ARCHETYPAL PROCESS III: The Moon – CREDO XCIX

   
The Sun and the Moon form a hierosgamos, as Jung would call it, a sacred marriage: the archetypes of the King and the Queen in alchemy and fairy tales. Why, is a lengthy subject! The Sun is a star and the Moon is a satellite of the Earth, reflecting the Sun’s light differently every minute as it rotates the Earth every mo(o)nth. The Sun is static, as it centers the solar system, but the Moon is in constant motion; the number associated with the Sun is 12 but there are 13 lunations in a year. So the Moon kicks the wheel, as it were, and keeps things happening as it reflects the light of Spirit into our every moment. The ancient Sumerians already noticed the relationship of women’s periods every month and so assumed that the Goddess was resting during the dark of the Moon. Cramps? But they also observed the four stations of its light and came up with the idea of weeks of seven days, which we observe to this day.

The Moon’s physical impact upon the Earth is incredible. Not only the impact on the tides, but on liquids everywhere, including our bodies. Studies have been made that a wee tide can be observed in a cup of tea, that the city of Moscow rises and falls an inch or two, that sap in trees rises at its behest, that the green of vegetables responds to a waxing moon and root vegetables to a waning one. Posts are better set on a waning moon, bamboo knots at full moon, and most human contracts signed at the dead of the moon (12 hours before a new moon) come to nothing. All this was considered old wives’ tales, but science and many farmers know the reality. Years ago, Russian soldiers would play a trick on their buddies by leaving their steel (not stainless steel) razors on the windowsill at full moon, dulling them. There are volumes of further examples.

Psychologically and astrologically, the Moon is logically our Ego, acting as the matrix of consciousness. This may be a matter of dispute today, but my diagram (see CREDO XCVII) proves what the Kabbalists and such great astrologers as Dane Rudhyar and others agree upon.

Identification with the Ego is the huge problem of our time. Our inner Sun is the individual wick holding the flame of our Divine Guest, which is the same flame shining through the personal lamps of our psyches, but when we identify with our Ego, we think that’s all we are. After all, the Self lies in the Unconscious. Jung said that the longest journey most of us make is from the consciousness of the head to the heart, where only Love can approach the mystery.

The Moon spends about 2½ days in each sign, and in our charts it progresses every 2½ years and maintains a time relationship with the transiting of Saturn around the zodiac, so life comes in at least three stages if lived to the full. At 87, I am almost there!

Simply summarized, the first 28 yrs seem to be spent picking up the karma or lessons learned or yet to be learned. Our childhood seems to make us choiceless recipients of parents, siblings, neighbors, schools, and environment. However, by age 7, there is a shift in individual consciousness, and there are rituals in various cultures to mark this. In Hinduism, boys are given a red string to wear, signifying a shift from the mother’s influence to that of the father. Roman Catholics offer Confirmation rituals at that age. At 14, or whenever the individual Moon opposes its natal place, a girl is likely to have had her first period and a boy’s voice changes, and both acquire the characteristics of adolescence: pubic hair, breasts in girls, muscular growth in boys. Psychologically, esoteric teaching has it that we acquire another sheath in our aura. The “tomboy” in girls vanishes and they become more emotional and vulnerable, and often frictions occur among them; boys become more rebellious and form teams or gangs, or undergo ceremonies of joining their tribes, as among natives or more formally the celebration of a Bar Mitzvah. The underlying premise is that the adolescent is readying himself to become an independent, responsible adult. Jung adds the important concept that the inner feminine in a boy becomes his anima and the masculine in a girl becomes her animus. These, in turn, get projected out onto the opposite sex with varying amount of intensity and form the stuff of human comedy or tragedy according to which scenario adults knowingly observe. I was a classic tomboy myself who underwent such a transformation, projecting, I seem to remember, a serious passion for an actor in Mutiny on the Bounty in 1936, whose name I think was Franchot Tone! These are broad strokes, but I am also convinced that the genuine suffering some children go through over a broken doll or toy may well be a reliving of a memory of some poignant loss as an adult in a former life! Who knows? As you read this page, you probably think of all the exceptions, and collectively there are indeed so many shifts in history, but the physical realities persist: Women act out their clock far more visibly than men, especially as they age. It is harder for men, yet old men visibly soften and old ladies often grow random whiskers.

Today, we accept the reality of the gay issue, which has always been part of humanity. Think of Sappho of Lesbos, and realize that in ancient Greece gay warriors were welcomed into the military, because of their fierce desire to protect their lover!

The second 28-year cycle comes with Saturn’s first return. It dawns on us that we are mortal! If our karma was metaphorically to eat boiled eggs and we didn’t do that the first round, we now get them scrambled or poached, but it’s still “eggs” on another level! Here we become the true heroes or heroines of our lives, going to work, starting families, dwelling away from our parents, acquiring, above all, new experiences, and usually identifying with our Ego, until at some point we begin to think that life is just “one damn thing after another,” and finally we may experience an emotional crisis that forces us to look inward to seek that center of Self, which, don’t forget, dwells elusively in the Unconscious. If you remember the diagram, the Ego is on the circumference, going around in circles, searching (and both of those words come from the Latin circare, meaning to circle). But we look and hopefully find the radius of “the Only Way” of Hagia Sophia, the feminine gift of Spiritual Wisdom, which is also full of joy. All cultures speak of Wisdom as feminine. There is a whole chapter in The Dove in the Stone devoted to her many other names. Only the Roman Catholic Church translated Sophia into spiritus sanctus, a masculine noun (!) that made all the referring pronouns of the Trinity male. I rest my case. The Greek and Russian Orthodox did not agree! The Dove is the only visible symbol in Catholicism pointing to the feminine, all of which Jung has written about.

The third 28-year cycle is the most important of all! If you think of the first in terms of an apple tree blossoming, the second the long summer of green apples, the third is the ripening of the fruit and the apples falling to the ground – the gift to the future of others. You can understand why Jung felt old age the most important one of all. The idea of people retiring and playing shuffleboard, or being put away in rest homes, etc., seemed to him a tragic waste. Unfortunately, today we have the specter of Alzheimer’s and dementia on an unforeseen scale. I, myself, thanks to a horrifying toxic reaction to doxxycycline last summer was paralyzed briefly, and aged almost 10 years in three months! plus other stressful matters, facial shingles, hip displaced, computer crash among them! Now I have a bad case of forgetting names!! This, combined with lack of use of right hand and ongoing paresthesia for 13 years, makes every day a challenge. But I am blessed with help on many levels and so am able to continue so far with these CREDOS …

Jane Wheelwright, Jungian analyst, wrote a short book on the animus in aging women. She pointed out that when it becomes extraverted it enables the woman to give of herself to others and the collective, but, if not, the woman may become a dominating matriarch or worse, a complainer and a burden to others. I am struck by the number of Jungians alive today, living to the full as they age. In the past three decades, we had the privilege of meeting analysts James Kirsch and Werner Engel in their nineties, Margit van Leight-Frank, Edith Wallace, and the dear man who lived to be 100, James Henderson. The other profession I might mention is that of symphony conductors. It must be the power of music filling them with good vibrations!

Forgive my rambling, but as I am 87 now, I have been blessed by meeting so many wonderful people and going to so many places in the world, I feel such gratitude! My grandma King was born in 1854! and when I was 16, I met Emilie Bardach in Switzerland, who was the last love of Henrik Ibsen! I have also been “one touch away” from so many great souls.

When I lectured to 1200 people at the ITA Conference in Davos, Walter and I sat out later under a pine tree to picnic. Marie-Louise von Franz passed and bowed under the branches and without a word kissed my cheek and walked on!

I truly have been blessed!

lovingly,
ao

Archetypal Process II: The Sun – CREDO XCVIII

   
As the Sun shines upon my heart, so may my heart shine upon others! – The Upanishads

One Sunday in 1945 I was sitting on the fire escape outside of my flat in Greenwich Village, and I had an epiphany. The Sun shines and it didn’t have to! What started existence in the first place??? What makes a YES! necessary before a “no!” can come to deny it. There has to be something to deny … This may sound crazy but it took my breath away. This then was the essence of that mystery word FIAT! This was also before I studied Astrology and eventually began to understand it as a symbolic language of archetypal processes.

With that in mind, stop and think about the Sun in the Solar System. 1) It is the only star; 2) it actively gives out light, heat, and life; 3) the circumambulating planets are receptive and reflect that one light in different ways; 4) its astrological glyph is a circle with a dot in the middle; this glyph you find is also used for gold, which never tarnishes (aha!); 5) it is associated with the greatest value; 6) in the body, it rules the heart and when the heart stops, we leave that body for a return to a greater life; 7) it rules the spine and the right eye in men, the left in women; 8) in mathematics it rules One which is in every number and 12 as in the Zodiac, the Constellations, the Tribes of Israel, the disciples of Christ. (For many more, see my The Web in the Sea); 9) in geometry, it rules the point and the circle; the sphere and the dodecahedron. It is hidden in every atom as energy!

1) In alchemy it is the goal of transformation of lead (Saturn) to gold but non aurae vulgaris, not “ordinary” gold. Think Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice! 2) In the Rosarium at the end is the picture of the Sun looking to the right as if acknowledging a greater invisible Source. 3) In Jungian psychology, it represents the goal of individuation which I, personally, see as the “Divine Guest” that lights every wick of the individual Self. The flames of that “fire” are all the same flame! 4) In myths and fairy tales it rules kings, royalty, solar heroes (think Joseph Campbell) avatars, Leo as lion king, fathers, emperors, figures of power and authority, chiefs, and, collectively, monarchies and governments, CEOs. A common mythical theme is the country ruled by an usurping King (ego) and the country is in bad shape!

Given the fact that if the Sun were to go out, it would take only 8 minutes for us to find out(!), it is not unreasonable for people to have been Sun worshippers for it is a visible testimony to the source of our being. The Roman Sol Invictus is an example.

Nowhere is the current split between science and religion more evident than in the scientific, astronomical attitude towards this heavenly center! By science’s self-limiting definition, it cannot allow itself to speak of the word Love! And yet on another level that is the mystical truth our Sun gives proof of.

God is making love in your heartbeat twenty-four hours a day! as Dadaji pointed out. For anyone questioning the existence of God, keep in mind that the best we can do is what Jung spoke of as the imago Dei or our personal image, which varies according to our current experience. For me, as I expressed in my very first CREDO, the only way I can approach the matter is I feel it as a “vast certainty.” “The Tao that can be defined is not the Tao.”

That there are many different kinds of Love is obvious: Eros – physical; philia – brotherly; agape – transpersonal.

The Hindus take it for granted that there are different ways we approach the matter of relating to God: 1) as father to son; 2) son to father; 3) friend to friend; 4) mother to child; 5) Beloved to Beloved!

All the archetypal processes have negative aspects in common: weakness, excess, or Shadow. In the case of the sun in its symbolic role in human nature (notice lower case!) in the chart or psychological expression, weakness denotes an obscuring of the light, as in a dirty glass lantern; the result is cowardice, Mr. Milquetoast, lack of self-confidence. Excess on the other hand, results in a bombastic nature, a Know-it-all, a show-off or a tyrant. Hidden in all three is hubris, pride, the conviction that “I am the doer.” The Shadow is pride; Satan is a fallen Angel.

I have written the true story of the thirteen-year-old boy who, influenced by his religious studies at school, came home determined to be a saint. He gave up his bed, slept on a mat, became a vegetarian, got a summer job requiring long bike rides in the heat. He was obedient to his father, helpful to his mother, and patient with his pesky sisters. About a week later, his mother got up in the night to go to the bathroom, passed his door, and heard sobbing. She knocked, entered, and found him pounding the floor and crying, “It’s not FAIR! It’s not FAIR!” He explained further, “I’ve tried to be good and now I’ve fallen into the greatest sin of all! I think I’m better than other people!!!” The mother tried to comfort him, but when she returned to bed she was puzzled as to how to help him. She prayed for an answer, and, in a way, her reading Jung might have helped.

The next morning, she had to change the empty paper towel rack. As she took out the cardboard tube, the light shone through it. She had the answer! She stuffed one end with a tissue and told her son to look through it. “Duh!” said the boy. Then she whipped out the tissue and told him to look again, “Duh!” Then she explained, “The light comes through the tube not out of it!” I may have told how this helped me myself when dealing with applause, at lectures – you just send it back up the tube to your inner Sun, the Divine Guest.

I may have told this story before, but it later entailed a synchronicity. A group of friends that have met monthly at our home for over twenty years for discussions wanted to give me a birthday surprise. Each came with a written tribute and began reading them, After about four, I grinned and told them the story above. As I was telling it, my daughter Beth walked in with an empty paper-towel tube and threw it on the burning fire!!! She is unable to attend because she has to go early to her job, so her appearance alone was a surprise. Believe me, I now keep such a tube in my study as a teaching prop to this day!

So as each of us has an individual centerpoint or wick of Self, the flame of the inner Sun is the Divine Guest who is waiting to be recognized consciously as bringing Love as well as Life to your heart!

lovingly,
ao

Archetypal Processes I: The Concept – CREDO XCVII

   
The Emerald Tablet of Trismegistus gives us the saying “As above, so below”; Jung, in my opinion, gives us the horizontal of “As within, so without,” making a linear cross , and the quaternity is symbolic of the manifest world. It can be measured.

Processes are active verbs. They start out as abstractions, which even primitive man recognized, and since they were in nature, they were considered divine and given different names of gods and goddesses in different cultures, because the necessity of speaking about them required reifying images with names.

A quick example of what this means is expansion, ruled by the planet Jupiter, which Roman god goes by many different names: Jove, as in jovial, and the French jeudi or the Norse god Thor, as in Thursday. Every culture has a name of this gift-bestowing process. We recognize the positive Santa Claus, or Falstaff. In the natal astrological chart, it shows generally where a person’s enthusiasm lies. That word breaks down to the Greek en-theos, to describe being possessed by a god within. Too much expansion runs into excess, physical obesity, gluttony, etc. I have Jupiter conjunct Mercury (communication) and so suffer from an excess of books and papers, now made worse by only being able to use my left hand!

This process will be delineated later, but I hope you get the idea. To use a homely analogy: a cake baker sometimes uses a frosting bag with adjustable tips. The frosting itself is the same sugar but it now can be expressed in large, small, rippled, star-shaped spurts. Well, energy or prana is one force but it can be expressed in many different ways. The center of our Solar System is the radiating source of light, life, heat, and love. The planets reflect that light in different ways. Saturn’s lead, Jupiter’s tin, and Venus’s copper are symbolic ways that the radiant sun’s energy is reflected on our earth and every living creature and every atom hidden in matter. Mind-boggling! However absurd this sounds scientifically, the fact remains that these elementary processes do exist and function in outer nature and inwardly in each of our psyches. I have studied and lived reflecting on this for sixty-six years, only to become more and more convinced that this cosmic science we call astrology is in fact a symbolic language of archetypal processes. It is far, far more than just dealing with individual charts. It is in fact not only a spiritual guide to individuation, but a faint glimpse into the proof positive or “vast certainty” that some greater force is at work and that there is even a menu for the evolution of consciousness, a topic addressed in my The Heavens Declare.

Somebody rightly said, There is another world and it is hidden in this one! Jung coined the concept of synchronicity as the meaningful coincidences that occur and flabbergast us by being so improbable. I call them Sophia’s Winks! And if you are reading this CREDO, chances are that you know full well what I am describing.

I remember an incident in Heathrow Airport in London. I had to go to the Ladies. As I opened my cubicle door, a friend and member of a spiritual group in the USA walked past that narrow aperture! We had no idea either one of us was in England. She was on her way to Berlin and I was returning from Scotland to New York, as we discovered over a quick last cuppa in the busy airport. We had not seen each other for several years!

Another instance was when I traveled with three young students of mine on Long Island , New York, to the Scottish Hebrides. We were in a rowboat off the west coast of Skye. There were three other men in the boat. As we headed to a remote peninsula, one of the men looked at one of my boys and said, “You must be Peter Murnane!” He was. The man had been a college friend at Yale with Peter’s father, and this boy was the image of his father. Coincidences happen; meaningful coincidences are synchronicities.

I mention these examples only to suggest that our lives seem to be lived at more than one level, and these Winks are indicators that we need to pay attention. Life consists of two halves: an event and its meaning. To live a symbolic life, as Jung highly recommends, is to look for the meaning! He wrote:

Now, we have no symbolic life but we are all badly in need of [one]. Only the symbolic life can express the daily need of the soul, mind you! And because people have no such thing, they can never step out of this mill—this awful, grinding, banal life in which they are “nothing but.”… They are simply sick of the whole thing and that is the reason people are neurotic … and therefore they want sensation. They even want a war.… They say, “Thank heaven, now something is happening that is bigger than ourselves!”… Life is too rational, there is no symbolic existence in which I am something else, in which I am fulfilling my role, my role as one of the actors in the divine drama of life.
Have you got a corner in your house where you can perform the rites, as they do in India … even a private spot where they can lead a symbolic life, renew their vows or meditate.

Thus, it is my intention to write a series of CREDOS examining some of these basic processes and linking them to the planets they represent. Hopefully, we will begin to see how our Solar System may indeed be a hologram uniting infinite diversity as expressions of the One, as in uni-versal. To me a sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an invisible spiritual meaning. Uniting the two is the function of living that symbolic life. The true meaning of sym-bolos in Greek is putting things together, and its antonym is dia-bolos! This literally means separating, the function attributed to the devil which separates the radius of Sophia’s Wisdom connecting the ego at the circumference and that mysterious centerpoint Jung called the Self, which like the individual wick in a candle holds the same flame of Spirit.

We have to remember that a diagram is read with the right brain but what I am writing, you read with the left.

So keep in mind that processes are active verbs. As Heraclitus says, “Everything flows. The river remains though the waters flow.” Thus the diagram is describing an active process!

lovingly, ao

Sophia’s Devices VI: Sacred Geometry – CREDO XCVI

   
Heaven’s way is round, earth’s way is square.
– Lu Wu-pei (Chinese poet)

As the ancient Greeks proclaimed, “God geometrizes.” By that they meant that nature unfolds according to discernable patterns of consistent nature, true now even in the subatomic world. In addition, a symbolic value is implied. Unfortunately, I am unable to do justice to this, being limited to my computer, but I have written a book on the topic called The Web in the Sea: Jung, Sophia, and the Geometry of the Soul. It is a sequel to The Dove in the Stone: On Finding the Sacred in the Commonplace, so you know it is more conversations with Walter on Iona, but with illustrations of circles and squares, et al.

However, I can give you an idea: Draw a circle and look at it. Can you see the whole circle? If you think you can, think again. What is the formula for a circle? It is π r squared and pi never ever comes out. So a circle is a mystery and stands for Spirit Unmanifest, which, no doubt, is the reason that Jung called the psyche a mandala and Joachim of Floris wrote, God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere! This even hints at the suggestion that our solar system may be a hologram, hinting that everything is contained in everything! Phew!

Emerson wrote a whole essay on “Circles,” pointing out that every circle can be encircled by another, and we have the saying: “He drew a circle and shut me out; I drew another and brought him in.”

In the history of mathematics, the introduction of zero was a huge step!

The three-dimensional of a circle is a sphere, and the dodecahedron fits into it with 12 sections! This hints at the nature of the Sun and the 12 Signs of the Zodiac. However, since this is symbolically static and radiant, the Moon adds its orbiting of our Earth, making 13! And this past December (2009), we saw that “blue moon” with two full moons in one month. Incidentally, the number 13 gave rise to all kinds of negative feminine projections in the superstitious Middle Ages, which surprisingly continue to this day. Friday (Freya’s or Venus’s day) the 13th was the double feminine whammy!! And even today, some hotels just don’t have a 13th floor!

So the circle is an abstract concept. The visible constellations are actually an ellipse, as is the twisted form of the lemniscate or symbol for eternity. However, many things in nature are circular: the eye is circular and raindrops form circles, and the scorned dandelion’s pouf is a miraculous life-giving wonder! A streetlight shining through falling snow is a sermon in silence.

It takes a compass to draw a circle. One point is stationary at the center, the other sweeps the circle. The visual result yields the glyphs of the Sun and the metal gold, and sheds light on Jung’s symbol for the mandala of the psyche, the point being the wick of the individual Self, which holds the same flame of the Spirit in every individual.

Perhaps you are familiar with William Blake’s powerful work depicting God holding that compass.

The square is symbolic of the manifest world. Why? Because it can be measured. The carpenter’s square and the compass are the symbols of the esoteric Ancient Order of Masons indicating that they knew of the symbolic import of these two factors for centuries.

The three-dimensional forms of the circle and the square are the sphere and the cube.

The Golden Rectangle employs both a compass and a ruler. There is no way I can convey the miraculous results of this figure! The Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens is built in every detail according to its formula! It engenders not only the four proportions hidden in a pentagram, but also the spiral that one finds in a nebula, the water swirling in your toilet bowl, or the cowlick on a newborn’s head! The unfurling of a rose, the setting of seeds in a sunflower, and on and on. These geometric insights were familiar to the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Sumerians but were lost during the destruction of European civilization by the barbarian Goths, resulting in the Dark Ages, but were kept alive by the Islamic world and restored to Europe when the Moors invaded Spain around A.D. 711, which led directly over the following centuries to the Renaissance and, among many others, to a mathematician called Fibonacci. He discovered the Fibonacci sequence of numbers, in which each subsequent number is the sum of the two before, starting with 0 and 1: 0, 1, 1 (0+1), 2 (1+1), 3 (1+2), 5 (2+3), 8 (3+5), 13 (5+8)….. The ratio of each successive pair of numbers in the series soon converges on the Golden Number (phi), 1.618, the ratio expressed in the Golden Rectangle.
Here is my tribute to Fibonacci:

Fibonacci at my kitchen door
Fronds of one stock furl
mathematically considerate
of each other's surging
into space
their rectitude
the straightest lines in nature
their modesty in touching curl
of heads bowed
in proportion's acknowledgement
of place
I am undone, dear Fibonacci,
by this green and silent sermon
of humble harmony's
return
an old testament of ordered law —
a new testament of beauteous portent
a family of fern.

lovingly,
ao

Sophia’s Devices V: Astrology, the Cosmic Science – CREDO XCV

   
I have related in my book Jungian Symbolism in Astrology and elsewhere how I came to be converted from viewing astrology as “superstitious twaddle for nincompoops” to spending the next sixty-five years of my life studying it, teaching it to Jungian analysts, lecturing worldwide, and writing about it in my books! So I will concentrate on it as a majestic topic uniting the visible cosmos with its invisible meaning. Astrology transcends people’s individual charts. It is at least 5000 yrs old and has evolved through the collective unconscious and sheds wisdom through each of those Ages right up to the Age of Pisces and the coming “New Age” of Aquarius. If you are sick of hearing about the New Age, relax, we have 2000 years of it to come!

So my definition is Astrology is a symbolic language of archetypal processes. The astrological horoscope or natal chart is a description of the way an individual is likely to process experience. In other words, no two people are exactly alike. Even born at the same moment, one will go to the drugstore while the other takes a nap. As Heraclitus put it, “With our eyes open we share the same world, but when we close our eyes, each of us enters a separate world,” Jung warns of predicting because many complexes can be dissolved through consciousness; otherwise we have to live them out as fate! Three factors are requisite: latitude, longitude, and exact time of birth plus the gender of the person.

Up until the Age of Reason, in the seventeenth century, astrology was what united science and religion. For centuries Christian cathedrals and early Jewish temples had zodiacs on their floors, and the 12 tribes of Israel and the 12 disciples each were allotted to a sign of the zodiac, but when the split occurred with Descartes and others, religion lost its proof and science lost its sense of the sacred. Now, in the last hundred years, thanks to theoretical physics, Jung and many others, we are beginning to see the reunion of the two taking place on a new level.

We do not reject Shakespeare because of comic books, though both share the same words and even some of the archetypal characters. Unlike many other mantic or psychic devices, such as tea leaves, crystal balls, etc., astrology is soundly based on the visible planets orbiting a visible Sun whose positions are measured mathematically through time. But I confess I get a symbolic kick out of looking in an almanac and seeing the Sun’s glyph depicted as a circle with a dot in the middle and finding the same glyph for gold in metallurgy! The same symbolic implication is the wick in a candle and the individual Self that Jung describes as the center of our own unconscious psyche’s mandala. And each Self holds the Same (!) Flame of Spirit’s Life, Light, and Love that I call our Divine Guest to avoid the differing names given it in different cultures.

I find all these matters to make sense, to be symbolically obvious. God geometrizes indeed.

Most of humanity these days is too preoccupied with enormous social and environmental problems to remember and appreciate that our solar system is still running on time. The Sun appears to rise daily, the Moon orbits the Earth every month, and the seasons come and go every year. The Point of the Vernal Equinox precesses (not processes) through the 12 visible sidereal constellations at the rate of 1 degree every 72 years. This message of cosmic order should be a source of comfort. (The word kosmos comes from the Greek and actually means ‘beauty,’ as in cosmetics.)

As I am writing this in December, the whole idiotic argument about whether schools, for constitutional reasons, should abstain from religious or even secular displays and music celebrating the season! What most people don’t realize is that the entire basis for celebration is astronomical – the Winter Solstice – when the Sun appears to suffer the longest night of the year in the Northern Hemisphere and yet begins to return the Light anew. Hence all the Light symbolism! December 21 marks the entry of the Sun into the sign of Capricorn, ruled by Saturn. Pagans for millennia have naturally welcomed this event, and the Romans literally called it Saturnalia and whooped it up, big time. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, it was easiest to arbitrarily supplant this with Christmas, which symbolically equates the birth of Jesus Christ as the coming of the “Light of the World.” The actual date, even year, of his birth still is a mystery. One thing only is certain – the astronomical event of the Winter Solstice, and the rejoicing of all of us that the days will be getting longer and spring will come again.

When my children went to school, they sang all the carols, Christian, Jewish, and secular, and celebrated Santa Claus, who as the disguised archetypal Jupiter, the beneficent opposite to Saturn, ho-ho’s his way, bestowing gifts and good cheer. If you don’t believe me, look at the actual planetary glyphs or symbols. They are the same, only reversed! They balance each other’s processes of contraction/expansion.

Saturn, who is depicted as an old man with a long white beard, rules the material world and matter. Symbolically, it takes nine months for a new life (Aries) to manifest in a body. Capricorn starts the tenth sign. Saturn is also the Grim Reaper or death, proving our body is temporary, and, wouldn’t you know, Saturn’s Greek name is Kronos, which rules chronological Time! Saturn’s process is contraction.
Jupiter, rules Sagittarius, and the processes of expansion, fecundity, religion, optimism, and joy. These archetypes manifest themselves in literature in characters such as Scrooge and Falstaff, and, by now you should know which is which!

The Chinese advised the artist: When you think of expansion, use contraction and your work will have good form. When you think of contraction, use expansion and your work will have the spirit of effortless ease.

To close, a friend of mine decried the loss of these archetypes in our daily lives, and I had to laugh – each day of the week is named for a planet with a god’s name:

Sun-day, Fr. dimanche, Lord’s Day;
Mon-day, Moon’s day, It. lune-di;
Tues-day, Norse for Mars or Fr. mar-di;
Wednes-day, Norse, Wotan’s Day or Mercury, mercredi, Fr. (the German Mittwoch or midweek, is Mercury’s function as both/and);
Thurs-day, Norse for Thor or Jupiter, as in It. giovedi, Jove’s day;
Fri-day, Norse goddess Freya, or Venus, as in Fr. vendredi;
and finally Satur-day!

Writing this on Mercury’s Day. I could mention that the ancients also had planetary hours, starting with the Sun’s rise. Years ago I made myself, for fun, a bracelet with colored beads: gold, silver, red, white, blue, green, black, so I could watch the rotation. I know, I was eccentric, but that is Uranian, the higher octave of Mercury, and I have Uranus rising in Pisces in my First House and Aquarius on my Ascendant. Uranus, now rules Aquarius, and Aquarius rules astrology. Figures! Now I have hunger rising and will stop for lunch!

Lovingly,
ao

Toys, Games – Chaos, Order, and Motion: Sophia’s Devices IV – CREDO XCIV

   
“The unexamined life is not worth living” could have been one of Jung’s mantras, and I learned early from him to ask the simple question “why?” or “how come” and then look for a symbolic answer. And this is fun! What demonstrates chaos and order at the same time? How about a kaleidoscope? The Greek word translates into “a seeing device of beautiful image.” It is a toy and I hope you can find one. It is a colorful cardboard tube containing two vertical mirrors set at an angle. At the bottom is a cluster of small transparent tiny shapes of multi-colored glass or plastic held in a translucent bottom that can be shaken around. At the top is a peephole. When you look through the hole the bits and pieces form gorgeous mandalas of geometric shapes which change as you rotate the tube. Were you only to see the one end of random bits, you have chaos but reversed is breathtaking beautiful order in motion. The one I have is cheap, but I have seen more expensive ones made with real glass. I keep one in my office to prove a point now and then.

Another example that comes to mind is knitting, especially with different colored wools to make a patterned sweater. As you knit the right side it forms beautiful order but the inside or wrong side is a total mess of seeming chaos. When I could knit, and I loved to! before my stroke, I used to think that most of the time my self-estimation was of the chaotic mess, and I would hope that when I died, some pattern could emerge. I also remember my grandmother had a Chinese silk embroidered little hoop that was supposed to serve as a sconce for a wall light. The embroidery was the same on both sides! It was so fragile it eventually fell apart but not before delivering the message of an avatar’s example, a Buddha or a Christ, who wore a “seamless garment.

Children’s games are another source. Take Ring-around–the-Rosy (Ashes, ashes, we all fall down!). Nobody’s perfect. But from another point of view, when children hold hands in a circle, the energy is distributed and may reach a niveau of collective energy which helps the teacher. When grown-ups form a circle, I have already pointed out that each individual sees the same circle from a unique perspective, and I quoted Heraclitus saying With our eyes open we share the same world, but when we close our eyes each of us enters a separate world. Later I learned from the Stanford physics professor William Tiller, who discovered through biofeedback, that when two people hold hands the energy is squared! Then on Iona with a group of seventy two participants, I shared this, and realized we had solved the insoluble riddle that one cannot square a circle!! I probably am repeating this anecdote but in this context it shares an insight on Ring-around-the-Rosy, and further on the dichotomy presented by the coming 2000+ years of the Age of Aquarius!

Aquarius rules the “Common Man” and the global collective – we see this development happening all around us – the opposite constellation is Leo, which rules royalty and the imperial Self of the individual. In North Korea, when you see squadrons of men marching as one, that is Aquarian, and individual opinion seems difficult to come by. This was the ideal of Communism, but with time, the opposite, an elite (Leo), inevitably emerged. Technology is Aquarian: We get Social Security in an envelope but there is no love (Leo) in it. So a flashing light that says “Thank you! “is a poor substitute for gratitude. Now we have the Internet with Facebook, Twitter, etc., presenting the so-called civilized world with a “virtual life” rather than a natural, real one. It will take some time before the balance is restored. Obama is a Leo with Aquarius rising and undoubtedly used Aquarian know-how not only in trying to get elected but in trying to set our sights on a peaceful global community. Lincoln was also an Aquarian, I might add.

I hope I can be forgiven for repetition, but Sophia’s wisdom is at work in every candle. Each individual has the wick Jung calls the Self, but the flame on every wick is the same Flame!! So the Christmas season abounds in light symbolism. Why? What we forget is that for millennia we have welcomed the return of the Sun at the winter solstice on December 21 and that Christmas was consciously designated to replace the pagan festival of Saturnalia after Rome became officially Christian. Saturn rules Capricorn, the most material sign of the Zodiac, so the rebirth of the Sun coming at this darkest time, had symbolic meaning also for pagans throughout history. The Gospel of John speaks of Christ as that true Light which lighteth every one that cometh into the world.

Hanukah is a festival of light as are Hindu traditions involving floating lighted candles down rivers at Diwali.

In Gerald Schroeder’s masterful scientific book The Hidden Face of God, he describes the light in the subatomic world. He doesn’t have to preach. There is Light hidden in darkness, where Jung points out, One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but in making the darkness conscious.

Sophia’s Wisdom extends even further. I remember my ninth graders expressing boredom on an absolutely still day and using that to defend the use of “Speed,” a drug popular at the time. I stopped them in their tracks with the following information, which emphasizes her paradox of stillness and motion:

1. When you, like Newton, drop an apple or a stone, gravity seems to draw a straight line of descent; however, is it really?
2. Our earth is rotating at 1000 mph.
3. The earth is orbiting the sun at 60,000 mph.
4. The Sun and Solar System are moving at 481,000 mph in the Milky Way.
5. The Milky Way is said to be moving at 1,350,000 mph!!!, or so I have read.

I’d like to close with a funny dream I once had:
It is night and I am in a hotel. The manager is conducting me down a hall to show me the rooms. The odd thing about him is that his head is a small blazing sun. He proceeds to open the door to a closed room, sticks his head in which lights it up, and says “I can’t see anything dark in here!” He repeats this each time.

I woke up laughing and then realized a Solar God cannot know darkness, so the domain of Sophia’s feminine Wisdom of the Moon provides the dark in which the Sun’s light can be reflected and constantly changed during each mo(o)nth. If everything were light, we would not be conscious of it. The paradox is that sunrise is actually earthset! And vice-versa. The sun is always shining and steady, at least, in its centering of our solar system. Earth as a planet is the one constantly moving in orbit.

Today, the astronauts are able to move outside the spaceship as if nothing were happening, and yet they, too, are subject to orbiting the earth at 20,000 mph! Now if someone could explain to me who or what the Prime Mover was or how motion ever began!

As Galileo put it, E pur si muove and Heraclitus was spot-on when he remarked “Everything flows.” But, guess what, now I am going to stop!

lovingly,
ao

Sophia’s Devices -III: Myths, Legends, Fairy Tales, Parables, and Fables – CREDO XCIII

   
Many of us may have grown up dismissing all of the above as fanciful nonsense from the past – just not true! Jung however points out that myths are “true of the psyche.” Marie-Louise von Franz, whom I met in Davos, wrote extensively on the psychological import of fairy tales. Jesus and all other avatars taught with parables, and good old Aesop did it with fables. It seems that hiding psychological wisdom in these devices endures because everybody enjoys a good story, so they last, but “having ears we do not hear” until we learn to think symbolically. That is the key!

A Hindu example is “Two birds sit in a tree. One of them eats the fruit and the other one watches.” Think about that from the psychological point of view or from the philosophical point of view, etc. It contains, for me, the whole essence of Herman Hesse’s novel Narcissus and Goldmund! Two schoolmate boys make a deal: one goes out into the world and the other enters a monastery. They agree to meet again when they are old and compare notes. . . What does the saying suggest to you? Are you an extravert or an introvert? As for myself, I have decided I’m an ‘ambivert’(!), extraverted with people, deeply introverted when alone.

The hidden wisdom in all of the devices above is revealed when we think symbolically because this demonstrates the different levels of understanding. The story of the lion that is suffering from a thorn in his paw and is rescued by a kind child was always one of my favorites. One version has him meeting the same lion in the Roman Coliseum. The man expects to be martyred but the lion recognizes him and comes over to lick him fondly. I think George Bernard Shaw wrote a play about that.

On a more controversial level is the whole story of the Exodus in the Old Testament. Some historians today maintain that this story of the Hebrews fleeing Egypt is an allegory, on the grounds that there is absolutely not a shred of historical proof of it given by Egyptian records, which are extensive for the period. Stay tuned. My own take is that this story is set during the Age of Aries the Ram, when the concept of the ego (Aries – I am!) and its opposite Libra (law) emerged. It was the great Age for Judaism. Remember Abraham substituted a ram for Isaac’s sacrifice, and altars with rams’ horns were built, and even today the shofar that is blown is made of a ram’s horn! Moses, stand-in for the ego, led the people to the Promised Land but could not enter it, a psychological truth. Up until the last eight centuries of the Age of Aries, 800 BC, only rulers or eponymous figures were given names, and the concept of universal laws rather than local ones flowered then in the Code of Hammurabi, the Roman Twelve Tablets of Law, the Ten Commandments, and the Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path. Also, at the end of that Age, the huge number of named individuals indicated the final triumph of an anthropocentric era, and actual men and women entered history for good in countless fields of endeavor. Jason and the Golden Fleece (ram!) seems another reference to Aries the Ram, and Greek coins of the time have Athena with ram’s horns on them. (For lots more, read my book The Heavens Declare: On the Evolution of Consciousness through the Astrological Ages.) We owe the actual discovery of the Precession of the Equinoxes, that Platonic Year of 26,000+ years, to the astronomer Hipparchus of Alexandria, an incredible feat!

Aesop’s fable of the ant and the grasshopper, and many of the stories of Hans Christian Andersen and the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales, contain much symbolic wisdom, and perhaps I might include my own efforts in my “children’s” The Beejum Book, which has also been studied by several groups of grownups for several weeks, and the chapter “Figg Newton’s Tale” has been taught at two universities, one in a class of cognitive psychology!

I find it sad that the Fundamentalists in many religions take every word literally in their sacred scriptures. This concretizing is a form of idolatry. It keeps the story at the level of kindergarten and by the time the child is in college, he or she is apt to chuck the whole idea as nonsense. And yet if you read my CREDO LX, “The Global Return of the Prodigal Son,” you can see that parable even has political applications.

I cannot stress Jung’s emphasis on thinking symbolically enough! He wrote extensively on the subject and maintained that leading the symbolic life was the key to individuation because it united any external events and objects with their inner meaning. In the end, after all, when we die, all we can take with us is the intangible import of it all. As I will be 87 tomorrow, I can honestly say this with some conviction!

I feel that the purpose of my own life has been to prove that the Sacred is also to be found in the commonplace and that is the easiest place for us to start finding it. Love can be found and expressed in kindness, as well as passion. If you think about it, kindness has no secret agenda. It’s such a simple thing, and I learned this from a fairy tale and as an old lady from a six-year-old little boy, who got off the school bus with a bunch of wild flowers for his mother meeting him. When he saw me, he rushed to the edge of the road and picked some buttercups so I, too, would be happy. I am still blessed, not by the actual buttercups, but by the memory of his kindness. My life has been punctuated with such examples, as well as hideous examples of the opposite.

As a former teacher of children, I cannot resist giving the reader an assignment! What story, parable, or fable was meaningful to you as a child and has guided you unconsciously ever since? If you can remember it, you have been touched by Sophia whose disguise is often the Fairy Godmother, that archetypal aspect of feminine wisdom that mediates between the visible and invisible worlds, always with our spiritual benefit in mind.

This is the first of Sophia’s levels and leads us to understanding that the “Vast Certainty” of Spirit operates on ascending stages of discovery and is constantly challenged by the destructive aspects of dia-bolos, hateful ignorance, the antonym of symbolos. The thing to remember is that there has to be first a yes! for a no to deny it!

The most serious level of Sophia’s devices has to be legends. The difference between a myth and a legend is that myths tend to involve supranormal beings and deities, whereas legends involve human beings. It seems every unique culture has one and they are of heavy duty import. The Hindu Mahabharata, The Teutonic Walkyrie Cycle, the Norse Sagas, the Irish Leobhar Gabala Eirann, and the Christian Legend of the Holy Grail, to name only a few. Each, in its way, is filled with esoteric levels of interpretation and reveals a different facet of humanity.

lovingly,
ao