Читать книгу Astrology: The only introduction you’ll ever need - Charles Harvey - Страница 35

The ancients spoke of the Creator as the Great Geometrician. This is because the greatest minds in all the ancient cultures observed that all living entities developed, or emerged from potential into manifestation, through an ordered, logical and numerical process. Pythagoras was the first to develop the science of number to a sophisticated level. He and his followers learned to think in numbers, to reflect upon realities in their progressive states. And to these progressive states they gave the names of numbers.

The Pythagoreans believed that the first 10 numbers contained the secret of all things, and that each of the first decade of numbers was a primary creative principle in the Cosmos, indeed a God.

Number in the deepest sense relates to the creative processes of the cosmos. With regards to the birth, flowering, and death of any entity, number describes the archetypal relationship between part and whole.

Archetypal number is at the heart of astrology. We come to understand ‘two-ness’ in the two-fold division of positive and negative signs, in the ascendant (self) – descendant (other) axis, which divides the chart into an upper horizon section (more extrovert) and lower horizon section (more introvert). We grapple with ‘three-ness’ in the three modes of expression – cardinal, fixed and mutable; and with ‘four-ness’ in the four elements – fire, earth, air, water – and also in the four angles of the chart, ascendant (east), descendant (west), midheaven (south), and immum coeli (north). The 12 signs of the zodiac are made up of the three modes and four elements. And the unfolding cycles of the planets express themselves through number in the aspects. The study of astrology is the study of the rhythms of the universe as they relate to the individual, and rhythm is number. From this point of view, astrology connects us to the inner reality of things, if we are sufficiently sensitive to perceive the mystery unfolding before our very eyes.