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140 pages

English

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Under a Sacred Sky is a treasure trove of essays by the author on the ancient art of astrology. This far-reaching collection is drawn from articles and interviews ranging from discussions of its use in our personal lives to its value for understanding historical cycles and patterns. It also includes a fascinating chapter on planetary stations, a topic rarely covered in other astrological literature. Along the way Ray Grasse interjects with some of his ownpersonal experiences in the discipline, while exploring its broader implications for subjects like synchronicity, spirituality, and the yogic concept of the chakras. This book includes interviewswith Rick Tarnas and Laurence Hillman and is suitable for both beginner and advanced students of the subject.

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Astrology

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Publié par	The Wessex Astrologer Ltd
Date de parution	01 juillet 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781910531112
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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UNDER A SACRED SKY
Essays on the Practice and Philosophy of Astrology
UNDER A SACRED SKY
Essays on the Practice and Philosophy of Astrology
Ray Grasse
Published in 2015 by The Wessex Astrologer Ltd, 4A Woodside Road Bournemouth BH5 2AZ www.wessexastrologer.com
Ray Grasse 2015
Ray Grasse asserts the moral right to be recognised as the author of this work.
Cover Design by Jonathan Taylor Cover Art: Star of the Hero (1936, tempera on canvas), by Nicholas Roerich. By kind permission of the Nicholas Roerich Museum, New York.
A catalogue record for this book is available at The British Library
ISBN 9781910531075
No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher. A reviewer may quote brief passages.
All chart data drawn from Lois Rodden s Astro-Databank files at www.astro.com unless otherwise indicated.
Ephemerides generated using Solar Fire v8.1.2.
for Laurence Hillman
Contents
1 The Enchanted Cosmos: Symbolism, Synchronicity, and the Astrological World View
2 The Divine Science: Reflections on a Life in Astrology
3 Saturn, the Late Bloomer: Understanding the Long-Range Dynamics of Saturn in the Horoscope
4 The Seven Most Common Mistakes Made by Astrologers
5 What Goes Around Comes Around: Learning from Past Transits to Better Understand Future Trends
6 Astrology and the Chakras: Toward a Sacred Psychology of the Horoscope
7 On the Perils of Telling People What to Do: The Razor s Edge of Astrological Counseling
8 Astrology Goes to the Movies: Exploring Planetary Symbolism in the Cinema
9 The Dawn of Aquarius: The Turning of the Great Ages
10 Cinema and the Birth of the Aquarian Age
11 Wheels of Change: Stelliums, Mundane Astrology, and the Art of the Big Picture
12 Drawing Down the Fire of the Gods: Reflections on the Leo/Aquarius Axis
13 Tuning into the Zeitgeist: Riding the Waves of Planetary Change
14 Monsters, Mystics, and the Collective Unconscious: Planetary Cycles and the Outer Limits of the Zeitgeist
15 Tectonic Triggers: The Hidden Power of Station Points
16 Synchronicity and the Mind of God: Unlocking the Mystery of Carl Jung s Meaningful Coincidence
Conversations in Astrology
Cosmos and Psyche: An Interview with Richard Tarnas
All the World s a Stage: An Interview with Laurence Hillman
Author s Preface
This book features a collection of my articles published over the last 20 years, exploring different facets of astrology and its symbolism. Broadly speaking, these fall into two primary categories: personal astrology - how the horoscope illuminates the lives and psychologies of individuals - and mundane astrology, which focuses more on historical trends and socio-cultural patterns. Since they first appeared in print, I ve updated some of them to reflect my current thinking and research, and rewritten certain passages to avoid unnecessary repetition. With all of them, I ve attempted to convey the ideas to as broad a segment of readership as possible so that both beginners and advanced students of astrology might gain some insight from the themes presented. I hope you, the reader, find it valuable.
Ray Grasse Chicago, July 2015
1
The Enchanted Cosmos: Symbolism, Synchronicity, and the Astrological World View
The universe is composed of stories, not atoms. Muriel Rukeyser, The Speed of Darkness
I recently met with a client whose natal horoscope included an especially volatile Mars positioned exactly on his 4th-house cusp - the segment of the horoscope relating to home and domesticity. During the course of our conversation, the young man told me of a curious event that occurred at the moment he was born: exactly as his mother was at the hospital giving birth to him, a small fire broke out back at the family home, causing extensive damage to one of several bedrooms.
A curious synchronicity, I thought, considering the fiery pattern in his chart relating to the home - and considering the ongoing pattern of domestic turbulence this individual experienced throughout his life ever since.
Over the years of researching various aspects of symbolism and synchronicity, I ve encountered many such stories, not only from discussions with clients but from a variety of historical sources as well. In many Native American cultures, for example, it s well known that special attention was paid to signs or symbols occurring in the environment at the moment of a child s birth. So if a child was born at the moment a deer happened to run by, that that child might be named Running Deer, in the belief that personality would grow up to express qualities of swiftness or gracefulness.
Or, in the Tibetan tradition, if a great earthquake occurred at the moment of a child s birth, this might be taken as a sign this individual would somehow have a great or unusual destiny, and might likewise shake the world. Western classical history tells us of similar symbols or omens that accompanied the births of figures like Alexander the Great, Socrates, and Plato. Indeed, there are few traditional cultures which did not place emphasis on such symbols or coincidences around the births of men and women.
As with astrology, signs like this have traditionally been thought to reflect the destinies or characters of the individuals involved - with or without added consideration of the celestial configurations of the moment. Applying this approach to my own client s case, any esotericist worth their salt would have immediately recognized an important insight into this person s life simply from observing the symbols in the environment around his birth - in this case, Martian symbols.
Simply put, while the starry sky offers a profound map into the soul and destiny of an individual, it is by no means the only map available within the symbolic landscape of our environment.
Examples like this open a window into an important but often overlooked dimension of astrology, and invite us to reconsider a very old question: How does astrology work ? If there is indeed a vital connection between the celestial bodies and our lives down here on Earth, what specifically is the mechanism involved?
Over the millennia, any number of theories have been put forth to explain astrology s inner workings, most of which can, in simplest terms, be classified into one of two primary groups: causal , or force, explanations, and acausal , or synchronistic, explanations.
According to the causal model, humans are influenced by means of an energy or force transmitted from celestial bodies to creatures down on Earth. For some writers, that s to be explained in terms of an already known force like electromagnetism or gravity. Astrophysicist Percy Seymour, for example, writes about the complex way the Solar System interacts with the Earth s geomagnetic fields:
The whole solar system is playing a symphony on the magnetic field of the Earth... We are all genetically tuned to receiving a different set of melodies from the symphony. 1
For still others, this causal force consists of an energy within nature that s still to be discovered by science - and might even be para- normal or occult in nature, as was believed by Rennaissance magical philosophers like Cornelius Agrippa. In either case, such force theories hold that celestial forces act upon humans by means of a classical cause-and-effect mechanism; in short, this affects that.
On the other hand, the acausal or synchronistic explanation believes that the secret of astrological influence won t ever be found in any purely mechanistic theories of cause-and-effect, but only in conjunction with a more holistic worldview that views all phenomena as embedded in a deeper network of interconnectedness and meaning. According to writers like Dane Rudhyar and H.P. Blavatsky, the planetary patterns at one s moment of birth don t cause particular traits or tendencies so much as reflect them. The simultaneity of celestial and earthly events are, to use Carl Jung s terminology, a meaningful coincidence, with the position of the planets and the life of individual s lives representing joint expressions of the same underlying pattern of meaningfulness.
In this essay, we will look more closely at the idea that astrology is indeed synchronistic - but with a twist. The mechanism of astrology could be more accurately described as symbolism , whereby celestial events not only connect acausally with earthly happenings but also incorporate dimensions of symbolism and meaning beyond their surface appearances. As evidence for this point, consider the fact that of all the myriad techniques and theories employed by astrologers, the vast majority of these are entirely symbolic in character, with little or no basis in empirical, concrete reality. Here are just a few examples:
The complex network of hidden correspondences believed by astrologers to link the diverse areas of our lives, in ways that are profoundly metaphorical and archetypal in nature.
The otherwise perplexing division of both houses and zodiacs specifically into twelve segments, suggesting an archetypal rather than practical basis. (Why not eight? Six? Or, more logically, four?).
The method of classic progressions, based on a day-for-a-year movement of the planets from their position at one s time of birth.
The art of horary astrology, whereby horoscopes are cast for such seemingly intangible things as questions or even ideas.
Astrology s employment of planets positioned below the horizon in casting horoscopes. In any purely force-based model, subtle influences like this (all the more minimized in the case of distant planets like Pluto or Neptune) would logically seem blocked by the sheer mass of the Earth; in the symbolic model, though, such factors simply assume more hidden dimensions of meaning.
The vast array of abstract points and parts employed in Arabic, Vedic, and some Western schools of astrology, arrived at through purely mathematical or symbolic, rat