Saturday, February 15, 2014

Astrology, Death and Human Sacrifice



Just watched the series Vikings on DVD. It’s drama, not documentary, about the semi-historical, legendary figure Ragnar Lothbrok. And at one point 9 men are sacrificed to Odin in the temple at Uppsala. They go willingly, and after their throats are cut they are hung upside down from an ash tree in the way that Odin was hung upside down from the world ash Ygdrassil in his search for wisdom:

“I hung from that windswept tree, hung there for nine long nights; I was pierced with a spear. I was an offering to Odin, myself to myself. No one came to comfort me with bread, no one revived me with drink from a horn…Then I began to thrive, my wisdom grew; I prospered and was fruitful…”

I never thought I’d find myself defending human sacrifice – it’s not exactly politically correct – but this event, at least the way it was portrayed, had archetypal power for all concerned. For the Vikings the afterlife was real. If you died as a warrior, for example, then Odin would take you to his hall where every day you would go out on to the plains to fight, you would be killed, and Odin would raise you up again for a night of feasting and drinking.

Well, Odin took half the battle slain, and the goddess Freya took the other half to her fields, and those who died a dishonourable death went to Hel. And as myth, there are plenty of loose ends.

Maybe it depends how you view death. But if death has this sort of myth behind it, who is to say that it is better to live than to die, why not be part of a religious sacrifice for the sake of your people?

Of course, the spectre of Islamic suicide bombers immediately raises its head, with the prospect of all those virgins waiting for them in paradise.

So human sacrifice is not a simple issue, and I think a major factor is the degree of brainwashing involved and the degree of narrow literalism behind the way the myth is taken, so that only your race or religion are saved.

All the same, the reason I am defending it was because I could feel the archetypal power behind the event, the sense of the forces of a greater reality being invoked. Maybe I’m just a sucker for Norse mythology.

And then I thought well which is better, having this sort of myth around death, or the nihilistic bleatings of the existential psychotherapist Irviv Yalom, that death is an extinction, and you’d better believe it, because any other view is a false comfort? And that there is no meaning in the universe apart from what we artificially add on? And he gets his poor patients to think like that as though these are ‘facts’ they need to come to terms with, rather than just his own prejudices.

No, it’s a puny way to live and die. Humans need great myths to live and die by, it is the way we are built. We are diminished as people without such myths, myths that are real without being hard ‘facts’, the curse of our Gemini Age, facts without meaning, lacking the the opposite sign of Sagittarius.

[We live in a Gemini Age because that is the sign in which the last conjunction of Neptune and Pluto took place around 1890; and the conjunction 500 years before that. The Spectre of Facticity, largely through the medium of science, has been pursuing us for a long time now.]


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So what myths around death does astrology have? First of all, anything around astrology is myth, rather than fact. The planets as gods, influenced by starry constellations, telling us stories about our lives down here. How could that ever be ‘fact’? But to the degree to which that sort of cosmology has imaginative power for us, to that degree it will tell us things that are real, far more than mere facts ever could.

This is an important point. Truth is an imaginative act, and there can only be a small degree of truth in anything that does not have imaginative appeal, that does not infuse the universe with meaning. And when a collective has a common set of myths, such as those of the astrological community, then I think those myths gain power almost as entities in themselves. So in some sense your mythology is “what does it for you”, but it needs to be more than that if it is to have much power, it needs to come from a deeper, collective source that will therefore also appeal to others.

I don’t think astrology does have a set of explicit myths about what happens when you die, which is why it can be used as an ‘add-on’ to say Christianity or Buddhism. But I think there are implied myths through the fact that the planets are named after the Greek and Roman gods, and astrology derives its power from that, whether or not we have reduced the planets to a set of principles and keywords. They are there lurking in the background, and it is interesting that by transit ALL the planets from Jupiter outwards can be involved in death one way or another. Jupiter because he takes us up to the realm of the gods when we die; Saturn and Pluto because they ARE death; Uranus and Neptune because they can represent that life-changing disruption or dissolution respectively with which death can appear. The inner planets may be the trigger for death, but the outer planets ARE the death that the inner planets are triggering.

If you are an astrologer then you are living mythologically, so it would not make sense to have a non-mythological view of death. That said, I think there also needs to be room for the idea that actually we don’t know what happens after we die, there is an honesty to that if we live in modern times. And therefore a dishonesty to insist in a literal way on any particular mythology, including the materialist myth of extinction.

And let’s face it, some of us KNOW that life continues in some form after death, we have experiences of people after they die. They turn up, and it feels good, it feels right, even though we don’t probably know what happens to them next, but that doesn’t matter, it’s unknowable anyway because it’s happening outside of time and space and form, which are just temporary constructs that we use.

But back to the mythology of death and astrology, what we do have is Mercury taking dead souls to the Underworld where Pluto takes them in, once you’ve paid Charon’s fare across the river Styx. And that’s why I want to be buried with a coin in my mouth, in honour of that mythology, because Pluto turns up regularly for me and these sort of things continue after death. And I’m quite happy to have these 2 different things going on strongly: that I don’t know what will happen when I die, but I can trust it because life has taught me to trust whatever major stage comes next, and why should death be different?; and that I need a coin in my mouth to get to Pluto’s realm. I don’t need to add it all up logically, logic gets left far behind once you’re dead. Or thinking mythologically, something many people have forgotten how to do.

And when I say Pluto is mythological, I don’t mean any less real than ‘factual’ reality. Myth means a story about a divine being, and you can experience these beings, they really are there, and they are powerful.

So if you’re an astrologer, it’s worth thinking about how you feel about death in the light of Greek mythology, because you are plugged into that mythology, though not necessarily exclusively. And some parts of those mythologies are more primal, more archetypal then others, like descending to the Underworld and being taken there by Mercury; while other bits, like the description of the Underworld, with its different places such as Tartarus and the Elysian fields are more culture specific and less universally archetypal, and therefore I think we can put them to one side if we wish.

5 comments:

weaver said...

'thinking mythologically, something many people have forgotten how to do.'

because psychologists and scientists have been telling us for so long that we think in images, it seems such an obvious given that when we use mythology and metaphor to convey our point- and my own natal orientation finds it as natural as breathing - I find myself baffled when clients cant initially SEE what I mean when I use them to express the energies moving in their wheel. but over recent years, it really is an issue. and I am not just talking about people under 25 who may not have had an education a bit steeped in them.
it has been a very good exercise for me to begin with some kind of modern day example, though that's not always easy.
I haven't given it much concentrated thought beyond, geez, what a drag...but it occurs to me that these archetypes *are* still running through modern day story telling, via books and tv series, etc. and its going to have to be me that gets a bit more hip to these imageries as tools to convey what I have to share.
not sure when I will find the time! and just as much as I find zombie themes (amongst others) a profoundly important presence therein, I just don't have any desire to spend hours watching the series.
essentially, it seems we have all had to learn to comprehend and process new information in a very superficial way in 'recent times' - there is no time for the luxury of reflection - thus, no automatic *human* input beyond the comfy.
I love science. And I understand the pendulum always overswings the center initially. most of all, I look forward to our collective balancing of these two approaches.

clarelhdm said...

I found that episode of Vikings some of the most powerful vision I had ever watched. Stayed with me for days. I think the potency of death certainly would bind the tribe together...not in a light-hearted jovial way, but on that intense survival level... As a Libra Sun/Aries moon I have had some intense experiences of late due to the cardinal cross. This January it appeared that I might be dying...a lump was found on my lung and I had to have various tests and wait for nearly a month to find out. It turned out to be benign, and it was as if I came back from the dead (lung cancer can have a terrible prognosis). I have Algol rising, (con Mars square Pluto) and doing a bit of reading yesterday about that star, I discovered one of its qualities was walking the fine line between life and death...it has a resurrection aspect as a blinking binary star, that appears to 'die' and then come back to life. Strangely, my near death experience also corresponded with my progressed Sun leaving Scorpio...to the day! The positive diagnosis came as my P Sun moved into Sagittarius. The whole experience seemed to clarify a lot about the meaning of my life and the symbolism around my ascendant. Knowing the timing of the cardinal cross meant also that I had a time frame for the experience...which helped me to move through it.

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Anonymous said...

You mention that aspects of astrology, which contains mythology, can be used as add-ons to religion. Many religions, particularly Christianity, ARE myths. It's academically well-founded that the Christian movement simply acquired the Pagan astronomical-astrological events, then created a mythology of supernatural symbolism to negate the natural. Most religions present a well-defined death scenario for the faithful, faithless, worshipers of other gods, etc. It's all mythology...life AND death.

Roll Cage Mary said...

I have 8th Sun conjunct Moon and Mercury in Aquarius with the Sabian Symbol of "fields of ardath in bloom".

Used to keep the Death Registry at Royal Melbourne Hospital, ring up the undertakers to let them know who was ready to collect.

That was before I learned astrology.