The Problem of Astrology

by Robert Schmidt

In recent years, I have been writing and talking a lot about the problem of astrology,
and proposing that the astrological community undertake a serious and large-scale
investigation into this problem. And very frequently now I am being asked the question
"Can you define this problem for us?" Now, my short answer to this question is, "No, I
cannot state exactly the problem of astrology, for I cannot yet define what astrology
itself is, let alone specify the kind of problem that it poses for us."

To even specify this problem completely, I would have to answer several

interrelated questions: what kind of problem astrology poses for us, who or what is
proposing the problem, to whom is it addressed. So what kind of problem does
astrology poses for us -- that is, how it is thrown forward in front of us (which is what
the word problema means in Greek). Is it a challenge, a temptation, a provocation, a
ruse, a distraction, a humiliation?

And who or what is proposing the problem. Modern astrology? The dead hand of
the tradition? The gods? The truth itself? Some phantasm in my own mind? And to
whom is it addressed? The astrological community? The sciences? Humanity at
large? Anyone who has ears to hear?

I am not yet in a position to answer any of these questions. However, I believe I can
-- even at this preliminary stage -- DESCRIBE the kind of problem that astrology
poses us, and also establish its rank and importance as a problem in the modern
world.

First of all, I would say that the problem of astrology is one of the most persistent of
problems. It has been around for more than 2000 years now, as an itch that
consciousness has never been able to satisfactorily scratch, although the ancient
defenses and attacks of astrology may now seem antiquated and irrelevant. Astrology
exists like an indigestible lump in modern consciousness, and we would be hard put to
point to anything more incongruous to modern thought. It is not easy to formulate
hypotheses from philosophy, science, or epistemology that seem adequate to what
astrology is, which do not denature it in the process of either attacking or defending it.
And I think that anyone who is clear-headed and takes a long honest look at the
arguments that have been presented for and against astrology will conclude that the
attacks on astrology have been ignorant and trivial, while the defenses put up by
astrologers to validate or justify astrology have themselves been pitiful.

Astrology seems to exist in modern consciousness in some place where it is not

easily accessible. It is almost as if exists in our blind spot. Now this could be because
the astrological phenomena themselves, or astrology as a discipline, are somehow
just too brilliant for us to see. This is also a classical metaphor -- the higher things are
so bright and so brilliant that our limited consciousnesses can somehow not take them
in, we are literally blinded by the light. On the other hand, it could be the case that the
reason we cannot access astrological phenomena from a scientific point of view or
from any accepted modern standpoint is because the astrological phenomena are in
some way occulted by those very modern disciplines. The modern sciences
themselves may in some way be preventing us from having access to astrology as a
legitimate phenomena. Or to use the eclipse metaphor differently, maybe astrology
exists in the shadow of science, that twilight area which is the dumping ground of
science and represents all the issues and problems it is unwilling to come to terms
with. It may even be the case that, metaphysically speaking, astrology is a repository
or point of accumulation for everything we don't know, everything that is not present to
us. After all, in a practical context astrology is supposed to deal with the past and
future. Now I find that very fascinating, that there could be one area, one purported
discipline, one set of practices which in some way might sum up everything that we
don't understand. If any of the above truly characterize the problem of astrology, then
it would be no ordinary problem. In fact, it would be the mother of all problems, the
problem of problems.

Unfortunately, the problem of astrology has been around for so long that even the
formulations of special astrological problems have grown stale. One often hears in the
astrological world the statement "Who cares about all this theoretical and speculative
inquiry. Astrology works for me, and that's all that matters." But that very familiarity
may be the strongest indication that astrology is a problem that very much needs to be
addressed. For isn't it the case that the familiar, what we have taken into our own
household, so to speak, is what we constantly overlook? What we can no longer look
over? We have to find a way of making the problem of astrology fresh and exciting
again.

Let me try to make an analogy here that I hope will further characterize the problem
of astrology and speak further to its rank as a problem. There was a time in the Greek
world where a number of people were pursuing something that they called philosophy,
a word that simply meant the love of wisdom. This word originally applied to anyone
who was thinking seriously and deeply about fundamental questions in any discipline,
such as mathematics. Thus, these first philosophers were primarily characterized by
their attitude toward inquiry. The earliest philosophers were inquirers into nature -- the
original physicists -- who believed that they could understand the world by looking
intently at it and thinking about it. They wrote up their insights in the form of pithy,
enigmatical aphorisms. Later philosophers, such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle
developed special skills in the use of logos (or language), and they believed that their
dialectical tools could give them access to any subject whatsoever, whether in the
natural world or the human world.

But early on Plato and Aristotle began to treat of something they called prote
philosophia, or the primary love of wisdom. So the question naturally arose, What is
Philosophy? And what is the paradigmatic or primary Philosophy? We might say that
they had begun to confront the problem of philosophy. Was philosophy simply an
attitude toward wisdom (what we might call a mindset)? Was it a kind of inspired
madness? Was it the skilful use of the tools of language in their application to any
subject whatsoever, and thus a kind of craft? Or was it knowledge of a kind (we would
say a science), either possessing its own proper object of inquiry, or instead being a
special way or regarding any object whatsoever? How did the primary philosophy
relate to the knowledge accessible through the special disciplines, such as
mathematics and astronomy? And so forth.

I think that you see the analogy with the problem of astrology. Later on in this talk I
will say some more about the connection between astrology and metaphysics. Suffice
it to say here that these Greek thinkers did not try to define philosophy ahead of time.
It is also pertinent to say here that as a result of their inquiry they shifted later attention
to the question of Being -- namely, what is that which is -- as the proper object of
philosophical inquiry, and that question has dominated metaphysics ever since.

The problem of philosophy was originally the problem of greatest rank in Greek
times, and to some degree the question of Being has maintained that rank until
modern times. The Greeks clearly believed that it was the central problem for all
times. But have you ever watched some of those TV programs with Mortimer Adler or
Bill Moyers or other thinkers where they are discussing the most exalted philosophical
issues, including the question of Being? Now, I don't know about you, but I have never
been able to watch these programs without an acute and keen sense of
embarrassment -- this despite the fact that I have spent almost all my adult life
studying philosophical texts. And I have tried to analyze what it is that embarrasses
me. It's not that these people are stupid and I am embarrassed for them. It's not that I
think the issues they are discussing are unimportant. It is something more subtle than
that. It's that they are dealing with questions of weight that are not really their
questions; in some very real sense they are not entitled them. Thus their serious and
studied air seems to me to be a kind of metaphysical affectation. And this
embarrasses me -- in a metaphysical sort of way.

The question of Being became the central question for the Greeks. Is it the central
question for our time? Maybe we should conduct an inquiry into the problem of
philosophy all over again, bearing in mind the strange place and function astrology
seems to have in modern consciousness. Doesn't astrology involve the love of
wisdom, too? Maybe a modern inquiry into the problem of philosophy would no longer
reduce itself to the question of Being, of what always is, of what is eternally present.
When Aristotle says that the question of being was, is now, and always will be the
central question, isn't that a prediction, in some sense an astrological judgment? I
keep thinking that astrology has to do with what is in some sense absent, what will be
or what has been, with what is inaccessible to the present. Again, the Hermetic
tradition tells us that astrology can be a tool to dispel ignorance, agnoia? But isn't it
the purpose of wisdom to dispel ignorance? And if it is true to say that in modern times
astrology is the focal point of all our ignorance, wouldn't it show our love of wisdom,
that is, wouldn't we be the true philosophers of modern times, if we undertook to
investigate the problem of astrology?

For some reason, I don't find myself embarrassed when speaking about the
problem of astrology. Someone is bound to ask, "How can you hope to inquire into the
problem of astrology if you can't first define what astrology is?" I assume that what is
asked here is not simply a definition of the word 'astrology', but a definition of the thing
that the word refers to. There is a difference. We might define the word 'man' as a
'human being'; but the entity man as been variously defined as "a rational animal," "an
animal that uses tools," somewhat facetiously as "a featherless biped with flat
nails," (in order to distinguish a man from a plucked chicken), and in other ways.

Now, even the definition of the word 'astrology' -- what is called the nominal
definition -- would be difficult enough, for we would have to give an adequate
description of what astrologers do and what they study. One of my dictionaries says
"the divination of the supposed influences of the stars upon human affairs and
terrestrial events by their positions and aspects." I am sure that most modern
astrologers would violently disagree with this word definition, saying that astrology has
nothing to do with planetary influences per se, but rather uses the stars
"synchronistically" as a timing-mechanism; many would disagree that it is a form of
divination, preferring to think of it as a science, or perhaps a craft. In order to define
astrology as a word, we would have to completely and adequately describe what
different astrologers in ancient and modern times have studied, and take my word for
it, it would be very hard to find any common denominator here. In any case, the mere
nominal definition would not take us very far in our inquiry into the problem of
astrology, although we definitely think it valuable to be fully acquainted with what
astrology is for different modern astrologers and what it has been for the ancients.

Much more difficult is the essential or "real" definition of astrology as a pursuit that
human beings are concerned with, for then we have to mark off astrology from the
other things human beings do and pursue and demarcate it according to some exact
principles. Such a definition is not merely descriptive as the nominal definition is; it
actually purports to say what something "really" is. In the case of astrology, the
essential definition leads us immediately into a snarl of theoretical issues, which I will
try to hint at in a moment. In ancient times, it was the role of philosophy itself to
provide us with the essential definitions of things.

But SHOULD I attempt to exactly state the problem of astrology -- which obviously
presupposes some definition of astrology itself -- before entering into an investigation
of astrology itself? Now, from a classical point of view -- by which I mean the tradition
of Plato and Aristotle, and the dialectical inquiry in classical times -- it would be a
methodological error to try to define what something is before you begin to inquire
about it. At least this is true for a fundamental inquiry such as the one we are
proposing. In fact, in ancient times, the answer to the question what is something, its
definition, was the very last thing obtained or achieved in any inquiry. It may be first in
the order of demonstration, but it is last in the order of discovery.

Now, there are at least two reasons for this. First of all, it would be impractical. If we
had to agree on what astrology is before we began an inquiry, we would be in some
endless dispute with all modern astrologers, each of whom has a somewhat different
idea of what astrology actually is. We could never come to some agreement ahead of
time. And if I took matters into my own hands and proposed some definition of my
own, and then proceeded to argue my way to some position concerning astrology,
then someone is bound to reject my demonstrations on the grounds that he disagreed
with my definition. So the attempt to propose a definition ahead of time is also
inefficient.

But the more important reason is that even if you should propose a definition that
many or even most astrologers agree upon, you will in fact be prejudicing the outcome
of the inquiry. In a very real sense of the word, the way in which a question is stated or
a problem posed will prejudice the outcome of that investigation. And this is something
that I believe ancient thinkers had a very profound understanding of, something that
we are largely lacking in the modern world.

By why can't we propose definitions of astrology and debate their merits? We

moderns are animated by what I would call a debate mentality -- we like to wrangle.
We demand that the contestants in a debate must first define their terms. They then
respectively draw up their arguments pro and con. The contestant with the more
persuasive arguments wins. End of debate.

The intention of a debate is to "establish" one side of an argument persuasively.

This kind of wrangling, a somewhat degenerate form of the ancient art of rhetoric, is
often confused with the ancient art of dialectic practiced in Platonic dialogues and
Aristotelean treatises. This is because dialectical argumentation also draws up
arguments for and against some position. But the two are actually miles apart. The
intention of dialectical argumentation is not to establish one side of an argument, but
rather to deliberately bring the two sides into a deadlock, bring the question itself to an
impasse, what the Greeks called an aporia. The reason for this was to systematically
draw attention to something that had been overlooked in the inquiry. As Aristotle said,
the aporia or impasse in the intellect makes visible the knots in the problem, and we
cannot make progress in an inquiry if we do not know where the knots are that are
holding us back. We might call this an art of calculated confusion.

Thus, the intention of dialectic is to advance an inquiry. But in a very real sense the
rhetorical arts of persuasion and debate effectively stop the argument, bring the
inquiry to a close; for when we are persuaded we cease to inquire further. It is a
terrible perversion of language to use the rhetorical arts of persuasion in an inquiry
into the truth.

Modern astrologers often like to think of astrology as a symbolic language of the

stars, a divine language, and I believe ancient astrologers would also have approved
of this characterization (which is not intended as a definition, by the way). But
shouldn't this celestial grammar, this celestial logic, then be the standard for our
human languages? And may it not be the case that the stars are trying to teach us the
proper use of logos, of language? Wouldn't it then follow that only the proper use of
argumentation and dialectical inquiry will provide us access to the problem of
astrology itself?
 So, to repeat, I cannot yet define what astrology is, nor should I at this point. But
what about taking a less ambitious approach and tackling some easier questions.

I could indeed draw up a loosely organized list of special questions and problems
somehow connected with THE problem of astrology: Is astrology an art or a science?
If it is a science or some kind of exact discipline, does it have its own proper subject
matter? If so, is it about time itself, human life, natural phenomena such as the
weather? Or does it perhaps encompass the whole breadth and depth of existence?
And if, say, it deals with human life, is it properly person-centered, concerned with our
souls and personalities, or is it rather event-oriented, concerned with the events that
befall us, or both? And if, say, the events that befall us, then is it all of them or just a
certain class that can properly be labelled astrological? Again, does astrology use the
stars as causes or as timers; or are the stars perhaps speaking to us in a symbolic or
even oracular language that we must interpret? Again, what are the appropriate
validation procedures for astrology? Are they statistical or otherwise experimental?
Again, were the rules of astrology discovered empirically through centuries of
observation or were they the insights of certain enlightened beings possessing a
consciousness beyond that of normal humans? And so on.

But if instead astrology is an art of interpretation, does it more resemble a fine art
where reading an astrological chart is like interpreting a piece of music in
performance? Or is it a craft that follows certain pre-established rules? Or is it perhaps
divinitory in nature, requiring some special intuitive gift on the part of the interpreter?

You get the idea. There are other difficulties. There are a great many surviving
astrological traditions. There is Western astrology, Hindu or Vedic astrology, and
astrology as it is practiced in China and the Orient. Now, in many cases these different
traditions use astrological methods that are virtually contradictory to one another. As a
case in point, let me only mention the Western commitment to a tropic zodiac (which
begins the circle of astrological signs at the vernal point, or point of intersection of the
ecliptic and equatorial circles) and the Hindu insistence on a sidereal zodiac (which
divides the zodiac from some privileged star); these two zodiacs are not coincident,
yet the two different astrologies employ many of the same methods which are
dependent on the choice of sign, and they both claim success in their applications.
How can this be? Furthermore, even between and among the various strata of the
Western tradition itself there are many inconsistencies and incompatibilities of
concepts and methods. From the point of view of a fundamental inquiry of the kind we
are proposing, this must be admitted to be a truly sorry state of affairs.

Astrologers do in fact discuss and debate all the issues mentioned above, although
I think it fair to say that their opinions on these matters are at best educated guesses,
and at worst are simply reflections of their personal preferences. It is hard to say
whether any of the problems catalogued above qualifies as THE problem of astrology.

The Plan
 In the problem of astrology we have a very special kind of problem. We have to
make inquiry into a subject without being able to define that subject ahead of time (or
without even knowing whether it is a subject matter instead of a method). The subject
itself may be obscured or occulted by the only investigative tools that we have at our
disposal, whether these are the tools of mathematical physics or the application of
dialectical or speculative reasoning. The approach must keep astrology center stage
and not allow it to be reduced or assimilated to one of the special sciences. It must
help defamiliarize ourselves with the stale formulations of astrological problems that
have accumulated over the past two thousand years or better, and which will also
prevent us from coming to some artificial and superficial kind of clarity. But at the
same time this procedure has to take us forward to our goal of trying to gain some
initial access to the problem of astrology. Let me lay out the plan that I propose.

The first stage of this plan consists of "the restoration and the recovery of the
practical astrological tradition." The second stage concerns "the search for a
theoretical foundation," and the third stage I call "the securing of the Metaphysics of
Metaphysics". This division is just a declaration of intention, in recognition of the
requirements we have laid out above.

I will be explaining each of these stages in a moment, but I want to make a

prefatory remark. Even though I've laid these out as three stages, I don't mean that
they are to be followed sequentially. Rather, all three of these stages have to be
pursued simultaneously. I know no way of doing proper and responsible translations of
ancient astrological writings without coming face to face with theoretical issues. In my
opinion, it would be foolish to simply spend the next ten years routinely translating
astrological writings and only then try to confront the theoretical questions. For one
thing, the translations would not be that good. Unless we have grappled with the
theoretical issues, we are in no position to translate even the practical aspects of the
ancient astrology correctly. In the very first Greek translations that I did I found myself
immediately in a nest of theoretical and metaphysical problems, and without
confronting those I don't think we would have gained much of the clarity that I think we
have gained in interpretation and use of these ancient methods.

I also know of no way of pursuing an inquiry into the theoretical foundations of

astrology that does not presuppose an extensive and prior familiarity with the entire
practical astrological tradition, and that does not immediately involve us in
philosophical and ultimately even esoteric concerns. In other words, the restoration of
practical astrological methods, the pursuit of theoretical foundation, and the attempt to
understand the higher philosophical and metaphysical implications of the astrological
tradition itself -- all three of these concerns implicate one another and cannot really in
any way be done separately. We have in fact been pursuing them simultaneously.

Now let me begin to talk a little bit about the first stage, the restoration and recovery
of the practical astrological tradition. This first stage has been officially underway for
better than four years now, going under the name of Project Hindsight. During this
period of time we have translated about 2/5 of the surviving astrological writings from
Hellenistic times, and made at least a dent in the large number of astrological works
written in Medieval Latin.

One of the most interesting things we have discovered so far is that there is an
incredible stratification of the astrological tradition. It is not one seamless whole. It
does not have what I would call conceptual integrity. Before we can hope to
understand the astrological tradition on its own terms and in accordance with its own
presuppositions, we must first try to resolve the tradition into its component strata. Let
me try to give you an idea of what we are up against by briefly tracing the astrological
tradition that developed in Europe and the Middle East.

The best evidence seems to indicate that astrology began with the Babylonians
some time during or before the 5th c. B.C.E. It quickly spread to Egypt, Persia, and
India. Around 200 B.C.E. the astrology developing in Egypt was translated into Greek
and made available to the Mediterranean peoples, resulting in a tremendous flowering
of astrology during the Hellenistic era that lasted up until the 6th c. C.E. Beginning in
the 9th c., the fundamental Greek astrological texts from Hellenistic times were
translated into Arabic. The Arabs also drew directly on Persian and Indian sources and
compounded these with the Hellenistic material. In the 13th and 14th centuries, many
Arabic astrological texts were translated into Medieval Latin. As we enter the
Renaissance, a revisionist attitude set in, and many astrologers attempted to purge
the Arabic-style astrology of the Latin west of its Arabic influence using the Greek
astrological writings of Ptolemy as the paradigm of a "rational" astrology, unwittingly
throwing out much of the legitimate Hellenistic tradition at the same time. Toward the
end of the 17th c. astrology begins to fade out. It barely survives for a couple of
centuries until we get up to modern times in the 20th century, where we have a kind of
astrological revival which is based originally on just little scraps of astrological
knowledge that have managed to survive through the intervening centuries. This
revival is conducted virtually in ignorance of all the earlier astrological texts except for
Ptolemy, and even he is poorly understood.

This should give you some idea of the kind of complexity of the astrological tradition
as it has come down to us. Now, there is something I want to emphasize because it
has great bearing on what we are trying to do with our translation program: The
western astrological tradition develops through an attempt to interpret written texts.
Each successive generation of astrologers going all the way back to Hellenistic times
has tried to interpret the written texts of their predecessors. There appears to have
been very little continuity of oral transmission of astrological doctrine as there
supposedly is in India, where you have master/student relationships and the
astrological doctrine has been handed down through families for centuries.

Thus the foremost astrologers of the C.E., Dorotheus, Ptolemy, and Valens, are all
trying to interpret the writings of earlier generations of astrologers, and ultimately the
root text of Hellenistic astrology, a work attributed to Nechepso and Petosiris, an
Egyptian pharaoh and his high priest, dated to around 200 B.C.E. This work does not
survive intact, but only in excerpts quoted by later astrologers. Dorotheus, Ptolemy,
and Valens often interpret key passages in this root text in totally different ways. Now,
even the writings of Ptolemy, Dorotheus and Vettius Valens are not especially clear in
many places so we have another generation of astrologers who are basically
compilers who are trying to study the work of those three Greek astrologers and trying
to understand what they have said, and there are differences of opinion in the
interpretation of these primary Greek astrologers whose writings we possess in some
state of completion. Then all this material is translated into Arabic, a language very
different than Greek, and you can guess at some of the problems Arabic astrologers
must have had with their Greek sources.

So, not only is the astrological traditions stratified but it appears that in many cases
the tradition was not transmitted intact. In my opinion, there have been numerous
errors of translation and misinterpretation, particularly as the astrological material went
from Greek into Arabic. What this means is that much of the astrological doctrine that
survives into the late Renaissance must be bracketed, you might say. If we can
plausibly argue that some of these astrological doctrines and some of these
astrological concepts can be due to misunderstandings or mistranslations, we must in
some way treat them specially or treat them differently. It doesn't mean that they are
necessarily incorrect -- the history of thought is full of creative misinterpretations of
earlier traditions -- but it seems to me that such material must be put into a separate
category until it can be tested.

Once we have resolved the tradition into its component strata and diagnosed the
errors of transmission, and before we can hope to re-synthesize the tradition in a
manner that will not leave us with a lot of conceptual fault-lines that are bound to
cause us trouble later, we have the task of understanding each stratum without
anachronism, that is, on its own terms and from its own presuppositions. This is far
from easy to do. Although modern astrological concepts bear some resemblance to
those of ancient times, they have altered in subtle ways. The astrological vocabulary
of the Greeks is in some ways very similar to our own, but in other ways extremely
different. Key concepts like the astrological word for a sign, the astrological use of
rulership, [house] all these kinds of things for the Greeks have a kind of slightly
different significance, or in some cases a very major difference from the way in which
we use these concepts in modern times. They make look familiar to us, but in fact they
are not. It takes a special art to defamiliarize ourselves from what we think we
understand about astrological concepts and confront the tradition afresh, and this is
really what Hindsight is all about.

[Goal to restore the lost work of Nechepso/Petosiris from its fragments.]

Yet at the same time, by studying an astrology which is still very different from us,
even though it has this suspicious air of familiarity about it, by studying these ancient
writings we can in fact get a kind of clarity about our own thinking and our own
astrology that we would not necessarily have if we simply sat down and tried to
approach the problem of astrology directly, stating the problem in modern terms and
so forth. It is a commonplace that you learn more about your own language by
studying a foreign language, and the same thing applies here.

There is one point I would like to make clear. Despite all the time we have been
spending translating and restoring the tradition, we do not consider ourselves to be
antiquarians. We are not librarians trying to preserve the tradition out of mere
historical interest. After all, these ancient astrologers had their day; we are modern
people and we have to create a modern astrology.

It is clearly valuable to study the astrological tradition for what it has to offer us.
Hellenistic astrology, for instance, is in many ways the source of all later Western
traditions. And we do find in this Greek astrology a greater integrity and coherence of
astrological concepts, and this can set standard for us in our effort to create a modern
astrology.

However, even though we have been spending all this time with the Greeks, our
intention is really to basically to rid ourselves of the burden of the Greeks. It is very
hard to get free of the Greeks. It is very hard to do that scientifically, mathematically,
philosophically and also astrolo-gically. The Greeks haunt us. They always have. One
might say that the reason they haunt us is that we have never given them a decent
burial. Their ghosts are ever present, and even if we don't know it, Greek principles
and Greek thinking are always pulling our strings in ways that we are not always
aware of. Our intention is to become aware of how those ancient dead Greeks are in
fact pulling our strings.

So we don't want to simply admire and return to an ancient time. We would like to
take the ancient writings, understand them on their own terms, and from their own
presuppositions, and get out of them what we can get out of them. And then, bury
them so we can be free from them at last. Now this may seem like a somewhat
disrespectful attitude. In fact, I think it is the most respectful attitude we can have
towards past thought. In order to welcome the future of any discipline we basically
have to give the past, or give our ancestors, a decent burial. And if we don't do that,
we will be forever subject to various concepts, various procedures, various ways of
thought that the Greeks began that are not necessarily appropriate to our time any
longer. So when we study these ancient writings, it is always with an intention to
ultimately get free from them.

Let me move on to the second stage in our attack on the problem of astrology, the
stage that we call "The search for a theoretical foundation." Here our first task is to
identify, isolate, and critique all the theoretical frameworks, ancient and modern, that
have already been proposed for astrology, implicitly or explicitly. These are actually
quite numerous. As far as explicit ancient frameworks are concerned, let me here
mention only Ptolemy's attempt to reconceptualize astrology in terms of Aristotelean
natural philosophy and the medieval attempts to draw on an interesting doctrine called
"light metaphysics."

But everywhere in earlier astrology we find the free use of scientific and
philosophical concepts, particular the Aristotelean distinction between form and
matter, the classical doctrine of the elements and the primary qualities, the
intensification and relaxation of forms (the classical concepts employed for the
understanding of the variation of qualities), These concepts are often used with great
skill for the purpose of "deriving" delineations of aspects, transits, dispositorship, etc.
We should also mention the Stoic concepts of fate, their epistemological concepts,
and so forth.

You can imagine how the confusing manner in which these concepts are used at all
stages of the astrological tradition complicates the stratification problem considerably.
We also have to ask ourselves whether these concepts are integral to the astrological
teachings, since they have been either discredited or left behind by modern physics.

But there is also in ancient astrology, particularly in that of the Hellenistic period,
evidence of an implicit theoretical framework, and this may be of even more
importance to us in our search, because it may be one more intrinsic to astrology
itself, if only we can disclose it. This evidence is found in the Greek astrological
vocabulary itself. All the key words of Greek astrology seem to have been very
carefully chosen so as to contain a deliberate and characteristic ambiguity. Sometimes
the words could belong either to the field of causal thinking or that of oracular
divination; other times it is hard to determine whether they are referring to entities or
images. And there are other equally fundamental dichotomies. But more about this
when we come to the third stage of our investigation.

What about the potential of developing a theoretical foundation for astrology out of
modern thought? You have no doubt heard many astrologers talk with great
enthusiasm about the most avant garde research of the modern sciences - quantum
theory (which of course is not simply avant garde any more) chaos theory, Bell's
theorem, super string theory, the morphogenic fields of Sheldrake, transpersonal
psychology, God knows what -harboring the belief that these new developments in
physics will eventually pave the way for a true astrological theory.

Now, in my opinion, astrology and physics are by no means on a convergent

course. It is comparatively easy to show, for instance, that in so far as chaos theory
could make celestial causation plausible, it would make astrological prediction
impossible; and in so far as astrological prediction is possible, chaos theory is
irrelevant. Analogous things could be shown for almost all the avantgarde theories of
science, and we have already done quite a bit of this work.

[Haven't even made a real attempt to investigate astrology in terms of classical

physics. Assume that astrological influence is anything wavelike, etc.]

In fact, I think it would be a terrible tragedy if astrology were conceptualized in

terms of physics, psychology, or any of the special sciences. In ancient times
astrology seemed to have a rank and a role nearly equal to that of metaphysics, in so
far as it took as its province the whole of reality. And if we were to define or
conceptualize astrology in terms of any of these special modern sciences, however
powerful they may seem, we would not be doing justice to the promise that astrology
has always held out for mankind -- we would be selling it short.

But there is a more serious danger here. If we examine the methodology of the
special sciences, we will find that they can only deal with astrological phenomena -- or
any phenomena -- by taking these phenomena and turning them into something that
they can deal with, often times by leaving behind or denaturing what was
characteristic about those phenomena in the first place. In my opinion, the events that
astrology studies are not intrinsically objects of physics, psychology, or any other
special discipline. I say this because we have already been making a systematic
attempt to formulate hypotheses from the special disciplines intended to account for
astrology.

In order to organize this particular part of the inquiry we have invoked the word
"phase" -- p-h-a-s-e -- which by the way is derived from the Greek word phasis,
another of those ambiguous astrological terms, and one very dear to my heart since
it's a word that means on the one hand "speaking" and on the other hand "appearing"
and seems to give us access to all manner of esoteric phenomena.

In any case, the word "phase" we understand to be an acronym for philosophy,

history, astrology, science and esotericism (or possibly epistemology, or possibly
experience, all of which we understand to be summarized under the letter "e"). From
time to time we have even flirted with the idea of putting an "r" on the end of this word,
which might stand for "religion", because certainly there is abundant evidence that
astrology was central in many ancient religions and there may have even been an
astral religion at one point. But the intention behind this particular acronym is to
emphasize, by putting the "a" or "astrology" in the very center, that we are in the first
instance trying to understand astrology in terms of the modern disciplines, philosophy,
history, science, epistemology or experience, possibly esotericism, if you can
understand that to be a discipline.

We have seen that many of the concepts in these disciplines are not applicable to
astrology as they stand. Instead, they need to be stretched, modified, or as I like to
say, rehabilitated, before they can be applied to astrological phenomena. In many
cases they have to be modified almost beyond recognition. The attempt to honestly
conceptualize astrology in terms of the special disciplines invariably takes them to a
frontier they were never designed to explore.

Thus, this problem of astrology goes well beyond the astrological framework itself. It
can be an indirect way of studying and critiquing the modern sciences and other
disciplines, and in my opinion this is one of its greatest advantages. If we fail in our
attempt to solve, so to speak, the problem of astrology we will certainly find something
interesting along the way, if nothing else but the limitations and vulnerabilities of the
sciences themselves.

As I mentioned a moment ago, we have already formulated several hypotheses

concerned with the meaning and workings of astrology. In fact, we have developed a
hypothesis corresponding to each of the letters in PHASE: The Hypothesis of a
Temporal Field reconceptualizes the field concept from physics so as to accommodate
temporality and consciousness and make plausible a kind of astrological causality.
The Hypothesis of Metaphysical Appropriation is a philosophical hypothesis,
originating in the near-equivalence of the Hellenistic concept of familiarization, which
describes the way the signs are related to the planets via rulership, and Heidegger's
metaphysical concept of appropriation, which describes the way in which Being and
Man are related. The Hypothesis of a Celestial Grammar deals with the issue of
astrology as a symbolic language; it uses Greek grammar to articulate both the
rational and the oracular character of celestial communication. Finally, the Hypothesis
of Ritualistic Connection seeks to understand the sequential connection of the
astrological events themselves in terms of the defining moments in ritual, as an
alternative to causal and effect relations.

Now, these hypotheses are all very provisional and they are by no means
intended to be definitive. However, I do believe that they are exemplary in the sense
that they indicate how deep we may need to dig, and how deep down we may have to
place our columns, in order to begin to begin to support the true weight of astrological
phenomena. Or understanding these hypotheses themselves to be supports (the
Greek word hypothesis simply means something set underneath something else --
that is, a "support") we may begin to locate the grounding bedrock upon which an
astrological discipline may be erected.

Let me say something now about the third stage, what I've called "the securing of
the metaphysics of metaphysics." In the search for the theoretical foundation we are
primarily attempting to apply the special disciplines to astrology, but remember, with
the expectation that they would somehow fail. In the securing of the metaphysics of
metaphysics we turn this procedure around. We could still use the acronym "phase"
but instead of trying to apply philosophy, history, science and esotericism to astrology,
we begin with astrology and we ask the questions, "What type of philosophy is
appropriate to astrology as it survives? What type of historical hypotheses may be
used in connection with astrology? What type of science is really appropriate to
astrological phenomena without in some way denaturing them, as modern physics in
my opinion most assuredly would? What type of esotericism really belongs to the
astrological tradition itself? In other words, in this stage of the project or of the
investigation what we do is keep astrology center stage and use it to redefine and
reorganize the modern disciplines themselves.

Why the title "Metaphysics of Metaphysics?" Now I chose that title very deliberately
because, in my mind, metaphysics has two completely different meanings. My
background being in the study of ancient and modern philosophy, when I heard the
word metaphysics, I always understood it to mean the study of Being, as it was for the
Greeks. It was a great surprise to me when I first went into a bookstore and looked for
the metaphysical section expecting to find some new books on Aristotle, and found
instead books on crystals, out-of-body experiences, meditation, occultism, and
astrology. This was long before I was involved in the astrological world, by the way.

So what am I trying to get at by this little phrase here, the "metaphysics of

metaphysics." There is a statement by a Neo-Platonist philosopher named Iamblichus
in a strange book called On The Mysteries. In this book another neo-Platonist
Porphyry (of Porphyry house fame, for the astrologers here) is directing a number of
questions about the Egyptian religion to an Egyptian priest. In the course of the
answering of these questions the priest says that the men who translated the Egyptian
sacred writings into Greek -- and these sacred writings included the their magical,
alchemical, and astrological writings, all generally attributed to one of their sages
names Hermes -- the men who translated these sacred writings into Greek were men
who were trained in Greek philosophy, presumably the philosophies of the Athenian
Greeks Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics.

Now, this is a very astonishing statement and it made a great impression on me. If
we take it seriously (it is several hundred years after the fact), it means that in
Hellenistic astrology we may have an absolutely unique event, something that had
probably never happened before and has not happened since. We may have a
deliberate and unprecedented fusion of what we might call the straight Athenian
philosophical tradition and the esoteric traditions of the Middle East.

Now, I think that we have already found abundant evidence of this fusion in the
Hellenistic writings, but whether or not this turns out to be valid, the term metaphysics
of metaphysics reflects that goal, the goal of somehow bringing the straight
philosophical tradition together with the esoteric tradition, and this without reducing the
one to the other, the goal of showing the esoteric implications of philosophy and the
philosophical import of esotericism.

I keep thinking of the Harranian Sabians, that strange cult in the Arab world who
considered themselves the heirs to classical antiquity, but who had the goal of
arranging and articulating all the sciences and disciplines from the Greek world
underneath the master disciplines of astrology, alchemy, and magic. Even the
metaphysics of the Greeks became a handmaiden to the esoteric disciplines.

As I hinted earlier, doesn't the problem of astrology give us a golden opportunity to

rethink metaphysics from the ground up. We propose to ask anew the question: what
is the primarily love of wisdom, for don't we all think that astrology has something to
do with wisdom?