Astrology as a light that shines in the dark or the quest for hope in this time of chaos

by Alejo López

In The Obsolence of Oracles, Plutarch tells us that a sailboat was travelling to Italy when the winds suddenly stopped blowing.(1)The sailors had just finished supper when they heard a loud and clear voice: ‘Thamus, Thamus, are you there?’. Thamus was the head of the crew and was hesitant about answering. The voice insisted twice and only then the captain answered: ‘Who calls?’. A response was then heard: ‘When you reach Palodes, take care to proclaim that the great god Pan is dead’. They were not sure whether or not to trust this voice. But when they were finally arriving to Port, the wind stopped again, all of a sudden. So from the unmovable ship, close to the shore, Thamus raised his voice: ‘¡The great god Pan is dead! ¡The great god Pan is dead! ¡The great god Pan is dead!’. And even before he could finish, a great lament was heard all over the earth. And it was not the voice of one but that of many who expressing their sorrow.

To me, the myth of Pan’s death seems crucial at these current times. Pan was a god who would create panic in those who encountered him. This extremely sexual god represented the forces of the natural world and was sometimes related to Dionysus. Pan’s death has also been linked to the birth of Christianism, civilization, and a moral rectitude that repressed sexuality: an attempt to control chaos and the panic that these natural forces may cause.(2) I personally like this god, I like his erratic behavior (some claimed he was the son of Hermes), his swiftness in getting angry and the same haste to laugh and forgive. As nature itself, he appeared as a changing being. And perhaps his death can remind us today of another death, that of the natural world and, with it, an enchanting way of perceiving reality. The crisis to which we are submitted now, due to the global pandemic, is not just sanitary, economic, political and ecological but it is also a crises of meaning. What is our place in the universe as earthlings? What is our place as human beings who tread on this Earth?

Astrology and its archetypes may guide us in searching for some answers. And those answers may not be straight and clear but perhaps elusive, as a sea of fog that is encouraging us to sail through it without a fixed course. It is not a black or white matter that can be solved with definite answers. It may be asking a more symbolic approach, representative of the needs to address the crises that we face today. Maybe we are not being asked to see the world from the immediate and literal point of view. We live complex lives, having to distinguish the good from the bad, the right from the wrong. Times in which grief lives along with happiness. François Jullien, in his writings, brought in eastern concepts that may be useful when trying to embrace these paradoxes. He asserted that ‘the right middle way’ was not a tempered middle ground, made of layers of grey and uncertainties but, on the contrary, the ability to react from any opposites whatsoever, a disposition to move to any side.(3)

Following his advice, I would like to summon, in this time and in this place, some figures that may be able to guide us in this ‘middle way’, this being in both extremes, just like Pan who shared diversing types of nature. I invite you on this journey to look for guidance in some myths that could give us gifts to be used at this moment in time. After meeting all of them, I plan to go back to the astrology and our role in the current society as possible carriers of light in this dark night. And the first guide that I have met in this quest was Hermes, the messenger of the gods. So let’s begin there.

Hermes’ caduceos

Hermes is another mythical figure of a dual nature and we can quickly find it in the horoscope under the Roman name Mercury. This guide’s duality is manifested, for instance, in his rulership over Gemini. Hermes was the messenger of the gods, he had free entrance to the Underworld and thus could connect the world of the living with the world of the dead. That may be why Mercury rules thresholds, the “in-between” that connect one place with another. Hermes also had the title of Psychopomp, guiding the souls in the world of the dead so they could arrive to their new dwellings. Some shamans to whom I have talked about this, and who work as psychopomps, have assured me that there are lost souls in the world. When the shamans find them, these souls express that they are angry or annoyed because they are not aware that their bodies are dead. So they must be guided and taken to their proper dwellings. Even if he had this role, Hermes was not seen as a serious and bitter god, burdened by this job, but as a jovial one. He played games on Apollo and laughed at us when he went retrograde and our plans did not turn out as expected. In fact, the high amount of retrogradation periods may have also been a way of connecting two worlds. And his freedom to enter the underworld may signify the possibility of going to the roots of the matter with our thoughts. Hermes was a profound god who could get to territories that were not allowed to others. But he was also a funny god, gracious, who did not take himself or others too seriously.

So the path that this god is taking us through is one that tries to create bridges between opposing places: life-death, up-down, clever-naïve. And so in this journey to the underworld, we now meet another guiding figure that may help us find light in the darkness: Persephone, the queen of the dead herself.

The Queen of the dead

Persephone’s story is a bit more renown. Her mother Demeter was in charge of making the earth give us fruits. The daughter was collecting some narcissus when Hades (who was her uncle) kidnaped her and took her to the Underworld. Demeter then started a long search, visiting every corner of the world of the living without being able to find her. And so Helios (the god of the Sun, all-seeing) confessed that Zeus had promised Persephone to ‘the invisible’ (Hades). Desperate, Demeter decided to wander through the world until she reached Eleusis and there she demanded that mortals raised a temple for her. She decided to renounce to her life in Mount Olympus and to share her life with the lesser gods so that she could cry for her daughter. But her sadness made the earth barren. So humanity had nothing to eat or to offer in their sacred rituals. Zeus, who was both Demeter and Hades’ brother, did not know how to comfort her. So he sent Hermes to ask Hades to return Persephone to her mother. But the maid had eaten some grains of grenade so she was not allowed to go back. In the end, it was settled that Persephone would spend some time with the living and some time as the Queen of the dead. So this other character can also teach us something about the way of the middle, being at once among the living and among the dead, at once a maid and a queen.

Other characters of dual nature

Another dual being is Tiresias, who was both man and woman in the same life. Blind to the events of this earth, he could see what once was and what once would be. Thus, he (she?) was also in between worlds and could help us walking this path. He knew the experiences of being both a man and a woman, he lived in opposing times simultaneously, he saw without seeing. He may teach us to clamber in the blind darkness and to try to experiment those extremes that are socially considered as opposite.

Chiron is another character who followed the middle way: half a horse, half a man. His nature spoke about a wound that was hard to heal. Perhaps, as astrologers this might be an indication that to know the future has a bitter price to be paid. Other cosmogonies offered similar characters. Jesus Christ, for instance, was god and man at once and joined heaven and earth in the moments of the crucifixion and the resurrection. Before him, it was the snake who joined heaven and earth when she was moving up and down the famous Tree of Good and Evil. In these mythologies, the way of the middle implied giving up paradise in order to be able to return to it. And we could even see a mercurial nature in Virgen Mary, joining heaven and earth when giving birth to the son of god. This is not that odd, if you think about it, as Mercury rules Virgo.

The list of archetypical characters that can help us here is long and, unfortunately, I cannot describe each one. In Egypt, Thot; in native North America, the coyote; in Medieval France, Melusine de Lusignan. And today, we also find this being in our own contemporary cosmologies: Professor Snape, from Harry Potter, at once a friend and a foe, inspiring trust and mistrust; or Rick Deckard, from Blade Runner, with all that replicant ambiguity of his.

Between fate and free-will

The last being that I would like to summon now is Eärendil from the world of The Lord of the Rings. In this cosmogony, men had become so corrupted that the gods (the Valar) had abandoned them. Eärendil decided to take a forbidden path: to sail to the land of the gods and ask mercy for the people of the world and succor in their needs. These gods were touched by his plead and instead of grounding him for breaking the prohibition, they decided to help and answer his prayer. Eärendil was of a dual nature because he was a half-elf, which means he was neither elf nor human. I think he may inspire us so that we too raise our prayers to the gods and ask for help in this moment of tribulations.

The astrologer Nicholas Campion, in his book about the history of astrology, claimed that the idea that we have been given a destiny was developed further by the Greeks.(4)The Myth of Er, described in Plato’s Republic, tell us how the Moirae sew the fate for each human being with the aid of the Spindle of Necessity.(5) cAt least since the Greeks, we have gained the idea that we were given a destiny at birth and that it could hardly be changed (because we had chosen it ourselves before incarnating). However, it was not always so. When I studied Babylonian astrology, I learned that the split between Heaven and Earth was not so rush as it is today. Divinity did not only speak through the movements of the planets but it kept a constant dialogue with human kind. A cloud over the Moon might have been an indicator of what was about to happen, or the sudden noise of the wind in the branches of a tree, or running into an antelope in the middle of your path… al of this was a message. The Earth was enchanted and inhabited by the divine. ‘If the celestial deities could influence the earth then humans might, with sufficient skill, influence those deities. (…) people might influence stars or, better to say, the cosmos, just as the stars influenced people…’, said Campion.(6) And even the Greeks who had a different idea of fate, believed that the divine could be moved. Persephone intervened when Orpheus was trying to regain Euridice. Athena got enraged when she heard about Aracne but she also was distressed in trying to help Orestes.

As astrologers we have tools that can help us create that dialogue with the divinity. In this time of difficulties, may we walk the steps that others have shown us to walk, before us. From Hermes, we can learn how to go down into the Underworld and come back with lightness, humor and a smile. Persephone may show us how our innocence may be preserved even when there is intensity and grief in our hearts. From Tiresias, we might learn to experience the world from opposites sides of life and to see beyond the apparent. Chiron might guide us when facing our wounds, to accept how they set us apart from others. Furthermore, Jesus Christ, we may learn to join heaven and earth, to love no matter who and to make sacred every act of our lives. From the Virgen Mary, we may come to see how to engender the divine spark within us. From the serpent, we might learn how to use the gift that was given to us: rationality that can help us separating good from evil. And finally, from Eärendil, we might learn to take responsibility from our sorrows, to remember our gods, to ask for mercy, mercy for all beings who tread on this Earth and succor in this time of need.

May it be.

Endnotes:
(1) Plutarch, ‘On the Obsolensce of Oracles’ en Moralia (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1936), p. 401.
(2) K. Chesterton, The end of the world from the everlasting man recuperado de https://matiane.wordpress.com/2019/05/06/the-end-of-the-world-from-the-everlasting-man-by-g-k-chesterton/ 
(3) François Jullien, Un sabio no tiene ideas (Madrid: Siruela, 2001 ), p. 36.
(4) Nicholas Campion, A History of Western Astrology (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
(5) Plato, The Republic, Libro X, vv. 614-621 (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2013).
(6)  Nicholas Campion, A History of Western Astrology (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

Published by: Revista Stellium, Dec. 2020.

Author:
Alejo López, D.F.Astrol.S., was born in Argentina where he graduated from the Performing Arts Conservatory. He is also a psychologist and holds the Faculty of Astrological Studies Diploma. He moved to Europe at the age of 23. Further journeys set him on a quest to find some kind of language that could describe people’s diverse lives and inner world. He studied myths and observed some other spiritual practices such as shamanism and Kabalah.  He is particularly interested in finding techniques that could help us develop a dialogue with the Divine. He believes that once you learn Astrology, you can never be alone for the planets will always speak and guide you. He holds his astrological practice in between Spain and Argentina and travels frequently to other parts of Europe and sometimes USA to do lectures, workshops or consultancy work. He loves sharing his passion for astrology with others.

Images:
Thamos: Alejo López
Persephone: Public Domain
Oh, Sailor: Victor Ferreira, Instagram @vicsticky
Sunset: Image by jplenio from Pixabay

© 2020 - Alejo López - Revista Stellium

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