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Marilynn Lawrence Casts the Chart
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In this continued interview we chat about a whole bunch of things, including:
- The Middle Platonist idea of multiple Providences as a way of accounting for the presence of evils while preserving god’s goodness and free choice for human souls, and the ways in which such a model largely plays out in later Platonism as well, with Plotinus’ take on the question being something of an odd one out,
- The doctrine of the descent of the soul into the body understood as a process of progressive accretion of astral influences, which then govern the embodied soul, discussed in some Hermetic texts, in Numenius, Porphyry, and later in Macrobius and others, brought into dialogue with Plotinus’ thought,
- In which Plotinus doesn’t seem to support such a doctrine (or if he does, he doesn’t attach much importance to it), although he does speak of the soul gaining an ‘astral body’ of sorts,
- The question of how some astrologers seem to ‘get it right’, although there doesn’t seem to be an obvious way to explain this (since they can’t even agree on techniques or which zodiac is the right one to use),
- The ways in which astrology plays out in later theurgic practice and the philosophy of Iamblichus (stay tuned for more on this in later episodes),
- The ‘Jungian turn’ in astrology since the ‘sixties, allowing for continued use of the geocentric models of the past in today’s non-Hellenistic cosmos through a process of ‘symbolification’,
- The work of Michel Gauquelin on the ‘Mars effect’, which claimed to show a statistically-significant link between athletic success and a prominent Mars in the birth-chart,
- A discussion of all the different approaches to astrology that are out there nowadays,
- And a short coda, looking at the levels of providence in Plotinus.
Works Cited in this Episode:
Primary:
- Iamblichus on astrology: Response to Porphyry/De mysteriis 7.3, 8.4, 9.3-4.
- Plotinus on the ‘astral body’: IV.3[27]15.1-4: a number of different types of body that the soul can put on once she has ‘peeped out’ from the noetic realm. The first of these is acquires in heaven, which in the context would seem to refer to the ‘periphery’, the realm of the stars and planets Plotinus has been discussing in our various astronomical texts. Cf. II.2[14]2.21-22, a possible reference to the pneuma being a kind of pneumatic soul-vehicle, which moves in a circle like the heavenly bodies, and III.6[26]5.28-29, where the soul ‘rides on pneuma’ (ὡς ἐπ’ αὐτοῦ ὀχεῖσθαι), which recalls the ὄχημα or vehicle of the soul which is of great importance to later Platonist theories of embodiment, serving as a medium between matter and the soul.
Secondary:
- The ‘Geoffrey Cornelius school of astrology’: see e.g. Geoffrey Cornelius. The Moment of Astrology: Origins in Divination. Wessex Astrologer, Bournemouth, 2003.
- Michel Gauquelin: see e.g. The Truth about Astrology. Hutchinson, London, 1984.
- Project Hindsight.
Recommended Reading:
- Claude Benski. The “Mars Effect”: A French Test of Over 1,000 Sports Champions. Prometheus Books, Amherst, N.Y., 1996.
- E. R. Dodds. Proclus: The Elements of Theology. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1963, Appendix II on the theory of the ‘vehicle of the soul’ in Platonism.
Emily Stewart
April 12, 2021
So i’d like to offer a bit more nuance to the discussion of geocentricity vs heliocentricity!
First of all, heliocentricity was proposed, though not widely accepted, by Aristarchus of Samos in the 3rd century BCE. Even with the pure geocentric model dominating, in the 5th century CE, Martianus Capella reports a system that had the Sun revolving around the Earth, but Mercury and Venus orbiting the sun, at Philologia 8.854. It was not always so simple as “ancients geocentric, moderns heliocentric”.
But even granting that basically everyone thought the Earth was the center of the universe when astrology was systematized, and we now know that to be false, the emic view is: so what? We live on Earth, so of *course* astrology is geocentric. In the entire course of humanity, fewer than 600 people have ever *not* lived on Earth, and none of them have ever ventured outside the sublunary sphere!
Anyone who’s taken an introductory college Physics course will be familiar with the idea of frames of reference, where you can define any arbitrary physical system as a reference point, and motion seen from outside that frame of reference can look wildly different than it does from inside. Geocentricity is a perfectly reasonable frame of reference for anyone stuck on Earth who isn’t sending things to other planets. As astrologers, we can know that in a wider view, it simply ain’t so, while also acknowledging that it can be used to accurately describe where we’re from.
Would fate work differently outside the sublunary? Maybe! If we ever get there (something that i’m increasingly skeptical of, despite the naïve transhumanism of my youth), the discipline will have to adapt. I suspect some astrologers might try to keep the system intact as much as possible, and simply swap the places of Earth with the Moon, or Mars, or wherever we happen to end up. But maybe things would be entirely different! Maybe our hypothetical second-generation (the first generation will of course still have been born on Earth, and have accretions on their soul from traversing the spheres to there, not to their new home) Martians find themselves lacking much will to *do* stuff due to the lack of influence from Mars in the sky, replaced with a hitherto unknown (or at least uncommon) urge depending on where Earth is when they’re born. It’s interesting to speculate about, sure, but there’s a good chance we’ll never be in a position to put it to any sort of test.
Collin Hazlett
April 13, 2021
One cool aspect of geocentrism is that it was basically the earliest example of a Fourier approximation. The geocentric models approximated a function (in this case the position of the other planets relative to the Earth) with a sum of cyclical functions, in this case sine and cosine, since they were using circular epicycles. Just because there weren’t physical epicycles out there in space doesn’t mean they weren’t extremely useful for predicting the position of planets in the sky! And we still use Fourier analysis for all kinds of stuff, still building models out of epicycles like in the old days- using the same process with more formalized math.
Emily Stewart
April 13, 2021
That’s really cool, Collin! Fourier transforms were definitely one of the things that contributed to me failing out of my engineering degree, so it’s a relief to find out that they’re good for something actually useful, like astrology.
Earl Fontainelle
April 16, 2021
Thanks for the useful comments, Emily (and the Capella reference, which I was not aware of!). Sounds a bit like Tycho Brahe’s system.
Interested parties will want to check out the many non-Geocentric systems from antiquity, with Aristarchos sort of heading the list, as you say, but Philolaos the Pythagorean’s system with all the planets (and the sun) circling around the central ‘hearth fire’, the Epicurean infinite universe of (inhabited) worlds, and others bruited about at the time. But for whatever reason, geocentrism won in a big way. Maybe your points about frame of reference are one obvious reason why.
Emily Stewart
April 16, 2021
Yeah, Brahe was the initial reference that had come up when i was discussing this with friends a week or two before this episode came out (clearly the workings of providence that i had this relatively fresh in my mind!), and one of them mentioned Capella as an antique precedent. I wasn’t familiar with Philolaos or much detail about Epicurean physics, so i’ll definitely have to check them out!