Читать книгу Astrology: The only introduction you’ll ever need - Charles Harvey - Страница 7

It is deeply unfortunate that for much of the general public the word astrology instantly means the Lottery’s Mystic Meg and breathless mediums peering into crystal balls. As the great French surrealist poet, critic and philosopher André Breton (1896–1966) lamented:

I see astrology as a very great lady, most beautiful, and coming from such a great distance that she cannot fail to hold me under her spell. In the purely physical world, I see nothing that has assets to emulate hers. She seems to me, besides, to hold one of the noblest secrets of the world. What a shame then, that nowadays – at least for the common masses – a prostitute reigns in her place.

Since Breton wrote that, the media’s trivialization of the ‘very great lady’ has become even more widespread. In consequence, no one who has not studied a book on real astrology could possibly understand why some of the very greatest minds and creative individuals down the centuries have preoccupied themselves with its study. From Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus and Proclus to St Thomas Aquinas, Kepler, Galileo, Goethe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, W.B. Yeats and Jung and many, many more, the Royal Art and Science has proved to be a source of deep fascination, inspiration and guidance. And, despite the contemptuous guffaws of scientific orthodoxy, it still continues to enthral the minds of some of our finest contemporary thinkers, and to be used, behind the scenes, by some of the world’s leading figures. So what is astrology’s noble secret?

Astrology’s noble secret is rooted in the fact that she preserves an ancient understanding of the temporal cosmos as:

 the flowing image of the Eternal God Thought;

 a living, intelligent, purposeful entity in which part and whole dance together in resonance to the music of the spheres;

 a hierarchy of levels of order in which the higher levels order the lower and in which the apparent random activity here on Earth below can be seen to be orderly behaviour when viewed from the heavens above.

We explore the key principles of this understanding of the cosmos in the next chapter. But first we need to look briefly at some of the key steps in the history of the evolving consciousness of the relationship between above and below, between time and eternity.