Astropoetics

A Word to Non-Astrologers and Skeptics

Extract from the Preface to the latest book in the Astropoetic Series by Joe Landwehr Astrology and the Archetypal Power of Numbers (pp. xvii-xix). 

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A Word to Non-Astrologers and Skeptics 

Not everything that can be counted counts, 

and not everything that counts can be counted*.

Although astrology has fallen into disfavor and has been seriously maligned – usually by those who know little or nothing about it – it has also been taken seriously by some of the greatest minds our culture has ever produced, including Hippocrates: the father of modern medicine; Nicholas Copernicus: the father of modern astronomy; and Carl Jung: the father of modern psychology. Through the 17th century, it was taught at every major university in the civilized world – not as the irrational superstition it is considered to be today – but as essential to an understanding of the natural order of things.  Despite the institutionalized cultural bias against it, and centuries of vociferous rejection as a worthy discipline by religion, science, and the media, some form of astrology has existed in virtually every culture on the planet since humans first looked upward in wonder to the nighttime sky, and it continues to flourish today in the popular imagination. 

Belgian archeologist and historian Franz Cumont once called astrology “the most persistent hallucination which has ever haunted the human brain,” intending to put to rest what he considered to be our neurotic fascination with it. “How could this absurd doctrine arise, develop, spread, and force itself on superior intellects for century after century?” he wondered.  Indeed, this is a question worth asking, along with the corollary question (mine, not his):  “Is it really all that absurd to think that we might actually be a part of the cosmos at which we – astrologers, scientists, ‘superior intellects’ and ordinary human beings from every culture and walk of life – continue to marvel?”

The very premise on which astrology is based – namely that there is a discernible relationship between the evolving cosmic order (the macrocosm) and the journey of an individual soul (the microcosm) – has been disavowed by science.  And yet, the absence of this premise in contemporary discourse contributes greatly to the alienation and disenchantment of postmodern humans, who are often cast adrift in a cold and lifeless universe to which they do not feel as though they belong.  Without a language with which to understand our personal connection to the cosmos – such as astrology – we lack the profound sense of being an integral part of the natural order of things that gave meaning and purpose to the lives of our indigenous ancestors, who were not too sophisticated or jaded to look up into the nighttime sky and marvel at the patterns they saw coalescing and dispersing there.  In discussing why young people today (those born since 1980) have little interest in the scientific worldview – with which astrology is generally sharply contrasted – economist Jeremy Rifkin clearly spells out the problem:

[T]he scientific method [is] an approach to learning that has been nearly deified in the centuries following the European Enlightenment.  Children are introduced to the scientific method in middle school and informed that it is the only accurate process by which to gather knowledge and learn about the real world around us. The scientific observer is never a participant in the reality he or she observes, but only a voyeur. As for the world he or she observes, it is a cold, uncaring place, devoid of awe, compassion, or sense of purpose. Even life itself is made lifeless to better dissect its component parts. We are left with a purely material world, which is quantifiable but without quality. The scientific method is at odds with virtually everything we know about our own nature and the nature of the world. It denies the relational aspect of reality, prohibits participation, and makes no room for empathic imagination. Students in effect are asked to become aliens in the world.

Although it is rarely considered as a viable alternative to science, astrology addresses these issues.  It provides a more open-ended way to gather information about the world around us and about ourselves – not in an objective voyeuristic way, but as active participants in our own lives, and in the larger evolutionary processes unfolding within and around us.  It facilitates an understanding of self that is filled with purpose.  It propels us on a quest of meaning, wonder, and self-discovery.  It connects us to others, the entire web of life, and the cosmic order in which we play our part.  It does not dissect the world into fragmented pieces, but rather shows how it all the pieces fit together into an integrated, cohesive whole.  It unabashedly discusses quality.  And it triggers the empathic imagination through its willingness to explore the hard facts, not just literally, but as metaphors and symbolic portals to a multi-dimensional truth larger than can be comprehended by the rational mind.  Astrology – in its essence, if not always in its practice – provides the foundation for a psychology of soul that offers everything that is missing in science.

The first modern psychologist of soul Carl Jung once said:

I do not hesitate to take the synchronistic phenomena that underlie astrology seriously.  Just as there is an eminently psychological reason for the existence of alchemy, so too in the case of astrology.  Nowadays, it is no longer interesting to know how these two fields are aberrations; we should rather investigate the psychological foundations on which they rest.

*  This quote is often attributed to Einstein.  According to Wikipedia, “A number of recent books claim that Einstein had a sign with these words in his office in Princeton, but until a reliable historical source can be found to support this, skepticism is warranted. The earliest source on Google Books that mentions the quote in association with Einstein and Princeton is Charles A. Garfield's 1986 book Peak Performers: The New Heroes of American Business, in which he wrote on p. 156: ‘Albert Einstein liked to underscore the micro/macro partnership with a remark from Sir George Pickering that he chalked on the blackboard in his office at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton’.”  Whether or not this quote can be attributed to Einstein, a moment’s reflection should convince anyone but the most dogmatic scientist that it is true.

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My Personal Quest For a Deeper Understanding of Number

 

Extract from the Preface to the latest book in the Astropoetic Series by Joe Landwehr Astrology and the Archetypal Power of Numbers (pp. 7-10).

Read more about the book here

Advance ordering now available for: Astrology and the Archetypal Power of Numbers

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 My Personal Quest For a Deeper Understanding of Number

[T]his power of the psyche could not be measured by science, but rather had to be felt, sensed by intuitive faculties, and spoken of obliquely through story, metaphor, and analogy.

In my sophomore year of college.  I was studying chemistry, hoping one day to become a research chemist.   Who knows, thought I in my foolish youth – perhaps I would be the one to discover a cure for cancer.  On the road to this lofty goal, lay a rather pedestrian titration experiment in organic chemistry.  I was charged with the task of adding a certain reagent, measured drop by drop, to a flask of sodium permanganate in order to neutralize its acidity, and then determine the concentration of the original solution.  It is possible to know when you have reached the point of neutrality because what begins as a dark purple liquid turns clear.

Within the scientific context in which I was conducting this experiment, what was important was the quantification made possible by the numbers.  Knowing the volume of reagent necessary to neutralize the acid, I could determine mathematically the molar density (units of reagent per volume of solution) of the original material.  But what I experienced instead that day in the laboratory was a moment of personal epiphany.  I became enthralled with the magical transformation I witnessed as the purple solution began changing – first to burgundy, then magenta, then blood red, then orange, then pale yellow, then clear.  Since this was only one of a series of experiments I had a limited amount of time to complete, my lab instructor was insistent that I move on with the procedure.  But I was so excited by this apparent miracle, that I had to repeat it several times.  By the time I had satisfied myself that what I was seeing was real, I had unwittingly stumbled into a realization that there was much more to numbers than could be explained by their quantitative properties.  For me, this experiment was a terma teaching that changed my life.

In the days that followed, I wrestled with self-doubt.  I had thought I wanted to be a chemist, but how could I resign myself to a pursuit so dry that it failed to appreciate the miraculous beauty of the transformations it measured?  How could I relate such magic to the mundane chemical formulas that described them, and how was it that something with the power to move me the way this chemical reaction did could be reduced to a mere number?  There simply had to be more to the story than I was being told.  The more I thought about it, the more the academic journey toward a degree in chemistry seemed a Faustian bargain I could not make.  I changed my major to English, and for the remainder of my college career, I studied literature, philosophy, and psychology – finding much more gold at the end of the day for all my efforts than I was permitted to find in the laboratory.

Eventually, I continued my education, working toward a Masters degree in Marriage, Family and Child Counseling.  Again, however, I came up against a major stumbling block involving numbers – statistics.  I was just beginning to appreciate the complexity of the human psyche – illuminated by some rather clever and imaginative theories, and given poignancy by the fledging work I had begun to do as a therapist-in-training – when I was asked by my teachers to reduce this intriguing complexity to a pedestrian set of numbers.  Meanwhile, many of the more fascinating ideas I encountered – particularly those put forth by Jung, Assaglioli, the humanistic/transpersonal school and the radical brief therapy movement being pioneered by students of Milton Erickson – seemed to point toward the psychological equivalent of that sophomore titration experiment. 

It seemed to me that those who had the most interesting ideas about the possibilities of human transformation were not concerned with the strictly quantitative dimensions of the human psyche.  Instead, they seemed focused on its irrational power to evoke and wrestle with archetypal forces that changed their shape as consciousness was brought to bear upon them.  As far as I could tell at this stage in my own understanding, this power of the psyche could not be measured by science, but rather had to be felt, sensed by intuitive faculties, and spoken of obliquely through story, metaphor, and analogy.  A true transformation of the psyche’s wounds could not be brought about by manipulation or coercion.  It had to be evoked through a compassionate dance of intentional courtship and openness to the mutability of color, tone, and luminescence in the tender soul at the bottom of the flask of circumstance in the laboratory of life.

Yet here I was, being taught to measure these wounds, the external factors that may or may not have caused them, and the effectiveness of various strong-arm tactics of intervention in terms of number.  Unlike chemistry or physics, psychology could not be made to conform to immutable laws that would always ensure the same result each time an experiment was performed, despite the collective efforts of generations of psychologists who believed it should be able to.  As a concession to the softness of the science beneath psychology, its truths were measured instead by statistics – number used, not as a statement of irrefutable fact, but as a measure of our ability to know or not know something definitive about human nature.

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From Control to Conscious Alignment With Natural Law

Extract from the Preface to the latest book in the Astropoetic Series by Joe Landwehr Astrology and the Archetypal Power of Numbers (pp. 9-10). 

Read more about the book here

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From Control to Conscious Alignment With Natural Law

I never did get a satisfactory answer to the obvious question:

“What could numbers possibly tell me about the human soul?”

 

Why would it be important to measure human nature according to various sets of probability?  Because, as I learned early on in my study of psychology, the goal – at least from a clinical perspective – was control: control of the uncomfortable symptoms of the wounded human condition; control of unruly and potentially disruptive emotions; and control of undesirable behaviors.  In the darker, more chilling visions of the scientific psychological establishment – as sketched for us, for example, by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World and more recently by the Wachowski brothers in the movie The Matrix and its sequels – control extended to the human soul and the course of its journey from cradle to grave.

As pointed out in my earlier book The Seven Gates of Soul, the history of the early development of psychology was an attempt to wrestle the unruly human soul into submission to scientific standards of measurement, predictability, and ultimately control.  Wilhelm Wundt [shown above], widely considered the father of modern psychology, was one of the first to insist that psychology was as much a science as physics and chemistry.  In defiance of common sense, he believed ultimately there was no difference between inner experience and the outer phenomena by which inner experience could be inferred .  Such a radical posture was necessary because outer phenomena such as behavior and physiological response to stimuli were measurable and thus within the reach of science, while inner experience was not.  Despite the fact that this assertion was increasingly untenable to successive generations of therapists dealing with the actual experiences of real human beings, Wundt’s psychological scientism set the tone for all future investigations of the human psyche.  Although “psyche” means “soul,” the soul had been effectively eliminated from the discipline of psychology centuries before I began my study of it.

What I was offered in graduate school instead of the discussion of soul I craved was a reductionist insistence on describing the endless variety of tastes, smells, and sounds on life’s table as a set of numbers.  I couldn’t do it.  I dropped out, and fled to northern California where I indulged myself in distinctly non-mathematical pastimes.  Eventually, I returned to finish what I had started.  But I never did get a satisfactory answer to the obvious question: “What could numbers possibly tell me about the human soul?”  Numbers had their own undeniable attraction in the mysterious ways in which they combine with each other and shape-shift into other numbers.  At the same time, I could not help but feel that something vital was missing in our understanding of them, especially as they were employed by science.

Numbers, as I had been taught to use them, were solely for the purpose of counting, measuring, comparing, and contrasting, according to quantifiable units of measurement.  Because I had witnessed the transformations behind the numbers – the magic that numbers were employed to measure – it seemed to me that numbers were more fundamentally an invitation to understand how each individual piece of the whole fabric of this apparent reality was related to every other piece, and how each piece revealed the presence of the whole.  How was it that all these wondrous colors could emerge from the same substance?  How is it that a soul caught in the debilitating snare of some psychological trauma could also be loving, creative, intelligent, and at times free from trauma?  How do all these various and diverse, sometimes contradictory states of being, live in juxtaposition to each other within the same individual?  If numbers were going to be used to investigate the nature of reality, both around us and within us, then they ought to somehow speak to its inherent interconnectedness and multi-dimensionality.

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Numbers As the Gateway to an Understanding of Multidimensionality

Extract from the Preface to the latest book in the Astropoetic Series by Joe Landwehr Astrology and the Archetypal Power of Numbers (pp. 10-11). 

Read more about the book here

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Numbers As the Gateway to an Understanding of Multidimensionality

One who is interested in knowing the original power of number can only do so by entering the storm and getting wet. 

In the Pythagorean approach, number is seen not as a counting mechanism, but as a living force.  In the foreword to Robin Waterfield’s translation of The Theology of Arithmetic, Keith Critchlow finds an expression of this more holistic approach to number in the famous arrangement of ten dots in a triangle.  Pythagoras used this pattern – called the Decad or Tetraktys – to illustrate the unity of the first ten numbers [see above].  Critchlow says “that ideal number is not necessarily subject to a sequential or causal progression from one through ten, but is rather a unity with ten essential and potential qualities, simultaneously present….”  The intriguing implication behind these words is that everything science uses number to measure, participates in this Unity, and encompasses these same universal qualities.  

Within this worldview, the observer cannot be separate from what is being observed in the way that science insists she must be.  The most intriguing implication of the Pythagorean understanding of number is that everything I am capable of observing in some way reflects back to me who I am, because both it and I are embodiments of this same Unity, elaborated and illuminated in different ways by the same numbers.  Or as put by the Jewish Neoplatonist Philo of Alexandria, “Both in the world and in man the decad is all”. 

As I observed and measured the changing colors in my sophomore titration experiment, something parallel to that transformation occurred in me.  As a therapist, every time I was able to facilitate growth in a client, it was because on some level of my own being, I resonated with the changes in them that wanted to take place.  If numbers are a Unity, within which simultaneous qualities intermingle and perpetually shift in relation to each other, then subject and object must both share in that dance.

Science remains blind to this possibility whenever science insists on objectivity – requiring its practitioners to pretend that they are not part of the world they observe, and that what they observe is not influenced by their observation.  Science’s own experiments have proven that this is an untenable pretension, but most scientists keep on pretending anyway.  By contrast, in the original sense in which numbers were understood – by Pythagoras, by Moses, and by the indigenous peoples who employed them in their ceremonies and rituals – they were instead a key to more conscious participation in the world.   Participation by number was more conscious because each number was a dakini syllable within which natural law was written, and to become conscious of the true meaning of numbers required the seeker of truth to align herself with natural law.  Unlike science, which insists on maintaining intellectual distance, engaging the terma teaching of number is not a spectator sport.

If we imagine this terma teaching to be a thunderstorm, the difference in these two approaches to an understanding of number becomes rather tangible.  A scientist witnesses and documents this thunderstorm from the comfort and safety of a room protected from the weather. One who is interested in knowing the original power of number, however, can only do so by entering the storm and getting wet.  Such an act would make no objective sense, but be filled with subjective meaning, in the same way that communing with the gods is different than worshipping them. 

As a student of both chemistry and psychology, I was brought to the altar by the high priests of education and compelled to worship.  All the while, what my soul craved was communion.  I wanted to tear the altar down and embrace what it was built to honor.  Numbers were offered me in college as the ritual tools of worship.   Never was it hinted that they could also become the ritual tools of communion, if I was willing to cross the subject-object barrier and allow them to permeate me.  It is to reclaim this missing piece of my education that this book is being written.

Part One [the current volume] explores individual numbers from Zero to Nine.  Each chapter begins where possible with references to the original teachings of Pythagoras, and to other sources that hint of the true creative power of number.  My exploration then extends into a free form dialogue designed to elicit an experience of each number in its archetypal essence. 

Part Two [to come in 2012] shows how these experiences reverberate through the birthchart in various ways, and are embedded as implicit dakini syllables at the heart of the astrological language.  Part Two includes a series of case studies – of both significant moments in history and of individuals who have altered history – showing how these principles can be used to enhance our understanding of the soul’s journey as it is revealed in the birthchart, and to facilitate the soul’s participation in our collective evolution through a more conscious embodiment of natural law.
 

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Read Some Extracts from Tracking the Soul

In anticipation of the first Tracking the Soul Workshop this Fall (October 12-18, 2012), Ancient Tower Press presents a series of extracts from the book that inspired this offering. The 6-day experiential workshop will integrate the exquisite spiritual psychology of the seven chakras with a personal, image-based approach to astrology called astropoetics.  All workshop participants will receive a free copy of Tracking the Soul (a $25 value).   We hope these book extracts will entice you; and, if you cannot join us, you can of course obtain your own copy direct from Ancient Tower Press.

Below are links to the first three extracts from the book Tracking the Soul With an Astrology of Consciousness .  Between now and the mid-October workshop, weekly posts on the Ancient Tower Press blog will feature many more.

Astrology and Consciousness

The Astro-Chakra System

The Root Chakra

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• Follow this link for video and audio about the workshop

 

To purchase a copy of the book now, see below ...

ISBN-10: 097476261X

ISBN-13: 978-0974762616
Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.4 x 1.1 inches
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