Читать книгу Astrology: The only introduction you’ll ever need - Charles Harvey - Страница 28
AS ABOVE, SO BELOW
ОглавлениеAs Above, So Below that the miracle of the Unity may be petuated.
HERMES TRISMEGISTUS, THE EMERALD TABLETS
Astrology studies the arrangement of planets in the solar system at a particular moment in order to determine the potential of an individual or other entity born at that moment.
In terms of current Western thought, this seems utterly irrational. Viewed holistically, it is entirely reasonable, for the universe is not only a unity in itself, it is a unity of unities. And, as the Platonists pointed out, ‘all unities are identical in essence’. In this way, as the legendary Hermes indicates, ‘the miracle of the Unity is perpetuated’.
The Cosmos itself, and each part of the cosmos including we human beings, is ‘made in the image’ of the ONE, the ‘God Thought’ which thinks creation into existence. In this way, the essential pattern of the ONE is both literally and metaphorically present in every part of Creation, from super-galaxy to solar system, to man, to a cell in the body, to an atom and to the last and least of things. Everything, in this sense, is a metaphor of the primary music of the One and the gods, the original Word.
These sound like very elevated ideas, and one might ask how we get from this sublime oneness down to the rest of the mundane world. That question belongs in another book, but suffice it to say that the ONE expresses itself at each level of creation in very different ways. We see this principle at work in genetics. Hence the possibility of cloning and the re-creation of an entity from a single cell of the original whole, an idea which was exploited to such dramatic effect in the film Jurassic Park. Every cell in an organism contains the instructions for making the whole organism. A blood cell and a skin cell and a hair cell contain identical genetic information, although their actual manifest functions are quite different. At the most basic level, they are each made ‘in the image of the one’, and yet each just gets on with its own job. The ‘wholeness’ of the body needs each cell to do just that.
Likewise, in the life cycle of, for example, a butterfly, it is impossible to see any obvious resemblance between a butterfly’s egg, the caterpillar, the dried-up brown chrysalis, and the colourful new butterfly. Yet each phase leads on in an ordered, intelligent way to the next, and finally to the flowering of the whole organism; genetically each phase contains identical information.
By analogy, a galaxy and a solar system and a man or woman may look very different. But in real terms each is a different expression of the same basic ‘God Thought’. This is what is meant by such cryptic statements as ‘man is made in the image of God’, ‘man is a solar system in miniature’, ‘microcosm and macrocosm are identical in essence’, and what Origen (AD 185–254) meant when he said ‘Thou art a second world in miniature, the Sun and Moon are within thee, and also the stars.’
This invisible bond between Above and Below is invoked every day around the world in the words of the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.’ This is the key to astrology. By studying the orderly movements of the planetary ‘gods’ of the solar system, which contains Earth and all its life, the astrologer is studying the conditions of the Above, in order to understand what is going on Below in the individual ‘cells of consciousness’, such as you and me.