OK, so I’ve done some preliminary research and I believe the correct answer is, in fact, astrology. Hold on before you flip out, and let me explain why I’ve come to this conclusion.
The popular version of astrology is bastardized. Of course, there’s nothing inherently immoral in palmistry/fortune-telling but what people don’t realize is that this is just one way of looking at astrology. I’m going to make the case that astrology is actually a serious art/science and is, when understood in this serious-minded sense, actually the glue that binds all of human thought together.
The primary interests that the public has in astrology are: fortune-telling and romantic prospecting (and, to a lesser degree, self-psychology). The first two interests are, I think, infantile - at least, they are based on an infantile concept of the relationship of the heavens to the self and to one’s future. It’s not that there’s no relation between these, it’s that “reading the stars” won’t give you the magical answers you’re looking for.
So, if astrology isn’t about what popular culture gleans from it, then what is it about? I have to give credit to Santos Bonacci (lots of YT vids are available for the interested) for getting me started, though I will caution that he is a bit loose with his facts (his etymological theories, for example, are downright atrocious) and not too critical of sources. That said, the man is actually very insightful and he is nothing short of a real Renaissance man. What got my attention in Bonacci’s presentations of astrology (what he terms “astrotheology” I think to distinguish it as the academic study, in contrast to the daily practice, of astrology) is that he shows how astrology connects everything. “Everything is interrelated” - Alexander von Humboldt (h/t Bonacci)
Bonacci doesn’t offer a very thorough justification for why there should be a subject that connects everything but I think he has inuited the fact very well. In the modern age of hyper-specialization of the sciences, it is not at all obvious that there should be anything that “connects it all together” but I will argue that there should be. Basically, science - natural philosophy - consists of rules describing the structure and unfolding of the physical world. Some of these rules are geometrical (as in the principle that two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time), some of these rules are causal (as in the law of inertia which is deduced by thought-experimental extrapolation of real experiments) and some of them are merely correlational (as in the law of gravity* and a great deal of the other laws of physics that are, today, taken to be facts of reality on par with the geometrical or causal facts of physics).
In addition to these rules, modern science consists of a body of methods for uncovering the facts of relations between things. Rules and methods comprise “what is known”, that is, that knowledge which has been distilled as far as it can be with the state-of-the-art techniques. But what rules and methods govern the discovery of the rules and methods for use in science? The answer is, necessarily, none. For if there were, these would then just become a part of the body of rules and methods we have already described. Hence - until human beings attain Absolute omniscience - there must reside in back of scientific knowledge (rules and methods knowledge, “left-brain knowledge” if you will) a permanent residue of human experience which is unsystematic, that is, mystical. I say “mystical” because it is a mystery. By definition, it’s a mystery. It works, yet we have no idea how. That’s the definition of a mystery.
Astrology has a wonderful claim for being the acme metaphor for navigating the terrain of the mystical. It is like the railroad-switching station of all knowledge. Here are some reasons why I think this.
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The roots of astrology lie in the observation of the heavens. This is why astrological traditions have arisen independently multiple times in human history. This commends astrology as a basis for methodical thinking and living because the stars are both eternal and unmediated - you do not need to consult an expert to observe the heavens, you merely need to step out your front door and look up and you are in direct contact with the eternal background of human experience. This eliminates the problems of bias and conflict-of-interest that afflicts mediated knowledge (e.g. the AGW debate).
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Astrology is extremely ancient, more ancient than written records of it and astrological ideas are at least as old as any recorded religious doctrines. Versions of astrology have arisen in every sophisticated culture (in several instances, independently - as in Mesopotamia, the Far East and the Americas) and have been extremely durable. Also, I think we have a disposition to be “conservative” and to feel more at-ease with the idea that our far ancestors whose minds were less tainted by the pushing-and-pulling of self-interested charlatans and myth-makers were in a unique position to think “purely”.
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Astrology and myth both have a deep interplay of give-and-take and this makes astrology, at least in part, a repository of cultural memory, which I will argue later is crucially important.
The progression of astrological science is so natural that its authority lies not in proofs or arguments but in its direct appeal to the intellect of the careful thinker. Again, Bonacci’s presentations have been hugely influential on me in this regard.
First, man starts by noticing the rotation of the heavens - the most obvious fact of nature to the first contemplative humans to ever turn their eyes skyward. Observing the heavens, he intuited directly their influence on the daily and yearly cycles. The sun rises and sets and this gives us the day/night cycle. The next cycle man observed was that of the stars - the solar year. This cycle gives us summer and winter. In correlation with the solar year is the yearly rotation of the stars, which becomes quickly evident to anyone who observes the stars each evening. The next cycle man observed was the lunar - its monthly cycle affecting women’s menses as well as the behavior of other animals. The final cycle he observed was the Platonic Year or great cycle, the 26,000 year precession of the equinoxes. In addition to the three great cycles (the day, the year and the great year), he observed the motions of the wandering stars (the Planets) and noted their epicycles with respect to the Earth, yet never do all 7 form the same pattern in the sky.
In order to track the yearly cycle, man had to create a reference in the stars. To do this, he needed some system for dividing the heavens. The lunar cycle divides the solar cycle almost in 12 - so man divided the heavens into twelve regions or “signs” and assigned to each of these regions a grouping of prominent stars as a mnemonic - these are the constellations of the zodiac. The twelve signs of the zodiac form a “stellar compass” by which we can track our movement around the Sun. This is the Indo-Persian-Mesopotamic-Greco-Roman-European system of astrology. Note that the Chinese zodiac also has 12 signs (I’m unsure if this is an independent development but my understanding is that Chinese astrology is independent of ours).
This ratio - 12 - is the basis of an astounding amount of organization within our cultural knowledge. There are 24 hours in a day (two divisions of each sign in its rotation in the heavens). There are twelve hours on the face of the clock. White light can be separated into 6 primary (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet) and 6 intermediary colors. There are twelve notes in the Western equal-temperament scale and 7 (the number of the Planets) notes in any major or minor scale.
Going further, 12 is also the basis of the Babylonian arithmetic system which, in many ways, is superior to ours. The Babylonians used base 60 (12 x 5) arithmetic with each “digit” being represented by a decimal sign from 0 to 59 (yes, they had something that acted like a zero!) One of the immense practical advantages of base-60 arithmetic is that the first several factors of 60 are 2,3,4,5,6,10,12 making it trivial to split things into these quantities. A shipment of 732 clay pots can be quickly split 12 ways (into lots of 61 each) in base-60 just using mental arithmetic. The mathematical sophistication of the Babylonians may be quite underestimated in the modern understanding.
But just as persuasive and satisfying - to the structured thinker - as the numerological divisions of light or sound, are the humanistic divisions that arise from the heavens. First, there are the binary divisions: day/night, summer/winter, pleasure/pain, good/evil, male/female. On top of these can be layered many other divisions (the five Platonic solids form the basis of further subdivisions within the astrological signs, etc.)
The true power of astrology lies in the fact that it operates on Humboldt’s principle that everything is interrelated. Music, light, visual art, time, astronomy, myth, history, geometry, number theory, psychology, sociology, morality, virtue, commerce, relationships, health, anatomy, etc. are all connected through this metaphorical switching-station which doubles as a mnemonic map of all human knowledge.
I want to give what I think is the correct astrological view that has been bastardized in regard to the planetary influences. Firstly, there is no doubt that the planets influence us. The Sun provides daily warmth, the Moon gives us the tides and the planets actually “wobble” the Earth ever-so-slightly in its orbit around the Sun. But something more fundamental is at stake here. The ancients believed that we are connected with the rest of the Solar system and the stars and I think one of the great failures of modern science are these false notions of gravitational action-at-a-distance as the primary organizing principles of the Universe - we are adrift in a black ocean of “empty space”, connected by the thinnest of threads only to the nearest star which is itself connected by an even thinner thread to the rest of the galaxy.
In this view, everything in the heavens is remote, distant, capricious, irrelevant. But we already know that this view is simply false. There is no empty space. Space is filled throughout with hot, electrically active plasma currents. There are currents flowing between the Sun and the planets, between the planets and their moons and between the planets and each other. High-frequency electrical signals are emanating from all the electrically active planets (most notably, Saturn and Jupitre). The Sun’s immense gravitational field reverses and sweeps over the planets on a regular, 33-day cycle.
So, all this fortune-telling business is a lot of folly for fools - it is all that astrology has to say to the shallow-minded who just want to know “what does my future hold?” OK, I’ll take that $15. Here’s your birth-chart and horoscope. Have a nice day. The fact is that your fortune-teller is inside your skull. With that mystical crystal-ball in your head, you can peer into the future and predict what will happen hours, days, months, even years in advance. Go and figure out what the consequences of your actions are. That’s what your future holds, dumbass.
As for the psychologizing aspect (personality types), I think that you have to understand that the signs refer both to man and to mankind at the same time. This is part of the fact that astrology is a switching-station. That is, we are all expressions of the whole zodiac, not just one particular sign. The psychological zodiac is not just a map of you, it is a map of man and you are a man. Can we actually systematically deduce the influence of the stars on particular individuals based on when they were born? Well, if we could, it wouldn’t be astrology, now would it? The practical use of birth-charting is that it makes you think about yourself, about the heavens and about your fellow-man and how all of these are inter-connected, which is really what human action is all about.
Astrology is frankly human. It is individualistic and yet connectionistic at the same time. It forms a persistent pattern within the respository of cultural memory and this pattern is self-reinforcing (for example, consider the effect of the division of the globe into 24 time zones has on how people organize other activities and knowledge wholly unrelated to longitudes or the rotation of the heavens, etc.) And it provides a persuasive framework for organizing a moral science, which is where my primary interest lies.
Finally, I want to say a word on the relationship of astrology to individual ends, that is, the market. I’ve written before that I think our education and law systems are atrophied by the cartelization/monopolization in these areas. This is a huge blow to human knowledge, the social order and even individual morality. Astrology, likewise, is suppressed but in a less obvious way.
Astrology stands in competition with the “major religions” - that is, those religions which currently or in the recent past enjoyed State-guaranteed monopoly status - because it offers a humanistic cosmological framework for all human knowledge and action. In other words, I believe that astrology in its ancient roots and its long “marginal” history has always been a fundamentally market-driven art/science. The travelling gypsies coming through town offered services that people were willing to pay for - divination, palm-reading, horoscopes, birth-charts, life-paths, etc. They were consistently demonized by the bourgeois as charlatans, devil-worshippers, con-artists, and all-round lowlifes. Nevertheless, they still managed to make a living at it.
I think that we need a Renaissance in moral philosophy and religious ideas. And I think that a revival of interest in astrology - and, just as importantly, further refinement of the art through incorporation of more recent insights and ideas, such as binary numbers, for example - could form a foundation for this Renaissance and drive innovation in the art of helping people organize their lives, their values, develop their character and their thinking with the best available tools ever devised by man in every department of action and knowledge.
Clayton -
This is what Newton himself had to say about his “law” of gravity: “That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of any thing else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to the other, is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it.” And yet we have. And not only have we fallen into it, we have multiplied this absurdity many times over with relativistic physics.
