Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Curious About The Foundation And Use Of Astrology

By Amos Stordahl


Where did the concept of astrology originate. Did it evolve in one part of the world and then become adopted by other civilizations.Whenever you study the ancient civilizations within the Middle East, Central America and in Asia, you will discover remarkable similarities in how they adapted their lives to be in harmony with the rhythms of earth along with the cosmos. Contemplate that you will discover pyramids in Mayan and Aztec cultures, as well as Egyptian ones. And that lots of pyramids are constructed around and point to key events inside the solar system, like equinoxes and solstices.

Equally, astrology is thought to have developed independently in Babylon and Central America. The astrology systems in India and China most likely were derived from those in Babylon.It's curious that several fundamentalist religions reject the principles of astrology, simply because it was, actually, an integral component of the religions of Babylon. It was part of the calling of priests in Babylon to predict the future and component of their methodology for doing so was to interpret events within the sky. Nothing was considered pure chance and any natural occurrence, no matter how mundane or mysterious, might be an omen of either excellent fortune or poor.

The component of Mesopotamia which is now Iraq once comprised Babylonia within the South and Assyria within the North. Just before Alexander the Terrific conquered the area in 330 BC, the Assyrians had been a military and administrative power, and Babylon was the center of culture. The underlying belief system in both cultures was that there was a spiritual force behind each act of nature. Heaven and Earth had been complementary systems, with neither one having dominion over the other. But by the 4th century BCE, this belief system was influenced by the Greek view that the heavens, and its resident gods, determined events on earth.According to Richard Tarnas, who also wrote of The Passion of the Western Mind, history is on the verge of a main shift, comparable to the 1 wrought by Copernicus and Galileo, but a seemingly antiscientific 1: an astrological turn that may only be understood thorough chronicling planetary alignments as they correlate to the rise of the modern mind over the last 500 years.

Being familiar with planetary alignments, for Tarnas, is crucial to the world's future and requires a genuine dialogue with the cosmos, by opening ourselves much more fully to the other, to ancient and indigenous epistemologies, even to other forms of life, other modes of the universe's self-disclosure.The book is filled with philosophical, religious, literary and scientific thinking ranging from Luther and Kepler through Hemingway and even Hitchcock and Dylan. Reading it will need a strong background within the history of modern thought, an advanced knowledge of astrology, a willingness to withhold skepticism about the role of planetary alignments of the past in understanding life today and the avoidance of imminent world catastrophe. Tarnas's call to redefine what we look at as legitimate knowledge will resonate in some sectors, but it will be a tough sell with the more scientifically hardheaded.

In terms of planetary cycles, our present condition in history is most similar to the period five hundred years ago-that era of extraordinary turbulence and creativity, the High Renaissance. Not since Copernicus conceived the heliocentric theory has the human community faced such a profound realignment of the way we feel.Maybe it's time for us to move back to the philosophy that man is component of the universe, not placed here to conquer it. Just as we're discovering some older medical procedures, including the use of leeches, to have value right now, perhaps we must open our minds to the distinct possibility that astrological forces could be an effective influence on our lives.




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