| Introduction
In
the 1970s I was living in Southern Africa and practicing
astrology in Johannesburg. The people who called
to consult me came with their desires and questions,
which I attempted to answer through the medium of
their astrological charts, as every astrologer has
done since the beginning of time. However, again
and again I felt as if there was another longing
beneath the desires they were voicing when they
came to consult me. I found myself listening, as
if with an inner ear, while I tried to divine exactly
what these deeper longings and desires might be.
During those years my life in Johannesburg was balanced
with equal time in the African bush. Especially
when traveling through deserts and other uninhabited
places, deep in starry nights, I wondered what was
the unspoken desire contained within the question
I was so often asked, "What do the stars sa?"
During
those years of my apprenticeship to astrology I
was fortunate to be working with Adrian Boshier
at the Museum of Man and Science in Johannesburg
on a project which involved sangomas;
the tribal healer-diviners of southern Africa. We
traveled all over African recording and transcribing
the arts and practices of different tribal ways
of healing and divining. During the course of this
work I became close to one or two of the female
sangomas who taught me a great deal about what it
was to be a diviner. They saw me as a diviner too,
one who "works with the spirits" as they
did, but in my case my spirits were the stars. Most
of the women I got to know used a method of divination
which was known as "throwing the bones".
The "bones" were all sorts of small objects
- bones, stones, shells, beads, engraved pieces
of wood or ivory - which were gathered over a period
of time and kept in a special bag. When someone
arrived for a divination they were taken out and
"thrown" on a mat. The subsequent pattern
told the sangoma not only why the seeker had come,
what they wanted, but all sorts of details about
the inner and outer life of the querent.
The
sangomas I worked with were highly trained in their
art of divination. They never forgot that they were
doing the "work of the spirits" and their
lives were marked by constant rituals of purification,
physical and spiritual practices which kept them
constantly aware that it was their work to attend
not only the physical but the spiritual lives of
their patients. The ancestors were the spirits with
whom they worked and who, through them, told their
patients what rituals or sacrifices were needed
to rebalance their inner and outer lives. Once,
in a village, late at night under the stars, I was
sitting with Dorcas, one of the older sangoma with
whom I had a close bond. I said, "Dorcas, when
you throw the bones you read what the spirits are
saying for your patients. What am I doing when I
read the stars?" She said, " Look up Da
- look at the stars. You can see that God threw
the bones, and it is your work to read them."
The
co-incidence of these two lives - town and bush
- gave me the foundation for the way I work today.
I learned, from these woman, that when I was "working
with the spirits" I must take the time and
space very seriously. I learned that people came
to me, as they did to the sangomas, with their desires
and longings around love and health and work and
their success and failure, and underneath these
questions there were other levels that had to be
addressed if any peace or healing was to take place.
I learned it was possible to create a private, sacred
space in which my clients felt something happen
that shifted their attention in such a way that
they could see their lives in a different perspective.
Spending so much of my time with diviners helped
me to find ways to access that space more readily.
When the energies were right, it became a space
of transformation for both my client and myself,
a space in which desire was put to rest for a moment.
By
the time I left Africa I knew that doing a chart
well was certainly depended on understanding the
mechanics of astrology - but through living so much
with those women I had absorbed something of their
constant attention to their spirits and also their
attention to keeping the space in which they worked
sacred.
Desire
In
the early 1980s I left Africa and came to live in
London where I eventually became involved with a
group of astrologers translating early astrological
texts from Latin into English. The group was set
up by Graeme Tobin of The Company of Astrologers.
Geoffrey Cornelius and Vernon Wells of the Company,
and Dr. Angela Voss, Phillip Weller, Donald Walker
and I were devoted members of the group at the time.
We met in a small satisfying room at the top of
the Artworkers Guild in Queen's Square, London,
where the COA had their school during those years.
It was a very exciting group because of the different
backgrounds that came together in the group and
the shared passion for the work.
In
the course of our translating we came across the
word desidero quite often. We simply
translated it as desire. Vernon took the word apart
and began looking at it. De - sire
he said, wasn't it extraordinary to never
have noticed? Someone had the Langenscheidt Shorter
Latin Dictionary and so we looked up desidero and
found "to long for, desire, wish for, require,
ask. . .to miss, lack, lose;" and "to
be lost." We noticed that it was constructed
from de and sidero, and
realized it must be connected with sidus,
star or constellation, from which our word sidereal
arises.
At
that time we were translating some of Marsilio Ficino's
astrological texts which had led us to examine Plotinus'
text on enchantment and the soul. (Enneads
IV ). We spent one afternoon exploring
a section of Ficino's commentary on Plotinus which
examines the idea that soul puts lures in the things
to which we will inevitably be drawn. (See Carol
Kaske's translation of Ficino's commentary on Plotinus
in the Liber de Vita Book 3,
Ch. 1, p. 245. ". . .let no man wonder that
Soul can be allured (allici )
as it were by material forms, since indeed she herself
has created baits of this kind suitable to herself,
to be allured thereby, and she always and willingly
dwells in them.")
This
word desidero coming into focus at the same time
as Plotinus' and Ficino's texts on the enchantment
of the soul set my imagination alight. I remembered
my discussions with the sangomas and my early sense
that people who came to diviners were asking something
more than they knew. I felt as though a trail had
been opened up in front of me.
And
so, at first with the Latin group, and later, on
my own, I began another kind of adventure to my
African one. Something had put a lure in the word
desidero and this lure took me on a journey of several
months through all kinds of dictionaries in all
kinds of places, but especially in the beautiful
British Library. This quest led me on a journey
I could not have imagined in my early days of practicing
astrology in Johannesburg, and certainly gave an
imaginative answer to my original question.
To
begin with I looked in the Shorter Oxford
English Dictionary for the definition
of desire. It was translated as "...that emotion
which is directed to the attainment or possession
of some object from which pleasure or satisfaction
is expected; longing, craving, a wish. to require."
From
there I went to the classical dictionary Lewis
& Short which told me that sidus
was "stars united in a figure, a group
of stars, hence a constellation." It was associated
with the Sancrit word svid which meant
to sweat or melt; the Greek sideros [sideros]
(molten) iron and then the Latin sudo, which
had the same meaning as the Sanscrit svid.
It was contrasted with stella which
could be used in the singular to denote a single
star. And so it had the image of stars melting together
to form the constellations: The sky full of stars
creating a kind of primal Rorschach at which early
desert, mountain and sea people gazed for centuries
until certain patterns melted together in shapes
that could be recognized and conveyed to each other.
Anyone who has spent months under a sky full of
stars know what I am talking about. We seem to have
been pattern seeking creatures for as long as we
have been on the Earth.
The
final definition in the listing was somewhat shocking
: "to be blasted or palsied by a constellation,
to be planet-struck or sun-struck." We know
from mythology that when the stars "melted"
into constellations they were experienced as something
more than pictures in the sky. This, however, was
something more powerful than I expected. I decided
not to track this notion of paralysis for now, but
to perhaps follow it at another time.
In
the Oxford Latin Dictionary Fascicle V
(1976) sidus - sideris, n, was "a heavenly
body (star, planet, etc.; even the sun and moon)
or night (when stars shine). the planets, constellations
as region, as marking seasons, considered as having
direct influence on human affairs." And again,
"As causing paralysis."
At
this point I looked up the prefix de in Lewis
& Short and found it was defined
as a preposition meaning "as far as" or
". . .the going out, departure, removal, or
separating of an object from any fixed point."
(They said that it held a middle place between ab ,
"away from, which denotes a mere external departure",
and ex "out of, which signifies
from the interior of a thing".) Furthermore,
by transference, it indicated "the quarter
from which motion proceeds (cf. ab )
from, and because motion is so often and naturally
downwards, down from. . ."
The
ambiguity of this de is intriguing. Desidero
denotes a separation, departure from, or,
paradoxically a moving out from, down from, the
stars. Is this desire, this "longing for something
lost" a something that comes from our stars,
or is it something that takes us away from our stars?
Next
I look up desidero in Lewis &
Short. It was similar to the Langenscheidt
and said "to long for, greatly wish for, to
desire something not possessed. . . with predominant
idea of lacking, wanting, to miss anything."
However, Lewis & Short also included the meaning
of losing something or to be missing or lost, and
finally, and somewhat surprisingly, at the time,
"to investigate, examine, discuss" though
the latter association was said to be rare.
There
were many other words associated with desidero
which extended the meaning to include a longing
for something once possessed or grief for the loss
of something once possessed, and the sense of having
once had something that once lost was felt as necessary.
So,
the word desire had its roots in the
Latin word which was associated with longing and
a sense of loss, or even grief. This sense of loss
seemed to be pointing to the stars - or certainly
our tendency to melt the stars in to constellations.
A
note in Lewis & Short said
that desidero was said to be etymologically associated
with considero, however they considered this association
dubious! I looked up considero.
Consider
The
very first bit of information under considero
was, and I quote "acc. to Corss. Nachtr.
pl 49 from sidus prop. to observe the
stars..." and I was referred back to desidero !
Otherwise the meanings attached to considero
were what one would expect; "to look
at closely, attentively, carefully, to inspect,
examine." All the other meanings of this word
and its associated words were unsurprising and so
I do not list them here. But, what a delightful
find :"from sidus prop. to observe
the stars..."
At
this point I was given an old copy of Chamber
Etymological Dictionary (the 1947
edition) and it gave the English verb desiderate
the expected meaning of "longing for
or desiring earnestly" something and then added
the meaning of "wanting or missing" but
they were not shy about their etymological associations:
"L. desidero, desideratum - from root of Consider."
In
the British Library I looked up desidero and
its associated words in the The Oxford
Latin Dictionary Fascicle V and found
their definitions similar to those I'd found in
Lewis & Short. However under desidero they
added "to want to know, raise the question."
And they were quite clear about the etymological
association with considero.
Back
in our translation group one of the others gave
me a slip of paper on which he had written a definition
from a dictionary and though he told me the reference
at the time, I lost the note and neither of us could
remember later. Also I never found the dictionary
myself. : Hermes had decided to play one of his
tricks. However I still have the paper with the
definition : "considerare - watch the
stars, for people by the coast, marine term."
It
suddenly seemed so obvious. A marine term. As far
as we know early navigators found their way across
the seas by the stars. Once they had 'melted' the
stars into patterns that could be recognized by
others they could then use these patterns, constellations,
to communicate their navigational routes. As the
heavens became a map by which one could navigate
the seas, I imagine it was also a map by which desert
people navigated their terrain.
A
friend showed me her copy of A Short Etymological
Dictionary of Modern English by Eric
Partirdge where I looked up the word Desire
again. It told me that "Desire, n. comes
from OF-MF desir, itself from desirer,
whence 'to desire': and desirer comes
from L. desiderare, (orig in augury) to cease
to see, regret the absence of, hence to seek, to
desire. . .desiderare was prob suggested
by considerare." Under Consider I read,
"To consider derives from OF-F considerable
and E considerable; to examine carefully,
prob orig a term in augury and therefore deriving
from sidus (o/s sider-), mostly in
pl sidera, the stars: if the s be sid-, the
i si-, the word is perh Medit: cf Eg siu."
It also told me that this word was from sidus,
which also generated Desiderare, to cease
to view, hence to regret the absence of. . .etc:"
This first intimation of a connection with augury
was immensely exciting : From navigation by the
stars to augury, another kind of navigation.
Soon
after that I discovered the French Dictionnaire
Etymologique de la Langue Latine. Histoire
des Mots in the library. First I looked
up sidus. It told me that sidus was connected
to considere and desidere from early
times and that "Ce sont sans doute d'anciens
terms de la langue augurale (ou marine), comme contemplari
auquel considere est souvent joint." So, the
writers of this book were without doubt that these
words were from the ancient language of augury (or
marine language) with which contemplari and
considere were often used together. According
to this reference these words passed into common
language and were subsequently lost. They then referred
me to contemplor .
Up
until now a pattern was forming that made sense
to me. Desidero was rooted in sidus
- desire, in the sense of longing for something
one had once possessed, was rooted in the stars.
This notion seemed beautifully appropriate. We don't
even have to look to Platonic and Neo-Platonic thought
for this idea, though we could start there. We had
been reading Ficino who refers to Plotinus and the
notion of desire as that which soul uses to draw
us to objects and people through which we will learn
of the deeper longing for something numinous and
eternal. But even on a physical level, science has
been telling us for a long time that all the elements
of our world come from the explosions of stars;
we ourselves do come from the stars in a very real
sense.
That
desidero was naturally connected to considero
seemed also clearly natural. We come from the stars
and we then navigate by them. But now, considero
and contemplor: that took me into a new territory.
And it seemed obvious in this new territory I was
going to find a temple somewhere. So I began to
follow this trail.
Contemplation
First
I looked up contemplo in Lewis & Short
and found that it was a collat. form of contemplor
and meant "to survey, behold, observe, consider,
contemplate, etc;" And contemplor was a deponent
verb and was "originally pertaining to the
lang. of augury." The entry referred me to
M. Terentius Varros' De Lingua Latina
written just over 2000 years ago, but it took
me some time to get there. Here, in Lewis
& Short, contemplor had the meanings,
not unexpectedly, of "looking at or viewing
attentively, surveying and beholding, observing
etc;" and finally considering and contemplating.
It then said that in classical prose and poetry
contemplate equaled considero.
And
so here we were, firmly in the early language of
augury. Once again I turned to the Oxford
Latin Dictionary Facsimile. Contemplo
had most of the expected meanings and it stated
the obvious : "con + templum." And then,
under contemplum, it said "a place for
observation in augury" but hedged its bets
by telling us that this was dubious. By this time
I had noticed that the word "dubious"
seemed to me to be a trail marker.
Several
days later I checked Chambers again.
Under Contemplate it said "to consider or look
at attentively" to meditate on or study: to
intend, v.i. to think seriously: to meditate."
and they traced it to the Latin contemplor,
contemplatus, which was "to mark out
carefully a templum or place for auguries
- con sig[nifying] completeness and templum."
It said to see Consider and Temple.
Under
Consider I found the usual definitions of looking
at closely or carefully : "to think or deliberate
on: to take into account: to attend to: to reward.
v.i. to think seriously or carefully: to deliberate."
And , to my delight, it said that Consider came
through French from the Latin considero and
was probably "a word borrowed from augury,
meaning to mark out the boundaries of a templum."
and it referred me back to contemplate which it
associated with the phrase "by the stars"
and quoted the Latin sidus, sideris,
a star."
Temple
Now
the connection between consider and contemplate
seemed obvious and it seemed to be everywhere I
looked.
Before
leaving my friend's house that evening I looked
up Temple under which it said, "(lit.) 'a small
space cut off' or 'marked out' esp. for religious
purposes: an edifice erected to a deity or for religious
purposes: a place of worship" and then referred
to the two inns of court in London which were formerly
occupied by the Knights Templars. From the Latin
it referred to templum and said it was probably
for temulum "a space marked out"
and then said it was a diminutive of tempus
for which it defined "a piece cut off".
(To this date I have not found a listing for temulum
in any of the dictionaries I have examined.)
There
was another listing for Temple which referred to
the temples on the side of the head and here Chambers
referred to the Old French temple and the
Latin tempus which it defined as "a
portion of time, the fit time" and down the
listing all words associated with temporal had this
idea of time and the world as opposed to the eternal
and the sacred.
At
this point I found another unreferenced note in
one of my notebooks: "Contemplation. ex
templo: augers used a stick to mark off portion
of the sky and stood in the middle of the corresponding
spot on earth to connect the two. temple."
Where oh where did that come from? The image burst
like a flame in my heart.
Back
in the British Library the Oxford Latin Dictionary
Fascicle V said that templum
came from the Greek temno, temenos..
The definition given was "the area of sky or
land defined (in words) by the augur, within which
he took the auspices" and "A piece of
ground demarcated and consecrated by the augurs
for the taking of auspices esp. as the site of a
temple, shrine, etc;"*
I
knew from Greek that tem or tam was
a stem meaning "to cut" and I presumed
that all words beginning with 'tem' that came from
Greek or Latin had the central idea of something
'cut' from, out of, or off. Looking at Greek as
well as Latin dictionaries I found that this was
considered true in many, but not all cases, and
certainly it was for words that sprung from the
Latin, tempus, time. The classical Greek
dictionary Liddell & Scott told
me that temno was Ionian "temno
. . .to cut or hew in battle, to wound, maim. of
the surgeon, to cut, use the knife - and then of
animals, to cut up, cut in pieces, to slaughter,
sacrifice since truces, covenants, and the like
were solemnized with sacrifices, . . .It referred
to all kinds of cutting, -[with pharmakos ]
cutting up plants for medicinal purposes - drawing
a line and ploughing corn - ships "cleaving
the waves" and birds "cleaving the air"
- and finally "to cut short, bring to a crisis."
As
for temenos "a piece of land cut off
and allotted for any purpose, a portion of land,
esp of corn-land." and then "a piece of
land sacred to a god: the precints of a temple,
hence from the worship offered to the Nile, the
valley of the Nile is called temenos Nilos
(Temenos of the Nile)." And finally, under
temenois "of or in the sacred precincts:
filas temenia the grove in the sacred precincts."
Now
it was time for Varro, and in his De
Lingua Latina (VI: II 3) I found "Time,
they say, is an interval in the motion of the world."
[Tempus esse dicunt intervallum mundi motus].
I
sat there for a long time with the words and their
images swirling through my head. When I left the
library that night and walked though the street
to the tube station everything looked brighter,
sharper. These time things, cut from eternity, me,
them, us, it. I stopped at a book shop, saw Henri
Corbin's Temple and Contemplation on
a shelf and couldn't imagine how I had never seen
the connection. I wondered if one could simply stop
in the middle of any unconscious flow and mark off
the space into a temple, cut it out, and from there
take the auspices. I kept thinking "Time is
a piece cut out of eternity."
The
next week in the library a German dictionary crossed
my path. It was the Lateinisches Etymologische
Worterbuch of Alois Walde (Heidelbuerg,
1940). I saw, under templum the sentence
"Der vom Augur mit dem Stab am Himmel und auf
der Erde abgegrenzte Beobachtungsbezirk, innerhalb
dessen der Vogelflug beobachtet werden soll, oder
der Aussichtsplatz fur die Vogelschau." I don't
speak German but I recognized the words "augur"
and "vogelflug" and rushed around until
I found someone who could translate it for me. I
was told that it said a templum was an area
of observation which has been delimited by the augur
with his staff in the heaven and on earth, inside
of which the flight of birds should be observed
- that it was the place for watching the birds.
I
checked Lewis & Short again
and found that templum was a neuter noun
of the second declension which was probably from
temulum (which it did not list anywhere else.)
It gave me the Greek root tem of temeno
saying that temenos was a sacred enclosure
and therefore defining templum as "a
space marked out: hence in particular, in augury
an open place for observation, marked out by the
augur with his staff." It then quoted Servius,
a forth century commentator on Virgil "Templum
dicitur locus manu auguris designatus in aere, postquam
factum illico captantur auguria." A temple
was said to have been a place marked out in the
air by the augur, after which event, immediately/on
that spot the augury was taken (seized/captured)".
The image of the augury being 'seized' or 'captured'
was a thrilling one. Every astrologer knows the
moment when suddenly all the aspects and transits
and progressions come together and suddenly the
images and words are there, clear and right - the
augury is seized - both astrologer and client know
it: For as long as it lasts, this moment, cut out
of time, is sacred.
The
Lexicon Totius Latinitatas Tom IV Mull's
edition) gave this definition for templum:
Templum trifariam dicitur, a natura in caelo, ab
auspicio in terris, a similitudine sub terra. I
translated this as "It is said that a temple
is threefold, from nature in the sky, by auspices
on the earth, and similarly under the earth."
It sent me back to Varro.
This
time I discovered that there were many different
versions of Varro. I went to the Loeb edition, Kent's
version, it was written as: Templum tribus modis
dicitur: ab natura, ab auspicando, a similitudine:
[ab] natura in caelo, abo auspicilis in terra, a
similitudine sub terra" which Kent translated
as "Templum 'temple' is used in three ways,
of nature, of taking the auspices, from likeness;
of nature, in the sky; of taking the auspices, on
the earth; from likeness, under the earth."
I think I would translate "similitudine"
as "by analogy".
I
enjoyed that translation for its sublime obscurity
and power to light up and, at the same time, confound
the imagination. The image of a templum being threefold,
nature in the sky, auspices on the earth and by
analogy beneath the earth rang bells in my deep
memory. In present time it reminded me of what happens
when we do a chart and suddenly all the dimensions
come together for a moment - soul, spirit and body
resonate to something numinous. The astrologer and
the client enter sacred space at those moments.
And even when these moments are few and far between,
we who are vocated to astrology cannot give up our
contemplation of the stars. We consider aspects
and angles and positions endlessly, always seeking
ways by which to navigate our own and our clients'
lives. Again and again we erect temples in the airy
spaces of our minds, within which we contemplate
the patterns and take the auspices.
My
quest had come to an end for a time. In the Latin
translation group we discussed the trail that had
opened up through desidero. It is always
some sort of desire that leads one to an astrologer
- sometimes it seems a simple thing such as a business
deal, or the right time to buy or sell something;
for modern psychologically oriented astrologers
it is often the desire of the client to understand
better themselves and the world they inhabit. Often
it is something more naked; something looked for,
longed for; something felt to be missing; sometimes
real grief at something gone. We are asked to consider
the question, however overt or covert it may be,
and to use our contemplative powers to give an answer.
"What do the stars say?" is a request
for the auspices to be taken.
No
matter how simple the desire may seem people usually
come to astrologers for something deeper. Often
the question asked is hiding another, deeper question,
another deeper longing. If that longing is to be
addressed, our contemplation of the chart, its natal
configurations and progressed and transitting planets
will lead to the creation of a space cut out. Suddenly
there will be a moment, which is also a temple,
a place of sacred space cut out of time, where and
in which the auspices can be read. And if these
auspices are to satisfy, they must connect the three
realms: spirit, body and soul. When that happens,
there is a sense of peace, in mind, body and soul.
Desire considered, leads naturally to contemplation,
and contemplation is always "a space cut out";
it is always sacred space.
In
sacred space, desire is at rest. In this interval
the eternal is present. Or, as Dorcas would have
said, "the spirits speak." A moment of
healing takes place, not only for the client but
for the astrologer as well. The desire, brought
by the client to the astrologer and inevitably reflected
in the horoscope, constellates a "space marked
out" for both of them. The longing which is
time-deep in each of us is, for a moment, returned
to the stars from which it, and we, came.
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