WHAT IS
THE TRADITION IN ASTROLOGY?
by
John Frawley
The Carter
Memorial Lecture, given at the Astrological Association Conference and
the Astrological Lodge of London, September 2009.
What is
the tradition in astrology?
There is a book by Miljiana Mitrovic & Alexsandar
Imsiragic that is a collection of birthcharts of notable astrologers,
from the earliest days down to the present time. It’s in Serbian, but as
it’s a collection of birthcharts the language doesn’t matter much. What
struck me when I was looking at this is that
all the living astrologers
associated with traditional astrology whose charts are published here
have close Sun/Saturn oppositions. While those fluffy little creatures
who frolic in the sun-drenched fields of modern astrology have…. things
like planets in Libra! And most of them don’t have Saturn in their chart
at all.
What does
this tell us – apart from the fact that traditional astrologers are not
top of anyone’s party-list? We might think, ‘Aha, they have this
obsession with the past – with things that should by rights be long
since dead and gone.’ But then we look at the nativities of Lilly,
Culpeper, and find exactly the same close Sun/Saturn oppositions. It
never crossed the mind of either Lilly or Culpeper that he was doing
‘traditional’ astrology, or that there was anything anachronistic about
what he was doing. They were practising astrology as it is – there was
no other variety on offer.
Far from
being the stern traditionalist of modern legend, Lilly was in fact a
gung-ho modernist. The innovations that Kepler was cooking up – the
self-contradictory nonsense that is minor aspects – Lilly was first in
the queue. I’m quite sure that if you’d gone up to him and said, ‘Hey,
Bill, have you heard about Sedna?’ he’d have bitten your hand off. ‘Wow,
look – it’s right on my Chiron!’ I’ll come back to the reason for this
later.
I have heard people referring to the main-line 20th
century astrology as ‘traditional astrology’, in a blithe unawareness
that any other form of astrology does exist or ever has existed. But
there does seem to be a growing realisation that there was life before
Alan Leo. We may argue about what virtues main-line 20th
century astrology possesses, but I don’t think there can be a serious
argument claiming it as traditional.
Back to
the question: what is traditional astrology? Within the world of those
miserable, Saturn-afflicted creatures who might be described, whether by
themselves or by others, as ‘traditional astrologers’ there are various
factions going under various names – not unlike the world of
revolutionary politics. People get terribly upset if you align them with
the wrong faction, just as if you were confusing your Trotskyites with
your Maoists.
There are those who practice ‘medieval astrology’.
It baffles me why anyone should want to do this. I live in the 21st
century. My clients live in the 21st century. Why should I do
medieval astrology? ‘Does he love me?’ ‘Oh, it really doesn’t matter:
you’re both going to die of the Black Death tomorrow’.
I must stress here that when I use the term
‘modern astrology’ as a contrast to traditional astrology, I do this in
a very loose way, as an abbreviation for something like ‘astrology as
most commonly practiced in the modern world’.
I firmly
maintain that the astrology I practice is every bit as modern as
anything involving large numbers of asteroids. It is fully as modern –
it just has rather deeper roots.
We hear
about ‘classical astrology’. Classical – in contrast to what? If we have
some stuff filed under ‘classical astrology’, we probably have a lot of
other stuff filed under ‘easy-listening astrology’. Indeed, most of the
astrology practiced in the modern world is exactly that: easy-listening
astrology.
But this
is by no means a modern phenomenon. Most of the astrology practiced
throughout most of astrology’s history has been easy-listening
astrology, because most of the time that is what the astrologer’s
audience wants. ‘When will I meet him?’ ‘Oh, very soon – and in a quite
unexpected manner.’ Or, at a bit more sophisticated level, the kind of
thing we read in the almanacs: ‘There’s an eclipse in – well, whatever
sign you like really - so a noble person will die.’ And, guess what:
somewhere or other some noble person does die, thus proving that there
is order in the universe. God’s in his heaven and all’s well with the
world.
This
demand for easy-listening astrology is one of the main reasons why there
is so much dross in the text-books, ancient as well as modern. Because
that is all the easy-listening astrologer needs: a few bits of plausible
hocus-pocus to mumble before telling the client exactly what the client
wants to hear.
Medieval
and Classical are terms employed by traditional astrologers themselves.
One also hears, from time to time, the term ‘fundamentalist’ applied to
them by others. In the current climate, of course, calling someone a
fundamentalist allows you to dismiss their argument without needing to
trouble yourself thinking about it. Insofar as ‘fundamentalist’ has a
meaning other than that, it seems to be of exclusivity and rigid
dogmatism. I would suggest, however, that the view of modernity, with
the watchword of ‘it’s true for me’, is fully as exclusive and fully as
dogmatic, in its inability or refusal to find value in anything that
does not acknowledge its own basic assumptions.
I have
been criticised many times for writing in my books that things are true,
rather than ‘true for me’. I’m not quite arrogant enough to see why what
is true for me should be of the slightest interest to anyone other than
my nearest and dearest. What is true for me is that the Grateful Dead
are a whole lot better than Celine Dion, but I’m not going to write a
book to argue this.
There is
one term that I do like, however. At our Real Astrology conference and
6-day natal intensive, which we hold most years, I was discussing
Hellenistic astrology when a slip of the tongue by our German translator
gave birth to the wonderful concept of Hedonistic Astrology. That is
something to which I’ve devoted many years of dedicated research.
Let’s look a little more at William Lilly. There
is a strange affliction of the eyesight that affects people when they
approach Lilly. It makes 50% of the title of his great textbook
invisible. What’s it called? ‘Astrology’? ‘Horary Astrology’? ‘Grumpy
Astrology’? Well, no: ‘Christian
Astrology’. When this other 50% of the title is noticed, it is explained
away as a lip-service to powers that might wish to persecute him – a
kind of offering at their altars. Why else would anyone want to call
what they do a Christian astrology, except as a way of crossing the
fingers and crying ‘Nix Nix’?
Far from
being some politic lip-service, this 50% of the title was, for Lilly,
probably the most important word in the whole book. That’s why it’s the
one you read first. He is making a direct reference to Tertullian.
Tertullian’s fun. If you’ve read Lilly and think he’s a cantankerous so
& so – try reading Tertullian. He’s the Liam Gallagher of the Fathers of
the Church.
In his
tract ‘On Idolatry’ Tertullian at one point turns his attention
specifically to astrology. Astrology being idolatry, because it implies
the investment of power in the planets. We may think we don’t do that
today, but oh we do! Anyone who has ever said ‘Saturn’s transiting my
Ascendant, so it’s such a bad time for me’ or ‘I can’t do that today,
because Mercury’s retrograde’ is investing power in the planets. My
colleagues are out in the courtyard, preparing a fire, so those of you
who have done this, please form an orderly queue when the lecture’s over
and we will burn you at the stake.
‘But’, Tertullian says, in his discussion of
astrology, raising an argument against himself, ‘what about the Magi?
They were astrologers.’ He makes much of the statement in the gospel
that ‘they went home by a different route’. They were changed by this
encounter with Christ. They gave up astrology and took to… he doesn’t
specify what – opening a gift shop perhaps. But the exact point that
Lilly refers to is Tertullian’s statement that
‘Astrology nowadays treats of Christ. It is the science of the stars of
Christ.’
So when Lilly calls his book
Christian Astrology, this is a
radical statement. It is not mere lip-service, but a nailing of his
colours to the mast.
Lilly was
a millenarian. We don’t know to exactly which sect he adhered, but it is
clear that he believed he was living in the last days. Within the space
of his life, either the second coming of Christ on earth or the rule of
the saints that would usher in this second coming would undoubtedly
occur. So he turns his astrology towards that great event.
Tertullian was not, of course, advocating a new
astrology – ‘Hey, this is how we do
Christian astrology!’ He was
saying that astrology is now redundant. It is most unlikely that Lilly
had read Tertullian. But it is equally unlikely that he had not heard
Tertullian’s argument given many times by some hell-fire preacher
inveighing against astrologers. Inveighing against people such as
William Lilly. Remember that Lilly would have listened to two or three
sermons on any given Sunday, and idolatry, especially the question of
what did or did not constitute idolatry, was the big religious issue of
the day.
These preachers would have meant something
quite different by saying that ‘astrology nowadays treats of Christ’.
They were following Tertullian and dismissing astrology. But Lilly picks
up this statement and takes it to himself: ‘OK,’ he is saying ‘this
is a Christian astrology’.
So the
title of Christian Astrology is a bold statement of intent: it’s his
manifesto for the book. We all know that bold statements of intent are
easy to make; following them up is more difficult. Many among my
audience here have written books: you will know well the difference
between the bold vision and what one can manage. Does Christian
Astrology live up to Lilly’s bold vision? Not that much. There is an
awful lot of easy-listening astrology in it: the specious hocus-pocus.
(As a completely irrelevant, but perhaps interesting, aside I’ll point
out that the term ‘hocus-pocus’ derives from exactly the arguments about
idolatry that were going on in Lilly’s day. Hocus-pocus is a mockery of
‘hoc est corpus’: this is the body. ‘Jack-in-the-box’ is from the same
idea.)
Lilly
picks up what has gone before in astrological manuals. He does a certain
amount of winnowing out - ‘the ancients say this, but it doesn’t work’ -
but not a great deal. But there are places where he aims for something
more. These are in his political judgements: both in his horary examples
on political issues, and in those passages in his natal volume which
reflect the study he had made of King Charles’ chart, where the
delineations are of course bent to his own less than impartial view of
events.
For
instance, there is a horary on what form of execution the Archbishop of
Canterbury would suffer. Lilly’s judgement of this chart owes nothing to
astrological principles. What he is writing is purely a piece of
propaganda. His concern is to show that the Archbishop of Canterbury –
who was of the King’s party, so from Lilly’s point of view a major
Baddie – really is a baddie, because it says so in the stars; and that
he deserves his fate; and that Parliament is being merciful to him by
giving him a more dignified death – having his head cut off, rather than
being hanged. Lilly gives this lame addendum, that ‘I thought he was a
decent enough guy’. But it is quite obvious from Lilly’s whole judgment
that he didn’t think that at all: ‘Oh no you don’t, Bill!’ This is
merely him saying ‘Don’t think I’m twisting things because I don’t like
him. Look: these are the astrological facts!’
Which they are not. Here we find Lilly’s radical
Christian astrology, as he
demonstrates that the political events of his day are guided and
ordained by God, as shown by their being written in the stars. ‘It’s all
right, everyone – the Big Guy’s on our side’. Which is, of course,
exactly what we are doing every time we look at a chart and say, ‘Your
Moon is on my Sun: oh Darling, we’re made for each other!’ Lilly was by
no means the first person who had ever used astrology in this way: such
astrological propaganda was around from earliest days. But it is his
belief that his astrology is helping to usher in Christ’s kingdom on
earth that explains the invisible 50% of his book’s title.
So in
Christian Astrology we have a lot of easy-listening astrology; we have a
lot of propaganda – George Orwell says that, using the word politics in
its widest sense, the ‘desire to push the world in a certain direction’,
‘no book is genuinely free from political bias’. Which is quite true: if
you write a shopping-list it has a political agenda. And then, as with
any book on anything more complex than the multiplication tables, we
have the gaps in the author’s knowledge.
This is
why Lilly is so keen on innovations: to fill the gaps in his knowledge.
There will
always be such gaps, unless perhaps authors wait until they are dead
before writing – which in many cases is, I think, an excellent idea. The
logic of a book demands that we can’t leave gaps. We know A, we know B;
but we have to say something about C, and – ‘Oh dear, C is something I’m
really not sure about’. Often, the stretch this need demands produces
inspiration, a leap forward in our knowledge. Sometimes what it produces
is more like Wily Coyote realising that he has run over the edge of a
cliff. Lilly has his fair share of Wily Coyote moments.
I am
talking about Lilly here, because there are those who regard his writing
as an infallible revelation, and twist all points of art in the attempt
to justify this view. Exactly the same can be said of Bonatti – another
popular candidate for infallibility – or any other authority. I’ve
discussed only three reasons why books are flawed. There are many
others. Books are not to be trusted, and vesting authority in them is
misguided.
So the
popular game among traditional astrologers of beating each other on the
head with weighty volumes is a foolish one. There are those who like to
play ‘My authority is older than yours’. Others prefer the variant ‘My
authority is more obscure than yours’ – if you can base the whole of
your astrology on the work of someone whom nobody else has ever heard
of, you’ve really got something!
Ibn Ezra
is instructive here. Ibn Ezra possessed what is undoubtedly one of the
finest minds ever to have turned itself to astrology. But astrology
wasn’t the day-job. He was a rabbi. Not just any old rabbi, but the man
whom Maimonides regarded as the greatest of all rabbinical commentators
on the Bible. What do rabbis do? They argue. So he knows a thing or two
about argument – what is a sound argument and what is not.
His Book
of Nativities doesn’t contain anything particularly earth-shattering in
terms of technique. What is interesting is the way he treats
authorities. I said that Lilly does a certain amount of winnowing-out in
Christian Astrology. Ibn Ezra cites authority after authority, and there
runs almost like a refrain throughout his book ‘This makes no sense at
all’, ‘That can’t possibly work’, ‘Hasn’t this guy ever looked at a
chart?’ You can feel him tearing his hair out in despair at what people
have written. A lesson for us all. As Culpeper said, let us keep our
wits in our heads, because that’s the place ordained for them, and not
in our books.
If we
follow Culpeper’s advice, we do not need our authorities to be
infallible. The great value of Lilly – again, I take Lilly just as an
example, because I am more familiar with his work than I am with that of
others – is not that he is infallible, but that he gets it so obviously
wrong so often. For instance, he laboriously works out somebody’s
temperament, and then says, ‘But I know this guy, and he’s not like that
at all’. Or he complains that a horary client isn’t grateful to him
after he told her how she could persuade a certain man to marry her. We
look at the chart, and see: ‘Of course she’s not grateful, Bill – you’ve
married her to the wrong man!’
If he
didn’t get it so obviously wrong, we might think his methods were
perfect. They are far from that. As of course all our methods ever will
be – but we can aspire to improve. Which brings me back to Lilly the
gung-ho modernist. There are holes in our knowledge. Of course there
are. How do we fill them? There are two common answers. There is the
answer of modernity, which is to reach into the future, acquire enough
new stuff that we can leave the flawed old stuff behind. I’m speaking
now of modernity not only in astrological terms, but as the prevailing
attitude of the western world for the past several hundred years.
Then there
is the answer which is often claimed – I believe incorrectly – to be the
traditional method, which is to reach back into the past.
The distinction between what is traditional and
what is not is often seen as a temporal division. Old stuff is
traditional; new stuff is not. This is an error – a fact that I see more
clearly now than when I was writing The Real Astrology. Traditional
astrology did not finish at some point in the 18th century.
It is alive and well today. A book like The Horary Textbook, for
example, is not secondary literature, a book about the tradition. It is
as much a living part of that tradition as anything written by any one
of the illustrious dead.
Nor is it
true that anything written a long time ago is part of that tradition.
The western tradition of astrology is a monotheistic tradition. It is
the astrology of the Jews, the Christians, and the Moslems. As such, it
stands over and against any astrology rooted in relativism. Egyptian
astrology; Hellenistic astrology; Vedic astrology; the astrology
generally practised today: these are not part of the western tradition
of astrology, and, because of the philosophies within which they are
framed, have far more in common with each other than they do with that
tradition.
This has a
lot to do with why Hellenistic astrology is for so many the acceptable
face of the tradition. Yes, the Greeks wrote a lot of books, and they
had the decency to put ‘Astrology’ in big letters on the front cover,
rather than making us read between the lines to find the astrology, as
in many other works. But I suspect also the enthusiasm for the Hellenes
has a lot to do with an image of that society that seems in many ways
not so dissimilar to our own – certain modern authors who would quite
fancy a job in the library of Alexandria. This has led to an
over-valuation of the Hellenes’ place in history.
It is also
most important to realise that the tradition is not a yearning for some
past age when things were better than they are today. There is a
traditionalist literature outside the world of astrology – authors such
as Huston Smith, Coomaraswarmy, Schuon – which holds such a view, and
traditional astrologers are often accused of espousing it, no matter how
few there are who do so. ‘There was once a golden age, and life has been
getting remorselessly worse ever since.’ No matter with what
intellectual gravitas this view is expressed, it always reminds me of my
grandmother’s firm belief that civilization came to an end when postmen
stopped wearing hats. This view is profoundly untraditional. It owes
much to a nostalgia for lost youth; much to the Romantic movement, with
its idealisation of childhood: nothing at all to an understanding of
what tradition is.
Tradition
is a living thing. It lives and breathes, moves and changes. A tradition
that does not change is dead – and what interest does that hold for us,
other than as a piece of sterile intellectual archaeology? This changing
is what the Catholic Church refers to as ‘the operation of the Holy
Spirit’. This is not some theological abstraction, but the recognition
that a tradition, like an individual, can grow in wisdom. Things are
learned, things are realised. We grow up.
Coming
from a different direction than this traditionalist literature, the
theologian Josef Pieper writes that tradition must be passed on exactly
as it was received. This too is an error. If tradition were a material
artefact it would, of course, be true: if I inherit the Mona Lisa from
my father, it is my duty to pass it on to my son without adding any
embellishments of my own. Tradition is not a material artefact. It must
change, must be changed. The vital thing is, these changes must always
preserve its pure essence. So long as that essence remains – so long as
its philosophical truth does not become corrupt, does not slide into an
easy relativism to suit contemporary trends – the external form of that
tradition must adapt to the demands of the time, else it becomes mere
anachronism. Traditional astrology is not a costume drama! The idea that
we should adhere strictly to this or that authority from the past is as
ridiculous as the sword & sandals movies, where Mr Collegiate America
wraps himself in a bed-sheet and pretends to be an ancient Roman.
The idea
that seeks perfection in the past - there was once perfection and we’ve
fallen away since – is no more than the mirror image of the idea that
there will be perfection in the future, if only we can piece together
enough new stuff: discover enough new planets, for example. The story of
the Tower of Babel should persuade us against this idea of a man-made
perfection in the future. But when we see those who seek for authority
in the past beating each other on the head with their weighty volumes,
we see that reaching into the past brings us just as certainly to Babel.
I suggest
that our attitude to the tradition should be not one of trying to revert
it to its past, nor of trying to remake it in the future, but of
understanding it in the present.
This increased understanding will come not from
reading many books, but from gradually shifting the perceptions so that
we see what is before us, not merely manifestations of our own self.
This demands a willingness to change ourselves so that we may
understand, not a readiness to change the astrology so that it may be
understood. It is for this reason that the words with which Ibn Ezra
began his textbook are the most important words ever written on
astrology: The beginning of wisdom
is fear of the Lord. It is this that is the heart of the western
astrological tradition.
Because this
is the basic geographical alignment: up there is the Creat-or; we are
his creat-ures – and therefore there a necessary relationship between
us. This is the fundamental ‘You are here’ of the astrological map. It
doesn’t matter how elaborate we make this map, how many new planets we
throw in, or how many old techniques we unearth: if we don’t have the
‘You are here’, the map is useless. It is plainly evident how many of
these innovations – whether imported from the future or from the past –
are an attempt to make up for the absence of exactly this ‘You are
here’.
Truth is
not back there somewhere, nor over there somewhere, but only, always,
and ever, up there.
That is why this is the picture of the traditional astrologer.
With the kind permission of John Frawley
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