Astrology &
The Soul of the World

by Pierz Newton-John

"... I saw the forms of serene ancestors, men and women for whom the stars were both words and gods, for whom the world and the sky and the earth were a vast language of dreams and omens. "

?Ben Okri, The Famished Road¹

Astrologers often get caught on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, there is a part in all of us that longs for the sanction of our society, for the status of confirmed truth, even if we may sometimes enjoy imagining ourselves as someone who "saw further" than the rest. A lot of time and words have been expended on apologias to science, attempting to justify astrology on the basis of everything from "undiscovered forces" to quantum theory, yet always falling far short of anything resembling a scientific theory. On the other hand, we buck against the whole philosophical basis of science and decry scientists as blinkered bigots. 

It's a thorny problem: how can we justify astrology, which ascribes psychic qualities to non-living matter, when our whole scientific paradigm denies the existence of qualities, per se, and believes only in the reality of the quantifiable attributes of the world?

Yet perhaps if we listen to what astrology teaches us about the world, instead of seeking to find an explanation that will allow it to fit into existing categories of understanding, astrology could open the door to a different way of knowing the world, in which qualities are considered a primary and irreducible reality. Astrology demonstrates that qualitative energies are not mere projections; they are inherent to the world. They constitute its soul.

This statement is, of course, an unforgivable heresy from a scientific standpoint. According to science, the only thing that is real in the world is its material structure. The qualities of things are regarded as purely subjective constructs, insignificant by-products of the brain's processing. 

The World Soul

Once we make the leap of allowing the world to possess intrinsic qualities, we must admit the presence of something akin to an imagination in the world itself, an anima mundi, or world soul. Our current materialist paradigm sharply divides "imagination" from "world", seeing the former as belonging entirely within the brain of individual humans, the latter as consisting of external, purely material structures void of any imaginal dimension.

It is not only astrology that belies this view. Flashes of clairvoyance or precognition and striking synchronicities are phenomena that just about everyone has experienced at some time or another. The more deeply one delves into this kind of experience, the more one is forced to recognize a dream-like underpinning to reality. This dream world interpenetrates our ordinary reality, present everywhere and nowhere. Different traditions refer to it with different terms. Sufi scholar Henry Corbin termed it the mundus imaginalis, or imaginal world, coining the word "imaginal" to denote a kind of reality that is neither physical nor purely imaginary.² It is the realm within which the dead, the angels, demons, and archetypal presences move. 

Astrology, the science of seeing the soul of the sky, is part of a greater vision: that eye that opens each thing like a poetic treasure, perceiving at work within it the divine imagination that animates the world.

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The Australian aborigines refer to it as the "dreamtime" by which they do not mean a remote epoch, but another timeless dimension. Consciousness researcher Stanislav Grof talks of the "holotropic mode" of consciousness, which can be accessed through psychotropic drugs or breath techniques, within which one can travel freely through time, space, and worlds beyond both. ⁽³⁾ For David Bohm, the innovative quantum physicist, it is the "implicate order", a hidden order of reality within which everything is connected to everything else. ⁽⁴⁾

James Hillman, in his essay "The Soul of the World," ⁽⁵⁾ has put forward a notion of the world's soul based on the sensual presentation of physical forms. According to Hillman the anima mundi or soul of the world is to be perceived directly in the "inherent intelligibility" of forms in the world. He argues that every thing, place, or animal in the world, whether constructed or natural, has a presence to the imagination through its "physiognomy" as a sensual form. The precision, freedom of spirit, and fierceness of the eagle's soul can be read in the aquiline form, just as the sensitivity, gentleness, and reflectiveness of the deer are made manifest in its movements and its whole presence to the senses. According to Hillman, this expressiveness of physical forms is the presence of soul in the world, and it is as much present in architecture, technology, and designed interiors as it is in the places and organisms of the natural world. ⁽⁶⁾

This idea could lead us to a kind of radical extension of the astrological principle, so that all things are possessed of a certain "astrological" character. Just as every stone has its minute gravitational influence, every stone might also be a microcosmic astrological planet, a living presence with symbolic and psychic import. The astrological character of the planets might be just one example of the presence of soul qualities in the world.

Continued on the next page:
  * The Resonance of Imagination;
  * Detachment and Objectivity;
  * Seeing with the Soul's Eyes

?1999 Pierz Newton-John - all rights reserved