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...
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