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Astrology
by Hand Week 21
Last
week,
I said that we would begin to get to the bottom of the question of where
this language of nature comes from, and we will do that. However, I do
want to say one thing about this before we go on. The phrase “language
of nature,” with “language” in the singular, is not quite accurate. There
are many versions and forms of the language of nature that are as different
as English and Chinese, and it is not a matter of whether one of these
is more accurate or “correct” than another. They are all valid for some
things. For example, each of the various divinatory techniques, such as
tarot, astrology, geomancy, I ching, etc. constitutes its own form of
the language of nature. And within each “language” there are dialects
such as medieval astrology, as opposed to modern Western astrology or
Jyotish. Again, the language model suggests to us that each of these dialects
is also equally valid, although possibly each has different strengths
and weaknesses of expression.
The
Languages Are Many, But Not Arbitrary
The language
model also tells us something else that is important. The structure of
any particular language is not arbitrary. Within a language there are
rules that a language must follow, or the language cannot function. While
these rules may take many and varied forms, they must be present. That
means that we cannot arbitrarily make up a symbolic language any time
we feel like it. Such a language must arise gradually out of the consciousness
of a culture combined with whatever that other thing that we are looking
for as a source may be.
The
Language(s) of Nature and the Collective Unconscious
In week
three of this column, I mentioned that many people, especially
Jungians, have sought the language of nature within something like Jung’s
collective unconscious. I mentioned at the time that the problem with
this notion is that, for the most part, it would confine the language
of nature to a system within the human psyche, that is, such a language
would have no existence anywhere outside of the human mind. The histories
of astrology and magic both suggest that these languages do have an existence
outside of the human mind, or at least the human mind as modern thinkers
think of it.
If we could
expand the idea of the collective unconscious to something that exists
outside of the human mind, something we experience together because it
is “out there,” this would begin to account for these languages. This
could also be accomplished by another similar, but somewhat different
route. We could say that the human mind and all of its parts are local
manifestations of a mental power that is spread throughout existence in
some way. This is more the route that traditional occultism has favored.
Another
Possible Difficulty with the Collective Unconscious Model
In his book
Eye to Eye, Ken Wilbur (Shambala Books, Boston, Massachusetts,
1996) describes what he calls the “Pre-Trans Fallacy.” This is the tendency
on the part of many thinkers to confuse that which is preconscious with
that which transcends normal consciousness. For example, a Platonist would
regard archetypes as coming from a transcendent realm of super-consciousness,
whereas a Jungian would regard them as coming from a realm that is preconscious
(or subconscious). For the moment I am not going to try to sort that one
out, but I expect to later on when I have proposed a model for what I
believe is going on. Suffice it to say that for the present, a pure Jungian
model for the origins of our languages would seem to force them to have
their origins in something that is of a lesser order of consciousness
than the typical human mind. Are the gods (as the ancients would have
called these archetypes) unconscious? This raises another question; are
they persons? That, too, I want to hold off on for the moment.
A
Model of How Things Are Dating from Late Antiquity
There is
a text written in Hebrew that dates from somewhere between the time of
Abraham and the tenth century A.D. More conventional historiography places
its earliest possible date as somewhere in the second century A.D. It
is the Sepher Yetzirah, or Book of Formation.
Aryeh Kaplan, in his commentary on the Sepher Yetzirah (The
Sefer Yetzirah, Samuel Weiser, York Beach, Maine, 1990 where
Sepher is spelled Sefer), actually refers to it in several places as a
very early text on astrology. But it is not a text on astrology that is
anything like what we would expect. It is very obscure and deeply mystical.
It is usually said to be a description of the creation of the universe
as embodied in the Hebrew alphabet, and it is one of the oldest texts
that make up the body of Judaic mysticism known as the Kabbalah.
In the midst
of this text there occurs a model of how the universe is constructed that
seems oddly modern in its way of representing things, and yet incredibly
revolutionary in its implications. We will begin with this text in our
next installment.
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