Neo-Platonism and numericals or astrology's elements as levels of variously clarified being

The philosopher Plotinus ongoing debate with the world hating Gnostics once again surfaces in his hugely interesting tractate "On Providence". Here his theory of the spontaneous emanation of our sensible universe from higher planes of existence is again referred to. Even if having been a consciously thought out creation, he says, the primal principle The Good assures that all parts of the world works as one unity, meaning the mankind is grievously mistaken in detesting what it demonizes as evil since perfection must include everything. Plotinus, however, always wavered a bit since he does sound a bit Gnostic himself, not the least when in this tractate he mentions kinds of spiritual beings (Enneads III, Armstrong p. 53). 

According to P. it is as if the universe says: "a god made me, and I came from him perfect above all living beings (embodied, visible or invisible things)... All things are in me (the World Soul)...many gods and population of spirits (daimones), good souls and men happy in their virtue (purer souls clearly inhering in the Good). 

The first blog entry depicted the four elements as metaphors for Plotinus' emanations, in line with the radical micro and macro cosmic parallelism where even our lower world reveals traces or images of the highest principles excluding The One (The Good) and only beginning the Intellect of the One, illustrated by the human head (the seat of the soul according to Plato, but better reserved for the Rational Soul, the Sun-Soul located in the human heart is the soul of the living being in this world, man or animal. 

Says Plotinus: "It is not true that the power of soul has reached to the sea (water as metaphor for the growth principle in nature, which displays a weak semblance of soul, dimly seen as through water). All the air and the aether (heavenly "fine air") is without a share of soul, but (nevertheless) up there are all good souls, giving life to the stars and to the well-ordered circuit of heaven (the rotating zodiac, Platonists were aware of the precession of the equinoxes) which in imitation of the divine Intellect wisely circles around the same centre for ever."

Here one senses the radical thought that All is everywhere but differently distributed, the same teaching as in philosophically enlightened astrology. Plotinus repeatedly complained about mindless astrologers who hadn't reflected on what they were dealing with. From the above quote, the element Air (and Ether, connected with Jupiter in Hindu astrology) is in this universe but do not belong to soul but rather represents the Intellect of the One. This clearly illuminated the Hindu thought that Moon in Gemini (Air in its Sattvic or illuminated mode) has an affinity with the subject Philosophy. And of course the third house (naturally linked with Gemini) is seen as a mirror to the 9e house of Dharma linked to Sagittarius, whose ruler is Jupiter, the sole planet representative of Aether in this world. This is deep astrology, known in late antiquity but now lost to the disintegrating Western world...

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I came across Plotinus' mention of other kinds of being only a day before discovering American news broadcaster News Nation and its long overdue homage to journalist George Knapp who has devoted four decades to the UFO mystery, again hotter than ever due to Congress hearings with, notably, a high ranking whistleblower David Grusch earlier this year. (See this on YouTube.)
Followers since the start early in 2023 of Weaponized, the podcast by George Knapp and Jeremy Corbell will not find anything new but News Nation has created a clear timeline for the general public to whom Knapp may have been an unknown.

Part 1 (42 mins): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hD7uPnXQDSo
Part 2 (42 mins): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6u7-_kSP0wU

Before the materialist paradigm, all mankind took pleasure in trying to envision the higher worlds belonging to the gods and immaterial (spiritual) beings and astrology seems to have encoded a common and widespread idea of this material world as the last and least stage in a continuous process. As Darwin's evolution became known to the Chinese due to Western Imperialism during its last obvious stage (the turn of the 19th century), Chinese intellectuals wrote in defense of their time honored Confucianism and made a point of their having known about this secret of nature, at least since their early mapping of the world and developing a cosmology proceeding out of the Great Dao (total unity), the appearance of Polarity (yin/yang) and as a third stage the world of ten-thousand things - our world of innumerable beings.

The question of precedence is beyond my knowledge, but either the human being is hard-wired to develop similar worldviews or civilization really began in the east and drifted westwards. Westerners tended to be stingy dating every other tradition and placed the developed "Yin/Yang cosmology" roughly at the same time as the Indian, during the final centuries before the common era. The oldest Babylonian horoscope so far found takes note of the planetary positions for a day in 412 BC and while no cosmology has been found in connection with the few discovered Babylonian horoscopes (tablets consisting only of astronomical data), it is obvious that a culture doesn't develop the concept of scientific observation (and mathematics) without a simultaneous idea about the nature of the world. 

The Internet abounds with good material and there is no need for another history overview; it is the connection of the three worlds view with astrological terms that is important here. But this left field contribution from a student of Jungian depth psychology may suffice which its mention of Anu, Bel and Ea, also used as the three heavenly paths in Babylonian astronomy:

https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog/2020/07/22/pre-christian-parallels-to-the-trinity-in-babylonia-carl-jung/

This blog is so good the logical sequel, so that after the "Three" a text on the "Four" or Quaternity is also recommended:

https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog/2020/02/22/20222/

The Four would correspond to the late Plotinus and his division of World Soul (#3) into the pure Rational Soul (Soul when aiming higher, oriented towards the divine Intellect (#2) and the mix and impure Irrational Soul in which man on earth finds himself, slave under the senses due to his orientation away from true being.

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By the time Plato "rationalized" ancient myths to suit his own time (leaving a few to his distant successor Plotinus to translate (see his difficult but hugely interesting "On Love"), Babylonians already had developed the three worlds cosmology which spread to the ends of the world - as seen e.g. in Norse mythology, but seen already in Greek Hermes, able to traverse the three worlds, bringing messages from the divine world to the middle world of the human race and even moving freely in the Underworld.

 Note, the threefold does not yet include the separation of the World Soul into the pure part and the "Underworld", the irrational soul or the cave of the spiritually ignorant human and other souls mistaking the world of the senses for true being - the dilemma still obtaining in the West and having gotten progressively worse due to the discoveries of material science. Only near his death did Plotinus include the cave or Nature as a fourth emanation, seen in the initial post's illustration as the brown circle, the earth element outside the growth soul or lower soul ("Water") but still with some function due to water's relaying of the higher world's intellectual Forms to the lower or sub lunar world, the Irrational world of  seeming existence (continuous becoming but never of itself attaining lasting or true being). Initially this is confusing mix of symbols relating both to the physical and metaphysical, needing a working knowledge of the ancient worldview not to become a source of confusion.

Hermes' (Mercury's) ability to traverse the three worlds is a motif that rubbed off on Christianity so that a tradition about Jesus preaching to the dead in the Underworld (here literal and not a metaphor for life on earth) became attached to his being dead three days before escaping from ... Plato's cave of the fallen and bound souls. Human race relatively speaking being dead on earth compared to Man's essence belonging to the purer regions. Early philosophy resonates in religion and vice versa.

Plato thus systematized the age-old idea about the three worlds, and the father of Neo-Platonism, Plotinus, elaborated further on it. the Divine or The One itself, the divine Intellect as a second plane of existence and the Soul of the All as the third world and the last "unmixed" and truly eternal world.
Plotinus was adamant the universe was eternal and thus in a sense static, even though he agreed with Plato that the world was a rolling out in time of Eternity, and that the seven planets and their circuits together wove our - we the fallen souls - and our experience of a lifetime. Other species may experience Time quite differently from what experience is alotted to Man.

Had the zero been invented then, the One would therefore rather be divine Intellect (Plotinus' first emanation) and creating its self-conciousness by naturally inclined to itself/its original (The One), before flowing on towards subsequent worlds. Only with the old Plotinus' there seems to be room for a certain hesitation in his traditional Greek world-affirming, although he stills refuses the Gnostics and their opinion that Nature is evil. For Plotinus' Man has a certain free will to either turn further away from the Source and thus expose himself to Nature with its mix of good and bad, or start contemplating the soul's eventual escape from the human form of existence.

Here is where astrology occupies itself. The philosophy and cosmology is toned down but is discreetly there, especially in the Hindu basis in its cosmology. The One is of course the human soul's innermost essence, the Self among Jungian psychologists, the divine Intellect (Nous) can be inferred in astrological teaching, thanks to Plotinus' insistence that the All (World Soul and its higher principles) is to be found in each individual soul, although to varying degree (this universe is a mix). Some souls’ seeming misfortune in the lack of any connection to the divine Intellect shows in the mild mental disease Atheism in real life and symbolically certain astrological omens likewise indicate that the soul in question is presently not in tune with the upward path to the Good.

Another view would be that even in this universe of sense the higher supernatural worlds are present but in covert form and represented metaphorically by the three Qualities and the four Elements. On the lowly earth the zodiac is an image consisting of various mixes, and - sorry to step on many toes - various evolutionary degrees. The dark quality combined with Earth is certainly not the same as darkness combined with Air. Taurus of the Ox symbolizes mindless identification with the material world while the Water Bearer is mankind's station in the great chain of being, higher than the beasts but lower than the angels (daimones)... 

The perceived immovability or lastingness in the Dark Quality may either represent a radical fall into the hallucination of a material and only material world, while ignorance at the level of the human collective thus symbolizes the species as a harbor, as a lasting haven. In reality it is the sign Gemini that represents enlightened Air. Hermes/Mercury is a human spirit so developed in the way of freedom and knowledge that not even the middle world will do. 

Air in the Sattvic mode represents human essence capable of sojourning in all three worlds - the magic number 3 which is the portal to the "ten-thousand (innumerable) things" according to the ancient Chinese. The open-ended eternity which makes man's soul at least a  potential co-creator with The One. "In my Father's house there are many mansions," as the clearly initiated teacher Jesus said.
 

More on possible "daimones":

https://www.weaponizedpodcast.com/episodes-2/episode-41

 

Man (higher and lower) and the Bull - Astrology and Reincarnation

 

The preceding blog entry on Scorpio as the hiddenness of life or the dark night of the soul touched upon its ancient relation to the complementary Bull or Taurus, at least since the Bible known to be the stumbling stock causing mankind to underachieve due to hunger for material sensation. Through Disney the Bull is known as peaceful enough but simple creature only aspiring to its own comforts, to live leisurely, taking in the fragrance of the flowers. Over time, the zodiac signs accumulate attributes, but the Ox seems strong enough to have kept the same core value.

In present Western astrology its natural 2nd house merely represent food stuffs and money. Thus the statue of the Charging Bull on the materialist's Wall Street which is in fact now a universal symbol for evil except for those having succumbed to it (the soul stands somewhat apart from the zodiac signs for those realizing e.g. the Neo-Platonic world view). Hindu astrology sees the 2nd as a place of possessions of the moveable kind (land, buildings and such belongs to Cancer's 4th house of the secluded home (feeling of safety and comfort - Cancer's Moon is exalted in Taurus so that food, security and peaceful repose are closely knit together. Not the elements Water and Earth, the pair forming the unreal shadow world pre-philosophical people regard as their only reality). Curiously, cars would seem to qualify as a moveable possession but is likened to a house in Hindu tradition. Perhaps the 2th house tends toward consumables while you don't eat your hut, house, palace or car...

As astrology stems from ancient Assyria/Babylonia one would expect to find the beginnings the current symbolism there. The Dumuzi & Inanna myth is only one piece of the puzzle confirming this. The shepherd Dumuzi is consort to the heavenly goddess Inanna (Venus) and as he goes missing in the Underworld on a quest of his own, Iannna in turn goes searching for him. Equipped with the knowledge that the 2nd was called the Portal of Hades in the West (during Hellenistic times) it is rather obvious from where this idea comes. The first thing Inanna encounters upon entering the Underworld is an ante-chamber where sides of meat are found hanging by their hooks. 

Cattle was valuable property, so here is the money and the food the inhabitants of this Plato's cave of deluded souls still clamor and kill for. Here are the riches spoken about by the Greeks in connection with the Underworld and its mysterious lord Plutus (not Pluto), presumably a parallel tradition until the low domain became personified as the god Hades. The ancient Sumerian myth about Inanna's descent into the Underworld fits the zodiac and its signs - which anciently and still in India overlaps and coincides with the houses (that of course means the ascending degree/birth moment falls within a sign/house and does not constitute the beginning of the ego house, just as Neo-Platonism's father Plotinus never tired of correcting the bad thinking of his time: we live within and thanks to our soul rather than having one. The zodiac's ascending degree at birth likewise represents a person's manifestation in time and space. 

This way of thinking lends weight to the sidereal zodiac (as opposed to the tropical or Western zodiac) by being fixed in space and representing both mankind's surrounding collective soul, the World Soul, as well as the individual's soul - however unimportant the latter becomes when the karmic connections to other individual souls throughout time dawns upon one! As the good British doctor Arthur Guirdham said, upon discovering the entangled case of ground reincarnation France to England: We are one another. 

 

Guirdham was a most fascinating physician and also a gifted psychic, though his attempt to explain the interconnection between a number of previous lifetimes connecting him and some acquaintances resulted in "The Lake and the Castle" with so many names to keep track of, I lost interest. On the other hand he offered other intriguing book titles. From his experience as a general practitioner came "Obsession", discussing deep seated mental illnesses from the perspective of unsolved traumas incurred during a past lifetime.

His birth hour is not known, but the natural zodiac for the day makes the title "We Are One Another" pretty obvious this is Man or the Water Bearer as opposed to the fleshly person or the Bull. Using the natural zodiac the Water Bearer is filled to the brim and importantly Saturn was at home this year, ruling its positive or supralunary Air sign. One may therefore recall the corresponding 11th house if ideas or ideologies and the obvious connection to Plato's cosmology and philosophical idealism. Regardless of whether the lower mind's Moon occupies Pisces or has arrived in Aries (as pictured) this must be regarded as a lucky day if dealing with the Big Questions of Life beyond mere physical health. This year (1905) the other big shaper of destiny, Jupiter, occupies Aries, the place where Soul/Sun is exalted. 

In the natural zodiac Jupiter naturally has its positive rulership over Sagittarius and thus is at home in the 9th place of metaphysics, religion and philosophy. What a perfect moment in time for very mature souls to reappear on earth should they choose to! This means that Sun in idealistic 9th and Jupiter in personal Aries connects that perennial "who am I?" sign to the 9th from where answers may received, the house of pure spirit - if nothing messes up the emerging and very beneficial story.

Guirdham choosing an occupation by which to help his fellowman says these promising omens must have been prominent during his birth hour. The mutual reception between Aries (the principle of "I") and Libra (my complementary "Ally") shown by Mars and Venus also underscores the "we are one another" - even to the point of creeping beneath the other's skin! On balance this must be considered a very favorable day, as everything plays out on a spiritual level (all planets except for the low moon nodes) so that Guirdham in fact looks more like a spiritual healer than a general practitioner!

Forgive me this excursion! It just appeared out of thin air. We were in the sublunary world, discussing Inanna-Venus, who rules the Ox/2nd house. Seen from the gods' perspective one may well see the portal of Hades/2nd as also leading out (in time) into the 1st, sunrise, a new day on earth - life appearing in materiality. But to the gods this is no climb up from the Netherworld but rather a descent, down into the our earth with its mostly drunk and sleeping mankind - actually souls or quanta of consciousness but now in flesh bodies acquired through the Fall and thereafter only sensing darkly due to the coarseness of matter. (Plotinus never quite got his world view together, trying to defend the ancient Greek view of a good Cosmos while the bottommost building block - pure matter - was itself the root of all evil.

Even though there are three Earth signs (Taurus, Virgo and Capricorn) they are NOT expressions of "prima materia", though the Ox comes precariously close by not only belonging to the lowest Element but also to the Quality of Darkness in the preceding triplet of Qualities. I often think something happened on the way to the West since in Hindu cosmology Tamas guna is similar to Yin in ancient China: the dark quality passively sinking the continuous creation process and thus forever settling and bringing mankind the illusion of a stable foundation. 

One Hindu tradition envisages the three Qualities rather as forces, the Light lifting to true existence while the Dark drags the soul down into pseudo-existence. Even the Roman Plotinus seems to put the soul of man in the middle Quality - Passion - among the three Hindu gunas, just as Hindu astrology sees this species as especially partaking of Rajas guna, the passionate quality. But this precarious middling position seems not to exist as such but is merely a blend of Light and Darkness or the Far-Eastern Yin-Yang-cosmology. Thus one may perhaps look back to an Asian dualist origin even for Plato's thoughts about the soul in the world as a "mixing bowl." This too was an early import and perhaps origin of the later thoughts about the rational and the irrational soul parts, mixed-up and not at all very clear in the vast majority of the human beings...(compare astrology's immense number of combinations). 

Hindu philosophy obviously accepted Passion as a quality on equal footing with Light and Dark, since The One followed by Duality demands Soul or a third step before the Chinese "ten-thousand things" or the Westerners' hopelessly obscured "individualism" or fixation with "parts" becomes a blockage to a deeper understanding of what even the small life should aim at (the greater Life and its continuation on the path of restoration).

Where were we at? Taurus, the Ox, earthly and sprung from the Quality of Darkness. It may be seen as a symbol of the natural (primitive) or uneducated man's belief in the reality of this world while this illusion is shattered already in the next sign Gemini, which teaches the duality of appearances, as well as having a ruler, Mercury, acting as the Psychopomp, the guardian angel who lifts the soul out of the useless Taurean or physical body when that times comes.

Plato and still Plotinus, hundreds of years later, were both adamant about the two-worlds model, where Taurus represents this world and Airy Gemini (in time) has (from the human perspective) figured out there is another and higher level, Plotinus intelligible (archetypal) universe, the soul's essential home rather that this earth, this Plato's cave with fallen mankind, the bound prisoners. (Following Plotinus, it is hard to make out whether the human souls essentially belongs in the purest regions of the Universal Soul or rather in the divine Intellect (Nous). The latter sure seem like a possibility for those so inclined, while less ambitious souls will forever remain in Universal Soul after their life on Earth. I have not yet understood how Plotinus tried to reconcile the ever increasing numbers of "limited experiences" as individual souls in Soul, as he admits of souls' reincarnations. If at this point venturing a guess: our journey home is never ended and souls remaining souls is similar to the first and only surprising part of the Matrix trilogy. As long as a human or a ghost values his present life the highest, the Quality of Darkness is holding sway. Only the the Path or Quality of Light promises something more...

Greek tradition has preserved the thought about Hermes (Mercury, ruler of Gemini) being very clever even as a little child. What the Babylonians ascribed to Nebu (Mercury) may perhaps be gleaned from Dumuzi, the shepherd. Mercury does rule the Earth sign Virgo, which may represent herdsmen of all kinds as well as farmers.

Nebu being the scribe of the gods  (writing on clay tablets/Earth in Babylonia) also ties in perfectly the literate class in the ancient world. The ascription of enmity and misfortune to Virgo's natural house, the 6th, is typical the landowner who in opting for the materialistic life now only has problems with harvest and having cattle stolen. The sixth sector seems to focus on the bad outcomes of clever Hermes/Mercury. Probably the Babylonian Nebu must be held as another facet of Mercury, not the same as the resident landowner / farmer.

Sometimes it looks like Platonism and astrology were cut from the same cloth. Plotinus could well be contemplating the deepest meaning of Gemini (Mercury in its airy appearance) when in Enneads, II.3) he writes:

"Everyone is double one part the mixed soul (soul with matter) and one part Man himself. The whole universe is likewise double, on part being that which is compounded of body of body and a soul bound to body, and the other the Soul of the All - which is not in body but enlightens the traces [of its higher or heavenly aspect] in that part which is in body." 

Man is a dual being as opposed to the animals, just as the Roman astrologer-poet Manilius appears to have been the first to put down in writing, but only in Gemini, the Air sign belonging to the Quality of Light is this revealed (Air Libra as Quality of Passion is too occupied with forging alliances - and offspring - to care much about its heavenly origins, the last and foundational Air sign as far as astrology goes is mankind as a whole, Man as a social being and Air as the Quality of Darkness, since ignorance is what souls on earth as a group might be said to suffer from. Enlightenment is an individual thing and cannot be applied to an entire group - this is brainwashing although nations prefer to call it the process of socialization whereby the newborn are welcomed to this world and integrated in their society.

Astrology in the West still preserves Gemini as a way of describing the Messenger or an angel, this-worldly epithets like communicators, taxi drivers, journalists and traveling tradesmen being this-worldly masques behind which one archetype denoting enlightenment and knowledge hides. While the Twins partly hides the duality intended the Hindu name the Couple (Mithuna) emphasizes the souls striving for wholeness in it currently mixed and half-material condition. The Couple is a man and a women and this indicated the heavenly awareness still possessed in some measure by the unmixed soul resident in the human being. In this world the lowest form of symbolically representing one's being a part of the heavenly unity is sexual congress and quite logically Hindu astrology places Venus as the best planet for this sign when rising in the East. Plotinus used Aphrodite (Venus) as a symbol of soul and so one can see Venus between the lines in the above quote, especially by keeping the Couple in mind. Sexual congress is of course a primitive expression of the ideal of Unity (the thus by extension the soul reconnecting with The One), but Gemini has intellectual activity as its primary outlet if talking of its pure soul part.

The Hindu term "avatar" does apply to this mixed being, in this world but rooted in another and clothed in an alien skin (as Plotinus said). The term should not be reserved for the occasional visit of some god to mankind, although that is how the avatar has come to be understood in Hinduism, barring popular cultures less enlightened uses and which stand for next to nothing, especially in the virtual world of the Internet. I'm thinking that the movie Avatar got the idea, suggestive only because deep inside we know we are all avatars or guests having become involved in an alien world (and about to destroy it through our economic system fueled by greed). This is precisely the Gnostic teaching, so similar to some of Plotinus thinking although he criticized them for calling the god responsible for this darkened universe evil and not the highest good. Plotinus appears torn between the East (the Greeks) and the Eastern mood...

The mix of soul having embedded itself with material forms could well be described as the zodiac's negatively polarized lower half, every other sign appearing as either Water or Earth. Man as Man is thus only visible as a natural gift to those born in Air and Fire signs, preferably in constructive mixes, astrologically speaking. Fire denoting sight or vision and Air normally invisible structures of form. This combination by no means automatically produces saints, but once one has dumped the erroneous Western Tropical Zodiac the returned to the original one (luckily kept intact in India) one can begin to see how these very basic building blocks are very meaningful. One might even engage in primitive astrology by merely using these indicators of basic human tendencies.

Retracing the steps a bit, I have noted that Taurus and Geminis, although signs bordering on each other have very little in common earthly life, and the extremely stubborn Ox usually wins out. This may mean that communication about STUFF may be all that is possible. Gemini accessing the abstract or intelligible side may have to look elsewhere if eager for intellectual conversation. The Ox is tradition in the material, it is a quoter of other people rather than trying to figure things out for himself (Taurus' ruler is Venus, noted for saving energy where possible but also for being a docile beast of burden when so put to use). Seemingly unwilling to think for itself is where curious/investigative Gemini takes up the thread after Taurus. 

Hindu tradition places elementary schooling - mother to child - under the Ox and by this is meant not so much learning through oral tradition as merely the mother voicing words the the small child mimicking. Filling the words with meaning, there already the principle of Gemini/Mercury have. The child genius with unbelievable inborn talents is a head-scratcher. May some souls return to earth with their previous intellect intact? The thankless research (much neglected in the material West) performed by Dr. Ian Stevenson on children who remembered past lives indicates that much. This blogger was born with Moon rising in Gemini and ascendant ruler Mercury in the 5th house of  good karma and was as a child convinced having formerly been a Chinese, though strictly speaking this may have been a child's fantasy triggered by Japanese signs on a year calendar (one sheet with a photo for each month). Father got it somewhere and hung on a wall. I was six and on the verge of mastering writing and was naturally intrigued.

But at 18 it happened again, in a bookstore I overheard a customer ask for the "I Ching" and i froze on the spot and hesitantly approached the man to inquire further. "It is a good book" the man said, smiling. That was the start of more than 30 years with this and other old texts, I bought 10-12 translations to English to get deeper than the semantic layer and finally obtained a copy from China with both modern simplified signs and (poor) English translations. Only after having made my own dilettante translation did the strange Chinese pull ease.

Placing suggestive and sometimes lucid night dreams throughout life in approximate chronological order, the Chinese experience, if there was such a one, did oddly not precede the previous one (as Ian Stevenson's research would suggest). It rather took place in 1st century BC. This touches upon a deep philosophical question: Plato's the intellectual universe as "proper home of soul" as opposed to the lower world of human senses where one Time produces world history makes things appear in sequence. Ian Stevenson researched "far memories" in children for over 30 years and in fact found the occasional case with multiple remembered identities while awake.

Going to sleep with the suggestion to dream about one's soul history may sound very peculiar at our point in history, but this I have done throughout my entire adult life. Sometimes surprising "solutions" to strange acquaintances have presented themselves! And hopeless "affairs" have been shown at their root. (I became aware of the American psychic Edgar Cayce and his story of soul karma at 19 - a considerable influence before the subjects of Religion and Philosophy). After discarding dreams with fantastic or likely only symbolic content about twenty or twenty-two former lives remained, but of these only a very few seem to be important and perhaps the karma this life experience was based upon... No knowledge in the West and no answers to the found here. 

Ancient Greek philosophy had something going but Christianity put an end to the theory of transmigration... That certain lives is heavily based on certain life times, looked certain after finding Hindu astrology in 2007 and learning about the Atma Karaka concept, "the soul's significator" or rather, "what the soul has envisaged for this lifetime". This is thus not the soul per se but rather the soul's mission for this incarnation. In the Hellenistic tradition this takes the place of the Sun as a pointer to the reason for returning as a human (thus a specific form of karma), but the AK does not appear to render the "solar achievement" obsolete. A strong and well-configured Sun in a birth horoscope still has its message. Finding the AK point is so simplistic it borders on silliness: the planet at the highest degree in its sign of all, becomes AK. And if two occupy the same whole degree ("planetary war") the one with highest (most northern) latitude wins. Silly as it sounds, I found the tenet yielding interesting results in most of the timed birth charts I have studied.

And none more than my own AK. A life of being forced to change job types frequently because of Sweden's unstable economy and labor market as well as a hunger for knowledge is perfectly represented by the desirous Moon rising in Air Gemini (food for thought rather than a sybarite) and Moon's ruler Mercury becomes AK, being in airy 5th house of opportunities and good luck and furthest progressed of all. Gemini is the opposite of Taurus and its belonging to Tamas guna or the illusion of lasting certainties in this world. Gemini is Air partaking of the Quality of Light, which is keenness to learn due to the substance of Light itself coming even before Fire in Plotinus cosmology, a rather Eastern variant of Platonism though Classicist and Neo-Platonist translator A.H. Armstrong denies this.

It is true no trace of the Hindu cosmology with its three Gunas or Qualities is seen in Plotinus' writing but what prompted him to go East for Indian and Persian learning (though he never got there when a war got in the way)? It surely seems he had some knowledge of things Eastern. Reincarnation, though held by Plato, is hardly brought into the picture before Plotinus was very old and wrote "On Providence" as one of his final treatises.

This blogger, having been interested in reincarnation since his teens (if not earlier), has Mercury as the most progressed planet in 5th in Air Libra. This house symbolizes previous good karma "rolled over" into this life although it has not in this case resulted in material recompensation (Saturn, temporal ruler of the 9th philosophical house, blocks low aspirations). 

 

Through Libra, the 5th house is furthermore owned by Plotinus' symbol for the soul, Venus, and that sits in the 3rd house of (ordinary) learning and communication. Not a guru (house 9) but still some type of lifelong learner and communicator... Repeated indications of a similar kind must surely be taken seriously. "Who the glove fits, let him wear it," sang reggae artist Bob Marley. Is the physical universe identical with the soul, even if only to a small extent? Plotinus held to that. If so, astrology may reveal more of man's soul than most people like to think! 

As for the above chart it is by no means as favorable as its dominant supralunary tendencies (Air/Fire) may indicate. Gemini rising in the east means the Mercury value has the upper hand in this life. Thinking and communication are recommended and thus involves more than one individual. Therefore the sometimes self-centered Sun, general symbol of the soul but as engine in unspiritual people can become rather annoying. It becomes an efficient evildoer according to Hindu astrology. Using astrology for self-examination this blogger has even tied his Sun+Mars to certain of the least likeable dream characters, among which is found both a slave trader AND, fittingly, two different experiences as a slave - it seems eminently reasonable as one bad life as a profit hungry person has to be paid for by several lives in bad conditions. 

By declining a Sun type of career and rather sharing thoughts about others' expressions of life and leadership in this world, one may perhaps steer clear of the bad karma this Sun in 5th indicates. A possibly former life with certain authoritative Sun power must now be sacrificed in order for intellectual growth and understanding. (The blogger was during his teens VERY argumentative and critically disposed towards his father/Sun with clear improvements in their relation after the son had turned 40). 

This task of downplaying any leadership or even dictatorial tendencies in this case becomes easier as Sun in Libra is not much for dictatorship to begin with and also because Sun's dispositor (foundation) belongs with the good guys: Venus is both an essentially beneficial planet and an efficient benefactor for those with Gemini rising according to the hugely interesting Hindu system. Some bad and some good is connected to the 5th house and a rather typical outcome. This chart has a 5th house representing partly bad karma to be addressed in this lifetime but also good tools (a good Venus and a good ascendant ruler, Mercury) to come to grips with what the soul/Sun carries with it. 

More than twenty past lifetimes during night dreams during 40+ years look like stuff of interest contributing to THIS destiny, this life, but only four or five parallel lives of lasting importance. Studying the Chinese oracle I-Ching for more than 30 years must surely reflect a dream at 19 wherein I discovered a Chinese life as a book keeper and calendar maker in the employ of a cruel feudal lord. The dream clarified the troubled relation I had gotten myself info with a slightly younger lady, at 18 already a single mother. The several dreams after meeting her consisted of several scenes but the upshot was that small boy had been my employer whom I had let down in this lifetime and whom I now owed attentive service - karma may be fulfilled in the most unexpected ways. The weirdest thing was perhaps that I began dreaming even before having been invited to her flat. Both kitchen and the living room was filled with Chinese kitsch! At least four or five pieces. So there was another soul trying to work out a specific karmic knot in her distant past...

Subsequent to that relation I never married or had children in this life - check the Sun/Mars conjunction associated with bad karma i the chart above! Sun stands for children and as natural ruler of 5th the house too denotes one's children (or lack thereof). In the just preceding and short Italian life the ending was violent with bullets flying all over a car parking lot and a 6 or 7 years old daughter killed only seconds before me - her father in that life. Already at ten in this life garbled memory bits poured forth - but corrupted. I fantasized I had had a younger sister whom I accidentally had shot dead. Perhaps the remnants of the once-father feeling guilt of having caused his family's death and the present mind unable to form a better understanding of the information coming from within. It would take 35 more years before that violent life of an Italian engineer secretly opposed to Mussolini's Fascists (but revealed as a Communist) erupted during two very distinct dreams only days apart and clearly belonging together... Now Internet was invented and I managed to locate some curious bits of factual history fitting the dreams very well.

Possibly a future blog post will have a look at these fleeting glimpses of other people and times and ponder what planets - as entry values in the present birth horoscope - may represent as the takeaway from those times.)

*****

Metaphorically the element Earth represents crude materialism - a surface life lived through the senses, touching and tasting stuff. Air is representative of Mankind (as opposed to Animals) and its peculiarity, its natural curious and capability to see the unseen though pure Air or intellect. Air takes on a wide symbolical significance as it represents intellectual capability of man here on earth, though not man but only the earthly image. Man's essence is ultimately not his soul but the soul's essence, what Neo-Platonism calls Nous or the divine Intellect. (Recall Doctor Guirdham's very strong Water Bearer.) But only insofar man turns about and reestablishes contact and here the airy Gemini may serve as a free ranging intellect capable of understanding even Nous. 

One is obliged to mention here Mercury in Water, since this type may prefer living in the sensory world rather than an abstract thought world even though US psychic Edgar Cayce (1877-1945) declared that "thoughts are things" while in trance. This was exactly Plotinus' position in his taking up Aristotele's "Active Mind of God: creation by just thinking it in to being." For God, thinking is the same as willing something into being, no longer an option for fallen souls finding themselves in Universal Soul and perhaps even entangled in karma pertaining to this Earth. Mercury in Water is deemed "fallen" in Pisces, but the sign is more than compensated by having the Great Benefactor (Jupiter) as its ruler! 

In certain (admittedly rare) cases, Mercury in Water may not be much given to brooding thought but having direct access to awareness beyond ordinary logic, that is, the intuitive way of receiving answers without the tedious chore of having think through it all. As Water may be contaminated by Earth (materialism) the intuitive type is rare, the all that has here been said about Air-Saturn and the Air-Mercury, the shuttle, needlessly applies only to some birth charts. But seeing astrology's many possible combinations, one will understand why Plotinus stressed (several times) people's differing capabilities to realize even their own souls. Most of us remain tools for other souls with sometimes questionable intents.

(The propensity for conversion experiences is probably not written beforehand in a birth horoscope since free will is supposed to belong to the soul rather than the enveloping fleshly man, but this blogger cannot but think that various combinations of birth omens contribute to stagnating as a materialist in a given life, momentarily leaving aside Life's meaning, that is to gather the soul sparks back into the fold.)

God's mind thus is present in the higher rational part of soul of this species but to varying degree among its members. That Life placed the Animal (that is, itself) on earth before Man came here is generally seen by the 1st, 2nd and 3rd signs of the zodiac. 4th sign, the mother principle Cancer, may represent Plato's cave into with the souls fall while trapped in the cycle of reincarnation, one expression of which of course is the literal mother's womb.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead is young compared to the age old motifs hidden in the astrological symbolism, but looking at a part of the contents, one is stupefied by how far this mind-centered branch of Mahayana Buddhism appears to have figured out the facts of life...

Scorpio's hiddenness / Taylor Swift's positive mind / Hints of Plotinus' cosmology in astrology

 

Lisa Sheridan at approx. 25-30
(image borrowed from imdb.com)

 

Scorpio as the reaping of mysterious and perhaps ancient bad karma

For the second time I noted the haunting beauty of short-lived and not terribly famous actress Lisa Sheridan (1974-2019). This time as a one-episode character in a re-run of the well-crafted tv crime series The Mentalist (ep. 1-21, 2009).

Having plowed through literally thousands of celebrity horoscopes, and viewing them using either the "natural zodiac" (Aries/1st, Taurus/2nd and so on) or Moon as a lunar ascendant (often remarkably revealing of the emotional life), even these replacements for a chart with known birth time slowly began to speak in favor of Hindu astrology. Just by addressing the matter of the precession of the spring equinox clarified almost every chart and in the case of this actress (no known birth hour) perfectly illustrated Scorpio as the archetypal sign of idea of the dark night of the soul. It's been said that the entire birth horoscope (with time known) reveals the person's karma, at least in outline (though many would claim much more). 

Lacking known time, the chart instead takes on a kind of collective karma, or even a detached view of the World Soul indicating its own ups and downs, which may mean that entire "sub-generations" arrive on earth to share some experiences. But the national horoscope may be even more important as nations might be led by self-servers or wise men and this limit individual inhabitants of that country. Some people may technically have brought good karma to this life and still reach nowhere due to the homeland's restricted chart.

Being an extreme case of Scorpio and also consisting of the large cross in the Quality of Darkness (Tamas guna) anyone with some knowledge of astrology may guess that these are somewhat troublesome omens. Moon in Leo would like to be a mind reflecting an untroubled ruler, the Sun, but according to this natural chart, the dark 8th spot rather brings less pleasant things to mind. Should the actual birth hour agree it is easy to understand why that disease alcoholism struck. Scorpio is infamous for its toxic conditions, psychic or somatic.

From what little is said about Lisa Sheridan on the Internet she seems to have been the nicest of persons and I agree. Scorpios are nowhere nearly as tempestuous and/or sex-fixated creatures they are made out to be. The blog will return to the chart of the USA with Scorpio rising according the sidereal zodiac and using the well-known chart by the British physician and Freemason Ebenezer Sibly. From the US chart it is obvious that secrecy may be Scorpio's most prominent trait and these very friendly Scorpios may just as well be putting up a front. Scorpio is the opposite of being frank or above board. Integrity issues may be the real reason their calm and friendly manners. Hindu astrology means that the 8th house / sign  indicates karma not yet having matured, even as a storm may be brewing in that unseen world where the karmic puzzle is being laid out. Putting the lid on, that's Scorpio's way and naturliga has its legitimate place in some job types...

*****

Some Indian astrology sites juxtapose the 5th house of good karma (purva punya) with the 8th house of bad karma, a natural enough extension of the eight sign as a symbol of death. One is also reminded of the old saying "the wages of Sin is death". But then Christianity soon banished the then prevalent thought of reincarnation in order for Jesus death to have any meaning whatsoever in their ideology. Research by means of hypnosis indicate we do indeed return to earth time and again, even if having been a believing Christian believer in one or other lifetime, so obviously this religion was not very well constructed. Reading the Roman 3rd century Platonist philosopher Plotinus reveals the extent to which Christianity borrowed from philosophy in order to create their narrative about a sacrificial goat taking on the sins of mankind, introduced due the Fall. Scorpio and the Christian myth of Fall is closely connected.

The motif of a fall is common in philosophy too and even though Plato tried to de-mythologize old Greek beliefs, he still reverted to mythical descriptions since metaphysical realities must use similitudes from our world of sensory experience. His tale of the fallen souls as a mankind of bound prisoners in a cave is a perfect image found in astrology. 

During the Hellenistic era the Bull (Taurus) corresponding 2nd house was understood to be the portal to Hades (Plato's cave) - only that the view of our earthly life is now reversed and seen as time spent in the Kingdom of Death. Using the sun as symbol for the eternal soul, sunrise symbolizes its reappearance in the 1st house of the enveloping ego-body system. But during the step before that the soul receives its flesh body thanks to the Moon. This, the mother principle, have its place of exaltation in Taurus, which gives another take on Plato's cave/womb.

If one thusly reads the zodiac circle's first third backwards (opposed to the sun's daily movement) one discovers the Fall in the fourth sign, Cancer where the Moon rules. (The next to thirds are partly repetitions but on expanded stages, from the Person the second part deals with the soul level or the real Individual, while the third stage it the Universal level). On per personal level, in the natural or archetypal zodiac the newborn is represented by Aries, a Fire sign which to the philosophically inclined points directly to Plotinus' first emanation: The One. The Sun, while ruler of Leo, is held to be exalted in Fiery Aries, and there reminding one that soul is bodily man's essence. Withing the child or merely personal type a soul awaits its potential awakening.

Fire too is of course a symbol borrowed from the lower world of senses, but if for now neglecting Plotinus' distinction between Light and Fire, indicates an acting out or an outpouring which results in a second emanation or divine Intellect (Greek: Nous). Astrology, exalting Sun in Aries, seems to say there is an essential connection between God and Man, even when using Plotinus' exalted view of "The One." Indeed, how the lower and higher worlds interconnect makes the use of worldly metaphors legit when talking of the supernatural levels in Neo-Platonism. I find it nearly impossible to resist comparing the divine Intellect (Nous) to astrological traditions of the 7th heaven or Saturn. Whilst only the highest plane of the sense world (including man's rational soul) extends to Universal Soul, the latter in turn is, at its core, the divine Mind or Intellect (Nous). 

Man's soul being kin to (cut from the same cloth as) the Universal Soul thus potentially may experience on a higher level than even "cosmic consciousness" (which still may be occupied with the material universe). God-Mind seems to be within reach for a human. This blogger briefly had the same experience on going to sleep two nights in a row in his thirties (decades ago) and so far never again. Just about to lose waking consciousness a deep blue space opened up and "every piece of music ever composed" was heard playing as a unity with not a hint of chaos but everything fitting together perfectly. This was of course also a metaphor borrowed from the sense world as I have always been intensely appreciative of music (every genre). I do have a clue if seed experiences must be sought: at 15 rock group Be-Bop Deluxe was a favorite and on the second album is found the title "Between the Worlds". I seldom bothered with the enclosed lyric sheets and to this day don't know what the writer Bill Nelson had in mind.

So this was a vivid experience of some level within Rational Soul repeated twice just to make its point. I cannot for my life decide what level of Soul in Plotinus' cosmology this may have represented as I knew nothing about Neo-Platonism 30+ years ago. Classicist A.H. Armstrong criticized Plotinus' cosmology somewhat for including too many levels. Was my "higher soul" momentarily aware of the sensory world's "cosmic sympathy" and was it catching a glimpse - through Universal Soul - the noetic Mind of God (containing all archetypes/Ideas) of which my perspective honed in on musical forms? I do not know, but such experiences (especially when repeated the next day) serves to nudge the subject in unexpected directions.

Back to the zodiac as seen in the lower world of sense. Again reading the natural zodiac backwards from the moment of sunrise/birth, before equipping the soul with a flesh body in Taurus is seen Gemini, an Air sign indicating man's capacity for abstract and logical thought (though Man is discovering just how intelligent other species are). Now Gemini is not the divine Intellect or even the high, rational part with both Universal Soul and man's soul has as its crowning glory. All people differ in intellectual capacity and both Gemini's Mercury and Saturn (whose manifest home of real being is the Airy Water Bearer).

In the unusual case of a human with both the intellectual planets obscurely placed in the heavens at the moment of birth, but Moon in Mercurial 3rd may, may result in a day dreamer who responds to "gut feelings" instead of developing much interest in rational problem solving... Realizing how many combinations astrology offers just in thinking ability provides a good parallel to that incredibly complex heavenly symphony I briefly heard (maybe for just a second - I was stunned and again wide awake from the experience).

But still tracing the newborn soul past the creation of an enveloping flesh body (built by the Mother Principle the Ox) and enhanced by Gemini/intellectual ability/the brain/Air, the fourth sign Cancer is interesting. For this, as mentioned, is the sign of the Fall, indicating the soul's choice of life in the sublunar sphere. Do note the Hindu Gemini portrays a young couple (male/female). Sex thus is added AFTER the fall, and agrees with Jesus' supposed insight in the beyond: in heaven the soul again is sex-less, same idea as Plato's story of the original soul who got split up in two halves. Cancer being Moon's only ruling sign shows how tightly knit the story is in this short story of philosophical teaching in pictorial form. Thus it is not strictly true that zodiac's second and third part merely expands upon the initial or personal part. But such are these visible manifestations of the multiform archetypes in the true world. They are fit for many uses.

Following the soul fallen into Cancer or the lowest part of itself (also described as Nature), only one more step backwards and one arrives at its beginning in its Father's house (that according to Jesus had so many different dwellings). So what gives as the exalted Sun in Aries but really stemming from Leo where the Sun rules, and Hindu astrology naturally terms the 5th the house of Atman. This can be read as both as the deathless individual soul but also as the World Soul, which personalized becomes the Father, subject of so many different religions and bearing many names. Sun may here be seen as The One, rendered visible as an image by the Sun of this material universe. It took me a few years to realize the opposition of Sun in Leo and Saturn in Water Bearer is a perfect illustration of Neo-Platonism's two uppermost emanations and more. The One and Nous (highest intellect) simultaneously describe the Center and the surrounding Space or Air - this is the World Soul while Fire and Air together constitutes the Higher Soul in the material universe. Astrology's symbol system carries its analogies throughout this cosmology.

*****

From the time when the king was regarded as the representative on earth of God or God's will, comes the 5th house as a specially privileged house. It fascinated me immensely to find this house of good karma to be variable, according to Hindu astrology. Enter a planet unsuited to the 5th or dissimilar to the significations thereof, and the soul may reincarnate bringing bad or unsolved karma with it even through this fine house. Makes one wonder if  the 8th house of outright bad karma is even necessary. Studying this system makes one realize it is a cultural product containing layer upon layer and sometimes resulting in self-contradictions. Since giving up Western astrology in 2007 I do believe that the mind adjusts itself and sort things out. This blog shows the small and very selective set of rules I have come to prefer. 

Those with little talent for creative synthesizing may well prefer astrology software who profess to do the thinking for the astrologer. I have seen a feature built-in where the program quantifies planets in certain positions and instructs the user that they should be allowed "nn percent strength" during interpretation. This is the very essence of  "drawing by numbers", the average person's way of doing astrology. Astrology might appear scientific by its reliance on number and computation but that is only the initial step. Getting a chart to "speak" necessitates an altogether different mindset.

The puzzle that is the zodiac has the mathematically minded person archetypally represented by Mercury in Air-Gemini. But even so this nimble intellect needs a higher mental faculty for genius level understanding. This is given astrologically by Jupiter in Fire-Sagittarius, known in Hindu astrology as Guru, the divine Teacher. The 3e and 9th stand opposed as "simple" logicians and inspired, meta-logical intuition, capable of going directly from question to answer without a series of logical operations in between. 

As a Fire sign it naturally stands closer to The One, which likewise is spontaneous, not having to think beforehand: The One and its divine intellectually creates as Nous or the intellectual and transcendental universes contemplates its riches. Hindu philosophy as a very similar thought to Plotinus: God in his "lila" (play) discovers himself ever more deeply. By no means a specialist, I find it incomprehensible that the gifted Orientalist A.H. Armstrong refused to see any Eastern influences on the Roman philosopher. God's Lila is nothing but Nous timeless/eternal self-contemplation (looking directed towards the One) with its consequences further down the "great chain of being".

It is true that the elements as metaphors may take on many expressions and simple astrological versions of Fire may end up as athletes our outdoors people with no 9th house interests at all. But this may well change in a future incarnation. Often death and terror may force the fallen soul to think bigger. And there is where we return to the beautiful actress Lisa Sheridan whose alcoholism shortened her life. Scorpio is the "walk trough the valley of death" a place frightful for many but which didn't concern the Bible author in the least since he was a believer in a higher reality. Scorpio is the next to last stage of the Water element and thus deals with only the lower portion of soul, the one the higher one drops in Pisces, the one Water sign associated with the Quality of Light.

*****

Scorpio as a callous profiteer or careerist

Lisa Sheridan thus could be seen as a victim of an untoward fate. As for the extremely successful and rich Swedish producer Max Martin with numerous superficial Billboard Top 100 hits under his belt. Calling him a genius is rather exaggerated, this is rather a mix of a good and nuanced hearing and technical skills (everyone today can create music with a computer but some do it better).

Still this music producer carries bad karma mixed with good. He cashed in some bad a few years ago when world-wide phenomenon Taylor Swift broke free from his stranglehold on her artistic freedom. Out of deep seated greed Max Martin had insisted to be credited as a songwriting by inclusion of his own generic pop music as opposed to Swift's own considerable composing skills two of her album. In the sales of the songs are the money rather than by merely by producing. (For fairness sake: Swift re-recorded not only Max Martin productions.)

Noticing Max Martin's unusual emphasis on merely two signs, Scorpio and the Water Bearer the ugliest of combinations appear, as Water represents the hunger inherent in the natural, untutored soul while the Water Bearer represents Plato's rational soul, the real human. Sometimes they act in concert and creates e.g. fine pieces of art: director/producer Woody Allen has the same sign combination and just about all of his films are about this troublesome combination of rationality mixed-up with an all too willing lower nature. Scorpio at its simplest is merely nature's call to the biological organism to safeguard the life of its species. Mindless sexual instinct. 

Scorpio may become a callous profiteer if in business - se Donald Trump's Moon in Scorpio for a flagrant example (a full moon, furthermore). Bad or at least less developed cases of this sign and its contribution may become a hired killer or a subtle type of dictator/producer like Max Martin, infiltrating society but on the other hand always seen as a foreigner, poorly integrated. To my understanding he acts as a parasite by nudging or influencing his artists to record his songs as he obviously has an ear for the simplistic music the masses crave in their early phase, not yet having developed a mature taste. Artists may of course first approach with his established reputation for creating success and material for mass consumption. He thus moves with other money-seeking people, artists for whom art is only a distant, second consideration.

Max Martin's early hits with Britney Spears (and some boy group I manage to forget the name of) are perfect examples of simplistic music. "Baby, Hit Me One More Time" also reveals Scorpio's darkest and most violent side. Was this Max Martin projecting own violent fantasies onto his muse Britney? I didn't follow the talk around 1990 but hardly doubt Martin himself had been a victim of child abuse or a tough childhood from which music proved to be an escape. I have seen very unhappy childhoods prove to kindle a fantastic future career due to the person turning inwards...

One may wonder, though, to what extent Martin's mega hit contributed to Spears' unlucky future life. In attaching oneself to another one comes to partake of that persons' destiny to a certain extent, the more the less one's own character is developed.  Imagine being an overbearing Scorpio producer in the music studio all day, using the peculiar ability of Air mixed (or rather non-mixed) with Water in affecting, almost hypnotizing, those about about them to accept his suggestions born out of the complex mentality the Water Bearer often possesses. In the moment people do not realize they are being brainwashed. Remember, not all Water Bearers reach the high development of the sign, Ideology may be beyond their reach but a sub-cultural or "club" expression without much awareness of the wide world is also a kind of social milieu, and thus represented by this sign.

All combinations of Air and Water may lead to either gullible people and players capable of moving others' mindsets in devious ways. Actor Nicole Kidman, for instance, has played her fair share of  characters doubled-minded and devious (she was even nicknamed "Devlin" in an Adam Sandler comedy). Her horoscope contains Moon in Scorpio opposed to the duplicitous Sun in dual Gemini. This is a much more complicated and hard-to-grasp Sun/Moon combination than the bully Trump and his full moon, Sun in money-minded Taurus with hungering Scorpio Moon in opposition.

Scorpio being the sign of death is envious of Taurus, seemingly enjoying this paradisiacal life in the garden on the other side, but the Roman astrologer-poet Manilius put to writing an old tradition holding the axial power Taurus/Scorpion or their natural 2th/8th houses to represent the "Seat of Typhoon". This tradition ties in the the Bull's 2nd house. This sector may during Hellenistic times have been known as the place of a materialistic instinct (food, money) as Typhoon was Mother Earth's or Gaia's wroth son, so bad tempered it was imprisoned beneath the volcano Etna on Sicily. In India the 2th house is also associated with materialistic possessiveness though only signifying "movable possessions" (such as cattle). 

Scorpio, in the land of the dead is removed from this world and thus it is infamous for its jealously and envy. In Max Martin's case the sexual drive, Mars and ruler of Scorpio is at home contributing to a relentless feeling of being a mere ghost and wanting more of the goods all the living seem to possess only immensely more, since Taurus needs are in no way inordinate (think the old saying "creature comforts"). But in Scorpio too, the very rich man's Jupiter combines with the Lesser Evildoer Mars. Immediately the story turns a bit sinister. 

This may not be apparent since both Scorpio and the Water Bearer belong to the Quality of Darkness (Tamas guna) which in psychological terms is introvert and hard to get to know. This deep layer of Darkness sometimes is utter stupidity but just as often is seen a curious ability to reach positions of power and then remaining there. Very typical of politician on a power trip. 

There is much unknown about tamasic people and in Sweden, a formerly very poor country, money holds such hypnotic power over it and the evening papers regularly announce how much richer Max Martin has become. He may be the pride of Sweden, now that those who curate the ABBA brand name repackaging has reached the extreme in sucking money out of a heap thread worn sing-alongs. An example from September 2023:

"Hit maker Max Martin now a billionaire"
(presumably in Swedish currency)

All through the years I have never seen one article revealing the reason why Taylor Swift left the seemingly successful partnership with Max Martin and ever re-recorded old albums to regain full control of her life. Googling, the answer to these questions Swedish media declines to mention, due to Martin's importance for Sweden's reputation, showed the simple answer:

Why Taylor Swift doesn't work with Max Martin anymore? It's no secret that she stopped working with the titan Max Martin specifically because he wouldn't let her write songs on her own...

Simple and entirely inordinate greed from death sign Scorpio (holding Jupiter, promise of big money). Interestingly, Scorpio is strong in Swift's chart too, explaining her finally going it alone. Sun and ruler Mars in Scorpio must at least be deemed equally strong but as Martin her birth hour comes in three flavors - none of them verified! Thus none of them has a known house position for Scorpio.

Max Martin would never reveal his birth time, the chart for the entire day seems too secretive, given the odd pairing of the social Air sign Water Bearer and the unsocial Scorpio. This combination may even result in a society's outcast or one bad bully him-/herself. 

In Martin's case this is a problem as not even the Hindu Chandra lagna or Moon ascendent can be known with certainty. About halfway through the day, the promising New Moon (success in new endeavors) changes into a Moon in Pisces. Since western astrology to a high degree has lost sight of the importance of the dispositor of a planet (besides often looking at the wrong signs if using the tropical zodiac), this gives two very different pictures.

Speaking for the lucky New Moon is that both Sun and Moon has Saturn as dispositor and although this dominant planet is regarded as "fallen" and ill-behaved in egotistic Aries, at least it's an omen of success with children or newbies - Aries being the initial sign perfectly becomes the easily influenced crowd who might like ultra commercial dance pop by numbers.

On the other hand a Moon in Pisces altogether favored by being supported by Big Money or Jupiter, Moon being watery and Jupiter ruling precisely Pisces in its negative mode. As Mars is in its negative home sign Scorpion this may result in an inordinate musical talent a watery soul suits up beat dance music very well. But the hunger is strong among the animals below the Moons influence, the question is what has happened with Sun in Air and Moon in Water in this second scenario for the 26 February 1971.

Given such uncertainty, the best may be to use only the natural zodiac, via the archetypal Child / Aries carrying the dictator (producer!)  Saturn within as a most conspicuous omen. (Astrological interpretation from the natural zodiac is highly speculative.) This chart also reveals a mean father figure or Patriarch in Saturn, casting his long and controlling 270° Hindu aspect though 3/4 of the zodiac. The meanness comes from the low sexual drive Scorpio this makes the martian Aries very atypical. (Meanness is a recurring trait with the Water signs.)

This again suggests Max Martin had a bad childhood and not without realizing it wanting to control others as he himself suffered bondage or repression as young. This Saturn in egotistical Aries DOES NOT LOVE women (Venus) but would rather control them. One might turn a blind eye to this primitive patriarchal power-tripper and here only see an effeminate or weak man shaping a pliable woman  (Venus) to his own taste or rather a craftswoman plying his material. 

Besides, Venus is not regarded as strong in Saturnian and formalistic Capricorn. Here, signs of the sterility of a Max Martin production may be gleaned but is naturally exactly what the corporate music industry asks for. Not artistry but decent craftsmanship of the kind the consumer feels strangely familiar with. (Again: Saturn in Aries has a weak eye for quality as self-interest is so pervading.)

Though little can be ascertained in the lack of birth time, Scorpio's strangely unfulfilled nature and chronically aching inner child (controlled by the same Mars) looks like important parts of this day's Mystery.

Fortunately, Taylor Swift's Moon sign is not in question. Moon in Gemini with successful Jupiter is a good combination as Moon sees everyone as a friend. This is rather the opposite of her former producer, being lighthearted and communicative, Moon with Jupiter in Air is about as friendly as Geminis come, had it not been for Moon being opposed by reticent Saturn. 

But Moon likes everyone, so the feeling nature which here is in Air and thus denotes an intellectual type of mind rather than a sensationalist, is well placed to learn from Saturn, the organizer. One may in the end wonder at the capability of this Moon - self-reliant and organizing itself as containing a built-in grand Patriarch. In younger years Saturn will however put timidity's brake on Moon so that this chart still is hard to decipher, not knowing which are the actual houses, some which favor Jupiter and some Saturn. Even if open-minded Jupiter dominates when young, Saturn will close and create a distance to the world at old age, which is represented by this planet of wisdom.

Another thing can be seen even though this chart is for the entire day: there is a clear rupture to be seen here as Sun and Moon do not cooperate well at all, meaning there might still be a marked discrepancy between the Taylor seen during work hours and the personal Moon-Taylor, seen only by her closest circle. 

But then again, lack of known time may change this yet again. Jupiter with the Gemini mind makes for a generous and very talkative person sharing more of her life than would be possible with Max Martin's mark of the outsider (societal Water Bearer and secretive Scorpio). Should Taylor's Moon and Jupiter occupy the first angular house (1) she would nevertheless never be extremely outspoken, as that gives Saturn its strongest worldly position in the west. Same with open Jupiter in the official tenth house as Saturn would be restrictive regarding the affairs of the 4th private house (though enhanced being angular).

From her younger days the frequent change of boyfriends stands as a reminder that Sun and Moon often are seen as a couple, similar to Mars and Venus but more stable but for the fact that Hindu astrology warns of the big lights being in signs 150 degrees apart. In the case of silent Scorpio and talkative Gemini this makes for bad pairing, the couple don't communicate well and a long search for a compatible match can be predicted.

Hindu astrology does not have the Western quincunx or inconjunct planetary aspect, but it does count signs intervening between planets. Two planets may stand 6 respectively 8 signs apart (count current position as the first step) and trigger a "6-8 relation." This recalls the bad reputation of the 6th house of enemies and the 8th house of corruption and eventual death. Of course it would come to "sudden death" and "enmity" between Taylor's personal feelings some solar types, like company bosses or producers... If Sun is taken as a heterosexual woman's partner in a chart, there would be problems settling with a male. 

With a known birth hour the actual houses affected by this "anti relation" would give more information but already the "natural" zodiac decently fits the known facts about Swift. Seeing "Moon-to-Sun" as a life line she has really reinvented herself. Too, she becomes a representative of the many women held back by vampires and energy thieves, and Max Martin's Scorpio symbolism appears to literally point to one of them.

Still, even the different Air and Water can produce tremendously subtle individuals working with both logic and feeling - it's typically good for artists (or psychologists!) or anyone who have learnt a bit about the many levels within the human being. With Sun and Moon, however, some splits are rather hard to avoid in life, the great Lights are so fundamental to a life cycle. 

Among the less developed the "6-8 relation" easily lends itself to antisocial behavior, false rationalizations to explain strange instinctive behavior, this being astrology's way of hinting at a soul having not as of this birth managed to bring the rational and irrational soul into cooperation.

 

The Gaza strip foundation horoscope

 

As the Gaza strip is a nobody's child in world politics, not being an acknowledged country, I checked the day for the Egyptian-Israeli armistice agreement on the borders for this tract of land in order to establish some sort of birth horoscope. 

Much has happened since 1949, but comparing with Hamas' rocket attack makes this a plausible foundation stone for what might become the Armageddon of our times. The power hungry US, bound by the occurrences during WWII has just announced the dispatch of its most frightening aircraft carrier to the eastern Mediterranean, presumably to block access to Gaza by water and it needs be reduce this pile of rubble to desert sand, then going on to another desert storm and, perhaps, WWIII ...

The day of demarcating the border lines of the Gaza strip is seen in the innermost chart, and the soul and life of this area is certainly fraught with tension as the warrior Mars, is with the Sun. War over borders (or restrictions) is indicated by the opposition to Saturn, ruler over borders, limits and so on, but also an efficient organizer in less stressful combinations than this.

The chart is drawn as a "natural zodiac" meaning that this is how the Universal Soul might view itself, and here human morality does not apply. The planets are assigned as "good" or "bad" based on bodily man's preferences but for this natural chart many astrological rules don't apply. This is simply an archetypal map for a chronically warlike situation, and during certain periods the opposition between Sun/Mars and Saturn will spring into action in our material world, due to the synchronicity between the higher and lower parts of the World Soul.

As seen in the outer circle describing the attack on the stranger Israel in this area - stranger to the Palestinians and attested by the last two-thousand years - NOW is the time for this tension (seen in Gaza's "birth horoscope" to be felt. 

Natally, the area has the important mutual reception between Sun and Saturn (each in the other's ruling sign). Hindu astrology claims this to be as strong as two planets in conjunction, but here they are at the same time opposed and moreover in signs belonging to the unyielding Quality of Darkness. This is one complicated omen! 

In Hindu cosmology this might be taken as the deepest ignorance and habituated behaviors since the Quality of Light is the only way to progress (the middling Quality of Passion will never amount to anything while both Darkness and Light may both be useful depending on circumstances - ordinary people appears to trust the darkies, seeing stability and durability, although this quality in fact represents the illusion of a dependable world, so very few fallen souls in secular societies want to contemplate their brief existence on earth and thus explain why Plato found Democracy to next to the worst when managing a country. Only representatives of astrology's light quality, or the higher soul can be entrusted with the world. 

Now the animal king Leo and the human Water Bearer are only the archetypal motifs the planets act on. And while the ruler of Leo, the Sun itself belongs to the Light. A birth to Leo usually means a human soul has incarnated to become aware of his subhuman propensities and to master them. The ruler of the Water Bearer, on the other hand, is Saturn which essentially belongs to the Quality of Darkness. 

Why Saturn has been termed the Great Evildoer is again only from the human perspective, but even without moralisms it appears strange that the ruler of the 7th heaven - a metaphor in the ancient universe for the divine Intellect should not quality as Light but Darkness... A partial answer may be Saturn as Father Time: the veil of time causes all individuals to cling to Leo's view of life in desperation, living from day to day. Indeed only served an insignificant portion of life due to Saturn's division of time into small segments with very few individuals capable to follow the continuous thread, to see the Gestalt. 

The immensity of Saturn, beyond the ages he opens up, one at a time, is unfathomable and Tamas Guna (the Dark Quality) may well point to the inscrutable "ways of the Lord". Remember, Saturn is prominent as the bringer of Destiny. On Saturn's level all the individual karmas are brought together and organized into the Fate of the whole of humanity (the Saturnian Water Bearer has a strong social way of manifesting). 

Comparing the Gaza chart with the chart for its sending the rockets against their enemy thus is significant in the highest degree. Both signs are active in both charts and the mistreated people of the Gaza strip belong to the nobler part of Universal Soul but as yet unfulfilled or merely potential people. But while this people/piece of land is still based on Saturn in Leo and the fighting is precisely about being acknowledged as an individual (Sun = soul/individuality) - with arms (Mars) if need be, the creation of a Palestinian state is not in question, remember the "natural zodiac" does not moralize but takes the godlike view of things.

The outer chart thus shows how Saturn has reached one of its trigger nodes in the Gaza birth chart - the whole of the sign Aquarius, it's supra-lunar home sign. 

Here one may recall the wider aspects in antiquity. Saturn, natally in Leo's 10th degree must be regarded as a trigger during its entire transit through the Water Bearer and there triggering the tension in the Sun/Mars conjunction opposing its own foundation (Leo-Saturn). Some may regard this as contra-productive or even self-destructive but on the higher soul level no dead bodies are counted, for the gods (or their archetypes) operative through higher soul it is a question of principle. And a man opposing the god's will is indeed stupid.

Writing this from one of the most secular countries in the Western world (see the blog's 2nd entry), it seems to me West is not yet prepared to fully realize its global crime during centuries of colonialism. Untold accrued bad karma is waiting for its allotted payback time! As seen from the short final comment in Astrology and the rocket attack on Israel the astrological symbolism says this is about the realized mankind vs mere animals - Water Bearer's gregarious and social instinct and Leo's predatory or dictatorial instinct (Plato: dictators can range from good to horrific depending in personal qualities). 

Nobody can be so ignorant as to not realize how the West demonized historic Palestine (areas outside the newly created Israel - the "West/East mindset fully operative still in the 1940s) and thereafter labeled Hamas "terrorists". What these few charts (Israel, Gaza, the rocket attack) show is that all are share the same challenge. Especially Israel's destiny has been endangered from the first. As Orthodox Jews point out: a secular country, patterned upon the West, can not possibly be the Promised Land.

 

Post script

This short post failed to describe the "Gaza strip foundation horoscope" in full and leaving the matter without noticing that God's benevolence fills the fed up inhabitants would be remiss. 

Freedom bringing Jupiter with the faceless population (Moon) is an especially good omen, when noting it occurs in Sagittarius. Even in a natural horoskop (without paying attention to the 12 worldly houses) it is well to remember that this sign at its best carries the same meaning as the "noblest house", the 9th concerning itself with conscience and meta-logical intuition (the two highest faculties in the human being) and among worldly topics, religion, metaphysics and philosophy (of the idealistic kind).

Note. The 9th should not be confused with the 11th/Water Bearer who deal with thought models (conceptions), with ideology and social ordering. Except being, in rare cases, pointers to the unfathomable highest manifestation as divine Intellect. Very rarely a horoscope tie these sectors together, but then there is a strong potential for one of Plato's philosopher-kings". This blogger was born with Sun in the 5th "kingly house" but I can attest this is far from enough. The 9th house of Universal Dharma (order, but loose enough to be Jupiterian rather than Saturnian) must be connected to personal omens, creating a voice or channel for the Will of Heaven.

Also, the north moon node is about to return to its starting position in the Gaza horoscope. This does look foreboding... This Rahu is the demon of worldly ambition so the worst is possibly still to come... 

But how to handle the moon nodes (ambition/decapitation) if the natural zodiac indicates messages ultimately from beyond this material world? In Neo-Platonism earth also exists on a higher level (in Universal Soul) so that the Rahu node might indicate a karmically given period, part of the preordained destiny secular man no longer understands.

Using astrological rules it is interesting to note Jupiter/God promoting this riotous outburst of violence (the supporting120 degree aspect to Rahu). It happens in Aries, Mars' unsettled sign where, as it so happens, Jupiter/God happens to reside during this time. An entire blog post could have been written on this omen. This fits the early announcements from Hamas reminding that they remain in bondage at the hand of Israel.

As for the nodes, in Higher Soul earthy moralisms don't apply. The hopeless Gaza strip slum existence was preceded by geopolitical atrocities and bad planning stretching in earthly history (heaven and earth reflect each other). So in more than one way, astrologers could and should have been forewarned that Liberation is a keyword in this time. Such was the omen in Universal Soul. 

This flies in the face of Israel and the West, the latter whom authored the Mid-Eastern fiasco. The death toll, already high on both sides, is lamentable but this goes far beyond the individualist standpoint. This may even be yet another nail in the coffin of the old world order which eventually will give way to the Age of the Water Bearer and its new but yet so old insight of unity in diversity (one-and-yet-many).

Astrology and the rocket attack on Israel

 

 

With five blog entries being simultaneously in pipeline, the unexpected Hamas rocket attack on Israel is still portentous enough to merit a few quick words, although too early in the life of this blog. The combination of Hindu astrology and selected ideas from Western Platonism still needs some explaining, not to mention the two fixed stars Regulus and Algol graphically inserted in modern Israel's chart.

As the original Babylonian zodiac instantly made the blogger a believer means that the unfortunate modern Israelite means the same fixation with portions of land as ever in this part of the world, ant typical the West forced the birth of modern Israel in the Sidereal (Babylonian/Hindu) sign of Taurus a sign associated with the Jews' most unfortunate moment in history: escaping bondage in Egypt and not even having reached the promised land before the stupid people started worshipping the Golden Calf. 

The modern Israel born 1947 with Sun in the Ox seems to recall this lapse of reason, and even more so as the known birth time puts the Ox, although strictly speaking in the 8th house of Death (the Holocaust) into close contact with the 9e house of one's sense of the highest good. (During Hellenism the 9th was the house of God and pretty much the same in India, where it was the house of Guru, a spiritual leader as close to a god-man as is possible and similar to Plato's preferred group of "philsopher-kings" living communistically (perfected souls no longer in materialistic bondage and free to order the country in the best possible way). 

The reason the Ox plays into the country's highest good is because of the mutual reception between the accidental lords of the 8th and the 9th. Each in the other's sign binds death and the highest good together but could be seen as a bloodthirsty country as well as a martyr. Rather the former given  the significance of the warrior Mars, as we shall see in a minute.

 It may seem incongruous to have "the Golden Calf" ("mere possessions") in this elevated position (the close co-mingling of Taurus ruler Venus in the 9th house, but coming out of the Holocaust this humble material aspiration may seem natural enough: Taurus naturally belongs the a horoscopes 2nd house of movable possessions (herdsmen and their wealth in the form of livestock).

In order to aspire to "the Golden Calf" a people must be poor indeed and look for a promised piece of land. Unfortunately the West did solve the problems of their colonialism very well and thus it would be a mistake to see this war (as it surely is) as a local conflict, The Mid-Eastern countries are still ghosts, puppets acting out the iniquity of the western world.

While not strong, the conjunction of the very soul (Sun) of modern Israel on the Earth-fixated sign is coupled with Satan's head as Algol has been called. Elevated high in the night sky, it is still so close to the Sun that it appears to have much with modern Israel's destiny to do (traditionally the star and the planet may not be more the one degree apart in the zodiac, but as the head of Taurus is so similar to Satan's head one may be forgiven if relaxing the one degree rule a little. (A post digging deeper into the Taurus/Scorpion axis is under preparation.)

The Dead Sea Scroll fragments seeming to be an astrological depicting of a few persons, notes about the one deemed an evildoer that he was born in the "foot of Taurus" which is just as Israel's current chart happens to have it. From there, one might speculate whether Satan as the Accuser in the book of Job should have the same meaning. This country will be tried by God who is as of 1947 not yet certain if the people were the chosen ones... Modern Israel will have its soul tried...

Although no speaker of Hebrew, the counter-weight to Algol, the royal star Regulus stands fittingly in the Leo - king of the animal souls (if not yet king of the human kingdom), together with the warrior Mars, that is ARI-EL, the Lord is a warlike Lion. So Algol will test Israel and ask if this is what the country stands for in this day and age...

*****

The Rocket Attack on Israel

An Israeli newspaper has data for the start of this war: approx 6:30 (GMT 3:30 + 3) in the morning the first barrage of rockets appeared. Virgo rising with its ruler Mercury and the Sun might seem harmless enough, but as far as transits go there might be another configuration to ponder.

The time of the attack as the Palestinian's highest good (house 9) reveals an all but forgotten tenet regarding the temporary or accidental 9th ruler: Venus can be both av warrior-like planet and a loving temptress. When rising just before the Sun she taks on her warlike aspect ...

The soul group who constitute today's Israelites is offered the opportunity by their God to prove they believe in the warlike force, too (se national chart above). As the ancient Chinese said: in a single operation Nature at once realizes a dozen thoughts.

Those familiar with astrological symbolism may thus see that Venus as the local Dharma ruler, WAR at this time is part of the highest good, both for HAMAS and Israel. Both get what they seek. The 5th house stands for an individual's already prepared part of the Universal Order, but as a part of the whole this portion is now called karma (at least if the prepared plan is acted on). 

Here the Grim Reaper (Saturn) rules, but from a weak position: the 6th house of misfortunes and enemies. Both parties had it coming? 

The Leo/Water Bearer axis is a mighty moment to show one belongs Humanity and not merely acts like a Head of the animal kingdom.