16
Mark wrote:
Rest assured Deb , you have nothing to fear. My take on the astrological community...
Sad, but so very true.... Astrology is so very broad that it needs each of us to be a spokesman for the puzzle piece that speaks to us. Maybe some day we'll all come together, and the puzzle pieces will form a beautiful and complete mandala. (All right....maybe not in my lifetime...)
Last edited by Therese Hamilton on Thu Mar 06, 2014 1:41 am, edited 1 time in total.
http://www.snowcrest.net/sunrise/LostZodiac.htm

17
Thanks, Deb-- on both counts.

Therese and Margherita, thanks for your useful information.

One point that might be worth teasing out from some of the sun definitions (breath, soul, intellectual light) is the distinction between the sun as the ball of fire moving predictably around the ecliptic; and the sun as "the universal god manifested in the sun." (Campion, Astrol. & Cosmol. 89-90.)

Sometimes in Antiquity we get the concept of light as existing prior to and independently of the sun, and it is this light that is intended in the primary esoteric spiritual sense. (Wright, Cosmol. in Antiquity 110-113,cf. Genesis 1-2, John 1 in the Bible.) The "ether" (aither, aether) existed above the near-earth atmosphere, and was the home of the gods, the source of religious beliefs. It was particularly associated with the air (intellect) and fire (animation) elements when it wasn't given its own status as the fifth element.

Similarly, to a lot of ancient people, the seat of life itself was in the breath (Genesis 2 again) which is probably why our words "inspire", "spiritual", and "respiration" have the same root. This belief predates the Greek idea that that the ether was the source of divine "breath" given to animate humanity.

Jupiter, incidentally, as the fertile, supreme, philosophical, all-father god of Greece and Rome, was originally a weather god. He brought the crucial autumn rains, but also thunder and lightning. Possibly this made him a less suitable astrological candidate than his son Apollo or his earlier prototype: the Titan Helios. Apollo was already the god of prophecy (i. e., communicating the gods' will) prior to becoming associated with the sun.

The astronomical sun of daily life, time-keeping, astrology, and weather could be either beneficial or harmful. But the esoteric light and air qualities, associated with the gods and a supernatural heavenly sphere, could be only beneficial. But how to import these etheral qualities into astrology?

Of the planets, the astrological sun, alone or in combination, was the most logical choice. And so far, so good. We know about the sun as the source of life from science class. The ancients would have understood how plants respond to light and die when kept in persistent darkness, as well. So a literal and esoteric meaning could be conjoined, although not without some slippage between different meanings attributed to the sun prior to the codification of its attributes.

18
Hi
The Sun represents our ideals as these illuminate the soul,our assumptions,conscious or not.
We all have a set of general assumptions and motivations.The traveller scratches his head at the idea of becoming a Monk,the business man cannot grasp what motivates the junkie.
We are a big mess of contradictions,it is the Sun that brings them together to bring some coherence in life,just like the physical Sun uses gravity to pull other planets.
If the ASC sign is weak,like the dispersive gemini or pisces,it won`t be easy to realize the Sun`s nature,especially if it is a demanding Sun,like Leo,with its heroic ideals
my 2 cents

19
One possibility that I dont think has been raised here yet concerns whether the view of the sun in the ancient astrology may at times have reflected heliocentric pagan religious thinking in ancient culture. Certain pagan beliefs were heavily focused on sun worship such as the cult of Sol Invictus.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol_Invictus

The Mithras cult also seems to have been centred on a Sun God. Thus even without an explicit adoption of a heliocentric cosmology in mystical spiritual terms the sun often had special associations.

Some sources go even further though. An excellent example of such heliocentric thinking comes from Emperor Julian (aka Julian the Apostate). Julian lived in the 4th century (331/332CE ?363CE). Julian sought to reverse the advance of Christianity in the Empire and attempted a synthesis of various pagan traditions (neo-Platonism, Stoic asceticism, Goddess worship etc), with a particular emphasis on a universal solar cult.

Like the Stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius before him Julian was a scholar and cultivated person, an emperor who was also a philosopher and an author.

From a passage in his texts he even appears as a forerunner of Copernicus more than eleven centuries earlier! He believed that the planets revolve around the Sun, following circular orbits in well-defined distances. This passage (from the Hymn to King Helios) reads:
?For the planets round about him (the Sun), as though he were their king, lead on their dance, at appointed distances from him pursue their orbits with the utmost harmony; they make, as it were, pauses; they move backwards and forwards (terms by which those skilled in Astronomy denote these properties of the stars)?
Emperor Julian was destined to be the last and greatest champion of the ancient Pagan faiths. Julian's death in battle in his early 30's leading his armies in Persia finally closed down the option of an ongoing pagan Roman Empire.

From the death of Julian onwards the position of those holding pagan beliefs in the empire gradually deteriorated. The emperors who came after Julian were Christian, they made the Church supreme, dismantled pagan religious traditions and eventually persecuted those still upholding pagan beliefs in the Empire.

Mark
As thou conversest with the heavens, so instruct and inform thy minde according to the image of Divinity William Lilly

20
Interesting points, Mark.

I will have to check on my sources when I get home (currently checking email from a coffee house in the Four Corners area) but I would suggest that the sun is a more important **early** god in places without a dependence upon unpredictable rainfall for their agriculture; whereas the supreme god is more likely to be a god of rainfall, thunder, and lightning in places dependent upon Mediterranean winter rains. Examples of the former would be Egypt; the latter would be the early Greeks with Zeus (aka Jove) and Israelites with the God whose unspeakable name (Hebrew yod-hey-vav-hey) came out as Jehovah. One has to wonder how the planet Jupiter became associated with the "All-Father" given the obvious pre-eminence of the sun in the sky. I think it was because of the significance of rainfall to the non-riverine Mediterranean societes.

By late Antiquity, there was so much syncretism that we begin to lose these early meanings and connections.

21
Waybread wrote:
I will have to check on my sources when I get home (currently checking email from a coffee house in the Four Corners area) but I would suggest that the sun is a more important **early** god in places without a dependence upon unpredictable rainfall for their agriculture; whereas the supreme god is more likely to be a god of rainfall, thunder, and lightning in places dependent upon Mediterranean winter rains. Examples of the former would be Egypt; the latter would be the early Greeks with Zeus (aka Jove) and Israelites with the God whose unspeakable name (Hebrew yod-hey-vav-hey) came out as Jehovah. One has to wonder how the planet Jupiter became associated with the "All-Father" given the obvious pre-eminence of the sun in the sky. I think it was because of the significance of rainfall to the non-riverine Mediterranean societes.
Hello Waybread,

I'm sorry but I am not really clear what practical implication you think any of this has for the nature of the Sun that has passed down to us in hellenistic astrology? :-?

Mark
As thou conversest with the heavens, so instruct and inform thy minde according to the image of Divinity William Lilly

22
Mark wrote: Apr 12, 2014 10:55 am
One possibility that I dont think has been raised here yet concerns whether the view of the sun in the ancient astrology may at times have reflected heliocentric pagan religious thinking in ancient culture. Certain pagan beliefs were heavily focused on sun worship such as the cult of Sol Invictus.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol_Invictus

The Mithras cult also seems to have been centred on a Sun God. Thus even without an explicit adoption of a heliocentric cosmology in mystical spiritual terms the sun often had special associations.
In fact, Giordano Bruno's strong support for the Copernican heliocentric system was directly based on the Sun's prominent role in ancient Hermetic Gnosis (see Frances A. Yates: Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition).

23
Hi Mark-- just another fly-by message as I check my email from a public library while traveling. I was trying to suggest that today it seems very natural for us to situate the sun at the metaphorical center of astrology, even with our geocentric model. I am not sure that the founders of ancient astrology always did this. Their supreme god-king and All-Fathers were generally more like Jupiter, with the signal exception of the Egyptians. The Babylonian sky god Marduk (I believe) evolved into Zeus and thus Roman Jupiter: both as a planet and as a god who thundered and gave or withheld rain. (Cf. the Hebrew concepts of God in the OT.) One would think that if the sun were all-supreme, to the ancient Hellenists, as it was in Egypt, that the god Zeus would have been the sun god, but this doesn't seem to be the case.

24
waybread wrote: I was trying to suggest that today it seems very natural for us to situate the sun at the metaphorical center of astrology, even with our geocentric model. I am not sure that the founders of ancient astrology always did this.
Hi waybread,

Just as well! I get annoyed no end when I see western astrologers downplaying the sheer power of the Sun as symbolised in astrological charts. Glad to see the importance of the Sun as the creator of life and thus existence... period! No sun = No life, its a no brainer..
The founders of ancient astrology had limited perception of reality of existence as we now know it today. How could they have it any other way? They only did what they could at the time.

All of there philosophies, concepts and any other views about life and existence will always be limited by what they observed in their part of the world, in their time and the way they compared human behavior characteristics in their populations with physically observed astrological phenomenon.

Remember, these are civilizations that thought the earth was flat! :lol:
Libra Sun/ Pisces Moon/ Sagittarius Rising

25
RodJM wrote:Just as well! I get annoyed no end when I see western astrologers downplaying the sheer power of the Sun as symbolised in astrological charts. Glad to see the importance of the Sun as the creator of life and thus existence... period! No sun = No life, its a no brainer..
The founders of ancient astrology had limited perception of reality of existence as we now know it today. How could they have it any other way? They only did what they could at the time.
One could argue that we are no closer to, and perhaps further away from, any sort of grasp of "reality" today. Being able to measure the effects of something to a minute level does not equate to an understanding of it.
Remember, these are civilizations that thought the earth was flat! :lol:
Ah, they really didn't. You might want to read up a bit on that.
http://www.esmaraldaastrology.wordpress.com

26
Hi, Rod-- actually some of the ancient Greeks figured out that the earth was round: the "flat earth" idea is kind of a myth that we moderns have about people in the past. The Greeks miscalculated the actual size of the earth, but they knew it wasn't a big pancake when they saw the masts of outbound ships disappearing below the horizon, learned that daylight varied with latitude, and so on.

They also knew the sun was big and important, but for ancient agriculturalists living in a dry or seasonally-dry climate, water was terribly important to their celestial calendars, as well. The Egyptian calendar was pegged to the onset of the Nile floods-- it wasn't strictly solar. Rain was crucial to the ancient Greeks: see, for example, Hesiod's Works and Days that preceded the development of horoscopic astrology.

People in hot desert or seasonally rainless countries (like Babylon, parts of India, the Mediterranean, Persia, and Egypt) are well aware of the sun's destructive capabilities in ways that people who live all their lives in temperate climates can't imagine.

The ideas that water signs are the "fruitful" signs for planting (whereas sun-ruled Leo is "barren") and that the supreme father-gods (with whom the planet Jupiter was identified) might be a weather god rather than a sun god seem instructive.

This is why I am reluctant to read our modern science-class knowledge or medieval northern European sensitivities back into Hellenistic astrology and its forerunners. We do have to try to understand seasons and celestial objects as the ancients understood them.

27
Waybread wrote:
The Greeks miscalculated the actual size of the earth, but they knew it wasn't a big pancake when they saw the masts of outbound ships disappearing below the horizon, learned that daylight varied with latitude, and so on.
Actually, the calculation made by Eratosthenes (c. 276 BCE?c. 195/194 BCE) was remarkably close to the actual circumference of the earth.

http://www.windows2universe.org/citizen ... _size.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8On7yCU1EjQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8cbIWMv0rI


Mark
As thou conversest with the heavens, so instruct and inform thy minde according to the image of Divinity William Lilly