As astrologers we are privileged to study the most beautiful music of all which is . . . the music of what happens! To understand the building blocks of our craft, predict it's flow and understand the mind that created the blocks. The astrology that we have is, in a sense a fragment of a structured, disciplined mystical science.

Finn McCool and his companions were out riding one day, hunting the wild boar through the wooded hills of Ulster. While they rested at midday, lying eating in the sunlight of forest glade, McCool posed the question, “What is the most beautiful music of all?”

The fearsome, one-eyed warrior Golla MacMorna spoke first: “It is the sound of battle,” he opined. “The sound of sword on sword, of the spear in flight; the sound of fear and of victory.”

Then spoke Diarmid, so beautiful that no woman could look on him and not lose her heart. “It is the sound of a soft voice calling from her chamber in the night; the sound of sweet words whispered in the dark; the faint trembling of lips as they hover for that first long waited kiss.” Then Fergus spoke, who told of the singing of the wind through the cornfields near his home; Connor, of the tympani of waves crashing on the shore; Conan, of the murmur of his child in sleep; and Oisin, Finn’s own son, of the warmth and wisdom in a father’s voice.

Each one answered, each with his differing view. Then when all were quiet Oisin asked, “and my father, Finn McCool:what say you is the most beautiful music of them all?”

And that is what, as astrologers, we are privileged to study: the music of what happens, indeed the most beautiful of them all.

There are many ways in which man has attempted to make this music intelligible – to read the score, as it were. Some of these are inevitably more successful than others. The experimental methods of what is now, for some reason not immediately obvious, called “science” seek not to read the score or hear the music, but to understand it purely by examining its effects on its listeners, the existent animate and inanimate entities of the world, so putting many levels of apaque reality between themselves and the composer. At the other extreme, the mystic attempts to comprehend by realising his oneness with the mind that is creating the music.

Of what might loosely be called the divinatory arts, though limiting astrology to this does her a great disservice, some attempt to predict by humming along with the tune until the operator, if skilled enough, can catch sufficient of its form to gauge where it is going next, while some, of which astrology is the epitome, use the vestiges of true scientific method to objectively – or dis-involvedly – understand the nature of the forms from which the music is built: its notes and tempi, for example. From an understanding of these forms – the building blocks of the music of what happens – the astrologer can then proceed in two directions: to understand the music that is made from these blocks and predict its flow, and to understand the mind that created the blocks. The astrology that we have is, in this sense, a fragment of a structured, disciplined mystical science.

Plotinus says that if we establish the comprehensive principle of co-ordination behind all manifested phenomena ‘we have a reasonable basis for the divination, not only by the stars, but also by birds and other animals, from which we derive guidance in our varied concerns.’ That is, if we imagine all manifested phenomena as two dots on the surface of a balloon, these dots will move as the balloon is blown up. It is not until we realise that the balloon is being blown up and that this has an effect on the dots that the movement becomes comprehensible to us. Once we have grasped the basic coordinating principle of the balloon’s expansion, a knowledge of the movement of one dot will enable us to determine the movement of the other. If one of the dots is me, it is of no matter whether the other dot is the planet Venus or what my cat had for breakfast: the understanding of the basic coordinating principle will still enable me to deduce things about my own position from observing it. Over the centuries, the position of the planet Venus has proved rather easier to tabulate.

In practice, of course, the position is rather more complex than the metaphor suggests, in that we have the familiar Aristotelian principle of balloons within balloons; but the idea remains the same.

It is the size and apparent regularity of orbit of the planets that has made them of so much more practical use than the movements of birds or animals, especially so for a sedentary race increasingly removed from contact with the natural world against which the movements of animals must be seen if they are to become comprehensible. In India, we are told1, the classical model of the astrologer at work has him seated in a clearing, making judgement from the surrounding world as well as from the chart itself: the weather, the direction from which the client comes, his clothing, movements of animals, the chart – all are used as one. That we are a sedentary and, increasingly, an urban race has a profound effect on our choice of technique for grasping the coordinating principle. We judge from pieces of paper rather than the livers of newly-slaughtered sheep; but the form, too, of our astrology has been shaped by our culture.

Although this culture has become so universally embracing that we almost forget the existence of an alternative, one of the most fundamental divisions of humanity is into nomadic and sedentary peoples. In the account of creation in Genesis, only the divisions into man and woman and parent and child come before the division into Cains and Abels. Just as man and woman or parent and child, nomad and settler have profoundly different views of the world: a nomad would find the concern of Scarlett O’Hara for Tara quite incomprehensible: indeed, in the friction between Rhett Butler and Scarlett, we can see something of the difference between nomadic and sedentary values, and the power of that perennial romantic attraction which the nomad holds for the settled soul.

For the settler, place remains fixed while time is ever moving. The arts of the sedentary cultures fix time in place, painting or sculpture being the examples; cinema or TV being the most typical today. The settler’s dream is to found a ‘house’ in literal or metaphoric sense that will be passed on through generations. For the nomad, time is his static medium, one year being like the next with none of the gradual sense of growth with which the farmer is familiar, while place moves, the horizon moving always before him. The nomad’s arts move through time: poetry, which has no place, but which starts at one time and finishes a certain time later, and song are his chosen media. The nomad’s dream is to have a name that will be passed on through generations, to achieve a famous deed that will be recited by the bards. Note the opposition: the settler’s dream is the fourth house, the nomad’s the tenth.

Note also the significance of which of these is, above the horizon: the nomad’s deed must be honourable, done in broad daylight, for all to see, for nothing is worse than to be remembered for the wrong reasons; but for the settler, whether his house is achieved in honourable or dishonourable ways is largely immaterial: in the darkness of the IC, the foundations of his house cannot be seen. Whatever dark deeds may have built his house, they will be washed away with time. This difference in value is the basis for much of our literature, cinema and, indeed, political thought.

Nomad and settler have their different astrologies. The chart is a mixture of time and place: a certain time, at a certain place. The nomad uses whole-sign houses, which throw the emphasis of the chart onto the time. The sedentary cultures have developed the myriad house-systems (the choice of the word ‘house’ for a section of the chart is not coincidental), stressing the place. The term ‘whole-sign houses’ is in fact a settler’s mistranslation of what the nomadic astrologer is doing, for he has, being a nomad, no houses: he does not think “If the Ascendant is in Gemini, the second house is Cancer,” but simply “If the Ascendant is in Gemini, the second sign is Cancer – and the second sign is concerned with possessions.” Apart from anything else, whole-sign houses are simple to calculate while whipping ones sturdy little pony across the endless steppe. I have yet to come across anyone who can work out Regiomontanus cusps from scratch (no books of tables if you’re a nomad!) in their head. The whole paraphernalia of our astrology is specific to our culture.

The colouring of astrology by culture did not stop with the split between nomadic and sedentary peoples. Far from existing in a world of intellectual purity, our astrology has been moulded by our changing social world (just as the modern pseudo-sciences of physics or biology). We could doubtless find a cultural concurrence to many of the astrological divisions: those who reverse Fortuna by night and those who don’t, for example. The most obvious is that which occurred with the Renaissance.

The Renaissance, a gradual process extending over several hundred years rather than the sharp watershed that its name implies, saw a reversal of man’s priorities just as total as the reversal in the model of the solar system which is regarded as one of the great achievements of that age. Our position, dwelling in the foothills of that mighty mountain, makes it impossible for us to judge clearly its effects: its shadow falls across all our thought, however hard we may strive to escape it. But for all its pervasive influence, it is possible to see that it was not necessarily the unreservedly Good Thing that Whiggish history and the cult of St Leonardo assure us it was. Just because it brought us to here does not necessarily mean that here is the best place to be.

The discoveries of the Renaissance are manifold, from double-entry book-keeping to America, and, like all discoveries, they each reflect symbolically upon the age that made them: without the mental or spiritual capacity to receive that discovery, the discovery will not be made – we might evince the Vikings stumbling across America as a discovery made before the capacity to receive it was formed. Perhaps the one that most clearly symbolises the spiritual transformation of that age was one of its favourites: that of linear perspective.

To us it is self-evident that a drawing made according to the rules of linear perspective looks ‘real’, while the typical product of a medieval artist does not. Yet it is only because we have lived through the Renaissance that we experience this: only because we have accepted the Renaissance reversal of values, selling our birthright for a mess of sweet-smelling but nutritionally empty pottage. That it bears a resemblance to the superficial form of an object does not make something look real; this is the error of our contemporary scientists, who are convinced that if you can measure something you understand it. As astrology teaches us, the reality of an object is in its essence, not in its form: throughout history, it is only cultures in their decadence that have produced superficially naturalistic art: cultures still in touch with their heart produce art that concerns itself with essences, with the spiritual core. Naturalistic art may look like the surface of a form; this is not the same as looking real.

The significant thing about linear perspective is that it is made to be viewed from one particular spot, unlike a medieval work depicting essential truth which looks ‘real’ from whatever viewpoint it is seen. That is, linear perspective prizes the individual viewer in its abandonment of spiritual for mundane value. And because astrology is always coloured by the society in which it lives, this is exactly what happened to astrology at the same time.

The correlating change in astrology during the Renaissance was the switch in emphasis from horary and mundane astrology to natal (though, of course, natal existed before and horary since). The point of horary is that the artist is divining the Will of God on the particular issue under discussion. The form of the question is always, although rarely stated as such, “Is it the Will of God that X or Y…?” It is possible to treat a natal judgement as a divination of the Will of God for that life – in Vedic astrology, in particular, this approach is by no means extinct. But the way of the world being such as it is, natal astrology inevitably descended into what it is today: not a divination of the spiritual role of the life, but a revelling in the idiosyncrasies of personality, the very things that draw us away from the spiritual.

Apart from the contemporary role of astrological consultation as titillation, providing the otherwise rare opportunity to talk about nothing but ME for an hour or so, this difference in emphasis is perhaps clearest in the dramatic reversal of attitude towards death in the horoscope. To the ancients, when judging a nativity the first thing to do was to work out when the native would die: without this, any further judgement was clearly meaningless. But this was in an age where the spiritual verities were accorded more importance than today: in spiritual terms it is the moment of death that gives the life its meaning. In secular terms, the moment of death is the extinction of the ego, and so, as modern astrology exists solely for the amusement of that ego, all the textbooks now agree that one must never suggest to one’s client that they might possibly be mortal.

It is the reversal of value between the spiritual and profane, as total as the reversal in an electric current, if happening over a rather longer period of time, that explains the Galileo controversy. Contrary to what we are taught, this was not a matter of a true view superseding a false one: the victors write the histories, and this picture is born from the world which the Galilean view has created, a world whose unacknowledged legislators are the scientists whose conviction is that man does live by bread alone.

The Galilean controversy was not a question of true versus false, but of which level of truth was to be regarded as of prime significance, the spiritual or the profane. It is this that caused the opposition of the Church to Galileo’s teaching. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Church displayed a remarkable openness to new ideas: this catholic approach to knowledge was not suddenly abandoned without reason. The Church’s opposition came from an astute awareness of the spiritual and moral dereliction that the Galilean model would inevitably draw in its train, being both product and cause of a turning from true to illusory value. It is its importance as a spiritual rather than purely intellectual phenomenon that caused the two-hundred year delay in this model being widely accepted: culture moves at a slow pace. (And so it will doubtless be another couple of hundred years before relativity becomes widely accepted as anything other than an intellectual abstraction. As Gramsci pointed out, “One can think what would happen if in primary and secondary schools sciences were taught on the basis of Einsteinian relativity … the children would not understand anything at all and the clash between school teaching and family and popular life would be such that the school would become an object of ridicule and caricature.” Such was the shift in commonplace value demanded by the Galilean model.)

And so our study of astrology has two possible levels, two perceptions of truth from which we must choose, which perceptions might almost be described as the pre- and post-Galilean. We may listen to the music of what happens, or we may listen to the raucous dance of the individual ego. Seen in this light, the refusal of the traditional schools to admit the outer planets to judgement is in perfect decorum, because in the cosmological model that is relevant for the perception of truth in spiritual sense, they do not exist.

That they have now been discovered does not make them any more relevant to our model than are Nintedos or barbecue-flavour crisps. They must be there, and they may be useful if our aim is the titillation of the ego, but they are not part of the model of an astrology that is a true science: a path to knowledge of the Composer of the most beautiful music of them all.

1. By Louise Hutson: to whom thanks.