Heaven, Earth, & Humankind: Three Spheres, Three Light Cycles, Three Modes Volume I Days and Seasons

By William Wadsworth

Dedicated to fellow travelers: Charan Singh, Gurinder Singh, Jane Gray
Clarke, Danni and Anna Gold, Duncan Laurie, Lonny Jarrett, Don Cook,
Bjorn Von Schleburg, Constance Cappel, Pat Wadsworth, Joe Balani, Chloe
Wordsworth, Nicole Schatz, Charu Desai, Sr. Anne ODonnel

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493184934

Book preview

Copyright © 2014 by William Wadsworth.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2014904886

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-4931-8494-1

                Softcover         978-1-4931-8495-8

                eBook              978-1-4931-8493-4

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 05/16/2014

Xlibris LLC

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

541502

CONTENTS

Introduction

I. Orientation

BOOK I

The Horizon and the Daily Cycle

Chapter 1 The Sun in Context

Chapter 2 The Perspective of the Diurnal Cycle in the Astrological Chart

Chapter 3 Meditating on the Daily Clock

Chapter 4 Principles of Day and Night Applied to Visible Planets

Mercury

Venus

Mars

Jupiter

Saturn

Chapter 5 The Dual Interpretation of the Invisible Planets and Asteroids

Neptune Coruler of Pisces and Sagittarius

Pluto: The Coruler of Aries and Scorpio

The Asteroids

Chapter 6 Nature as Metaphor, the Modern Contributions to Understanding the Daily Cycle

Chapter 7 The Human Side of Day and Night in the Birth Chart

I. Heaven and Earth: Midday, Midnight

II. The Horizon: Dawn and Dusk

Appendix 1 Basic Terms of Astrology

The Prime Qualities

Elements

Aspects

Great Cycles

Lunations

Precession of the Equinoxes

Endnotes

Dedicated to fellow travelers: Charan Singh, Gurinder Singh, Jane Gray Clarke, Danni and Anna Gold, Duncan Laurie, Lonny Jarrett, Don Cook, Bjorn Von Schleburg, Constance Cappel, Pat Wadsworth, Joe Balani, Chloe Wordsworth, Nicole Schatz, Charu Desai, Sr. Anne O’Donnel

HEH%20Figure%201%20Three%20vert%20copy.jpg

Introduction

I have devised this mirrour, or cosmographical glass, in which men will behold not one or two persons, but the heavens with her planets and starres, the’earth with her beautiful Regions and the seas with her merveilous increases.

—William Cunningham, The Cosmographical Glasse (1598)

Traditional astrology is based on human experience. Every year light increases from the winter solstice to the summer solstice and then declines. Every month, moonlight increases to the full moon and then declines. And every day, light increases until noon then declines. Ceaseless gradations of light match ceaseless change in nature. Day is different than night as is our experience of it. We experience alterations in visibility, temperature, humidity, and mood. We are thrilled, frightened, hungry, or tired accordingly. This is the background behind all experience. The veil of nature shimmers with reflected light, and so if we observe nature closely, we know ourselves better. Cosmographers in the premodern era like Cunningham appreciated the wonder and beauty of these great cycles and accepted as fact their importance in human affairs. Sometimes by thinking about our ancestral past and how we would experience a world free of motors, lighting, and digital technology, we may see our potential for expanded awareness and human happiness.

If we read deeply into astrological tradition, we understand that prominent stars only had distinctive value in to relation the light cycles, their brightness, and ancient creation myths. The culture carried the meaning of Arcturus or the Pleiades as much as the light. Lunar cycles were familiar as landmarks for hunting or war, planting or harvest, and medical rituals, which devolved into festivals and ceremony. Every day has a special rhythm according to differing geographical conditions. So within every world culture, we find naturalistic wisdom about local geography, plants, and animals connected to heavenly objects but organized by the three great light cycles as they relate to local conditions. Everyone understood that the light cycles were responsible for natural transformations and it was not much of a stretch to see that these visible changes would influence human behavior as well. In a traditional cosmos, man was part of nature. The stars and relations between bodies in heaven always were understood in relation to movement on earth. These phased light cycles paralleled if they did not in fact cause human experience. What has changed?

Our habitat and culture determine whether our day starts at dawn or at sunset. Although location defines our desert sky or foggy northern coast, the cycles provide the framework of the whole. The balance of prime qualities of heat, cold, moisture, and dryness in any location was and is connected to the combination of geography and the light cycles. In this regard, the European Renaissance saw the development of a discipline called chorography that described the effects of the local balance of these prime qualities on diet, health, and culture. This can be considered an early form of anthropology, epidemiology, or sociology and was very useful to physicians when they advised patients about where to live and to navigators when they tried to interact with newly discovered civilizations. The stars are fixed, but our lives, like those in the world around us, are in motion. The stars describe the widest possible context and perspective within which all other contexts can be evaluated and each environment always has its own characteristics and influence. In this sense, astrology, fundamentally, is local not universal, and the traits attributed to the stars are pervasively local having to do with how we on earth interpret the effects of their geometry and position.

People live in a geographical location, but everywhere they survive, communicate, and philosophize using metaphor. Language and symbols give us leverage and power. Today, as in the past, when we think of the words heaven, earth, and horizon, we can visualize their complex cloud of experiential associations. For heaven, we might think of sunrise and clouds; for earth, the smell of earth and flowers; for horizon, a wide landscape filled with life or the tribe dancing around a fire. But the other part of these verbal narratives is metaphoric, and metaphor in turn becomes the basis of all myth, literature, and science. The title of this book, Heaven, Earth, and Humankind, refers to the combination of literal experience and metaphoric meaning that accrue to these three vertical levels of experience and association.

In this metaphoric and geometric next step, our ancestors wisely linked heaven’s empty space and clouds to consciousness and thought and then to God in heaven, and birds to inspiration, and planets and stars to essential defining human archetypes, such as intelligence (Mercury), love (Venus), war (Mars), leadership (Jupiter), and struggle (Saturn). For earth they developed narratives around the clashing titanic forces of nature to better understand the urges of love, the annual cycle of growth and decline, and animal migrations that so fill the earth with comparatively huge benign and horrible scenes of terror and happiness. Chinese sages have long associated human consciousness and social life with the horizon where we live. All living creatures are the children of heaven and earth. The horizon is the intersection where yin and yang meet, so humankind refers to metaphoric connections made by Chinese sages between man and nature in an attempt to underline the importance not only of the human form but also, metaphorically, of human consciousness. Thus, when we speak of the three great cycles of light, we are speaking literally and metaphorically about the mandate of heaven defined by the annual solar cycle that drives and organizes the seasons, with all its wealth of metaphoric value. We link, as our ancestors did, the twelve annual lunations with the terrestrial transformations on earth, with fertility, mating, and rules necessary to survival of individuals and families. We link all the complex facts, laws, and status issues with literary and valuations connected to human civilization with the horizon and its dynamic metaphors.

The only universal in a cosmos based on experience is the wide perspective offered by the stars, not their intrinsic traits. Every kind of information that we attribute to planets and stars is stored in that house or landscape of heaven that we identify with our local place on earth, and with it, all our records and cultural lessons remain forever linked to this metaphoric knowledge of the stars. What was learned in the past about basic connections with the world will forever remain useful in the present.

The core of all ancient attempts to describe cause in local circumstances lies in cyclic movement between opposites of light and darkness. The diurnal rhythm of day and night, yang and yin, is the root of philosophy and narrative. Based on that, every other opposition of traits developed such as hot or cold, moisture or dryness, blustery or calm, misty or clear, active or passive, high or low, strong or weak, or angry or patient. This fundamental dualism of light and dark establishes the framework of human experience. Robert Fludd’s metaphysical image beautifully shows how the divine unity behind the sacred world order divided itself into light and darkness and conceived good and evil, whose principles play out as separate domains that reunite and reflect in the cosmic flux of day and night, which then are experienced by people as two fundamentally different poles of physical experience that include life and death, pleasure and suffering, joy and sorrow. The congruence between cosmos and experience was not missed by sages of the past when they contemplated on the meaning of life and death.

Figure 1: Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi… Historia (1621).

HEH%20Figure%201a%20Yin%20and%20Yang.jpg

The visible and mobile planets always were distinguished from the fixed location of other stars, but both were identified with light phases by their colors and regular patterns of movement. Spring verdure is green; summer heat, red-faced and sweaty. Harvest is colorful; late summer, yellow; autumn, brittle and frosty white; winter, dark and cold, and skin turns blue. By association then, the colors of the major fixed stars that rise and set seasonally along the ecliptic merely reflect now as then the better understood planetary cycles of departure and return. The moon completes its motion through the zodiac in twenty-eight days Saturn in twenty-eight years. The sun takes twelve lunar months and Jupiter moves in twelve years. These parallels mirror their links to yang (day and metaphor) and yin (night and metaphor). A red star would be considered yang and assertive like mars, others as fruitful and warm like the sun and all similars would be given the same active, light-filled masculine attributions. Brilliant blue-green stars were progressive and sanguine like Jupiter and springtime growth, while cool rational light matched the strong contrasts between bare limbs, and shadow, reflecting intellectual traits of autumn Mercury and Saturn; silvery brilliance echoed yin character of Venus and the moon. To these correlations was added the sympathy of numbers that seemed to reflect a perfectly ordered divine order. But always, behind the attributive and associated meanings of colors and the timing of planetary movement in relation to the greater daily or seasonal flux of light, lay the protoscience that attempted to explain the seasonal imagery, meaning, and myths.

The waxing and waning of solar light organizes life on earth. The three great cycles of light all have their basis in sunlight, and the cycles have operated all through the course of human evolution. They define the typical periods of activity and rest, the agricultural cycles, and even periods of physiological and psychological activity, fluid pressure, and other bodily processes. Our bodies come from the world and have all its functions, chemically and physiologically. Even consciousness itself can be said to be merely a function of the whole.

Astrology and traditional cosmology always has affirmed that consciousness is a result of the interaction between humans and their world, not just an ideal within the brain, or in contrast, as in the ancient world, something that only derives from an objective outer world. In that sense, astrology as a protoscience always employed an interactive model that matches well the present nonlinear, postmodern worldview. The pivotal cycles of light derived from the sun, the moon, and the horizon are the annual increase and decrease in solar light that generates the seasons, the waxing and waning of moonlight that organizes the months, and the daily cycle of light and darkness whose defining moments are dawn, sunset, noon, and midnight. Locally, visible growth, harvests, and migrations predictably arise and decline in the wake of these motions. Insofar as human experience is measured and explained by these great patterns, they justify at least the attention given by astrologers to the hundreds of precisely calculated symbolic meanings and abstract harmonics attributed to the heavens. The conclusion of my study of the roots of astrology through historical research and meditation on subjective experience is that among real conditions symbolically shown in the astrological chart, the cycles of light are primary. While planetary position, motion, and magnitude are activating and illuminating factors, they only embellish the meaning of the cycles and the sun, moon, and ascendant that symbolize them. These great cycles obviously and seamlessly weld humans to the world around them.

Human experience lends credence to the traditional geometrical worldview, which persists culturally despite centuries of calculus and scientific dismissal. Although