Dane Rudhyar - The Astrological Houses: The Spectrum of Individual Experience

Most astrologers would probably agree with the general statement that astrology is the study of the correlations that can be established between the positions of celestial bodies around the Earth and physical events or psychological and social changes of consciousness in man. The motions of celestial bodies are, with very few exceptions, cyclic and predictable. As far as we can see, ours is a universe of order, even though this order is not too apparent from close up, since from our position on Earth in the midst of the happenings, involved in them, and emotionally reacting to them, we are 'unable to perceive the large picture of cosmic existence. When, however, we consider celestial events which occur at an immense distance from us, we can readily experience the majestic rhythms outlined on the background of the sky: the rising and setting of the Sun, the Moon, and the stars, the New and Full Moon, the conjunctions of planets and other periodic phenomena. Thus astrology, by referring man's seemingly unpredictable and aleatory experiences in his earthly environment to the rhythmic and predictable changes in the position and the interrelationship of the celestial bodies, gave to mankind a most valuable sense of order, which in turn produced a feeling of at least transcendental security.

There are many ways in which man can react to and interpret his realization that definite and at least relatively reliable correlations can be established between what occurs in the universe around the Earth and outer or inner changes in human lives. Quite obviously such reactions and interpretations depend fundamentally on the stage of man's evolution in terms of the capacity of his senses to perceive what happens in the sty, and the state of development of his consciousness, his psychic faculties, and his intellectual as well as physical tools for measuring and interpreting what he experiences. All this finds expression in the social, religious, and cultural environment which provides the star-gazer with a certain kind of language, basic beliefs, and a socio-cultural way of life.

To disassociate astrology from the state of the culture and the society in which the astrologer lives and makes his calculations and interpretations is quite senseless. Any conceptual system has to be understood in terms of the conditions of life social and personal, as well as geographical of the men who act, feel, and think. The truth, or rather the validity, of an action or a thought can be ascertained only by referring it to the larger social-cultural picture, and, deeper still, to a particular phase of the evolution of mankind, or at least of a section of mankind.

Because this often is not done, or done with a bias produced by projecting one's present state of consciousness upon the minds and feelings of men of archaic times and other races, much confusion arises. Astrology is a particularly fertile field for confusion and the proliferation of dogmatically stated opinions, whether or not these take the form of supposedly scientific analyses and erudite compilations of texts or of psychic hunches or communications. Many complex theories and confusing interpretations have developed because astrology has been thought of as a thing in itself, a mysterious science using a puzzling terminology unchanged since ancient Chaldean times and supposedly still valid. Yet this terminology quite obviously has failed to fully take into account the radical changes in human consciousness and in man's awareness of the Earth's and of his own place in the universe which has occurred over these many centuries.

As a result the present wave of interest in astrology is encountering all kinds of obstacles and flowing confusingly into various channels. Much of the time this means losing sight of the basic function of astrology, which is to bring a sense of order and harmonious, rhythmic unfolding to human beings not human beings as they were in old Egypt or China, but as they are today with all their emotional, mental, and social problems.

Until the end of the archaic age in the sixth century B.C., when Gautama the Buddha lived and taught in India and Pythagoras in the Hellenistic world, the consciousness of men with perhaps rare exceptions was fundamentally locality-centered. Relatively small groups of human beings lived, felt, and thought in terms of what one can best define as tribal values. Tribal groups, the basic elements of human society at the time, were as bound to the particular land from which they drew their subsistence as an embryo is bound to the mothers womb. The tribe constituted an organism; every member of it was totally integrated into this multi-cellular organism. Each member of the tribe was dominated psychically by the way of life, the culture, the beliefs, and the symbols of the group, whose taboos he or she could not disobey. There were no real individuals at this stage of human evolution; all the values upon which the culture and beliefs of the group were founded were expressions of particular geographical and climateric conditions, and of a particular racial type. The tribal community looked to the past for the symbol, if not the fact, of its unity; that is, to a common ancestor, or to some divine king who had brought it a revealed kind of knowledge and a special psychic cohesion.

The astrology which developed at this stage was also locality-centered far more than truly geocentric, that is. Earth-centered. Every tribal village had a central place which was considered to be either the center of the world, or the entrance to a secret path that led to such a center. What we today call the horizon defined the boundaries of life. Above it, the sky was the habitat of the great creative hierarchies of gods. The dark region below the horizon was the mysterious underworld to which the Sun retired every night to regain the strength needed to bring light again to man's horizontal world. It is of course possible that a few priest-initiates were aware that the Earth was a globe which revolved around the Sun; but if there was such a secret tradition communicated orally through rites of initiation, it apparently had no bearing on astrology.

For primitive, tribal man, astrology was an integral part of religious symbolism as well as a means to foresee periodic natural occurrences affecting the life of the community and especially its agricultural activities or the mating of the cattle. In such a condition of life and with human consciousness focused upon the soil and the total welfare of the organic community, astrology was quite simple. It was essentially based on the rise, culmination, and setting of all celestial bodies stars as well as the two Lights, Sun and Moon. Two categories of stars were readily differentiated. Most of the stars as they rose and set kept their relationships to each other unchanging; that is, as they traveled around the sky, the pattern these dots of light made remained fixed. Other celestial bodies, on the contrary, moved independently of each other and at times appeared to go backward; they were called wanderers, which is what the word planet originally meant. Some of these planets appeared to the trained observer as small discs, rather than dots of light, and they were considered to form a category of celestial objects very different from the stars. Their periodic conjunctions were noticed, and their motions were plotted so that they could be measured and conjunctions foreseen.

Plotted against what? The obvious background or frame of reference was the permanent pattern