Originally published in Re-Vision Magazine, Summer/Fall, 1979 Astrology, Space, and Consciousness Roger S. Jones Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor of Physics School of Physics & Astronomy University of Minnesota Minneapolis, MN 55455

The sympathetic study of astrology has much to contribute to the current emergence of a holistic world view.  The reawakening human awareness of the unity and connectedness of all things is reflected in the astrological blending and equating of the inner and outer realms of consciousness and space.  Astrology holds up a mirror to human consciousness.

More important than any debate over the predictive accuracy or scientific validity of astrology is what it can reveal to us about our literal view of the world and the current state of consciousness. Astrology shows us that our modern concepts for the physical world--for space and time, in particular--are constructs of consciousness which, while useful, are both limited and changeable. Medieval man felt imbedded in the cosmos, and his space and astrology conveyed an impression of connectedness. Modern man feels alienated, and his astronomical picture of space mirrors his sense of separation and distance.  In this article, we shall explore astrology in an attempt to grasp the inner meaning and implications of modern consciousness and space.

If we try to understand astrology sympathetically from within the Greek and Medieval forms of consciousness that nurtured it, we find that the underlying tenet of astrology--"as above, so below"--is decidedly inconsistent with the conception of an inner subjective world of mind and an outer objective one of reality, which is usually assumed as a matter of course today.  Our idea of above and below or of outer and inner is that of two separate and distinct spatial realms.

For the Medieval astrologer, above and below refer not to different places, but to different aspects of the same thing.  There can be no above without a below.  The two are connected--in fact, unified: and the many correspondences and felt relationships between them inform the study of astrology.  Astrology is thus the explication of the connections that exist between the stars and humanity, between two apparently different realms which are actually one.  Since the experience of this unity is not ordinarily given to us, we find correspondences, echoes, hints of each realm in the other.  But it is all a manifestation of the underlying unity.  In using the stars to study ourselves, we consciously or unconsciously accept this unity and find it reflected in our experience of the world and its space.

Medieval consciousness did not feel so keenly as does our modern consciousness that the mind and the rest of the organic space of the human body are bounded by our skin.  We feel ourselves to be well defined and delimited from everything outside ourselves.  What is inside is me, and what is outside is other.  There is nothing in between and no overlap.  If I think about it, there is some ambiguity when I eat.  Some of my intake remains foreign and is expelled. The rest turns into me.  I might have some trouble determining the exact instant the foreign substance becomes me, but, at some point, it is my living tissue which I can use to feel with, or pump blood with or think with.  When I conceptualize about my body in this way, it's almost as if my body, which therefore becomes somehow other.

This gradual reduction of the me to an ever smaller realm is a characteristic feature of modern consciousness, in fact, of the scientific world view and its space.  As I begin to think about myself in terms of the physical, chemical and biological processes which science has been so successful in describing, I am forced to picture my consciousness or my self as occupying a shrinking realm, somewhere inside my head (at least, that's where I seem to feel it).  And even as I retreat there, psychologists pursue me.  They explain more and more of my mental processes in terms of brain chemistry, and the extremists in their ranks write of consciousness and will as illusions, as by-products of the physical brain.  Where does that leave me and my inner space?  Indeed, without the revolution in mind-expansion of the 1960s and 1970s, the crushing weight of the arguments of modern science might well have convinced us by now that we don't exist at all, that only what is other is real, that consciousness and even life itself are ephemeral and illusory--accidental aberrations of the lifeless matter that floats without rhyme or reason in vast, empty space.

Medieval Concept of Space

Astrological or Medieval space, by contrast, has none of this abstract, lifeless character.  It would not even have a purely spatial character, were we to experience it.  Much of what a Medieval person would think of as spatial, we today would call mental, emotional or psychological.  To the medieval mind, space, or let us say spatial relationships, comprises the felt connections among things.  If a knight is quixotic or mercurial, it is because his variable nature partakes of the essence of the element mercury whose shimmering flow and endless divisibility and reunion are the perfect symbols for this kind of personality.  This felt connection is not located in space as we know it. It is not some physical influence which the element mercury has on our impish knight, but something which he and the silvery fluid share in common, something which they both reflect, both participate in. The knight and the element are two different aspects of the same thing.  They are connected in some way that is dimly perceptible to the Medieval mind.  This perceived connection between the knight and mercury does not occur in space; it is space.  There is no separate, external geometrical realm in which to picture abstract relationships.  Rather, there exists among things a web of organic and reflexive relationships, and this web of felt connections has a character for the Medieval mind which is analogous to our sense of space.

In the Middle Ages, there would have been no apparent confusion about how an element in the earth could be connected to a human being.  The element and the knight were felt as part of each other, as subliminally connected to each other.  This was no causal relationship in space and time, no physical force raying across a void, but rather a correspondence in the organic, psychological, holistic realm, where all things are connected, where "as above, so below." This realm was medieval space.

In such a realm of organic connectedness, the Medieval astrologer ponders the  relationship of man to the stars.  He does not think in the terms that we might use of the influence of the planet Mercury on someone at the moment of his or her birth, projected across millions of miles of empty space.  Rather, he recognizes in this primal moment, when a newborn child draws its first breath of life, the stamp of a unique event impressed upon the whole cosmos and reflected in its every rhythm and pattern.  He might equally well read the child's essence and potential in many reflexive and synonymous patterns--in the waves and currents of the sea or the fluttering leaves in the forests or the elements of the earth or the stars in the sky.

Astrology does not concern itself, therefore, with cause and effect.  It makes no more sense to say that Mercury has cast a spell on the newborn baby than it does to say that the baby has cast one on Mercury.  It isn't that either one affects the other, but that they reflect each other.  The whole configuration of the earth and sky is a profound symbol for the child and for Mercury=s momentary harmonies and relations to other heavenly bodies. In this important sense, astrology is antithetical to modern thought and science, which tend to suggest that the cosmos is without meaning or purpose.  Our modern, meaningless, random universe would be inconceivable to the medieval astrologer.  Meaning and wisdom are incorporated in astrological space, which is symbolic, organic and synchronistic, rather than empty, geometrical and causal.  The spatial relation of Mercury to the child (in our modern sense of space) is of little importance in Medieval astrology.  Even the natal chart represents the organic and harmonic relations among the various astrological elements much more than it does the geometrical ones.  It is the organic, reflective, symbolic relation that is of primary importance, and this connection is felt intuitively by the astrologer as it was by ordinary people in the Middle Ages.

The Medieval person felt connected to Mercury in much the same way as you feel connected, let's say, to your liver.  The geometrical location of your liver scarcely  begins to suggest its basic relationship to you.  It is your liver's organic and functional relation to you that is really important. It purifies your blood, aids your digestion and stores some of your energy.  In turn, it is nourished symbiotically by the organs and systems of your body that it serves.  All of this happens in a smooth and functional way which cannot possibly be described adequately in spatial terms.  Your liver functions holistically and purposively in concert with the rest of your body.  You are an integral whole.  Your liver is not really separable from you, spatially or in any other way.  If someone tried to convince you that your liver is really somewhere far out in space and that it carries out its function by mysteriously raying its product to you across the empty miles, your incredulous reaction would not be very different from that of a fifteenth-century astrologer who had just been told that the planet Mercury is located millions of mile away in space and that it is not organically connected to him, nor in any way part of him.

This spatial or geometric description of Mercury is at best a symbolic way of talking about its essential relationship to that astrologer, just as space and time themselves are metaphors for all the connections he feels between himself and the cosmos. He believes fundamentally that all things are unified at some deep level, and that space is just our illusory but convenient way of organizing and experiencing the unfathomable unity in terms of a web of connections among things.  In the present state of our consciousness, we cannot directly perceive the unity; and so space, with its myriad connections, is an imperfect metaphor for the imperceptible unity.

Evolution of the Modern Concept of Space

The transition from a sense of space which is organic, connected and holistic, to one which is lifeless, external and alien, is a fundamental characteristic of the change of consciousness that overtook European man as Western civilization passed from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.  One of the clearest examples of this change can be seen in the changes that painting and drawing underwent in the same period.  I refer to the laws of perspective which came upon the scene at about this time.  Medieval painting usually appears quaint or somehow incorrect to the unfamiliar eye.  This is primarily due to the treatment of space, which looks strangely amorphous and without a point of view, and in which there are no clear relationships between size and distance.  In a Medieval painting, for instance, God may be shown together with a group of saints and men.  God is the largest figure.  The saints are somewhat smaller under him. In turn, the men below are shown smallest of all.  All are posed against a background of gilt. The usual explanation for this is that thirteenth-and fourteenth-century painters couldn't or didn't wish to represent space and the physical world in a natural manner, but rather wanted to show the hierarchical relationship between God, the saints, and man in an obviously unrealistic setting.  A quotation from Morris Kline ("Mathematical Thought From Ancient to Modern Times, New York, Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 231) illustrates the prevailing attitude:

        In the Medieval period the glorification of God and the illustration of biblical themes were the purposes of painting.  Gilt backgrounds suggested that the people and objects portrayed existed in some heavenly region.  Also the figures were intended to be symbolic rather than realistic.  The painters produced forms that were flat and unnatural and did not deviate from the pattern.  In the Renaissance the depiction of the real world became the goal: Hence artists undertook to study nature in order to reproduce it faithfully on their canvasses and were confronted with the mathematical problem of representing three-dimensional real world on a two-dimensional canvas.

"The figures were intended to by symbolic rather than realistic."  That one sentence, with its insistence on two separate and distinct worlds, neatly demonstrates the modern ignorance of holistic consciousness and space and of the astrology which cannot properly be understood without them.

It seems incredible that many modern historians of art assume that the great painters of the Middle Ages were unable to make the same "discoveries" later made and codified into the laws of perspective by Brunelleschi, Albert and DaVinci--i.e., to assume that the great manuscript illuminators, Cimabue, Martini, even Duccio, and the early Giotto, lived in and experienced precisely the same space that we do, but that they were somehow incapable of correctly representing that space in their paintings.  I believe this hypothesis puts the cart before the horse. Rather than forcing the astrology and art of an earlier time into the strait-jacket of modern concepts of space, it is simpler and more illuminating to try to understand and fathom the earlier conception of space through a sympathetic study of Medieval art and astrology.  Through such an inner contemplation, it becomes possible to experience imaginatively an earlier world and the earlier form of consciousness that is part and parcel of it.  It becomes possible to see that the modern distinctions between symbolic and realistic, metaphorical and literal, inner and outer, subjective and objective have little meaning for Medieval consciousness.  To Medieval astrologers, alchemist and artists, seeking the unity of all consciousness, life and being, what possible sense could there be to a space which is abstract, external and perspectival?  They already knew that space was but a metaphor, a symbol of all the interrelationships and harmonies among things, for all the organic connections between the stars, the elements and man, and that even these connections, felt or intuited, were in turn ut an imperfect metaphor for the deeper unity that man cannot directly experience.  Owen Barfield, in his book "Saving the Appearances," (1959), has rightly observed that perspective has replaced participation.  In modern consciousness, mathematical laws of cause and effect in geometrical space are the emasculated vestiges of the connections we share with all things, which were vividly sensed by earlier consciousness.

The alteration of consciousness from Medieval to modern time, accompanied by the development of perspective in art and by concomitant changes in physical reality, is revealingly analyzed by Barfield in terms of the evolution of consciousness and modern idolatry.  Barfield's perspective study of language, culture, literature, myth and anthropology provides an interpretation very different from the familiar events of Western history.  He argues that in the past two thousand years, it is not only that man's understanding has grown, but that his very consciousness has evolved as well.  Since there's no waste separate man's knowledge of the world from his consciousness of it, then changes in either world or mind must be understood as changes in both. They are different, perhaps complementary, aspects of the same thing.  Thus, a different view of the  world held by earlier peoples, one which to us is simpler and more naive than our own, is not a reflection of inferior knowledge, but of a different experience which results from an earlier state of consciousness then follows from the inseparability of mind and matter and from the recognition that other people have experienced the world differently from ourselves.  All of this requires that we accept a "primitive" world view seriously and sympathetically as an accurate description of an earlier experience rather than as uninformed, superstitious or inferior.  If experience has changed and if consciousness is inseparable from reality, then there has been an evolution of consciousness/reality.

In modern times, there has emerged a form of consciousness which has lost its own sense of the connections between the inner and the physical world, between mind and body.  This gradual loss of our awareness of unity has proceeded from so-called primitive man's identification with nature to the Greek and Medieval sense of connectedness to nature and finally to modern alienation from nature.  Our lost sense of synthesis or connection has become intellectualized as an assumption about reality (that it is separate and independent of our inner mental world, and in fact subsumes that inner world which is therefore not real), which Barfield tellingly dubs idolatry.  An idolater is not so much one who builds idols as one who worships them, i.e., one who treats idols as though they had an existence and power independent of their creators.  An idolater forgets that he has built the idol and gives up his creative powers and responsibility.  This indeed is a kind of modern sin.  Our scientific age, which arose with the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, is founded upon the idolatrous assumption that our creations, our metaphors for space, time and the physical world, are literal descriptions of reality.  And the gradual reduction to insignificance and threatened destruction of our equally real inner (in fact, synonymous) world is the inevitable consequence of that idolatry.  We are now foundering on that assumption.

Modern Conception of Space

The clearest example of our idolatry is that we take literally the modern spatial metaphor whose meaning is well worth contemplating and contrasting with that of astrological or Medieval space. We conceive of space as an infinite, empty, lifeless, cold, dark, alien void.  It is the blank, unfeeling stage on which matter plays out its aimless, random acts.  It provides the merest, tiniest corner in which to harbor an insignificant speck of a planet, warmed by a second-rate star, and on which, by sheer accident, against impossible odds, without rhyme or reason, life and finally consciousness have come upon the scene.  We live on borrowed time, in a basically alien universe which offers us little succor or hope, and above all, no meaning or purpose.

Our modern space is the perfect metaphor for separation, extension, individuation, and alienation. We cannot even conceive of existence except in space, which then becomes the medium par excellence of existence.  To exist is derived from the Latin verb meaning "to stand out," and space is exactly what we stand out from.  Space is the background from which we emerge or exist, in which we become an articulate, individuated, unique being.  On the other side of the coin from existence and uniqueness is alienation and isolation.  Our spatial metaphor is thus intimately linked with our fears and apprehensions about life, death and survival.

The space of Medieval consciousness, by contrast, is organic, connective, nurturing, human and a storehouse of knowledge.  Rather than space, it is place, home, environment.  Like a womb to an embryo, it sustains, warms and nurtures; it provides a balm and lifeline; it has no clear-cut boundaries; no separation between inner and outer.  While less sharply defined, clean and geometrical than our space, it contains things that we could not think of as spatial at all, things psychological, emotional, intuitive.  One's feelings for others are for other living and inanimate things are included, so that the sense of space incorporates love, appreciation, inspiration, belonging, kinship, community and holiness.

The metaphorical implications of astrological space are almost the antithesis of ours.  It was a world in which you felt somewhat less an individual, but much more a vital part.  You belonged to some great organism and functioned meaningfully within it.  The meaning and purpose might not be clear, but it was there all around you.  You could feel it, sense it. Astrologers and alchemists sought it in the stars and the elements whose connections to you were not in space, but were space.  You were basically at home, supported, succored.  Life might be difficult, but never foreign.  Death might be frightening, but not annihilating.

The sterile, modern metaphor for space, along with the idolatry which sustains it, is beginning to show unmistakable signs of in the twentieth century.  We hear much today about an ecological (even a cosmic) consciousness and planetary ethics.  Many of our current problems stem from our loss of contact with nature and the environment.  People who feel forests, streams, earth and air to be intimately related to themselves, as did the American Indian, could no more pollute a river than their own bloodstreams.  The metaphors we use for reality and our attitude about their literalness have the most profound effect on how we run our lives, how we view and treat the world around us and how we conceive of our roles and values in life.

Another example of a counter trend is the new holographic theory of mind and matter of Karl Pribam and David Bohm.  Pribam, the psychologist, and Bohm, the physicist, have seen that an essential feature which the inner and outer worlds hold in common (as indeed they must since they are basically one and the same) is that the whole is implied by, or contained in, each of its parts. The hologram, a special kind of image-producing transparency, is the Pribam-Bohm analogue for this.  If any proportion of an hologram is illuminated, one obtains the full image of the original object, and not just a portion of the image, as one would get with a partially illuminated photographic image.  The image formed by a partially illuminated hologram is somewhat less detailed than when one uses the complete hologram, but the point is that essential information about the whole is contained in each of its parts.  Pribam and Bohm's exciting theory demonstrates that consciousness and physical reality are different representations for the same thing, and that our conventional conception of space and time, which fails to include the essential interpenetrating, overlapping, participating character illustrated by the hologram, is at best a very incomplete metaphor for space-time, with undeniable, though limited uses and applications. Modern consciousness and its space metaphor have enabled us to reach the moon and to build an electronic brain, but only at the reckless and exorbitant price of nearly divesting ourselves of any significance or value.

Through a study of astrology and astrological consciousness and space, we may reclaim our connection to and participation with the cosmos.  While avoiding the pitfalls of Medieval mentality, we can resume and extend its thrust toward a holistic world with human beings as participants in the divine.  Rather than condemning as anthropomorphic the tendency to find human meaning, form and value everywhere in the universe around us, we can recognized as idolatrous our readiness to do the reverse, i.e., to assume that there is an independent, alien world out there on which we intrude as trespassers with only the meagerest squatters' rights and with no gainful employment on the premises.  We are not the renters in this world, but the owners, indeed the creators.  We make not only the buildings, but the building materials; not only the bombs but the atoms.  The shortcomings and imperfections of astrology are trivial in comparison to its potential value in helping us rediscover and proclaim meaning in this world.