Blinded by Starlight: The Pineal Gland and Western Astronomia

By Frank McGillion

For centuries, notions such as the transformation of base into precious metals, an accord between humans and planets, the existence of an elixir of life, or prediction of the date of death, have been on the outermost fringes of science. So too have aspects of an art critical to western thought, what the Greeks termed, astronomia: an amalgam of astronomy and astrology.

In Blinded By Starlight, Dr Frank McGillion demonstrates how by reference to modern scientific studies into the pineal gland, such assertions are perilously close to being shown to be, to a greater or lesser extent, true.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 5, 2003
• ISBN: 9781462826711

Frank McGillion

Frank McGillion is the author of over a dozen books. They include On the Edge of a Lifetime, The Opening Eye, Blinded by starlight, The Leaf: a Novel of Alchemy and, his most recent novel, A Walk in the Park. A graduate of the University of Glasgow he carried out postgraduate work at Oxford University and City University, London. He has also worked internationally in the corporate sector and as Tutor in English Literature in higher education. A recent guest of the CBS broadcast, People of Distinction he has wide media experience.

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Copyright © 2002 by Frank McGillion.

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PREFACE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

(I)

CHAPTER NINE

(II)

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

For Eve

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Becker MEDICAL LIBRARY, Washington University School of Medicine, for permission to reproduce Descartes, L homme,

(1677)

Penguin Books, UK, for permission to reproduce Figure 5 from: Wilhelm, R. The Secret of the Golden Flower

Dr Doreen Asso, Niki Bartman, Martin Berzins, Dr Nona Ferdon Davis, Dr Mike King, Professor Aubrey McKennell, Claudia Nielsen and Eve McGillion

www.frankmcgillion.com

PREFACE

Almost TWENTY-FIVE years ago, I wrote a book called The Opening Eye, which attempted to provide a scientific framework for certain beliefs that had been held for millennia by natural philosophers and practitioners of medicine.1 In this I suggested that those who practised their art giving due consideration to their general environment—including the skies above them—might well have done so for good, if uncertain, reasons. For I believed these early scientists, and the physician-astrologers who were prevalent in the western world until around three hundred years ago, had some idea of the very real effects that the ‘planets’ (a term that included the sun and the moon) have on us by way of what our forebears called, the ‘third eye’—the pineal gland.

Despite a mixed reaction to my book from establishment science, this view has strengthened with time to the extent that I’m now convinced that observation of the indirect effects of celestial and other factors on the pineal gland was indeed the major reason that those who used astrology in their work held such strong beliefs concerning the planets’ influences on us. I believe these same considerations also rationally explain a number of phenomena, such as water divining, and the innate ability of humans to navigate, that until recently were considered esoteric or irrational.

Over the years I’ve published a number of academic works in this general area to which the specialist is referred. 2-5 However I wanted to publish another popular work that updated these ideas and gave an account of the contemporary findings that support them in relatively straightforward terms.

Blinded By Starlight is the result. It is written for a general readership, and will hopefully let a wide range of people understand that the astrologers and physician-astrologers of former times were involved with an art that has a solid scientific basis, as well as a mystique that, for better or worse, we appear to have lost in modern science and medicine.

Given the popular nature of the book, I have tried to keep the content as non-technical as possible, and have avoided discussion of more abstract issues and questions, including the philosophical. However, in terms of the references I have been as comprehensive as possible within the limits set by the intended primary format of the book. By so doing it is hoped that anyone wishing to follow up a particular line of thought can find adequate material to initiate a more comprehensive search of the existing literature. Dates too, I have endeavoured to give frequently in order to give some context concerning when major changes in thought occurred, and the periods that had elapsed between them.

In broad terms, therefore, Blinded By Starlight is intended to give the general reader some insight into how it was that our forebears saw tangible links between ourselves and the cosmos. And, how, despite the many criticisms that have been directed towards such beliefs, these were absolutely justified in terms of our contemporary understanding of how things are.

References

1.    McGillion, F.B. (1980) The Opening Eye, Coventure, (London/ Philadelphia)

2.    de Vries-Ek, P. & McGillion F.B. (1997) A Further Look At Jung’sAstrological Experiment In the Context of His Concept of Synchronicity. Jaarbook van de Interdisciplinaire Verenniging Voor Analytische Psychologie 13, 76-93

3.    de Vries-ek P. & McGillion F.B. A Further Look at Jung’s Astrological Experiment in the Context of his Theory of Synchronicity. Correlation, Journal ofResearch in Astrology. 1995 14(1),15-25

4.    McGillion F.B. The Influence of Wilhelm Fliess’ Cosmobiology on Sigmund Freud Culture and Cosmos. 1998 Vol 2/1, 33-48

5.    McGillion, FB. The Pineal Gland And The Ancient Art OfIatromathematica Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2002 16/1,Spring, 19-39

CHAPTER ONE

In 44 BC, on only the second ever 15 March of the Julian calendar, Gaius Julius Caesar (100-44 BC)—fifty-six years old and master of the known world—stood at dawn watching for lightning in the sky and noting where and when it appeared. It isn’t recorded how he felt about what he saw, but as this practice was one intended to tell you how the coming day was going to proceed, it seems likely he wasn’t filled with optimism. Some days before, the astrologer Spurinna had told him the omens were bad that day, which fell in that part of the month still referred to then as ‘The Ides.’

At around ten o’clock in the morning, ignoring Spurinna’s advice and that of others who’d advised him not to attend that day’s Senate meeting, Caesar made what was to be his last journey to the Senatorial building in Rome where he reigned supreme. As he entered, he walked past Spurinna whom he smiled at and spoke to mockingly, telling him The Ides had come, and he’d survived without harm. According to the Roman historian Suetonius, the astrologer gave a simple reply:

They’ve come, Caesar—but not yet gone. Caesar sat down beneath a statue of his former rival, Pompey (106-48 BC), whom another astrologer had predicted would bring disaster to Rome, as a result of his dispute with Caesar.

While Caesar sat, a senator approached and appeared to want to hand him a petition. Caesar rejected the petition, but the senator grabbed him and held him, while one of two brothers present walked over and stabbed Caesar in the throat.

As the dictator defended himself by sticking a stylus through his assailant’s arm, the remaining assassins made their move and—twenty-three dagger thrusts later—the greatest Roman of them all adjusted his toga so he was fully covered and decent, then lay down and, in total silence, died.

It’s not recorded how Spurinna viewed these events, but, as augur and astrologer for the State, he must have viewed, with an equal measure of satisfaction and horror, the fact that his prophesies had come so dramatically true, and that the man who, just a few years before, had reformed the calendar so that the movements of the sun, the moon and the planets could be calculated with an accuracy unknown in the Roman Empire before then, should have died so terribly as and when those self-same planets had predicted.

So ended the reign of the man who single-handed had given Rome and the Western world the Julian calendar: a gift he’d received during his time in Egypt from the priests of the Queen of Egypt, and the mother of Caesar’s son, Cleopatra (69-30BC). 1 2

Egypt

The fact the Egyptians had such an accurate calendar—they had a year of three hundred and sixty-five and a quarter days, as far back as 2,780 BC—was probably a reflection of the importance it played in their agriculture, due to their need to predict the times of flooding of the Nile. But despite this astronomical sophistication they had no sophisticated system of astrology, what they had in this respect coming by way of the Greeks via the Babylonians. However, their calendar embraced many of the astronomical factors encompassed into the terminology of astrology when the Greeks finally introduced this into Egypt. They also introduced the god, Hermes, where he was identified with the Egyptian god, Thoth: the god of the moon, magic and medicine, still commemorated in the sign written to prescribe a medicine (Figure1).3

The history of astrology is inextricably linked to that of medicine and mathematical astronomy. Indeed the word astronomía (or astrologia) was used interchangeably for centuries to denote both astrological and astronomical phenomena, and it was only around the seventh century AD, that astrologers who were considered prophets or fortune tellers—rather than technically gifted in the arts of astronomia—had a term reserved solely for themselves: the mathematici—or magi.

Medical astrology—known to the Greeks as iatromathematica—is an art that probably dates back to pre-history, and it was to endure in Europe until the seventeenth century, where it remained part of the curricula of most medical teaching centres. 4

Figure 1

Sumeria

It was in Sumeria, in present-day Iraq, however, that an early form of the systematic study of the stars first appeared. And when the Babylonians replaced the Sumerians, around 2000 BC, the history of Western astrology truly began. Measuring and recording the movements of the planets couldn’t be done then with great accuracy, however, so, from around 1800 BC, early forms of what we might term proto-astrology developed, which consisted of looking for omens in the sky, and making ad hoc connections between celestial events, and those on earth

The formal map of the heavens, at any given time, which we associate with modern astrology—the horoscope—had to wait until mathematical astronomy was more fully developed. This occurred many centuries later, when the Greeks introduced their expertise in astronomia to Alexandrian Egypt in the second century AD.

India

Long before then, ancient Indian medicine had spoken of celestial demons, or divinities called, grahas that were believed to cause disease in children. This same word was later used to mean planet, so it’s possible the tradition of a link between planets and illness made its way into Greece, and Egypt, from India. 5

Greece

In the sixth century BC, the first known western astrologer, Thales of Miletus (636-546 BC) had the necessary astronomical knowledge to predict a solar eclipse, and his pupil, Anaximander (611-547 BC), suggested the sky was a rotating sphere with the earth floating at its centre. 6 A half century later, Anaxagoras (500-428 BC) explained the phenomena that caused solar and lunar eclipses. He also suggested the moon was illuminated, not with an inner source of light, as popularly believed, but by reflected light from the incandescent stony sun. He also suggested everything in the heavens was made of the same basic material: an idea two and a half thousand years before its time.

Astrology really began to develop into the art we recognise today under the guiding hand of the Greek mystical philosopher: Pythagoras (572-480 BC). His beliefs concerning regular solids, such as the square, the cube, and the cone, gave us a new conception of how numbers related to celestial events including what we now know as astrology.

In 475 BC, another Greek philosopher, Empedocles (490430 BC), expressed the view that physical harmony of the four ancient elements—fire, earth, air and water—was the secret of bodily health. He also taught that man is a reflection, or microcosm, of the cosmos, and was the first to associate each planet with a particular part of the body. Thus Empedocles made a major contribution to the ancient view that events in the heavens were symbolically related to events on earth in general, and to health and disease in particular: a view of things collectively referred to as: ‘The Doctrine of Correspondences.’

Aristotle (384-322 BC) taught that, in addition to the four traditional elements, there was a fifth—aether—that enabled the stars and planets in the heavens to move. He also taught that the stars, and planets (at this time the sun and moon were thought to be planets) spun around a motionless earth on rotating crystalline spheres in perfectly circular orbits. For Aristotle, it was an intricate arrangement of these spheres—assisted by spirits in the all-pervading aether—that produced the motions of the planets.

At its outer edges, the Aristotelian universe was eternal and unchanging; the only changes that occurred in our world being in those regions beneath the moon where the earth sat motionless: the so-called sublunary regions. Changes here were said to occur due to predictable shifting movements of the elements, dictated by, amongst other things, planetary movements. Aristotle also held that the universe beyond the moon, what was called, the ‘Empyrean firmament,’ was unchanging.

His view of a balanced whole of body, mind and spirit, associated with the appropriate elements (in addition to what he termed, ‘the humours’), was to remain a major concept in medical practice in the West until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries As the four elements had long been associated with astrological teachings, as we’ve seen, astrology was thus seen to be an adjuvant to medical treatment more or less until this same era.

Another important hypothesis made by the Greeks on the nature of the visible universe was that made by Heraklides of Samos (388-315 BC) who, in a variant of Anaximander’s idea, suggested the movement of the stars might be due to the movement of the earth rather than Aristotle’s crystalline spheres. He also suggested the planets Mercury and Venus orbited the sun: an idea that persisted for centuries, and had significant consequences for the development of modern astronomy.

The travels and conquests of Aristotle’s protégée, Alexander the Great, spread Greek astrology widely. Alexander (356-323 BC) founded the Egyptian city of Alexandria, where, after his death, its library became a centre for the study of astronomia.

An Early Horoscope

A horoscope of this period consisted of a map of the heavens, for a given time, that included the positions—in the circle of the Zodiac—of the sun, moon and the five known planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. It was divided into eight or twelve sections, called loci or houses, each of which governed a specific sphere of life. The relationship of the Zodiac to these houses was fixed by the horoscopus—the degree of the Zodiac rising in the eastern horizon at the time of birth. This was also called the ascendere—or ascendant.

Despite this sophistication, the tabulated positions of the planets were crude estimates of their true positions, and it would take another few centuries of observation for mathematical astronomy to develop adequately to make them much more accurate.

Aristarchus of Samos (320-315 BC) produced the remarkably modern ideas that the stars were infinitely far away from us, the sun at the centre of things, and the six known planets orbiting it. He also made credible estimates of the relative sizes of the sun, earth, and moon. But, despite these insights, the Aristotelian dogma of an earth-centred universe with planets moving in perfect circles in the unchanging firmament, with us, beneath, in the sublunary sphere, at the centre of things, was to continue for another eighteen hundred years.

Meanwhile Hipparchus (146-127 BC), had replaced Aristotle’s idea of a series of spherical planetary orbits with that of complex wheel-like movements called, epicycles. By now Greek astrology had an almost modern feel about it, and its tools of prognostication would be familiar to most astrologers today.

Hipparchus also described the phenomenon known as, ‘the precession of the equinox,’ whereby, due to certain movements of the earth in its orbit of the sun, it moves backwards slightly each year through the signs of the Zodiac. This phenomenon gives rise to the astrological concept of ‘The Great Year,’ which gives us the well known astrological ‘Ages’ of Pisces, Taurus, Aquarius, and so on.

Claudius Ptolemy

In the second century AD, Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria (100178) wrote a famous astronomical book called, The Great Work (in Arabic, Almagest), which was influential until at least the seventeenth century. Ptolemy applied his findings to astrology in his Tetrabiblos, where he gave a comprehensive account of astrological tradition including a discussion of the use of numbers in this respect. He also spoke of astrological medicine, and the distinction between physical and mental illnesses, referring to the latter as, ‘diseases of the soul.’

Astrology and Prophecy

There had probably always been some link between astrology and magical arts—particularly prediction. Indeed a branch of astrology discussed by Ptolemy refers to what modern astrologers term, progressions: one of a number of practices whereby the movements of the planets are used in a symbolic manner, to attempt to predict future events.

Europe

Astrology declined along with much else during the Dark Ages in Europe, though there was a revival before the twelfth century when Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) adopted the rediscovered teachings of Aristotle, which were to dominate the Western world for the next two centuries. Aquinas also stated that whereas a circular path of the sun would not produce any changes on earth, its oblique path does. This was an inspired observation and a forerunner of modern views on how the stars do affect us, as we’ll see.

The Italian philosopher, Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) greatly assisted the reintegration of esoteric ideas into Western culture. He was sympathetic to the use of astrology in medicine, and suggested the planets might physically affect us at the time of our births. This sort of questioning attitude was starting to replace blind devotion to the stars in the affairs of both men and state, though the more traditional view was still being expressed by such as the famous Swiss physician, Paracelsus (1493-1541) who formally stated that, … all the influences that come from the planets … act invisibly on man, and if they are evil, they will cause evil effects.

Copernicus and the Sun-Centred World

In 1473, Nicholas Copernicus was born in Poland, and our understanding of the world as a place where the earth stood still and the sun moved around it in a predictable manner was about to change forever.7

Copernicus (1473-1543)—a Canon of the Church and a physician—learned how Aristarchus had thought the earth moved round the sun. He gave this idea his due consideration, and found he agreed with it. He went on to discuss this in depth in his book, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, which, in part due to concerns about the Church’s reaction, he locked away for almost thirty years. It remained hidden until a close associate of Martin Luther called, Andreas Osiander (1498-1552), published it, and, in so doing, changed history.

Copernicus was followed by Johannes Kepler (1571-1630): born, in 1571, in Ulm, Germany. At the age of twenty-four, Kepler realised that the ‘Pythagorean solids’—those figures, like the pyramid and cube, with sides inscribable into a sphere—almost exactly encompassed the orbits between the planets.

Kepler’s astrology was very specific, and it seems he preferred to leave prophecies and predictions