Definition of Astrology - the divination of the supposed influences of the stars and planets on human affairs and terrestrial events by their positions and aspects
Astrology is a pseudoscience that claims to divine information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the movements and relative positions of celestial objects. Astrology has been dated to at least the 2nd millennium BCE, and has its roots in calendrical systems used to predict seasonal shifts and to interpret celestial cycles as signs of divine communications.
Many cultures have attached importance to astronomical events, and some—such as the Hindus, Chinese, and the Maya—developed elaborate systems for predicting terrestrial events from celestial observations. Western astrology, one of the oldest astrological systems still in use, can trace its roots to 19th–17th century BCE Mesopotamia, from where it spread to Ancient Greece, Rome, the Arab world and eventually Central and Western Europe. Contemporary Western astrology is often associated with systems of horoscopes that purport to explain aspects of a person's personality and predict significant events in their lives based on the positions of celestial objects; the majority of professional astrologers rely on such systems.
Throughout most of its history, astrology was considered a scholarly tradition and was common in academic circles, often in close relation with astronomy, alchemy, meteorology, and medicine. It was present in political circles and is mentioned in various works of literature, from Dante Alighieri and Geoffrey Chaucer to William Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and Calderón de la Barca. Following the end of the 19th century and the wide-scale adoption of the scientific method, researchers have successfully challenged astrology on both theoretical and experimental grounds, and have shown it to have no scientific validity or explanatory power. Astrology thus lost its academic and theoretical standing, and common belief in it has largely declined.
This presentation briefly explores the ways in which Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy can provide one possible metaphysical basis for the practice and perspective of archetypal cosmology.
Becca Tarnas is a doctoral student in the Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. She also received her MA from CIIS in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program, and her BA from Mount Holyoke College in Environmental Studies and Theater Arts. She is currently writing her doctoral dissertation on the synchronicity between the Red Books of C.G. Jung and J.R.R. Tolkien. She writes regularly on archetypal cosmology and is an editor of Archai: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmology. Becca’s website is BeccaTarnas.com where she posts her current writings, paintings, and lectures.
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1
Speaker 1
0:22
I'm gonna be talking today on a topic I
presented this as a paper at the summer, and I'm going to just kind of give you
a brief taste a sample of what that kind of larger presentation was there. And
a lot of what I'm going to be talking about the presentation just has the
simple title right now of Whitehead and archetypal cosmology. And a lot of what
I'm speaking about has really arisen in conversation with Matt, who's the great
white head in scholar in my life. And these ideas have really arisen between us
so he's very much co author of this presentation. So what I'd like to pause it
and open up for further conversation. Is that whiteheads process philosophy can
perhaps provide us with a metaphysical basis for archetypal cosmology for
archetypal astrology. And for these ideas, I'm going to be drawing just so you
have kind of the background of the thinkers I'm bringing into this young on
James Hellman Katharine Keller, David Ray Griffin and Owen Barfield, among
others, but those are kind of the primary players, and I'm just going to try
and touch on the concepts. And I think at times you may be in a wash of white
heady and language, and just allow what images arise, to come with with those
terms, and with the hope of this sparking further conversation that I can learn
from and we can carry on this conversation. So I feel really blessed to be in a
community and family that explores the question of the astrological cosmos, and
we are able to look at the multi Vaillant ways in which astrology works. And so
today I want to explore another question, which is why astrology works. If we
can try and do that. And before I go further, I just want to touch on the
nature of archetypes and I'm going forward with the premise that you will have
some sense at some level of what an archetype is, but to kind of set the tone I
want to draw on the great articulator of archetypes Carl Jung. Just this quote
where he says, a kind of fluid interpenetration belongs to the very nature of
all archetypes. They can only be roughly circumscribed at best, every attempt
to focus them more sharply is immediately punished by the intangible core of
meaning losing its luminosity. No archetype can be reduced to a simple formula.
It is a vessel which we can never empty and never fill. It has a potential
existence only. And when it takes shape and matter it is no longer what it was.
And I give you this quote to present how archetypes are not fully definable, or
describable, without misrepresenting them without doling their divine
luminosity. And so as I try and discuss a metaphysical basis for an archetypal
cosmology. I am recognizing the impossibility of actually capturing the
archetypal presence in the single metaphysical system. That can't be fully
explained, so this is just touching on it in a conference in the early 80s put
on by David Ray Griffin and Katherine Keller. There was this conference called
archetypal process bringing together whiteheads process, philosophy and young
and Hellman's archetypal psychology and Griffin drew a parallel between Jung's
concept of archetypes and whiteheads eternal objects. So for Whitehead an
eternal object is an A quote, any entity, whose conceptual recognition does not
involve a necessary reference to any definite actual entities of the temporal
world. So, an eternal object, it's potentially relevant to some actual
occasion, it's a possibility. That's not yet defined as an actuality, so
eternal objects. They're like Plato's forms in that they're real, apart from
their particular expression, but they're unlike Plato's forms in that, as
Whitehead says they're deficient in actuality, and so because of this
deficiency of the eternal objects. They long to enter into actuality, to Ingress
is the term that Whitehead uses long to aggress into actual occasions, of
experience.
1
Speaker 1
5:19
So what are eternal objects. They're the ways
we describe the world. They're the adjectives. The colors the shapes, the
feelings, the smells, tastes, the qualities. Now, archetypes, we come to
actually understand through such qualities. But archetypes seem to be larger
than those simple adjectives archetypes are unifying fields, they're
gravitational attractors that draw together, a complex array of eternal objects
into a singular. And yet, always fluid form. So I want to make clear here that
from how I'm approaching this archetypes and eternal objects are not to be
equated and grant Maxwell has written about this in a previous issue of the
archive journal as well. So planetary archetypes. They include both the
potential reality of whiteheads eternal objects. And the incarnate experience
of actual occasions. So how we're living them in daily life. So, archetypes are
not just eternal objects or potentials because they have agency. They have
autonomy archetypes are complex persons or personalities, to use James Homans
language. Yet, they have a metaphorical unity to their complexity. So Hellman
says, always of speaking of archetypes are translations from one metaphor to
another. In whiteheads system, the source of all things is creativity, capital
see creativity is primary creativity is the realm of pure potential, and thus
it is chaos. I'm not going to go into the details of this but Whitehead has in
his philosophical system reasoned his way back to the existence of God, but God
and Whitehead system is not primary creativity is. So God is actually a
creature of creativity, which solves a lot of problems that God has had to
carry. So God orders this chaos of pure potentiality chaos of creativity into a
hierarchy of eternal objects, I want to be careful with that term hierarchy
that there's a relational order, but not a ranking of value. So God orders the
chaos of pure potentiality into the hierarchy of eternal objects. And I posit
orders. The archetypes. So God takes the chaos and turns it into cosmos. And
God is born of that chaos. So God is the first compresses the first and
everlasting Crescent coming into being the first achievement of chaos, becoming
cosmos. There's an image that I like to draw on to try and express this idea of
chaos becoming cosmos, and I'm grateful for Travis's presentation this morning
speaking about light feels very related to this, so the image, I want to draw
is one of the prism. And if you think of creativity that realm of pure
potential and chaos. As the white light, and then you can think of God as the
prism, and the white light passes through God God orders that creativity into
the refracted colors. The archetypes, but within the band of light that is each
of those colors, is there's an infinity of shades that are at play within each
one. And so you can think of that like the archetype of Venus, every shade of,
let's say, green every shade are all the possibilities of what Venus could
Ingress as or all the shades of blue are all the possibilities of how Neptune
could enter into incarnate reality. So the moment that a child takes their
first breath. That's their. That is the first concrete essence of that being
independent of the mother's body. Now, to use like whiteheads language.
Technically, a child is actually a society of actual occasions, each of which
are compressing, making the experience of the newborn in that moment. Now,
that, that first moment that inhalation that first breath, that's when the
birth chart is set, that's the time that we take that when we calculate the
birth chart. Why, why that moment. Well,
1
Speaker 1
10:20
when conquests happens all past actual
occasions, everything that's ever happened. That has to use whiteheads language
perished into objective and mortality, they all become one. And are presented
by this moment the child. So Whitehead says the many become one, and are
increased by one. And that happens every moment, every actual occasion is
compressing. So every archetypal expression that has ever existed is in that
moment gifted to the child. But Whitehead says that past actual occasions that
are most felt by the compressing actual occasion of that moment. So in this
case, again, the child, are those that are immediately prior. So, the positions
of the planets and the correlated archetypal energies enacted everywhere on
Earth. At that moment of that. Inhale of breath is independence. All of that is
inherited by the child. And as the child lives and grows into her subjectivity
can see as the crest of her compressing wave. She continues to inherit the
archetype we ordered actual occasions and this we see in transits. Yet, the
birth charts still effective still effective throughout the whole life, why is
that why isn't it in Whitehead scheme, it would be just that each next moment
is the most important, but there's something specific about that first breath.
How is that I want to return to the image of God for a moment. As an eternally
compressing actual occasion, you can think of God. If you think of a
compressing actual occasion like a wave that crashes, you can think of God as a
wave that never crashes that just keeps going, it's never perishing, and as
God's wave is in this everlasting conquest since. God is feeling the precession
of the cosmic community of finite actual occasions. So perhaps it's the same as
with the child in the moment is that first breath that actually the first
breath that concrete essence is an everlasting concrete essence that wave also
never crashes. And so each proceeding concrete lessons unfolding transits takes
place within the Gestalt set by that first concrete essence. And that's how
transits to the birth chart can be experienced by the individual. So I'm trying
to imagine it like the birth chart also is like a prism, and the refracting
archetypal potential becomes the archetypal particulars of this person gods
that whiteheads God has to nature's dipolar nature of God. And there's the
primordial pole and the consequent pole. Now, the primordial pole orders the
realm of eternal objects like we talked about before, so that they can Ingress
into the actual occasions, of the cosmic community, the consequent pole is
actually what's going on when they Ingress so the consequent full pole fuels
the experiences of this world, and adjust the ordering of the eternal objects,
according to that so it's this recursive loop that, in a way, God is
experiencing the ordering of the eternal archetypes through all of our
experiences, and then changes them changes that ordering so new experiences
arise. And just as God reorders the eternal objects.
1
Speaker 1
14:11
Perhaps that is also what's happening with
eternal objects within the archetypes. So as they progress into living
manifestation. We participate in their becoming. We co creatively engage with
them. So archetypes also have a consequent nature. They feel what we feel,
which forever reshapes the potential for their future and aggression. So
basically, the way we live and procreate with the archetypes forever reshapes
and continues to reshape, how they will manifest later in our lives. And then
in the lives of future generations. So it's almost like the cosmos is inviting
us through that. to. to participate or participation is actually enacting an evolution
in the archetypes themselves. And so by consciously engaging with them by co
creatively manifesting them. We're each able, and also have the responsibility
to reshape the potentialities of the future. So I'm going to leave it there for
now and see where we go from there with a conversation.
15:40
So you've processed it the first time at
Claremont
15:45
integrate an
1
Speaker 1
15:47
expert like pieces he or she is when you talk
about
15:54
mainstream was called like
15:56
white. He spoke about it. So how was it.
1
Speaker 1
16:00
Well, I'll just say the conference was huge.
There were 82 tracks. And we were in one of those tracks. And I was wonderfully
cushioned by a PCC filled audience. So, all of my fears going into it thinking
that I was going to have things thrown at me and I would be ridiculed didn't
happen. And I had a very supportive audience that I could engage with with a
lot of familiar faces and a few unfamiliar faces who I was able to dialogue
with there, and the longer portion of the talk was drawing, why I was even
bringing archetypal cosmology into the discussion. So I was speaking to
Whitehead Ian's. Or at least that's what I kind of had in mind, and justifying
to them why I was bringing in archetypal cosmology, and it was really Hellman
that kind of set the stage for that so there was this conference in 83 at the
same university, and he was the one who said that we need a metaphysics for
archetypal psychology. He had thrown out Young's metaphysics too as he said
save his psychology, but realize metaphysics is always operating whether you're
conscious of it or not. And so he wanted to draw on this term cosmology that he
could connect with Whitehead and cosmology being a worldview and cosmology
being of course related to the astronomical bodies and so Hellman provided kind
of my gateway into feeling like it was safe to speak at Claremont about the
subject walls. You should be up here helping me answer them.
18:02
Thanks Becker's.
18:05
Follow ons were
18:08
speculating about why it works. And my
question
18:13
for you personally. I mean,
18:16
you articulated this paper so it must be
important for you in some sense to understand the why ology but maybe you can
talk about the relationship between that question and the practices, ecology
which can
18:30
operate independently of
2
Speaker 2
18:32
having an explanation for how it could be
possible. Right, so there's the practice and then there's the theory. And, you
know, for me I'm interested in why because it's all
18:42
theory and I love theory. I love the theory
and practice even,
18:46
it's great but how do you
18:51
differentiate the two and why is it important
to do this work to try to understand why it works
1
Speaker 1
19:02
almost want to answer that question backward,
because it's an engaging. Really, this was my way to try and understand
Whitehead. And so it was that with the practice of astrology, that I could try
to understand what Whitehead was saying, and then realizing, again and again.
How much what he was saying, fit what seemed to be happening in the practice
and engagement with how transits manifest every, every day and throughout our
lives and in world events and so on. So it's almost like the practice drew me
into the theory. And that's probably why so many of the ideas here are arose
between us, because you're coming with the theory. I feel like I'm not going to
answer every
2
Speaker 2
20:05
one of the ideas that you've put forward that
got a lot of people excited and talking. After Unicron was the possibility of
the polytheistic processes of physics. And so, There's a kind of mutual
intelligibility that arises between archetypal cosmology and processive
cosmology, but then he also had a way of sort of massaging process metaphysics,
through a kind of polytheistic societal sense. So I wonder if you could
rehearse that for us now, it was great, rich. Well,
1
Speaker 1
20:47
I mean, with the idea of a god ordering the
actual occasions, and I mean kind of the mysterious part is the archetypes
being we've kind of attractors for the actual occasions that continue to be
expressed with them and those archetypes as attractors are in their own way.
God gods and the in a way you could almost see it as many nested prisms God as
the prism that refract, the many colors and then each color with as many shades
is another refraction. And then maybe each of us is another prism that refracts
that once again as we live,
21:38
you know I
1
Speaker 1
21:39
I may have one aspect and you might have the
same one but we live them out completely differently. And so we're each prisms
as well and so there's kind of a polytheism within each of us going all the way
back. Okay,
2
Speaker 2
22:13
maybe I don't know why, but it seems that the
physics of the process. You can do so you're doing so much in understanding how
archetype to to to to articulate that archetype process based on pointing. I
don't see the warning what happens, what happens, or what happened to young
side of things. Where were processes not merely the kind of endless cycling
back and forth between primordial and consequences. But it's actually attacking
trying to go somewhere. We're trying to get with, with whiteheads idea of creativity
and creativity. For young, of course there is a sense to tell us in a world of
scalability. Is there any heavy logical dimension that you're intuiting that
you can get out of the encounter between Whitehead archetypal cosmology.
23:16
I don't have an answer.
1
Speaker 1
23:18
It feels overwhelming to try and give an
answer. But the, the kind of dialogue between the primordial and consequent
natures seems not so much cyclical as spiral ik. And what I was attempting to
touch on with the idea of us, participating in that evolution is that the
reordering of the eternal objects. The reordering than the archetypes of those
potentials. It's, it's always new because of what we're doing. And so there is,
kind of, there is this movement forward in a certain way with that that it's
not just for, for, if that helps.
3
Speaker 3
27:01
Hello everyone. Here we are again for another
one of our live conversations and these are live conversations always amused
when I see in the chat people say is this live is this live yeah it's live if
you're watching live right if you're not watching it live. It's not live. And I
don't know maybe just to establish that fact it's always good to respond in
real time. There was one question here from someone in Fiji I don't know where
the, the question runt question went, I should say had to do with black holes
in string theory. If you want to ask that question again, our participant from
Fiji, our try to look at it. But the main event today. As you all know, is a
conversation with Lenny Susskind who is really one of the great theoretical
physicists of our time. So it's an exciting guest to have on the program, as
many of you know many has had profound impact in string theory. Black Hole
physics quantum mechanics elementary particle physics I mean it's quite a lot.
Quite a lot of accomplishments and we'll obviously only be talking about part
of those insights, but I think will likely skew heavily on black holes, you
know as you reach the end of the year. There's a tendency to think back on the
good things the bad things summarize you know they're always best of lists
worst of lists, things of that sort. If I was going to focus upon the best of
physics, or let's say theoretical physics and 2020 even perhaps even earlier.
Black Holes would be near the top, perhaps at the top. You know we've had a
great run and is continuing onward and we're going to discuss today. Some of
the puzzles that remain but some of the deep puzzles of the past that today
just are not as puzzling any longer. It's not that everything has been
resolved, or it's rare that deep puzzles just get fully thoroughly resolved,
but there are many things that were very unclear, even as early as 15 2025
years ago that now have really been unraveled and Lenny and a bunch of other
folks that will no doubt make reference to critical to making that happen so
Lenny will join us at about 130 or so. I'll do a little bit of q&a, maybe
just a couple of questions if there's something to get us going. And then I'll
maybe give a. I don't know, a little background to the conversation that we're
gonna have Atlanta so here's a question from Captain Vietnam. How are dark
energy and dark matter related Captain Vietnam asks, and I like questions like
that because the answer is short. Basically I don't know and nobody does know
how these dark things are related, they may be related they may not be related
remember dark matter is this idea of matter that is out there we believe in
space, and we come to that conclusion because when we take account of the
gravity that can be exerted by the matter that's not dark, which means matter
that we can see gives off light reflects light matter of that sort. The amount
of gravity that such matter can exert just is not enough to account for the
motions that we see through astrophysical measurements astrophysical data right
i mean the analogy that I like to use I think it's a pretty good one. If you
have a bicycle wheel, that's wet as it spins you know that the water droplets
fly off as the wheel turns. Similarly, in galaxies are spinning. If they're
spinning at a sufficiently fast rate stars should be flung outward. And we see
galaxies for which the stars should be flung outwards, but they're not which
must mean there's something else out there that's holding those stars inside of
those galaxies the belief is that there's additional matter, beyond the matter
that we can see with our telescopes and that dark matter is responsible for the
gravitational pull that's keeping those stars from flying outwards, like the
water droplets good that's dark matter as you'd say, there's a lot of dark
matter we think when you do these calculations. There's on the order of four or
five times as much dark matter as there is ordinary matter, you know the stuff
that we're made of
3
Speaker 3
31:52
dark energy is a different beast, dark energy.
The most convincing evidence for it. Are these observations that we've
discussed in this series from time to time of the accelerated expansion of
space. Space is not only getting larger over time that was a shock right. That
was the shock that initially was really confirmed through the observations of
Edwin Hubble. But, not only is the universe getting bigger it's getting bigger,
at an accelerated clip, so the expansion is speeding up. How can expansion
speed up right galaxies they pull on each other with the force of gravity force
of gravity we usually think of as pulling things inward. But yet, something's
pushing outward. And the remarkable thing is that an Albert Einstein's general
theory of relativity. Gravity can actually be repulsive it can push outward.
Not if the source of that gravity is a clump like a star, a clump like a galaxy
a clump like a planet rather if there's a diffuse energy that is spread
uniformly throughout a region of space then under modest assumptions, it will
give rise to a repulsive push an outward push that can drive the expansion of
space to accelerate. And because this energy does not itself give off light we
call it dark energy. So there are the two dark things Dark Matter dark energy
and again I gave you the amount of dark matter, dark energies in terms of the
energy mass budget of the universe is even more substantial on the order of 70%
of the mass energy of the universe is this dark energy. So that are these two components
now are they related. Many people have written down theories which suggests
that they are none of these have really gained the consensus of the scientific
community as yet, but who knows. You know, they both have dark in their name.
Is that the end of the connection, or is it deeper, I don't know. All right
anyway so that's a good question to get us going here. Mark Kennedy also has
How much do you miss mama joys. I don't know what that means but it does ring a
bell. Somewhere deep in my childhood or something. I know what you're talking
about Mark I think. Or maybe not. Maybe it's something that I don't want to
remember, I don't know. But anyway, I can't answer the question cuz I don't
remember exactly what it means, quick one more before we head on to a little
bit of background. Physics forever asks, What are strings made up we'll talk a
little bit about string theory here today no doubt many sides gein founding
father pioneer of string theory I'm sure it will come up in our conversation.
And look when you think about any proposal for what stuff is made of. And you
think back on the history of ideas, any proposal for what stuff is made of seem
to ultimately have finer stuff inside of it. Right, molecules made of atoms.
atoms. Yeah nucleus, with electron.
