By Trevor Hazle
Where did the concept of astrology originate. Did it evolve in one part of the world and then turn out to be adopted by other civilizations.Whenever you study the ancient civilizations within the Middle East, Central America and in Asia, you'll find remarkable similarities in how they adapted their lives to be in harmony with the rhythms of earth and the cosmos. Consider that you will discover pyramids in Mayan and Aztec cultures, too as Egyptian ones. And that lots of pyramids are constructed around and point to key events within the solar system, for example equinoxes and solstices.Similarly, astrology is thought to have developed independently in Babylon and Central America. The astrology systems in India and China most likely were derived from those in Babylon.It's curious that lots of fundamentalist religions reject the principles of astrology, since it was, actually, an integral component of the religions of Babylon. It was part of the calling of priests in Babylon to predict the future and component of their methodology for doing so was to interpret events in the sky. Nothing was considered pure chance and any natural occurrence, no matter how mundane or mysterious, could be an omen of either excellent fortune or bad.
The part of Mesopotamia which is now Iraq once comprised Babylonia in the South and Assyria within the North. Prior to Alexander the Fantastic conquered the area in 330 BC, the Assyrians had been a military and administrative power, and Babylon was the center of culture. The underlying belief system in both cultures was that there was a spiritual force behind every single act of nature. Heaven and Earth were complementary systems, with neither 1 having dominion over the other. But by the 4th century BCE, this belief system was influenced by the Greek view that the heavens, and its resident gods, determined events on earth.According to Richard Tarnas, who also wrote of The Passion of the Western Mind, history is on the verge of a major shift, comparable to the one wrought by Copernicus and Galileo, but a seemingly antiscientific one: an astrological turn that can only be understood thorough chronicling planetary alignments as they correlate to the rise of the modern mind over the last 500 years.
Understanding planetary alignments, for Tarnas, is crucial to the world's future and requires a genuine dialogue with the cosmos, by opening ourselves far more fully to the other, to ancient and indigenous epistemologies, even to other forms of life, other modes of the universe's self-disclosure.The book is filled with philosophical, religious, literary and scientific thinking ranging from Luther and Kepler by means of Hemingway and even Hitchcock and Dylan. Reading it will need a strong background within the history of modern thought, an advanced knowledge of astrology, a willingness to withhold skepticism about the role of planetary alignments of the past in understanding life these days and also the avoidance of imminent world catastrophe. Tarnas's call to redefine what we take into consideration as legitimate knowledge will resonate in some sectors, but it will be a tough sell with the a lot more scientifically hardheaded.
In terms of planetary cycles, our present condition in history is most comparable to the period 5 hundred years ago-that era of extraordinary turbulence and creativity, the High Renaissance. Not since Copernicus conceived the heliocentric theory has the human community faced such a profound realignment of the way we believe.Maybe it's time for us to move back to the philosophy that man is part of the universe, not placed here to conquer it. Just as we're discovering some older medical procedures, like the use of leeches, to have value right now, perhaps we need to open our minds to the distinct possibility that astrological forces may be an effective influence on our lives.
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