The Beliefs of Ancient Astrologers, Part Two: The One and the Many

Transcript:

0:00
Hi everyone, this is Acyuta-bhava from nightlight astrology and today I'm continuing my series on the beliefs of ancient astrologers. In the second episode, we are going to take a look at what I have called the problem of the one versus the many. Before I dive in to today's talk, this series is something that I'm doing in order to help students of astrology understand what it is that astrologers believed and what informed their practices philosophically, and what are the most likely beliefs that have sort of carried over throughout the couple 1000 years that astrology has been around. And in order to do this, what I what I did was a couple of years ago, I was giving a talk on the beliefs of ancient astrologers at a conference because of about a year worth of research that I had done looking into the subject for myself, I was really interested because I wanted to know as my own faith path was, I guess you could say clarifying itself in terms of my commitments to bhakti yoga, I wanted to know, were the beliefs of ancient astrologers and the type of astrology that I practised, Hellenistic astrology and to some extent, even modern astrology, I wanted to know what the beliefs of ancient astrologers were to see if they squared with my, my practice of yoga and just trying to have a deeper understanding of my roots philosophically and spiritually, which to me, has helped me to greatly clarify and ground and sort of stabilised my practice I know a lot better now why I do what I do. And I think that that's important. I get so many people year round asking me what do you have to believe to get into astrology? Is that like a religion? Like what is it? So this series is all about helping people at least start to clarify for themselves, what what their own beliefs are, or what kind of faith articles or statements might be necessary to practice astrology or not. So we started by talking about the fact that ancient astrologers, by and large, most likely believed in an ordered cosmos, we talked about harmonia, and rta as these grounding principles that that were common in the ancient world, and would have been common, philosophically Common Ground philosophically, for all of the different philosophical groups that were most likely the progenitors of ancient astrology. So harmonia, the idea that the universe is ordered, beautiful, just good and true. Right? In Sanskrit, rta appears so many times in the Vedas, and the carries over in the Upanishads, and so forth, is the same basic concept that exists in the east.

2:47
So today, we're going to continue this series by taking a look at the idea of the one and the many, or the one versus the many. So if you go back, historically, this problem philosophically, is in some ways, the ground floor of all philosophical traditions, all spiritual and religious traditions. It's sort of like the binary language of computers, zeros and ones. You can go back and see that so many different philosophical schools were looking at this idea of unity and diversity, or the one and the many, or you could say, an underlying pervasive essence, that is within all things, even though at the same time diverse beings and forms exist. So you have a kind of essential oneness but then you also have a sense of there being diversity and messiness, and ancient philosophers and mystics were dealing with this across the board. So let's go back and take a look at some of these are just some basic notes from my studies over the past years.

4:03
You go back to as early as the 16th century BCE, in Egypt, there began to Egyptians began to embrace the idea of a transcendental source or an an all pervasive singular Godhead, who they call Amun-re, who included everything, everything in creation was included in this God, but was Amun-re was also transcendent to creation. So you have this idea of a god that's in creation and transcendent to it simultaneously, a one all pervasive unifying Godhead. That's very old idea.

4:46
In Mesopotamian mythology and theology, the notion of a single anthropomorphic and transcendent being whose body parts were the various imminent aspects of creation, the cosmos, the universe that became popular as early as 2000 BCE, now, these are traditions that are coming far before we see the birth of horoscopic astrology, in, say, India or the Hellenistic region of the world. So it's very, very old to be thinking theologically, philosophically about the idea that in the universe there is the single all pervading, unifying essence, that connects all things and that there is also diverse forms in creation, and how do those things work together? How is it that there is one thing and different things at the exact same time? It might sound like a simple problem, but philosophically, when you're trying to understand why are we here? Where does everything come from? These become really important discussions. In the Rigveda, the universe is described as a giant body, the body of divinity, which is both imminent meaning it in a sense, is creation. Its arms and legs are the mountains and, you know, and the rivers, but it's also transcendent. It is also something beyond the manifest material cosmos. So similarly, if it you come all the way down, trickling down the years and centuries, to about the time of the axial age, which is the middle of the first millennium BCE, the last 500 years BCE, is where we think that Hellenistic or horoscopic astrology emerges. And you know, people will debate these dates and so forth. But if you go to around that time, what are the philosophers in the Hellenistic region of the world, which is Greek speaking, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's ethnically Greek. That's an important side note, lots of different people from that whole region of the world would have been sharing in many of these practices. So anyway, in Greece, the Orphics, that's roughly fifth sixth century BCE. Thales, that's going to be 624 to 545 bc Anaximande and Aximenes, you're going right around the five hundreds again, Heraclitus, 535 to 475, Pythagoras, thought to be 570 to 495, Xenophanes, 570, to 475, Parmenides, 540 to 480 BC, and Plato, which now comes down a little bit further 428 to 348, BC, something like that. You have different dates for some of these in different places. But all of those philosophers or schools that were born from those philosophers and their work dealt with the problem of the one versus the many. How is it that many different forms exist? And are they pervaded by or connected by an underlying essence or unity in all things? Is there a god? And is God transcendent? Is God imminent? Or is God somehow both at once? So these are the kinds of questions that, again, are going to be dealt with by off all philosophical schools.

8:06
Though there were many different schools of thought there was broad agreement about several fundamental issues. And this is why this is so important, and why it's so important to us today to look at in terms of our faith statements as astrologers. The reason that one would become interested in the difference between an underlying essence and the variety of changing forms in the material world is because the material world is impermanent, it demonstrates flux, variation and change constantly. Like Heraclitus talks about putting your foot into the, you can't put your foot into the same river twice. And you see complimentary teachings in the Upanishads. And you see complimentary teachings in Taoism. And so you kind of drawing a broad, huge tract of the existing world down into Egypt and Africa, up through the Mediterranean, through the Middle East, over East into India, even further east, that this conversation is happening across the board in that region of the world. And of course, there are other astrological traditions that aren't utilising the same technology, the same horoscope, the same methods and so forth in other parts of the world, South and Central America, for example, and many other places. Actually, there's a great book by an astrologer named Nicholas Campion called Astrology and Cosmology in the World's Religions.

9:38
Now, I'm not an expert in those subjects because I focus on horoscopic astrology from this part of the world. But if you were interested in astral omen, divination from other parts of the world, you'll find that the whole world is is teeming with it historically. So that's a great book to read if you want to check out maybe, you know, for example, maybe your ancestors or you know, you've descended from people from a different part of the world, and you want to know like, well, what did they practice? Check that book out, because it's a really good one. Okay, so anyway, all of these schools, though, in the east and the west, broadly speaking, and by the way, when we say West, we're not talking about like, like white European people, right? We're talking about Middle Eastern Egyptian, Greek. Again, the Hellenistic world is very diverse, in a sense. So at any rate, all of these schools, though, are looking at the material world and going, there's so many different things. There's so many different elements, there's so many different energies, there's so many different forms, and they're always changing. And yet something seems to remain. Of course, this would be of interest to astrologers, because where are we going with this? We'll be talking about this in episode three, we're talking about the difference between the body and the soul. The idea is that the body changes from childhood to youth to adulthood to old age to death. And that we see this in nature too, we see, flowers come up and wither away, the plant and natural world demonstrates a kind of cyclical union, amidst impermanent fluctuation between various forms, and even the planets in the heavens. They're always they all have idiosyncratic motions. The heavens, the planets do, they all have different speeds, they all retrograde for different lengths of time, they all have different synoptic cycles with the sun, their latitude varies relative to the ecliptic, there's eclipses that come and go the moon, you know, takes on light and then sheds it off. So there's all this variation. And yet, at the same time, all those variants take part in the same uniform motion through the Zodiac going in the same direction. At the same time, there is a repeatability in the cycle of the moon, that gives it a kind of constancy even though the Sun's face is constant. And it looks like it's the same all the time it rises, it comes up to the top of the sky and it sets and then it gets dark. So there is this sense in which there is cyclical unity, to everything. There is some way in which everything is enduring, and eternal, and transcendent. And then there is a sense in which it is impermanent and functional and changing all the time. And this is the same problem as the one in the many. Okay, look, there's an underlying essence or unity even though there's also variation and change. So, basically speaking, there was broad agreement about several fundamental issues even though there's there's variation in terms of how people are tackling these questions. The material world is governed by impermanence, flux and change. The material world is full of diversity, we see it in nature and the heavens and the sky and the animals and our bodies and our lifetimes. However, underlying or within all seeming changes all impermanence is a singular spiritual source, essence, eternal principle or divine being, the knowledge of which is of the utmost importance is the goal of the philosopher or spiritual aspirant.

13:27
So in other words, just like we were talking about in Episode One with rita or harmonia, this idea of cosmic harmony or unity that holds all things together, the philosopher or the astrologer, or the mystic is one, whether philosophically or through techniques of ecstasy, whatever they may be, is one who is trying to understand the unity behind or within all apparent inconstancy and change and mutability. Why would we do that? Why? What would the reason be? What would the necessity be? Or why would that be such a value? Because if we become identified with the changes, you were, we are, in a sense, going to be riding a roller coaster all the time.

14:16
I mean, you know, it's very basic, like, you know, and I think about what does meditation give me? What does astrology give me on a day to day basis? It gives me the ability to see the unity, the meaning, the order, the truth, the beauty, the goodness, in all of the fluctuations and changes by meditating on the cycles of the planets and the different variations and changes that they make as they go through different signs. And as we see those as a mirror for the different kinds of fluctuations and changes here on Earth. We start to be able to trust that our experiences are sacred. What does sacred mean? It's like the word sanctified. It means that they are held together and that they aren't just disparate chaotic pieces that they have a greater whole of which they are apart or a greater sense of meaning there's a deeper sense of union and harmony and beauty within them. And so this is why I'm bringing this up as a topic today, the problem of the one in the many, it's an underlying issue that all of these different theological and philosophical schools approach with the intention of trying to understand what is the relationship between the two, establishing that there is a oneness and there is a, some relationship between this unity and this realm of constant change? What is it and basically all of these schools in one way or another, land on the idea that to live a philosophical life to live a spiritually fulfilling life, one trains oneself to see and be in touch with the underlying unity in all things, as we also understand, track, watch and participate in the changes that is basic that is fundamental to what astrologers were doing, and the underlying philosophy that informed the practice. As far as I can tell, I can't make a good argument that astrologers wouldn't have had this in mind. So, again, especially given how prevalent this this was, this philosophical position, you could say, was in the ancient world, again, across the board.

16:29
So we see astrologers talking about this differently. For example, Manilius, in the very opening of his Astronomica, which is one of the oldest dated texts that we have, even though we know that there are texts that were drawing on sources that were earlier, his is still one of the earliest stated texts that we have. He was a poet in the Roman Empire, and he wrote this beautiful treatise on astrology. And in the very beginning, he talks about understanding that the heavens are like poetic metre, that there's a measure to every phrase in creation. And that the poet, a lot like the astrologer is one who is learning to see and hear the music, the meaning, the measure the order and the beauty. So it's not like order in some strict sense, its order as in the order of a poetic verse or the order of a musical scale. It's aesthetically pleasing to the soul, and that the soul derives some happiness by studying this order. And by by seeing something coherent, and beautiful, that unifies everything within the experience of multiplicity and diversity. So this is kind of complementary to the idea of harmonia and rita. But it goes a little bit further, because rather than just saying the cosmos is ordered, harmonious, good and true, we're also starting to get down to the idea that there is a soul, and that there is God, that there's a personal soul within and it has some relationship to God and that they both have eternality in common, and that they both also have a relationship to the world of change to the material energy, you could say that's always fluctuating. And what is that relationship? Well, again, to just briefly summarise it's the idea that underlying all with or within all seeming changes all impermanence is a single spiritual source, essence, principle or being the knowledge of which which we can gain experientially, through meditation through astrology, some through so many different things through study, the knowledge of which is of the utmost importance, and it's the goal of the philosopher or the spiritual aspirant. Because if we're touch with this, then we find that we we enter into a kind of flow with creation, if we don't train our minds and our hearts to see this, if we don't look for the one in the many, then what tends to happen when the the many without the one grabs hold, is that we get we get fragmented into tonnes of pieces. And we're always running around trying to make some order out of things that's like sand falling through our hands. So you could say a faith statement for ancient astrologers was that the goal of spiritual life and the goal of astrology on some level is to train our eyes and our hearts and our minds, to see and experience the unity in all of the fluctional states of change in the material universe.

19:48
So, this has been part two of this series. In part three, we're going to keep bridging this idea into the idea of divinity or God, the soul, and also astrologers participated in a very common idea that was that exists in the ancient world, which is that we have a there's a problematic relationship that we have to the material world. And I was just essentially what I was just saying, which is that when we're here in the material world, it's very easy to get identified and lost in the in the fluctional changes that are happening all the time, the inconstancy and the mutability. And what does right relationship with that look like? And what is the consequence of getting lost in that material energy and forgetting that we are an eternal spirit soul or forgetting that there is a divine source in all things? That's a problem that ancient philosophers tackled across the board as well, different answers and different approach in different schools of thought. But that's something that they all address. So in the next episode, we'll be talking about the reality of God in the soul, and the material world. So that's what comes next. I hope you guys are enjoying this series. I'd love to hear what your own faith statements are as an astrologer. Like, if someone came up to you and said, you know, what do you believe as an astrologer? How would you explain what astrologers believe? This has been, you know, this is my, you know, my speculating, in a sense, my trying to get back to the roots and figure out what astrologers were talking about, and what they most likely believed. But of course, I don't know because I wasn't there. And we all have to adapt to these things, in some ways to our modern world as well. So I'd love to hear what you guys think and also what you tend to tell people if they ask you like, what do you have to believe to be into astrology? It would be interesting, so. All right, well, thanks for listening. That's what I've got for today. And we'll be back again soon with another episode. Take it easy, everyone. Bye.