort for the hearts and minds, bodies and souls of the wizarding community.

Before we proceed to an actual examination of the works, it’s worth mentioning one biographical note: J.R.R. Tolkien originally invented Middle Earth and the stories to engage and amuse his children: the effort of an extremely bright academic philologist to engage his sons in his own academic passions. J.R. Rowling wrote her Books to support her child: she completed the first volume as an unemployed divorced mother, a few years after the death of her own mother.

At first, it’s easy to critique the HP series from a feminist perspective (and it has been done) – the current Top Dogs are all male: Voldemort, Harry, Professor Dumbledore, and the various Ministers of Magic. There is the slightly disturbing piece that all female magicians are called witches, while all male magicians are called wizards. To most ears, “wizard” sounds better (perhaps because of Gandalf in LotR) – had Rowling chosen the word “warlock” for the men, the footing would, perhaps, have felt a little more equal, although still raising the question of why the genders need to have different words ascribed to them at all. It is, by the way, completely appropriate to critique Jo on word usage: she has shown great care in her choice of language over the years, and especially in choosing titles for foreign language editions. Further superficial feminist critiques include the level of giggling among the girls, and the housewife roles like Molly Weasley. On the other hand, having taught girls of this age: I'm sorry - but they giggle. This may not be a convenient feminist idea, but it is true!

But I think these issues are better considered comparatively. LotR was written roughly fifty years before HP. In LotR, the female roles are ancillary and cardboard, for the most part. Of course! Tolkien invented this world for his sons, and so males occupy better than 95% of the roles, except for extras, of course. They mostly move the plot passively, if they move it at all. Some, like Goldberry, are female Earth or Water deities. Galadriel is the one female Elf ring-bearer (there are no female ringbearers among either the dwarves or men): and she uses her ring to maintain the forest Lothlorien, and to prophesy. Arwen is Aragorn’s love interest, an Elf, who gives up immortality to be with the (mortal) man she loves – a part so sketchy in the book that Peter Jackson considerably juiced up the role in the movie. The only active part is Eowyn, of the royal house of Rohan. She sneaks along with the army that rides to fight in Gondor, and acts as the agent to kill the leader of the ringwraiths – a man for whom it had been prophesied that no man could kill him. She thus acts the part of demonstrating, as was so typical of the Celtic concept of prophesy, that the exact wording of the prophesy is critical.

Things are much different in HP. Here, the first notable point is that the Trio as they have been dubbed – Harry, Hermione and Ron – is two boys and a girl. Stop and think about this – this is actually exceptional. How many trios do any of us remember growing up that were mixed gender, unless they consisted of brothers and sisters? Jo has said that Hermione was a composite of herself and her sister – Hermione played the role of the smart kid who kept Harry and Ron in passing grades in many of their classes – and was always there to do the library work to figure those things out that they needed, but hadn’t been taught yet. Because she read so much, she found amazingly useful spells that the boys couldn’t even begin to consider. She learned how to make complex potions and sophisticated spells by reading about them and then trying them out.

Women are all over Hogwarts, even if they aren’t in charge. Professor McGonagall is the Deputy headmistress throughout six of the Books, briefly becoming Acting Headmistress at the end of Book 6. Other regular female professors are Professors Sprout, Trelawney, Hooch, Vector and Sinistra. This works out to a staff gender ratio of 1:1. As far as we can see, the gender ratio of students is around 1:1. The school was founded by two witches and two wizards. The four houses that they produced are still headed by faculty members in a gender ratio of 1:1.

The issue of career pathways and choices for women seems to be open. It appears that Molly Weasley chose to be a housewife: but she also chose to be a member of the Order of the Phoenix, a resistance group set up by Dumbledore the first time Voldemort attempted to come to power. There are many witches employed at the Ministry of Magic. Witches are textbook authors, judges and examination supervisors. The professors at Hogwarts seem to follow the Medieval model of being in Church orders, which meant celibate. But whether this was compulsory is never stated. And here is one of the areas where the magical community does seem to differ from the muggle community: it appears that there may be a lower incidence of marriage. And what does seem to be completely absent from the books is any hint of homosexuality.

The story takes place in the United Kingdom in the 1990’s. The magical community is a parallel community to the muggle one: as such, it is going to look a lot like the world as a whole. Would a sub-community with no sexism and racism even be believable to kids (much less adults) reading what to them is contemporary fiction? I think not. In fact, it is precisely Jo’s brilliance at portraying Harry as the totally realistic obnoxious self-centered adolescent in Book 5 that sets up so much of the plot development in Books 6 and 7. Voldemort’s vicious sexism in Book 2 causes him to completely discount Ginny’s emerging strength – which becomes an increasingly important plot element as the series proceeds. Hermione’s bookish personality may not look like heroism in Book 1, but she does show an innate ability to think on her feet, and she finds her courage totally by Book 7, when she is in the thick of the hunt for and destruction of the horcruxes.

As it is, Jo’s magical community is less sexist – and racism becomes a major issue in the books: often, but not always, intertwined with evil. Racism in the magical community is shown in two ways: the ancient preference of some of the wizarding families for pure blood (i.e., no muggle ancestry, or at least none closer than great grandparents), and the treatment of the other sentient magical species: goblins, centaurs, and house elves. In Books 5 and 7, the racist oppression of others by the evil side is a primary theme. In Book 7, the benign neglect type of racism of a character counted among the “good guys” in Book 5 is shown to have been partially responsible for his death, and Harry himself gets involved with “fixing” things with the aggrieved party.

In comparing HP to LotR, we see not only a massive increase in both the number and complexity of female roles, but we see a greater articulation of the concept of evil. Tolkien did the written version of LotR in the shadow of World War II: when the whole Nazi regime could be seen as a personification of evil. Tolkien wrote of the ring of power: that the power over others was the gateway to evil deeds. Compare the evil of Sauron to the good of the Elves: the three elven rings were used to protect the people and lands. But in Sauron’s obsession to amass all power to himself, he insured that the other rings could not defeat him – but this also insured that when his ring was destroyed, that destruction in turn destroyed the power of the elven rings.

In HP, the track which turns Tom Riddle from a somewhat sadistic boy into a true bastion of evil as Lord Voldemort was his obsession with conquering death: and then surrounding himself with a cadre of Death-Eaters for whom the purity of (magical) blood was a paramount issue – this, despite the irony that Riddle/Voldemort himself was a half-blood (i.e., half muggle). In Book 7, it is also revealed that the last great evil wizard was also obsessed with the need for power over the muggle community. Riddle is gradually revealed through Book 6 to have been a loner – a boy/man who felt no familial connection, and no true friendship. As Dumbledore prepares Harry for the Final Showdown, he emphasizes to Harry how Voldemort cannot begin to understand the love and sacrifice of Harry’s mother when she allowed Voldemort to kill her, but as her last act, wove a spell around Harry which deflected Voldemort’s killing curse back upon himself. The theme of power vs. love resonates to an old mythos in the human psyche.

It should further be emphasized that Rowling does not merely populate the Good side with women: they are among the most evil characters as well. Voldemort has followed Hitler in designing the "chain of command" as a diffuse structure, not a tight hierarchy. That way, nobody but him knows everything going on. But within the competition thereby created for his attention, one of Voldemort’s top lieutenants is Bellatrix Lestrange, who of all the Death-Eaters, appears to be the most bloodthirsty by far. But witness her duel with Molly Weasley in Book 7 for two sides of the coin. Molly fights not out of malice, but for her family and friends: her two brothers had been killed in the earlier confrontation with the Death Eaters in Voldemort's first rise to power, and she has been suffering from the losses to the Order of the Phoenix in this more recent war as well.

The other seriously evil female character is Dolores Umbridge, who is a Ministry of Magic plant brought in as a professor in Book 5 to keep an eye on Dumbledore, when the Ministry of Magic suspects Dumbledore of lying about the return of Voldemort at the end of Book 4. Although not a Death-Eater (i.e., follower of Voldemort), she has a completely sympathetic vision of the future of the magical community (pure-bred), and some sadistic ways of enforcing her will, whether on students (Book 5), or on the magical community itself (Book 7).

I would be as seriously suspicious of a tale this complex with no evil women as one where all the evil characters were women. Thus, neither good nor evil is presented as having a gender affiliation.

In judging the whole of the work, it needs to be remembered that this was, from the beginning, a commercial enterprise on Rowling’s part. There is no shame in an author who wants to support herself on her writings! Part of what has made this such a successful work is that there is close to a perfect mix of creative imagination with realistic character development. Pretty much everybody can find at least one character to identify with – apart from the sexual preference omission. Rowling leads a bit on gender equality and certainly more than a bit on racism. And one has to acknowledge that the question of just how far one’s fiction should lead ahead of contemporary mores is as much a tactical one as anything else.

Note: I wrote the above before Rowling "outed" Dumbledore, which raises a whole series of other questions. Was Jo right to exclude any mention of homosexuality from the actual text, and then bring in the topic later? I have heard two sides to this question. On the one hand, and this seems to be the larger faction among feminists I have spoken to, is can be viewed as cheating. While there was nothing in Dumbledore's background to suggest that he wasn't gay, it was a bit of a stretch - but not impossible - to piece together the story of Grindelwald and the impact of Dumbledore's personal/sexual feelings on his subsequent behavior. However, this level of reading into the plot hearkens back to a much earlier period in gay history: the "Before Stonewall" Era, when only a hint of deviance was kosher. In that time, legions of lesbian and gay readers followed Jeannette Foster's example in Sex Deviant Women in Literature in teasing out the slightest nuance which could suggest this possibility. The fact is: in roughly forty years time, most of us have lost this knack - if we ever had it.

The other point of view is that Jo did the right thing: these works are, after all, technically children's literature, and perhaps it's best to just leave the whole thing out. I have to say I would disagree with that viewpoint: I am reminded of Philip Pullman's comment en passant about a minor character in The Golden Compass that he was unusual in having a daemon of the same gender that he was - a comment alive with possibilities, and yet hardly explicit in any way.

Of course, in Rowling's case, we may find that she has her cake and eats it too. By "outing" Dumbledore during the filming of Book 6 - where we first glimpse the younger Dumbledore - and before Book 7, one would ask how these scenes will be handled now.

An Open Letter to Maria K. Simms

Congratulations on the release of The New American Atlas for the 21st Century – Michelsen Memorial Edition (http://www.starcraftseast.com/). It’s hard for me to believe it’s sixteen years since Neil’s death. Our own paths diverged only a couple of years after Neil’s death, as first you, and then I left the NCGR Board, the place where we had briefly walked together.

Neils’ early death so easily could have been much more of a tragedy, but for you, who chose to assume the mantle of keeper of the flame. This new edition shows that you have done so with grace and discernment. This could have just been a slavish reproduction with a new cover. But no: you and Rique Pottenger chose to update it, making the best current calculations available based on equations that Neil didn’t have. Then, in what was the first choice of an astrological ephemeris publisher since the astronomical flak last Summer about the planetary status of Pluto, instead of demoting Pluto to a monthly position, you took the bold stroke of adding Ceres to the main pages while retaining Pluto. What more fitting tribute could there have been to Rique’s mother, Zip Dobyns, who also makes a cameo appearance in the section remembering Neil.

So kudos on the publication!

2006 Elections

The reason that I don't often make predictions about post-season baseball is that I'm too passionate about it. Strong emotions interfere with good predictions. Which is why most astrologers find themselves to be somewhat flummoxed with their own charts. The other area where strong emotion frequently gets in the way is politics: where almost everybody seems to have an opinion as strong or stronger than the most rabid sports fan pulling for his/her favorite team.

And so again: it's election season.

Well over a decade ago, I worked with Bernadette Brady to build a quantitative model for doing sports prediction based on the Medieval astrologer Guido Bonatti's rules of warfare. With this model, we were able to beat bookmaker's odds for both the cricket matches known as the Ashes (in Bernadette's case) and US football Superbowls in mine.

Shortly thereafter, I asked whether these models could be similarly applied to presidential elections. I did a study not only to determine if the warfare model in general worked (it did), but also which chart to use for the presidential election, as so many mundane possibilities existed. The three charts which historically produced the best results were:

• Midnight election day

• The prior lunation

• The prior Libra Ingress (a contrarian model: i.e., it predicts in reverse)

Note: this article can be found at my web site under http://www.leelehman.com/downloads___references.html

Although this model was developed specifically for presidential elections, I have experimented in the past with applying it to presidential off-year elections. In this case, my hypothesis is that the same model that predicts the presidential result by party could predict whether the congressional elections show a net gain or loss for the party in power.

Therefore, in the spirit of this hypothesis, I present the predictions for 2006.

Here are the tabulations according to this model for the three different charts. Please click on any of the graphics to see a larger view.

The only chart here which may be unclear is the Libra Ingress, since the score is tied. The rule for tie-breaking is that the superior planet “wins;” thus all three models favor the Democrats. The conclusion is that the Democrats will gain seats: how much is not a function of the model.

Can Accountants be Astrologers?+

In the wake of Enron and other such messes, I want to ask this philosophical question. Granted, greed is endemic to the human race. Kenneth Lay’s excesses along with those of his cronies are merely one chapter in a long history of corporate-government corruption that includes such earlier chapters as Tammany Hall, Exxon Valdez, countless scandals and bubbles, and schemes.

So why get upset about Enron, apart from its environmental consequences, and its obvious tie-ins to the Bush Administration, and the Clinton one as well? The reason, I think, relates to the legacy of the Reagan Administration in the USA, and Thatcher in the UK. There was a fundamental paradigm shift then that still relates to life today. To follow the very interesting presidential study of historian Stephen Skowronek, particular administrations set up a paradigm of government that holds until the next paradigm.* Subsequent administrations either follow the lead of the paradigm-setting administration, or unsuccessfully react to it, until the whole thing collapses with the new paradigm. In Skowronek’s model, the Reagan Administration was the last paradigm, with F.D. Roosevelt before that.

Curiously, one of the accomplishments of the Reagan Era was to further complete the secularization of society which was a hallmark of the Enlightenment – the furtherance of the very point of view that banned astrology from serious intellectual consideration. And even more curiously, that secularization is currently being driven in part by a group of Christian Fundamentalist businesspeople – whose own beliefs are also ultimately compromised by the same position they are advocating.

Whether one chooses to blame Reagan’s economic team, or the simultaneous influx of data processing into business, the fact is that the way that business is conducted on the inside changed radically in the 1980’s. The advent of relatively easy access to reams of data not merely allowed, but virtually mandated that all larger businesses run everything “by the numbers.” The Walmart model of breaking down every sale into components of line item and customer zip code preferences heralded the era of “ship on demand” and frequent buyer clubs: where the clubs were “sold” to the public as benefiting them, but where the real beneficiaries were the companies.

The dark side of this force is that everything and everyone became a number, or merely an aggregate of numbers. And this is where everything changed. Customers became numbers. In the airline industry, this resulted in smaller seats, less legroom, horrible and eventually either non-existent meals or purchased meals as airlines raced each other to find every last way to shave a little bit off the cost,or raise the price a little bit. Flying became uncomfortable as customers were forced to the realization that these literally are cattle cars, and the airlines blamed 9-11. Flight attendants have told me that once their payroll was automated, they routinely found errors in their paychecks – and these errors were always in the airline’s favor.

This disconnection between money and humanity – the severance of any sense of humanity in a business transaction – means that customers can be constantly hit with questionable charges, support centers can be outsourced in ways that significantly impact customer relations, and employees are reduced to productivity machines. The irony is that in the immediate decades leading up to this sea change, there was substantial research suggesting the models such as Abraham Maslow’s where employees are treated well, and allowed to make a significant contribution to self-autonomy, do in fact increase productivity. Whereas treating people as numbers and reducing choice results in lower productivity in employees, and loss of brand loyalty in consumers.

Yet, these newer quantitative models persist, presumably because the short term numerical analysis looks good on paper, and because numbers often provide a comfort blanket, regardless of whether they are correct or meaningful. What these models lack is any accounting for the uniqueness of individuals, or any incentive for service beyond the mediocre. Ironically, the enforcement of these quantitative systems has encouraged workers to act exactly like workers under the Communist system that supposedly was debunked: work is rewarded equally whether one does a good job, or a poor job, so why excel? These methods demean the individual person, declaring the only good to be “value,” which is strictly quantitative.

Whether one is interested in examining life astrologically or spiritually, this approach is both disastrous and demeaning. These systems declare the value of the individual so strongly that they are meaningless without it. You cannot run your life astrologically based on my chart – or vice versa. You cannot rely on me to do your spiritual work – or vice versa. We know that the whole is not the sum of the parts. Whenever we ignore this, we encourage those who seek to tear down our beliefs. Never forget this!

For a really interesting website related to this logical issue of the whole not being the sum of the parts, see http://www.abelard.org/category/category.htm.



+ With thanks to Nick Campion, who asked a question which provoked this essay.
* Skowronek, Stephen. 1997. The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton. Belknap Press: Cambridge, MA.

The Thirteenth Sign? What to do with Ophiucus

When I was first coming up in astrology oh so many years ago, there was a book called Arachne Rising, proposing a 13th sign. Now, the discussion is about Ophiuchus. Now, Ophiuchus is technically on the ecliptic. But I think what we may need to realize is that this is not a new phenomenon.

What is different now is that some very slick anti-astrology skepticism is picking up on this as an argument against astrology, as you can see through sites like: http://www.griffithobs.org/SkyOphiuchus.html. On the one hand, this website is completely correct. But that same page actually mentions part of why this issue is being raised now, and it has nothing to do with astrology. In the 20th century, it was the astronomers who redrew all the constellational boundaries so that all of the sky is defined. In other words, you have a fundamental re-definition of what a constellation is. The traditional idea was that a constellation like Cancer or Virgo was a recognizable group of stars that looked like something, and therefore meant something. Constellations were seen as being discrete: in other words, there was "space" around them. When astronomy seriously separated from astrology in the late 17th century, it maintained the old definition of constellation, while stripping it of astrological meaning.

Then, astronomy, in going its separate way, engaged in massive study of the sky with vastly superior telescopes. The more they looked, the more objects they found: more stars, and ultimately, galaxies, nebulae, clusters, etc. Under the telescope, the sky ceased to look like a series of discrete pictures, and by the 20th c., astronomers had realized that the constellations themselves were not "connected" in any way: the pictures only look that way from Earth, because the stars of a constellation aren't necessarily "near" each other in three dimensional space.

Thus, astronomy needed a system for ascribing location, and that meant that they needed to cover the entire celestial sphere, not just the ecliptic. Within this quest for locational accuracy, they redefined the constellations as zones of the sky: yet further divorced from the original pictures of our ancestors.

Then, in the ultimate irony, they come back and chide astrologers for not adapting their changed coordinate system, a system that might as well call a location in Leo as A-150X16 as anything else!

So: back to Ophiuchus. Is there any meaning to having the Sun in Ophiuchus? Maybe. The astrologer who I think knows the most about fixed stars right now is Diana K. Rosenberg. Diana for years has talked about the overlays of the tropical, sidereal and fixed stars. She's also talked about the fact that, using the traditional system, any ecliptic degree actually represents an overlap of several constellations. The fixed stars have always been seen as factors that should be considered in the delineation.

As to whether one should change the zodiac, I would be very reluctant to muck with this when the driving force is coming from a group profoundly hostile to astrology. But apart from that, if the ancients knew there were other constellations which intersected the zodiac, why didn't they incorporate them? Largely, we don't know. There's no historical evidence on this. We've got no one to ask. Whether it's because Ophiucus-Serpentarius (it's really a dual constellation) is simply so large, and that only a small portion intersects the ecliptic, who knows? We can certainly can and should modify our delineations for planets in that region based on the constellational overlap. But junk the old system because 20th century astronomers re-invented the wheel? I don’t think so!