Samain Thanksgiving Moon
One more turn to Tarnas before my consultation with Elisa tomorrow. He made his move toward a synthesis of the modern mind and the Romantic–equivalent to the distinction between the self shaped by the Copernican disenchanted cosmos and the primal, ensouled (enchanted) universe that went before. His initial step came through depth psychology, tapping the collective unconscious and the idea of synchronicity to suggest a permeable self influenced by the cosmos and influencing it. Having opened the door between Self and cosmos with depth psychology, he turned toward astrology.
Over three decades ago he began to make natal charts, do the calculations, first for himself and several (40 or so) people he knew well. He began finding uncanny correlations between charts and people’s lives, people with whom he was familiar. He went further, expanding his investigations through students and colleagues to include many more individuals. Tarnas admits the difficult, often subjective nature of determining correlations and seems genuinely interested in an unbiased look at the claims of astrology.
I’ve only read Cosmos and Psyche, but he seems honest in his approach to scholarship, careful, not prone to easy enthusiasm. That counts a good deal for me in assessing his work. He’s an intellectual historian and a depth psychologist, a working intellectual with a Ph.D. Of course, none of that says he’s correct; but, it does mean he’s been vetted by other scholars. He offers the usual and some not usual objections to the direction of his research.
His argument about skepticism as a tool, not an end, was a wakin’ up moment for me. Oh, duh! Of course. Only I hadn’t seen it that way. Skepticism was a way of life for me and I treated the world of ideas as you might expect. I embraced almost nothing, held every philosophical and religious claim at a skeptical arms length. Yes. And no. I had let the tool use me, rather me using the tool.
Opening to the possibility of some value in astrology has not come easily for me and I’m still not sure about it, though I hope Elisa will help me when I see her tomorrow. I’m having an X-File’s moment: I want to believe. Tarnas, recommended by Tom Crane, has helped push me a bit further along the way, opening me. Even if I become convinced of its utility though, I believe there are more ways to heal the disenchantment. Tarnas has leaned into astrology, but why not the tarot, the i ching, using the same arguments.?
There are other, less esoteric methods to open the Self, to mutuality between Self and enchanted cosmos. I mentioned a few of those a post or two ago. Here are a couple more.
Most of you who read this are familiar with my story of mystical atonement after a class on metaphysics in college. It was a moment, maybe a minute, maybe two, in which I stopped and the world beyond became clear to me. I was connected to it and it to me. It was a vital, all engaging other, the other in this case being the whole beyond me, beyond my Self. Yet. It was not beyond me, but within me while I was within it. This was a visceral, embodied experience. It needed no mediation from sacred scripture, natal charts, or card reading. It just was.
Dig. I mean it. Go outside (wait til it’s warmer if you want). Take a trowel or a shovel or use your hand. Scrape away the surface matter, push your hand wrist deep into the soil.* By going down into the earth you can know the thin substrata that literally keeps us alive. Without this living soil we could grow little food. It is outside of us and yet, in what I’ve often called the true transubstantiation, will become not only one with us, it will become us.
My only point here is that astrology, especially one linked as Tarnas does to the concept of archetypes, may provide us with aids to self-knowledge, aids that light up an enchanted universe, help it become visible. And if it does, I want to use it, include it in my tool kit. Right there alongside skepticism. But I don’t see it as the only, or even the most important, clue to an ensouled universe.
Mysticism is more important to me. So is the tactile spirituality that requires no charts, no trines or alignments, to show me the way outside of my self and into an enchanted universe. This synthesis between the primal worldview and the modern one is a critical for our time. It’s what reimagining faith wants to build. It’s what reconstructing faith will look like. There is more. Far more.
*According to S.A. Waksman, a microbiologist, in just ¼ teaspoon of fertile soil you could find:
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50 nematodes;
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62,000 algae;
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72,000 amoebae;
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2,920,000 actinomycetes;
and -
25,280,000 bacteria! Youth Guide to Soil
