Excerpts from Class I, Series 2, of

MBM course

Principles of Astrology

January – February, 1930

 

We will attack the signs from the human side.

The signs represent the path which man travels.  Like stages, or steps, on the way, over which the seven are shining in various degrees of power and interrelation.  Seven is not a human octave, the twelve is man’s octave.  There are different stages of development in each task.  In the center you as related to the Pattern.  We are to work on the same Pattern as the great belt of the zodiac.  You may be true to the nature of the light spark, which is magnetically pulling you on toward evolution.

The solar system.  The sun with its tremendous pull, keeping the planets in their circular path around it.  It is because the planets are moving and pulling and, on the other hand, are held to a central principle, that we make a circle.  When we are loyal to a central principle, and are continually progressing, we are describing the Cosmic Pattern of the circle around the point.  If you don’t progress you don’t make a circle.  But if you progress, and are faithful to the central point, so that it holds you to the path of your evolution, you make the perfect circle.

Man, starting the pilgrimage, is young and cannot follow a great scheme.  He has little power.  Therefore the power in him at a later stage in the same sign is different from the power in him in that sign in the beginning.  There are many degrees of endeavor to be expanded in each sign.

Aries: cardinal fire.  In regard to man, it is the first, undifferentiated, outgoing energy.  Undifferentiated energy — extraverted, animal spirits, power, activity.  In the large, the creative force highly developed, but not in man.  May be raw, brutal, but not in the sense of capacity developed.  A little further up the ladder this same energy is impulsive, violence, force.  Later passion.  Desire, recklessness; running into act without thought.  (These, the first three stages.)  4: secretiveness, hate, ambition, presumptuousness, insolence.  5: ardor, vehemence, self-will, enthusiasm, self-opinionated.  6: alertness (now more refined) enterprise, earnestness, vigor.  7: resolution, determination, courage; rather intrepid.  8: dauntless, valor, organizing ability.  9: power of directing others, primarily towards ideals; this type becomes the commander, guide.  10: perfect leadership, but wholly submissive to leadership from the Larger: the ram becomes the lamb.

Many grades to be accomplished in each sign.  Now we can see what the labors of the strong man (mind) are to work — from undifferentiated, extroverted energy to the high, commanding leadership, who remains ram to earth but lamb to heaven.  A good sized labor for a Hercules.

On the negative side, might be zealots, fanatics.  Moving upward, they might be lecturers, builders, designers.  At the top, pioneers.

Philosophically, mystically, it is the active fire of the Great Architect, but man builds from below up.  At the high point of the completion it is in perfect relationship with the great Fire of the Architect.

Taurus  Emerges in the infantile stage, and through which it develops differently.  (earth fixed)

1) inertia; because substance is so heavy in this sign at the bottom that there is negativity; 2) dullness, sluggishness, heaviness, surliness, sloth, indifference; 3) hard working, ponderous, slow, stolidness.  4) stubbornness, submissiveness, mildness (unless aroused).  5) persistence, retentiveness, sensitiveness, acquisitiveness, conscientiousness;  6) trustworthy, faithful, restrained, reserved, loyal; 7) perseverance, concentration (of earth energy), indefatigability; 8) constancy, placidity, long suffering, calmness (feeling repressed); 9) fortitude, dignity, patience, might; 10) the perfected bull, the foundation stone of the builder; solidarity.

Negative: stagnation, regression, indolence, torpidity; all sorts of things we meet in neuroses.

Quintessence: Obedience.

Types: laborers; fruit growers, builders, bankers.

Gemini air mutable.  First conflict of the pairs of opposites.  The work of the sign is to bring about consciousness through the labor of the pairs of opposites.  1) first conflict of the pairs of opposites.  So many ways he needs to be awakened, in order to become a son of the sun.  2) wavering, superficiality, hesitancy.  3) fickleness, inconstancy, irresolution, diffusiveness (because of the many pairs of opposites working, none of which can be solved at this stage); the false mercurial.  4) temperamental, unsteady, changeable — conflict growing stronger.  5) plastic, affability, suavity, conversational skill, etc.  This is an air sign.  6) quick-wittedness, versatility, adroitness; beginning of the professional or mechanical mind; becoming nimble and flexible to a purpose.  7) adaptability; mental effectiveness.  8) genuinely mercurial.  9) the balance between the higher and the lower mind, each functioning freely according to its own nature.  The response and resourcefulness of both are developed.  10) The two pillars — entrance to the Hall of Learning.

In proportion as man has learned the lessons of the pairs of opposites, in air, and puts them in their place, he enters into the true Hall of learning.

Negative: aridity; nervousness, worry.

Types:  accountants, newspaper men, guides, secretaries, school teachers, decorators.  All have to do with a certain flexibility in the mind.  Duality of the sign.

Cancer: water cardinal.  Ocean, impressionable, sensitive.

1) impressionability (sensation-feeling)  2) sensitivity, excitability, irritability.

3) feeling ambition, prejudices, biases, preconceptions; and in all of
these a tenacity like the crab; (negative: greed, gluttony, avaricious-
ness) 4) impatience, restlessness, fretful, petulant; and because of this tenacity it is antiquarian and old fashioned in its interests.  5) love of luxury; persistence in feeling reactions; selfishness; with it also timidity, shyness, because of the feeling reaction.  6) amiability, soft heartedness (good nature)  7) tenderness, fellow feeling, emotional sensitivity.  8) sympathetic kindliness, more active kind of expression; congenial, benevolent stage.  9) graciousness, reciprocity, benignness.  A kind of spaciousness in the affections; not sensitive in the infantile way but through a kind of developed fineness; psychic sensitivity freed from the personal.  10) sensitized human soul; the fellowship of the heart.

The very essence of this sign is power, or the motor of the heart.  Has much power.  Stays forever plastic, formative; for, being like the ocean it is always open to new impressions.  From outside; beyond itself.  At the end of this ladder it is again receptive to the Larger – ram to lamb, to the Cosmic.  This labor accomplished, we have the power which rises to the Larger and the sensitiveness which receives those impressions.  Hence it is formed by the Larger, – veridically, not psychically.

TYPES: Mediums, cooks, people who work with the crowd, or supply it; even actors;antiquarians.

Leo:  fire fixed:  1) crude heat, violence, fury; different from the impetuosity of Aries.  This is a fixed sign.  Aries leaps.  Even the heat in Leo more concentrated.  You come upon it, instead of its going out to you.  Ruthlessness of the hottest day of summer; steady heat and violence.  2) exhibitionism, fondness of pomp, haughtiness; negative of what is later disdain.  3) pride, love of power, domineering; lavish, quite regardless of any intelligence; diffusiveness; fire (very dissipated types). 4) heartiness, affectionate, over generosity, respectability, honesty.  5) moral soundness, faithfulness, firmness of purpose, but through the heart, not through the mind; goodness of heart.  6) generosity; philanthropy; strong love nature developing in this sign, because of the sun being ruler.  7) expansive strength of the heart; faith very strong and deep.  8) stability has been achieved through the steadiness of the heart; lofty conduct; idealists.  9) dignity in leadership, nobility, loyalty being developed in this sign now active and forceful, but works silently (the activity of Aries more noisy and extroverted.  10) kingly power of matured fire, which nourishes, sustains and preserves, as a king should.  Here is fire at its most economic development.  Here is the quintessence of fire; the fire of the architect or builder, concentrated and highly efficient, loyal and sustained.  It serves the will in all constructive organization; in that sense it makes for warmth and harmony.

     Taurus, the first stone in the structure; Leo, the second – the fire which Leo contributes, the higher psychic replacing the water; and the transformed nature of the water sign, which becomes the eagle.  This fire has no more need to go out and pioneer (in the self) hence the fire there is highly concentrated, and is a powerhouse.  More indrawn than Aries.

Types: jewelers, goldsmiths, musicians, poets or dramatic writers who speak out of the warmth of the heart.  In their higher development, hold positions of fixed authority.  Not pioneers but command which is stabilized.

Virgo: earth mutable.  Quintessence is discrimination.  1) craftiness; shrewdness; smartness in the unpleasant sense; domineering; 3) hypocritical, carping, garrulous; 4) ingeniousness, hardness, practical.  All through this sign much repression; 3) preciseness; introspection; methodical; 6) tact, diplomacy, first steps of discrimination developed.  With the development of that faculty, a kind of retiringness of the self, or personality, because discrimination is as a weapon, sword that goes out.  7) inventiveness, constructive activity, industry, the natural student, one who, in this case, tries to put things together.  8) flexibility, practical adaptability, and the kind of sympathy that arises out of that.  9) service in earth, of earth; consciousness of power in the lower spheres.  Having come this far, our soul becomes virgin, because it has learned earth wisdom.  10) virgin; the earth is now virgin soil.

Quintessence: discrimination

Negative: inferiority complexes, and all that goes with it.

Types: entertainers (flexibility, adaptability); students of hygiene; nurses, physicians, chemists, critics.

The higher stages of no one sign can be accomplished without the training of the others.  No indrawing of the arms until and unless the other signs have heavily contributed their lessons.

PRINCIPLES OF ASTROLOGY

MBM  Lecture II  January 23, 1930

Labors of Hercules

     Hercules not the perfect hero.  The first labor starts with Leo, not Aries.  The Greeks were not fond of facts; sometimes falsified the meaning of the mythos.  Here and there we will find that which corresponds.

     The first labor is the slaying of the lion: ego, or pride, or self-will; one of the very first attacks that must be made on the self to progress at all.

     Second: the Hydra, the great water serpent that had nine heads — lower aspect of the psychic.

     Third: capture of a terrible wild boar.  Hercules befriended by the Centaur Folus.  Hercules not an ideal hero; never perfected.  Symbol of the soul on its way to perfection.  Began fighting with some of the other centaurs, and Folus was poisoned by the arrow and killed.  The boar is a symbol of the earth.  The things of the earth have to be captured and subdued.  Concrete gesture in that direction.

     The first three labors: fire, water, earth.  The labors of Hercules were of the four elements in man, but not in any way that culminated them, or made them the final solution.  You will not find in Hercules the perfect labors the soul must accomplish.

     Hercules a sun god.  A child of the spirit, who must do the labors to make possible the return to his Father.  The offspring of spirit, who, in the disguise of soul, accomplishes these labors, and then returns.

     In all the mythologies you will find sun heroes conquering dragons, etc.  Typify some of the aspects of the zodiac, but less perfectly.  Sun, the symbol of spirit; center of our solar system, etc.  Those who become conscious of the sonship become heroes setting out on their labors of Hercules.  Hercules does correspond to some extent with Horus.

Libra   cardinal air.

An importance quite different from that of the other signs.  The aspects of the first six belong to the earlier stages; those in the latter to the higher.  But that is only a broad classification, and has innumerable classifications.  Depends upon what reference it is applied.  1) lazy, evasive, on the fence, sot.  2) moves, but only to seek personal ease; a certain movement of the air aspect, curiosity, will shake up this ease, so that presently this comfort loving will be of an entirely different grade.  3) carelessness, amiability, pseudo calmness, conventionality, indicating, at low level, the balance seeking tendency.  A thing at rest seeks balance too.  That which is pleasure loving, ease, does not want to move.  Later, when the air aspect has activated the sign, it will seek balance through activity, but not yet.  4) increase of intellectual activity; even tempered, likable, obliging, and great sensitivity.  5) expansiveness, ambition; affable (more activity than conventionality; great imagination of the mind; love for the arts, especially music.  6) increased development of the powers of comparison; refinement; artistic tendencies; real sweet temperedness, and aspiration.  7) sensitized mind, gradually open to what later will become intuitional; inspirational (receptive) whereas aspirational is active.  Here a beginning of love for unifying influences.  8) passion for order, for cooperation, the beginning of what, when perfected in the fixed sign, where it is passion, here is an affectional love for humanity.  9) justice, dispassionate judgment; sense of equilibrium through the powers of the mind.  Desires gradually transmuted to a devotion of the mind to seek balance and order everywhere.  A high development of Libra must go out to make for order, balance, justice, symmetry, with great devotion of the mind to it.  10) Mind identified with the intuitional, spiritual activities of the air.  They move upward, and are finally drawn in to the fixed quality in the sign of Aquarius.  Mind at that stage has grandeur and loftiness.

Types: Secretaries, housekeepers, stage managers.  In the esthetic world, or in the literary world, like librarians; overseers.  Must establish balance, not only in themselves but, later, in the environment around them.

Essence:  the activity in establishing balance, in the self, and later to project it out and use it in the environment.  A cardinal sign.

Negative: quarrelsome, restless, lazy.

Scorpio: water fixed.  1) At the very bottom, carnal; complete absorption in the delights of the body; sensation loving; passionate, in the animal sense; unrestrained sensualists.  2) (ruler Mars)  Tendency toward lust, tinged by another vice, and working evil in itself and in its environment; malevolent, vengeful, coarse, never weak.  3) abrupt, brusque, vindictive, full of hatred, resentment.  4)  distrustful, suspicious, severely jealous, exacting, fault finding; get a kick out of being plain spoken.  5) great power of attachment; powerful personality; great energy; positive, obstinate, domineering over others; secretive, and usually very attractive to the opposite sex.  6) power of attachment now being developed into power of retention and of keen judgment; power of recuperation; capable of very hard work, not usually physical.  Conservative; conserving their energy and, at a later stage, highly economic.  7) perseverance, courage, self-reliance; interest in occult things.  Earlier secretiveness now is interest in the secret.  Ability to hold on.  Conservative in their speech.  Earlier sting, but never spread, merely poisonous, virulent, like the tail of the scorpion.  That is continuing still more.  So now we have silence, tenacity.  Accumulate powers for what later will be necessary for transformation.  8) dignity, pride, reserved, high spirit, cautious in the best sense of the word.  9) develop much potency, because their emotions are stable.  Fixed purposes.  Mystical purpose greatly at work within them.  The sign that makes for transformation and regeneration.  10) complete mastery of the water world, or will dominating desire and transmuting it.  Accomplishes the second birth.  This sign the lowest and the highest.  For the greater the animal, the greater the man.  He who has the courage to go down lowest goes up highest.  Power of redemption.  The greater the risk, the greater the victory.  Capable of taking great risks, and therefore spans the largest octave.  Thus accomplishes the true alchemy in the self.  The wisdom of the serpent has been accomplished in the fixed signs.  Can’t go up on higher levels on some (signs) and not on others.  Can’t make a beeline home via Scorpio

This sign has also been called the sign of the magician, because in it are hidden secrets.  Correspondences.  All things that are born, or reborn, are born out of water.  Aspects of the name of the sea: Mare, Mary.  Wherever there is a great one born he is born out of the water, mother: the great soul, born out of the water.  In water fixed, and held steady, where the processes of birth take place.  Out of it is the new self born.  (This sign) most lures to the study of the profound.

Types: chemists, dyers, magnetic healers, detectives, surgeons; wherever there is need of carrying out great things (in the later stages), radical changes.

Sagittarius:  fire mutable; ruler Jupiter.  Archer of the arrow, because very much faster than the man can go.  1) rushing headlong, regardless of danger.  2) vehemence, impetuosity, bluffness.  As the arrow is affected by everything it meets, so gradually a kind of adaptability; hence  3) impressionability, carelessness; restlessness that comes from meeting thwartings; irritability.  Our arrow does not go as the perfect arrow of the Centaur; so our arrow is bent, or adapted, as in the mutable sign, because of the shunting of the arrow which has been sent out.  4) over imaginative; perversive, undisciplined; but a new quality developing — that of a visionary, and the beginning of sincerity.  Given to fiery anger if really restrained at this stage. 5) fervency; lacking discrimination; romantic; castle builders; dreams of where the arrow went, not where they are; identify themselves with the dreamers.  On the other hand, held by where they are.  A dual sign.  Conflict between where they are and where they would like to go.  Conventional; stand patters.  6) fieriness increasing; and if, at this stage, the energy cannot be let out, they become fanatics, cranks.  If they are beginning to be able to adapt it they become kindly, active workers, working in service to the castles they have been building.  7) progressives; self-confident; great liking to undertake, and have developed much foresight.  Some of their nature is beginning to go with the arrow, and have some of the sight which is in the arrow.  8) become religious exultants.  They are really a religious type at their higher stage, because always anticipating the future; and, being fire, not earth, it is given up to the higher things.  Also become now introspective (?); if writers, very fiery; inspiration, but not the air inspiration.  9) flexibility and adaptability of the fire; the thwarting of the arrow no longer upsets or disturbs them.  Adaptability of the fire in them.  A prophet-like quality, and of the heart, wonderful (?).  In that sense, mystical leaders, with flexibility and adaptability.  Quite different from what a water sign might be.  Mystical fire.  Seer of the Old Testament.  Very little of water in them, but very much of fire.  10) complete devotion of the fire of the heart to the highest.  Aim is to the bullseye of the highest.  The labor of this sign: to establish the law of the future in the present.  Not only rebuking but trying to establish the law of the future.

Types: fond of outdoor sports.  Especially in the earlier stage, want to go out, out, out.  As the arrow later, in higher activity.  May also be astronomers, photographers, ministers, philosophers.  At the highest, prophets and mystics.

Everyone is working at some aspect of every sign.  You may be dominantly working in one sign and incidentally in others.  Like a dominant function and a secondary function.

Capricorn: ruler Saturn.  Cardinal earth.  Contracts, solidifies; cardinal earth activity.  In this sign, even in the earlier stages; goat eating tin cans in the valley.  1) crafty, suspicious, indiscreet; limited activity in them (tied to a rope);  2) penurious, cold, skeptical, yet acquisitive as he can be (cold Saturn); distance. 3) instinct for business; very exacting; egoistic, suspicious, ambitious, fond of attracting attention.  Negative: miserly, extremely selfish.  4) cautious, severe, over-careful in details; at the same time self-complacency; peculiarly unaware of the feelings in others.  Coldness at another level.  5) severity and cautiousness now modified: careful, industrious; over-detail now neatness; precise, practical minded, and yet with an activity developed out of the cold, contracting influence of Saturn.  When an activity develops out of the pressure of Saturn we develop a very fine activity in Capricorn.  6) prudence, diligence, independence.  7) steady resolution, coolness; a kind of serenity; undisturbed; in crises self-possessed, like goat at edge of precipice.  8) impartial, accurate (justice and accuracy different from those in Libra.  The latter is an active sign, and goes out.  Capricorn, being economic, under the influence of Saturn, does not go out but is highly efficient in its sphere.  9) great perseverance; earnestness; patience; and the cream of self-reliance.  The goat has come up high.  The country is barren.  Patience here is different from that at a lower state — here it is in spite of all sorts of difficulties.  10) at the top, contemplation.  It is the consummation of the earth man.  Associate with the quest (?) of Capricorn the idea of service.  “Whoever would be chief among you, let him be servant.”  Sign of earth carried up as high as earth can go.  That is the best service of earth.  Blessed are those who can take earth up to heaven, – as high as possible.

     Very unpleasant when it is unpleasant, because of the influence of Saturn.  Morose; lack of honesty; deceitful; melancholia.

Types: Always practical; more or less stern people; in religious field hard and stern.  Leaders of large enterprises they often are.  There is a certain coldness.  At the bottom, practical workers; even laborers and in agriculture.

Honor received through action in earth.

Aquarius: air fixed.  ruler Saturn.  Also compressive.

1) chaotic; confusion; tricky  (air held down by Saturn; when Saturn works on air and holds it back.)  2) eccentricity, erratic (air) but always for personal ends.  3) self-opinionated; wayward.  4) queer ideas about things; fanaticism; extremely acquisitive, but without hoarding (air cannot be held back in the same way as earth).  5) whimsical, odd, unconventional; sympathetic manner in the social world; given to thoughtfulness; rather restrained; but in the first stages blocks (?) in the activity.  6) become quieter; unobtrusiveness; intense; carry out their purposes, and become more kindly.  7) cleared mentality; patient; humane; sagacity, discernment; develop magnetic influence (fixed sign).  The magnetism which has caused the worker to draw in also works on the environment; pull in.  But the pull, or magnetism, of the earth sign different from the air.  But will be experienced by the environment.  Outstanding in the four fixed signs.  8) discrimination; ability to read and judge human character; philosophicalactivity; catholic, or universal, tastes.  9) intuition, faithfulness through the mind; penetration; understanding.  10) mental service, as against earth service with Capricorn.  Hu-man, a humanitarian who pours the water of what he has gained on others.  The water of beneficence.  A certain majesty and exalted quality in the mind at this stage.  Distinctly an air majesty, quite different from the majesty of Leo.

The labor in this sign is to complete the air in man, and he who makes the labor in this sign makes the Man-type of the future humanity.

Types: Political and educational workers.  Have a keen feeling for organization, or that the work toward organization is the next step.  Organizers.  If inventive, organize ideas for the benefit of humanity.  Managers.  Very capable in the work of organization; that is part of the pouring of beneficent waters on the man of the future.

Pisces: Water mutable.  1) emotional unrest and vacillation.  2) indecision; laxness; emotional flabbiness. 3) over-anxiety; apprehensiveness; open to temptation; addicts, drugs, etc.(water).  4) emotional shiftiness; forebodings, premonitions (feeling which is too susceptible), dialectic weak and inconsistent; garrulous.  5) easy going; without stamina; lack of common sense; no stability; fond of new sensations.  6) now domestic, hospitable; dreamy; don’t like to reason things out.  Trustful and affectionate, but they are not to be trusted — no stability; don’t think.  Drawn on by their emotional interests; shift.  7) sympathetic, warm hearted, bountiful; open; fastidious.  8) devout; pious, reverent, meditative.  9) emotions become deep and silent; devotion; garrulousness has become meditative, and meditative has become devotion.  10) harmonized at last.  The mystic.  Love for humanity, but different from the activity of the air.  Individualized service and adaptability.  Primarily bound for the spiritual.  Moving toward the spiritual, but don’t know it.  Moving toward it via water.

These people like travel.  Like to cater.  Hotel proprietors.  Spiritualists, mediums, musicians.  Great sensitivity.

 

 

Philosophy of Astrology

MBM  Lecture III

January 30, 1930

 

Hercules: Theban hero.  Earthly mother, heavenly father, Jupiter.  Juno, who tried to hurt him.  Two serpents sent by her, which he strangled.  Higher nature resists the efforts of the lower to climb up.  The story of Hercules is the story of each one of us.  His name means immutable light.  (Horus, son of Light.)  Married; many affairs.  Wife jealous.  Nessus, Centaur, whose blood poisoned him.  His end, destruction by fire.

Lion, water serpent, and boar, the first three labors.  Stag, the fourth labor.  Golden hooves and antlers.  Gold captured, animal destroyed.  Captured (meaning) accumulated.  Killed some things.  5th labor: certain birds.  Strangling the lion represents the destructive powers of the lower mind.  6: cleaning of the Augean stables.  (Not till you do your thirty are you ready for thorough cleaning.  Hercules cleaned them in one day.) 7: overthrowing of the Cretan bull.  A wonderful beast, but must be subdued.  Therefore overthrown by Hercules and brought to Mycenae.  8: removal of certain horses that belonged to the king of Thrace.  Horses Diomedes.  Powers of the self which destroy the self in a way that is actually destructive instead of conquered.  He (Hercules) escaped again, and roamed around on the hills of Arcadia.  An imperfect labor.  9: Getting of a golden girdle that belonged to the queen of the Amazons.  Hippolyta gave it to him but Juno steps in and puts suspicion into the hearts of the Amazons.  It does not end well.  10: captures some oxen, three bodies.  11: to get the golden apples of the Hesperides.  This is a frivolous variation of a profound labor.  12: to go into the underworld and bring Cerberus, the dog, up.  Hercules succeeded in it.

The twelve labors led to the beginning of another octave, or the thirteenth.  The one who has done the twelve labors perfectly is the thirteenth man.  The truly great ones have been associated with the number thirteen.  Jesus; the thirteenth man being through with the earthly side of things, was about his Father’s business.  Always is: the business of the ONE, whose Light the Hercules, or the one who is accomplishing the twelve, carries in him.  He is the perfected Son of the Sun.

Hercules was said to be born on the 25th of December.  Was worshipped in parts of Greece under the sign of the cube, also the sign of the thirteenth – perfect stability, having, at the same time, all places.

Apples of the Hesperides:  First opportunity to taste, experience, the Eve story.  When you have won the perfect fruit of experience, so that the treasure of it is gold, instead of red, you have won the golden apples.  Hu-rac-cu-les — the immutable fire, or the great Lord of Light.  Horus is really Hurus.

There are certain classifications of the signs we are apt to find in astrology books, especially if from the East.  Certain adjustments to it which must be made in order to see it clearly in the Western world, and as we apply it here.

The East speaks of will, wisdom, and activity as a form of the Trinity of the one Immutable God: Will, that of the fixed signs — Taurus, Scorpio, Leo, Aquarius; Wisdom, by the mutable signs — Virgo, Pisces, Sagittarius, Gemini.  Activity: cardinal — Capricorn,Aries and Cancer.  The three lower ones as physical ones.  The three water as the personal self; fire, as intellect and the individual self; or spiritual aspect, with the air.

Rearranging them, we can associate the earth signs with sensation; water and fire, the two aspects of the psychic, lower and higher; and with the third, the mental.  We will have to reorganize the position of it.  We see it as the one who stands in the middle with the fixed signs, but has two arms, the one going out to the activity, cardinal, and the other to the adaptability, which is the mutable.

What is above the horizon is seen as manifested, as day, as revealed, as powers; what is below is night, latency, concealment and withdrawal.

Apparent contradiction: the three points away from midnight.  The real beginning is spring; apparent one where the fruit is seen.  Real beginning at midnight, the darkness, place of concealment; sunrise, where it is apparent.  The place of concealment, or the unknown, might be heritage, the zero from which you have come.  It begins to be visible March 21, or in the ascendant.  Man does not see things in the world of Pluto (?) but in the world of sensibles.  The three points to which it goes, and then the rhythm is complete.

From the tenth house to the fourth house the movement is down, and from the fourth to the tenth it is up.  Seems to contradict manifestation above the horizon.

The first, fourth, seventh and tenth houses are angular.  Thor’s hammer.  The Creative Will; Vulcan’s Forge; the solar whorl, wheel.  The wheel a creative activity, the movement of a wheel at its greatest activity; in man, of the greatest dynamics.  If most of the planets are in those houses your type of activity will be a vigorous one.  It would be an earth active activity if an earth sign in the ascendant.  Gives a key to the kind of a day by the sunrise.  If first house fire, the others are water, air, earth.  First light, moisture, space, and then earth.  In Genesis.  You will always find those four in the old cosmogonies.  Associate it also with the formation of a physical embryo.

If dominance of planets is in the houses of the second grouping, – succedent (we have) steadiness.  In general, corresponds to the fixed signs.  As if the energy launched forth in the angular position now goes at its proper rates.  The houses are positions where activities go on.  If most of the planets are in those succeeding houses, it will be quite a different chart in the reading and application than if in the angular houses.

The houses just before the angular are called cadent.  Means a lowering.  In the cadent houses there is a drop in the activity – a wearing off, a dying down.  Not to be equated with the mutable signs, but has a certain correspondence to them.

A rhythm, – much activity, sustaining of the activity, and down.

If most of the planets are in the cadent houses, there is a lessening of the energies, a waning, decrease; might be in regard to a number of things.  For instance, introversion.  This is a wheel of manifestation, – how it seems, not necessarily how it really is: as, for instance with regard to active introversion.

Hereafter we will study houses.  They are the positions on the wheel which are permanent.  The signs may be in many different positions but the houses are always in the one position.  The first always angular, second succedent, third cadent.  They are places in which the activity takes place.  A house stays.  They are to be seen from the gradations of the three positions.  There are certain strategic positions which help make the wheel go rapidly, or slow down; give a momentum and make the thing turn round.  Speed of the movement depends upon the activity, personally speaking.

 

Principles of Astrology

MBM  Lecture IV

February 6, 1930

 

The Houses

Ascendant, the first house plus its sign.  East and west of Greenwich; give parallel and meridian and you can figure exact time at birth.  GMT 15″- 1 hr’s time.  If it is noon at Greenwich, what time is it at 60″ west longitude?  What time at 20″ west longitude; what time is it at Chicago, which is 85″ west? (6:20 a.m.)  What time at San Francisco, 120″ west? (4 a.m.)  at 45″ east? (3 p.m.) 80″ east? (5 p.m.) If it is 7 p.m. at Naples, which is 15″ degrees east, what is GMT time? (6 p.m.)  If 4:30 p.m. at Christiania, 10″ east, GMT is 3:50 PM.  (other examples given but not recorded.)

What are houses, and how do they differ in regard to our interpretation?  Houses are very different from the signs.  Houses refer to outer things on the whole, to the form side, to matter; they are related to the physical world, the senses.  You would see earthly affairs from the standpoint of the houses.  See the house as a bottle, the sign as the color of the bottle, planets the contents of the bottle, or container.  The sign refers to emotions, thoughts, feelings, ideas (the thing that colors it) and the planets, the kind of influence working in that bottle, or house .

1st house: represents things as they are going to appear when manifestation begins — a kind of key to the way the soul is going to manifest.  From this point you will get a sense of the potentials in this life, – what has been drawn up into consciousness, and can be drawn out into life.  Represents the degree of energies which are at the point of extroversion, moving out toward the periphery, in the centrifugal movement.  How they relate themselves.  “I”, or persona.

2nd house.  Those things which are just out from the personality, – possessed by the personality in the sense of worldly goods, conditions, standing, etc.  Also the things possessed in the sense of actual finances, or that which has commercial value: possessions in the larger sense.  (Mine and possessions, finances.)

3rd house:  How do you relate yourself to “I and mine” – practical thinking, material thinking, the lower levels of the ladder.  Represents the first efforts of the lower mind, – why this?, why that?.  Outwardly, it is called the house of short journeys, but really the short journeys of the mind, which asks why?  At this stage, mind is limited; has small radius.  Nevertheless, it is beginning its work of assimilation, practical data; and, by asking questions, starts the movement of the mental function.  Corresponds to curiosity (on the ladder of Set.)

4th house:  Again, the form side.  Might be called home, the immediate life in the family, with parentage and the environment of that parental influence.  Hereditary tendencies.  Seen on another plane, it is the heritage, the invisible point from which all things come.  Other kinds of parentage, which are in your heritage.  Psychic tendencies — they belong to our heritage in the same sense.  It is the midnight point, to which we return.  Therefore also the house which contains conditions at the end of life. Going out from the zero and returning to the Zero — the past and the future.  Very interesting philosophically.  The mother is always the substance side, on whatever plane she appears.

5th house:  Further expansion.  Outwardly, the house of children.  The many kinds of children, or possessions.  Worldly enterprises — that is one kind, – something possessed in conjunction with someone else; love affairs; affections; and when related to love affairs with the opposite sex, the next step of “our”, namely physical children. Therefore, the powers of generation, physical children and the emotions which are related to them, namely the affections — the love motif.  Wherever there is possession, and we can say “ours”, there is implied an affectional, or love, relation.  So this house has to do with the emotions that arise out of the possessions; or sometimes precede the possessions.  More in key with the house which belongs to “ours” as the result of extroverted, or expressed, action – just as in marriage, business, community life, on the basis of an affectional relationship.

6th house:  As the result of this movement out, up to “ours”, many obligations develop. You can’t say “ours” without obligation.  So this has to do with obligation, service, work waiting to be done, as the result of conditions developed.  Therefore also has to do with the changes which come about through service.  Those changes have to do with profounder aspects of the houses – resultant of the labors done.  Hence, a new nature is developed; new powers; the second persona begins to come out.  Therefore, often relates to alchemy.  Sometimes called the house of ceremonial magic.  But very few ceremonies that have magic in them.  The word comes from magi, meaning wisdom.  This house is just below the horizon.  It shows that if you don’t make a progressive magic, a true alchemical transformation, you have a regression.  Hence, it contains the evil results of work: worry, fears, taboos, labors in leading forward, exhaustion, neurasthenia, physical sickness.  (Work, service, obligations, How.)

Moon:  The moon has to do with the soul side of things; the sun, with the spirit side of things.  But spirit does not manifest except through the individuality.  So we may, in charts, find the indications of the particular flavor which the individuality of a student will have, or is beginning to have, when they are working along the lines of individuation; and that the personality is described by the moon, and to some extent by the rising sign.  We have varying degrees of sensitivity to our transliminal.  In regard to the rising sign and the moon there are certain very close relations.  The relation of the moon and the rising sign may, on the one hand, be remote, whereas, with others, the moon and the ascendant are relatively close together.  Some people’s persona is more closely related to their transliminal than others; a close relation between the ascendant and the personality, as seen in the moon.  The moon seems to have to do with the personality, the rising sign with the potentials of the areas just below the mask, and the sun with the result of the relationship arising out of the two.  Out of it rises the individuality, a potent, masculine thing, seen in the sun, which is masculine, potent, the true individuality.  It is never born out of the concious.  You find freedom in proportion as you obey the law in your own nature.  You can only be true to a law of assembling and coordinating the dismembered portions of yourself.  “Know thyself.”

The writing in the heavens can be found lower down in man.  It is the same writing, whether you know it or not.

 

 

Principles of Astrology

MBM  Lecture V

February 13, 1930

 

With the fourth to the sixth house, a kind of repetition as in the first three.

7th house: The first above the horizon.  A new phase of relationships (like adolescent appearing on the horizon); beginning of a new type of relationship.  The house of alliances — all that belongs to unions, partnerships, federations, marriage, and to intimate relationships.  Usually called the house of marriage.  Other types of alliances that may be just as significant.  A.voluntary linking up.  In the family it is unconscious.  From one point of view you don’t choose your parents.  In the seventh house they are voluntary, and to some degree conscious, depending upon your capacity.  Results: may be enmities, conflicts and similar relationships which arise.  Above the horizon.  A new type of consciousness, and leads out into the world.  This house also has an introverted side; for, from one point of view, all that precedes it becomes transliminal material.  First half of the journey through the houses.

8th house: Has to do with the death of the body, of the form side, etc.  Why does it follow immediately upon marriage?  Compare life of the bee.  The outer object, the biological object, has been achieved.  House of legacies, derivatives — inheritance, as the world calls it.  Scorpio is the house of death, or regeneration.  You cannot have regeneration unless you have death first.  An extremely mystical house.  The 8th house and the 12th the most mystical, or profound.  As the result of death, Scorpio, there are other derivatives than legacies.  The legacy of the voluntary death is regeneration — the fruit of it.  But it is also the house of conscious introversion, – which makes for regeneration.  Also has to do with the formation of higher consciousness.  Even up to the state of Christ consciousness.  Through that, the inheritance is a great treasure.

9th house: near the zenith.  Directly opposite the zero point.  Now that there has been some experience above the horizon there is capacity for the mind to go further, and we have the house of the higher mind.  Asks larger questions, if you are ready to mount.  The lower house (practical mind) asks just: Why?, like a child.  The adult begins to ask: How?.  Inquires behind the veil of things.  Higher part of the mental ladder.  Has to do with scientific, philosophic, ideal inquiries.  The great thinking that goes into the Cosmic regions.  Also, there has been enough experience here so that the imagination is trued, and is therefore an excellent tool for the higher mind.  Then it is safe to make long journeys.  Also associated with true dreaming.  Preparation for activity in a still larger sense.

10th house:  Past the meridian line, and, in a sense, bears the fruit of the others before the decline.  The house of attainment, or house of profession.  As soon as you have a profession you are related to other people, but in a still more distant sense than in the first two groups.  A larger relationship.  A type of work or service that results from the attainment.  Sometimes lesser service; sometimes preliminary to attainment.  But the attainment of this house represents not so much the work side of things but rather the fruit that has been obtained as the result of the three-quarter circuit around the ring.  Thus, obligations are taken on consciously and voluntarily.  You take on its responsibilities by your labors but hold them through the voluntary condition in yourself.  Has to do with business ability, material reputation, fame, moral responsibility — those things that bind you to the other side.  If you have attained far, and become powerful, this house is the sign of your conscious extroversion.  Because it is the sign of your work in the world.  The personality is supposed now to be flexible, and in true service to the third dimension.  Likewise, great achievements in mystical ways may be seen as they appear to the world.  Anticipation of the 12.

11th house:  As the result of this relationship in the world, and before the world — labors that rank you – this brings you again into a new type of relationship.  There are widening relationships in all groups of three houses.  When we come to the eleventh house, if there is power at all, the great relationships are here indicated.  Outwardly, it is called the house of friends.  These relationships cannot be maintained by the weak soul.  They have not the grasp to keep relationships outside of themselves.  So this house is full of jeopardy for weak souls.  But you will see in it the reaching out of the soul toward larger relationships.  If they can stand it, this is the house of great expanding before the end.  So, in a profound sense, this house has to do with affiliations that belong to brotherhood, new groups, companionship, in the sense it was used in the first series – companionship, the fruit of man’s pilgrimage in earth.  Not many can stand it.  If that is possible, new relationships arise again out of this bond, and the end is near, namely, the twelfth house.

12th house: Closes the circle.  Quite different from the house of death of the old for the birth of the new.  This is the death to the horizon; hence, the house of mystery.  Very few are mysteries.  The house will indicate something of what the soul has done in the world.  If the soul has not gone far, it is bound.  Hence, outwardly, this is the house of bondage.  Very few have release there.  It is the house of self-undoing.  You may have made such a mess of things in the circuit that you are bearing these fruits when you come to the end.  Or it may be an undoing from a mystical aspect.  You may undo your ties in this dimension.  Voluntarily.  And there are few voluntary individuals.  The house in which you make your solution, and do it consciously.  Release to the bondage of earth, but bondage now.  A Cosmic pattern.  House of withdrawal from the world, just getting ready to go below the horizon.  House of disappearance.  May represent, in the last analysis, crucifixion.

Moon not reliable.  Sign Gemini not reliable.  Hence, this soul will not be able to maintain friendships.  Functions in the house of friends via its personality.  Your personality ought not to function in that house.  (This is a young soul.)  Generosity in the rising sign; warmth; but instability in relation to that moon.  Probably won’t come into contact with his sun.  House of generation remote from the capacity the moon can maintain.  So with this chart you can never read it philosophically.  Only in regard to the form side.  Chart also tells the age of the soul.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Nativity chart of Gladstone, part of)

Person of power.  Practical sign (rising sign), in itself cardinal and in angular position.  Mars an energizer.  Mercury in close position to the sun — a very favorable position.  This person should be forceful, and achieve much.  Aries in the lower mind, and an expanding sign, Jupiter.  It is beneficent there.  Moon in Libra indicates certain types of harmonious influences, balancing; harmonizing; therefore some form of death to old things.  It is above the horizon, and makes for balance, in a house that makes for balance through the loss of old forms. Conservative, the balance of Libra.  Personality in a favorable position.  Rising sign aided by tremendous power.  Expanding lower, practical mind – flowering of the practical mind.

 

 

 

Principles of Astrology

MBM  Lecture VI

February 20, 1930

 

Souls are in various stages of discipline, self-control, development.  Therefore, when we would speak of a young soul we shall (should?) say: undisciplined, untrained soul.  That helps you to another concept: that if a soul will quickly accept training, or discipline, it becomes rapidly old.  Condition replaces time.

How can you tell that the chart with the moon in Gemini and the rising sign Leo is a young soul?  (the first of the three charts of last week.)  The moon has to do with the persona — the self as it manifests in earth.  When the moon is in Gemini, in the house of associations, or friends, we have instability in the personality, instability in regard to friends is one of the signs of unfineness, or lack of discipline.  The moon in Gemini in some other house would be quite different.

Suppose the moon were in Gemini in the fifth house.  It might be instability in regard to work.

     An intercepted sign pushes out the others near it.  Saturn in the house of the lower mind may represent logic and definiteness, but not with the sun in the fifth and moon in Gemini.

Moon in Leo gives a great deal of activity, vitality, exuberance, quickness of mind, because the moon is the first persona.  The deeper aspects must come to approximate Scorpio.  The moon here does not represent the higher mind, but the appearance of the higher mind.  Mars is with the sun in the house of service, and in the sign of Taurus. Therefore the movement toward the sun, or to Mars, square with moon, indicates tight tension.  Triangle relatively easy to manage; square is forceful and dynamic.  Managing a triangle is easy, without dynamics; so you try to utilize the square and minimize the triangle.  There is no planet in the lower

mind; therefore it is not disciplined — has taken on the appearance without preliminary discipline.  The moon will be helped by Saturn.  Pressure will be exercised on this native that the activities of the persona are going to be crushed.  Will help bring about movement toward the rising sign.  It will make possible a gradual approximation of the sun.

Moon in Capricorn at the midnight point.  Interesting birth, at the midnight point; shows there is a certain power, voltage, that was unseen in the beginning — just as most people do not know that the new year begins December 21.  Indicative here of power, by the development of the chart.  Rising sign Libra.  Yet he did, if you read history at long range it was balancing.  Ruler Venus, (close to the cup of the) tenth house, with sun and Mercury — showing the mind is working in close connection with that which is the sun — not necessarily the individuality, but something approximating that.  Here, achievement before the world.  Moon carries out the top of the chart.  Not all positions are alike.  It may

be power instead of conflict.  That is the case with Napoleon.  Instability in morals and alliances, Uranus.  Chart.of a powerful, extrovert.  Dominant things near manifestation, zenith, high point of the heavens which is correct for Napoleon; outrush to appearances.  If in the twelfth house it would be introvert.  Invisible     of the Saturn too, at the zenith, which is correct for Napoleon.

     Sun and Mercury should be together.  It means the mind helping the individuality manifest, which it should.  Napoleon had a marvelous mind for campaigns.

     Discipline means coordination of yourself to a common purpose.

     Sun refers to the individuality.  To achievements before the world, as in the case of Napoleon.  Warm, expansive, extroverted; generosity represents the father.  If the sun and moon are in opposition it would indicate difficulty of getting from the moon to the sun.  In a strong chart, the opposite.  If sun and moon are in the same sign there is harmony between the inner and outer life — no conflict or ambivalence.  Progressive, even development.  More philosophically, according to the discipline of the soul, it may mean that the personality quickly yields to the individuality.

Position of planets in the sun system.  Astrology, seen philosophically, is a parabolic language.  The more you study it, the more you can draw from it.  One great peculiarity about the parable of the stars is that man cannot do anything with them.  They are there — an immutability about them.  Aloofness from the things of man.  That is why they are the most perfect scripture, from one point of view.  The most definite scripture. Patterns.

Sun: the central point of the sun system — nucleus, core, root, – and you must so make the analogy with this sun system, seeing it as the ideal, or archetypal, pattern of your universe; and therefore bring the parts of you that correspond to the sun system into the same relationship, so that the very core, or center, of your being becomes the sun.  It is potentially so, but not actively so.  A vast difference between the potential of a thing and its active achievement.

There are very few who have brought their sun into the central core position.  Nevertheless, there it is, written in the heavens.  Your spirit nature, or larger consciousness, is the central, warming, energizing life and light-giving force.  Remove the debris, liberate it, and aid it to the right position.

Mercury: the planet closest to the sun.  But is mercurial and adaptable.  In man, who is not the sun system pattern, but has a vast potentiality, Mercury is in close relationship, usually, to anything else except the sun.  If it is close to the sun it is usually only latent.  Mercury’s true nature is that of Great Mind in you.  The first mansion outward from the core.  The movement out from the central life in you should be mind, – and the inclusive mind that sees all.  The sun and Mercury should always stay close together, as in the sun pattern.

Venus: next Venus, the harmonizer, the one who makes the rolling movement over the roughnesses of earth.  Therefore, in the Great Pattern, the Great Mind begins the work of manifestation and it is Venus who harmonizes it to obey the will of the Great Mind.  In that sense Venus becomes the fruit of Mind, which is love.  Love is not the fruit of the lesser things that you have made it in earth, but it is the fruit of Mind.  Profit by the sun-system pattern.  Then you will understand the difference between the attractions of the things of earth and those of a larger dimension.

Next earth: These two forces are between it and the sun, which is for the earth too strong a force.

Next Mars: symbolizing activity.  The first two are not activity, from one point of view; they are, rather, emanations, or states of being, which operate toward the earth, and activity begins after that.  After the first two emanations from the coreactivity begins.  (Mars) symbolizes activity after the creation of earth.  That activity must be nurtured.  Activity must be drawn out for a while before it is corrected — every teacher knows that.  There is a period after that activity starts when it continues, or expands, under the beneficent influence of Jupiter.  Only thereafter comes the work of Saturn, the compacter, condenser, orderer, in the sense of making for discipline, accuracy, organization, etc.  Only after a pupil has expressed himself for a time should he be disciplined.  If you discipline before, you get no enduring productiveness.

Then two planets which have not been long on the scene of man’s consciousness – Uranus and Neptune.  Uranus is, in a sense, the symbol of the fruit of these processes.  In his peak, or essence, he symbolizes masterhood, perfected control, completion.  Masterhood as it belongs to the symbol of the shepherd; and the great shepherd is Mind.

So Uranus is the fulfillment of Mercury.  When the work of the human evolution has been accomplished through Mercury, the perfect messenger of the sun, through Venus, then earth, then Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, – in this compact fashion — for all parables are compact, – masterhood may be achieved.  That is not easy; but when it is attained it moves out to the outermost part of our circle, and you have Neptune.

Neptune:  This planet little understood.  Puncturing of the bowl from below up: the Great Cup, which is punctured by the Master (in the Ultimate).  He alone can puncture and enter into the Great Cup.  He alone can bathe in the Cup, and receive its baptism.  With that he passes into the regions beyond the Cosmic.

So we see not only the pattern of the processes of the macrocosm, but the microcosm must also fulfill the potential pattern in itself, and become like it.  The microcosm is not like the macrocosm, – only potentially of the same pattern as the macrocosm.  But it awaits the doing of man.

Man has been given choice.  The Pattern of the universe waits for the becoming of the sons of the Sun, and groans and travails until that is accomplished.  Every time a child becomes a man there is release of burden.  You must have Cosmic perspective.

A chart is not fate.  It is an effect of the past, which conditions the present, as all things are conditioned by the past.  Therefore, whatever influences there are in a chart are the things arising out of the past.  As they have been conditioned, so they can be changed.  Destiny is the working out of cause and effect.

 

 

Principles of Astrology

MBM Lecture VII

February 27, 1930

 

Some of the content of astrology is to be found in folklore and fairy tales.  Many references in the Christian and Hebraic scriptures about the stars, the sun and the moon.  Much in the book of Revelations.

 

Slavic story of a beautiful princess attended by twelve maidens.  Ogre Kostey summons his evil spirits.  Her arm (?) goes to sleep.  He surrounds her island with an iron wall.  Sun awakens the consciousness of a prince in a far distant land.  Heroic will.  Six riddles.  …. 5th:    ….has existed before the creation of Adam.  “I am always changing, in succession, the two colors of my dress.   …Thousands of years have gone by and I have remained unaltered both in color and form.”

 

The princess is the soul, who is surrounded by the potential twelve signs, labors, stages of the pilgrimage.  Nothing liberates the potent powers as in your soul.  She is still waiting for the true lover.  The ogre is the lower world, or matter.  As it descends, everything else goes to sleep.  The lower worlds breathe sleep upon him.  Slowly the process of liberation via the twelve labors, the twelve-headed dragons with the iron wall – the vast material substance which encloses the soul as it makes its pilgrimage through the twelve.

 

The maidens are the twelve beneficent aspects.  When the soul cries out to the spirit, or sun, or Great Spirit, the individual spirit comes to the rescue and the twin of life again takes place.  But the consciousness which is won through the lower processes of life, – which is spirit made conscious by the lower, must understand that the essential nature has nevertheless lived before the time of Adam.  Not until that riddle is understood is the mating consummated.  Only then the coming into potency of the thirteenth, via the prince, a sun hero, coming only in response to the sun message.

 

This is a fragment of astrological teaching.  Stitched in deeply in the fairy tales, folklore and myths.

 

Stonehenge.  That is not the correct name, which is Gorsedd; sometimes also called the Choir Gaur.  The root meaning usually in the early form, and it therefore has high content.  “Choral” related to the sun.  Also means a rock.  Chorus leads us to Gaurus, and Gyre, which means circle.  The sun goes in a circular course….  To the early races, the sun going in a course, and the sun itself, were closely related.  For there was also associated with the word gaur, gyre, the idea of the fire of the sun.  From Gorus we get the root gor in Gorsedd, – which therefore belongs to a circular rock scheme, laid out on the plains of Salisbury.  Connected with the circular path of the sun.

 

We find that root in many words where you would not expect to see it.  In marguerite, for instance, – the white circle of the petals.

Root, the circle which the fire of the sun made.  That pyramidal fire, that three-cornered fire, has come down to us in the word gore, a triangular piece in women’s dresses.  Pyramidal, associated with pyre, the fire in the pyramidal form.  Set up by stones, the rock circle of the pyramidal fire, on the plains of Salisbury.

 

Stonehenge, or Gorsedd: Outer and inner circles.  The outer contains sixty stones, five times twelve.  The inner has thirty.  Presumably one of the inside circles is nineteen. They are supposed to be blue stones.  Nineteen years is the sum of twelve and seven.  In the center are five groups of three stones each.  Radiating out to the trilithons — hand symbol.

 

The same astrology contained that we have already known through the science of astrology itself by the Druids.  They are written on the surface of the earth via these great stones, that these peoples revered the stars, and knew their import.  Many different types of stones, sometimes carried from a great distance.  Perhaps had various other meanings.

 

Book of Revelations  And now a few bits from the Book of Revelations.  In this book the astrological content is strikingly apparent.  We do not know the author.  It is not a coherent whole.

 

Seven is used, many times.  A multiplicity of content in the seven.  All these forces go by the name of the planets and have a variety of aspects, active and passive, dominant, – all of them energizers of some type.

 

The “seven churches”: the idea of places having planets guarding over them.  Typically Chaldean.  Astrology was known everywhere, but in Chaldea it was treated as a science, to be applied to many things, including the most mundane events.  The “seven churches” are seven localities, which are described in this book through their guardian angels.  Even now the Christian does this, and associates guardian angels with certain churches.  The seven churches are in Asia, which therefore symbolizes the world, under the seven tutelary spirits.

 

One:  The Church of Ephesus.  Gabriel, the guardian angel.  The moon is implied.  This church has left its first love; and the moon, or the soul, has left its first love (as in the Slavic folk tale.)  So the award of this church is to eat of the Tree of Life, for the sun is life; and when it returns to its first love it will eat of this.  When the soul returns to spirit it again eats of the Tree of Life,

2. Smyrna: And the angel thereof is Raphael. “It was first and last; but who is dead and is alive, etc.”  (one of the riddles).  Adonis, who went to the death, was wept, and returns to life.  The sun.

 

3. Pergamos: Its angel Zadkiel. Carried a sword with two edges – double edge.  Its sin was that of Balaam, who uses his sciences in the service of evil.  Marduk, or Jupiter, who carries the double-edged sword, and who has to learn to be faithful.  He has been in error, and must learn to be true.  When he learns how to be true he shall be given a new name; because then, he, this Church, who belongs to the power of Jupiter, becomes of complete service to truth.  Jupiter often seen as a surrogate for the sun.  To learn to be faithful is the labor of this church.

 

4. Thyatira; Angel, Hamiel. In this, the Christ appears with eyes of fire and feet of brass (copper).  Venus.  The sin of this church is sensual indulgence, the lower love; and Venus is the sign of the higher love.  The wonder (?), the lesson, applies to this church.  Then its reward is the morning star — Christ; that is, its love lifted up to Cosmic regions, – Venus being the brightest of the morning stars.

 

5. Sardis: Angel, Chamael. Had a name that lived, but was dead.  A star which is not.  The star which is associated with this church was, in the ancient day in Chaldea, spoken of as the star which is, but is not.  In this, Christ appears as the king through whom came war.  Mars.  Thief in the night.  Reward is to walk with Christ, or in the Cosmic, with a white garment, and to be proclaimed.  That means that the warrior is victorious; or, he who has gone to war has come back with the palm branch and, being victorious, will be proclaimed.  But now it is a righteous war, not the evil side of Mars.  Mars comes into his true realm.

 

6. Philadelphia: Angel, Zadkiel. Saturn.  Like Mars, is much maligned, but comes to his own here in this church.  Will be worshipped as a pillar.  Saturn’s work is, perhaps of all, the most beneficent, because it makes for accuracy, – the perfect disciplinarian; it makes for truth, symmetry, righteousness.  Don’t think so much of the pain side. Something of the pain side is represented, because he was worshipped aa a black pillar.  When the work of Saturn has been completed he will be set up as a pillar in the temple of God, and will no more go out.  Hence, he too will be inscribed with a new name.

 

7. Laodicea: Angel, Michael. Of this planet it is said it is neither hot nor cold; it can be anything.  Like the “I” principle in man, that can be in service to anything until, as in the story of this church, it comes into its true reward.  Then it is the faithful and true witness, as the mind becomes.  It is with Christ, the Great Amen.  And was, in the beginning, before time.  So it will sit with the Christ at the close of the Cosmic Day.  If the Christ is associated with the sun, in the fullness of its power, this is associated with the sun, and will sit with the Christ on his throne.  Mercury.

 

The message is also to the seven churches in yourself, and to see what your shortcomings are, – how much they fit in with the shortcomings of these churches, – which are rebuked, and then promised as to what it means.  The Seven are, at their fullest, Cosmic Power.

 

Other sevens:  The seven Golden Candlesticks and the seven stars.  These are a correspondent to the seven great stars which are forever burning before the throne of Deity.  They are forever before the invisible Throne.  So they burn forever.  And the seven lighted individual candlestick is an analogy to them.  Man must light the seven in himself; and transmute them from the sins of the seven churches to a state where he achieves the full achievement that the seven Churches receive.  (Ch. 12-16)

 

The Seven Seals.  “Who is worthy to open the Book with the seven seals?”  Only one.

The seven trumpets, and the seven vials.

 

The first four seals are associated with horses (Ch. 6.)  Condensation in this Scripture — several exposures on one plate.  Overlapping of the Four Horsemen with the Seven Seals.  With the fifth Seal there is no horse.  The first Seal is a white horse – trumpet and hell fire, blood — always associated in that early day with a lunar eclipse.

 

Horses are the four energies of the four points of the compass.  The vial which corresponds brings pestilence to those who walk in darkness; again associated with the moon’s nature, – moon, or soul, is always alight.  Eclipse.

 

Second, the Red Horse:  Power to take peace from the earth.  Trumpet; and a mountain of fire falls into the sea.  Vial: and it becomes blood.  This belongs to the power of the sun.

Third, the Black Horse:  the balancer.  Saturn.  Makes for symmetry, accuracy, discipline.  Famine, though.  Trumpet; and fresh water made bitter.  Wormwood.  Influence of the opening up of the Book with Seven Seals.  As it is opened, certain mysteries occur.  They are released, or made patent, outer.  At a special condition.  The seals, as that which releases them.  As the powers symbolized by these planets became fully operative certain things would be open to you: certain knowledge, – areas of experience.

Fourth, the Pale Horse: death.  The trumpet blows, and the sky is darkened; and when the vial is emptied the sun becomes scorched: Venus.

Fifth, ”Slain for God.”  Mars, the Destroyer.  And so we come to the beneficent side of the seal.  Scorpio, of which Mars is ruler.  The critical house.

Sixth, Earthquakes.  Jupiter. Destroying angels.  Euphrates dried up.  Jupiter as the sun regent, or surrogate, and so does some of the work of the sun.

Seven, Silence: a preparation for the understanding which is to follow.  Woman with the child and the dragon.  And with the pouring out of the vial Babylon and the beasts appear.  Mercury.  The symbol of the mind in its true position.  And so, at the last day, when the seal is opened, there is a revelation by mind of all things.  The Ultimates appear.  The woman with child, and, on the other hand, Babylon: the lower and the higher.  And through the enlightened mind will arise that battle, or war, which will decide that which is to be.

 

The vision now changes.  What follows is the result of these preliminaries.

 

The Churches set out the pattern.  Then the Seven Seals, and that which is behind them, announced through the trumpets — the ringing challenge, and the pouring out of the content thereof, which is the vial, or container, which is empty.  And then those who can arise, put into the Babylon and woman and child motif, enters into that conflict — the great battle of the future.

 

 

THE STORY OF HERCULES  (HERECLES)

Mr. Spear Knebel

July 25, 1957

 

 

This is a story out of old Greece…out of time long past.

 

The Golden Age of Pericles is the time usually thought of – but this story is from an earlier time.  The Homeric writings have a similar flavor.  There is a sense of lightness; brightness; of quality of life at that time . . . quite aware of the Gods.

………

 

Mr. Knebel held up a picture  (illustration from a Grecian Urn).  He pointed out the figure of Herecles battling the Hydra; of Aeolaus, his nephew standing behind him.  These are not big muscle men – the real power is pictured back of them, in Athena and Hermes (messenger of the Gods, with caduseus).

 

Hercules:  strength; labor.  He didn’t talk about things – just went out and did them.

 

Many of these old stories can be taken on several different levels:

 

1. A) Psychological – …would find great deal of help in the 12 labors of Hercules – they cover the chief problems in the story of every man.

 

1. B) …by-pass this and look for something deeper. The story of a very great human being – very advanced, on the same road we take but far beyond anything that we can connect up with our own.  Nevertheless, the story can still have very practical value.  Like a magnet, it draws you on and in a most practical way, can accelerate your evolution.

 

Every story starts with the birth……….

 

Perseus, the hero who slew the gorgon, won a legendary kingdom.  Identified with Mycenae – at very center of ancient world culture.  Perseus’ son, Electreon, succeeded him and Electreon’s son, Amphitrion, married Alfmina and went to live in Thebes.  On their wedding night, Alfmina was visited by both her husband and Zeus.  Of this union, twin sons were born: Iphecles and Alcaedes (representing earth and water).  There is simplicity in this – hero is the dual nature which we share with all higher animals. The wonder is, that the seed of Zeus is implanted in this simple animal nature and, presently, it will send out its roots and sprout and, presently, the hero will emerge out of this simple nature.

 

The child grew up (Alcaedes).  In youth, Alcaedes was trained by those of manly hearts. He lead an expedition against the Minions – freed Thebes from paying tribute.  What could be more natural that that he should go on in this role of leader and deliverer.

 

Alcaedes marries the King’s daughter – Megara.  On Olympus, Zeus’ wife, Hera, does not like this.  She sent a frenzy to Alcaedes in which he slew all of his own children.  What does this mean?  What is this frenzy?

 

Seen from below, up, – it is indeed madness.  That’s what Tolstoi’s friends said of him.  He, in the midst of his brilliant career, repudiated all writing (representing his children)  – took right-angle turn.

 

This frenzy was the opening of the eye of the mind to Reality.

 

The only way these things can be interpreted, is by deeds and way of life.

 

In general way, Herecles saw vision of greater drama which is taking place behind thescenes of this worldly life.  Something of its austere beauty.  Along with that, a vision, some kind of understanding of what his role could be in that greater drama.

 

Immediately, he kills his children.  Cuts off all association in this life with Megara, all things which life had picked for him.  His own interests, one’s deeds which were personally interesting to him as are our own children.

 

This right-angle turn – this cutting off of attachments, could be as painful to one as cutting off one’s own children.

 

For a truly great being to behold something real, is to act, to become different.  He cuts off all of the old life and now is ready to begin the twelve labors.  First, he goes to Delphi and the oracle of Apollo.  This oracle had the reputation of giving advice in riddles – but this advice to Alcaedes is very simple:

“From this day forth, your name shall be no more Alcaedes but Herecles.  In Tiryns you shall make your life and there, serving Euristes, you shall accomplish your labors.”

Herecles – the glory – thrice glory of Hera – tho one who had shown him his true nature.  (In naming the animals, you know the nature of them.)

“You are to show forth the nature of Hera………”

Euristes is the king…he is serving the highest, the finest…this differs from the Christ ideal.  The Christian ideal is the imitation of Christ – and you cannot…

 

The twelve labors are his own.  The number 12 is noted in the Temple of Olympus.  12 – symbol of the completion of a cycle.  Also, a number of completed work, as in “six days shalt thou work” and here, it’s 12 – twice six.

 

Completed work – balanced work – equals twelve.

 

12 is also symbolical of perfection.  Fulfillment is the idea of the manifold . . . as in the color spectrum……….made up of many.

 

You may think of the twelve labors as a succession – a climbing of steps up to the higher.  When you have reached the top step, you have not left the bottom step behind. . . they are all there to make the perfect brilliancy of white light.

 

Think of the disciples of Jesus – all different types…Peter; John; Judas; Thomas. . . It took many types to make up the band of twelve.  The 13th man is not a type but rather the man who can be at will, now this type, now that . . . whatever the situation requires.

 

The first labor was to slay a lion:  In this lion there is something both divine and something dangerous.  He faces the beast without any weapon – in hand to hand combat.  (holds up picture) – behind Herecles stands Athena.

 

. . . .story of Samson and the Lion . . . in which a riddle was posed to the guests.  “Out of the eater came forth meat.  Out of the strong came forth honey . . . .”  No matter how you see Herecles pictured, there is always the lion’s skin – which cannot be pierced.  Something always relates to the hero.  (You’ll recall that in the Rosicrucian Parable – the hero tackles the lion, kills him, dissects him and then is told the lion will come back to life again.)

 

The sin of Pride – most deadly of the 7 deadly sins…There is a common denominator in these stories – but the content is what makes them significant…….  If Herecles is going to perform this role in which men are going to look up to him, this problem of knowing how to use one’s own way of looking at himself, of his own facing and thought about his ego – is not overcome once and for all, it goes all the way up the ladder.  Here is a great being and he has to battle with it first of all – but after he has won the battle, there is always the lion’s skin.  He doesn’t have to strut – he just IS . . . . . and nothing can pierce that ……..

……..

 

(There is the example of Hitler…what soul age?  The will to power got him.)  A dangerous beast – but there’s something divine, too, (lion born of Hera without a husband).

 

After the lion, the next labor was the battle with the water monster which had nine heads.  The last one he severed from the body and put it under a great stone.

 

Huge doe – sacrificed to Moon Goddess.  Huge birds – water birds – hard to get.  Athena gave him a large gong.  He sounded it and the birds flew into the air.  One by one he caught them.

 

Exploit of Bull

 

Exploit of Horses

 

Had to bring back the girdle of the queen of the Amazons.  She gave it to him without his killing her.

 

Famous Herculean Labor:  Aegean King had 30,000 cattle in a stable … for great length of time nobody had cleaned the stable.  How was Herecles to go about this?  He broke down part of foundation of the stable.  Took two rivers – diverted them from their channels through the stables.

 

What are these cattle?  The cattle are the energies of body, heart and mind.  Why 30,000?  Because we’re talking about a great being who brings great voltage with him.  When he goes to extremes, he goes ALL THE WAY.

 

What is the filth?  We know there are situations which we don’t meet squarely.  This is full of energy…..(psychologically they are not dealt with).  Something like that but there are deeper roots to these things than can be reached even by a skillful psychologist.  What does Herecles do to himself?  First thing – breaks down part of his foundation (what supports you – what you need to lean on) – might be family – job – clothes – religious faith – philosophy of life — so you can see what a drastic thing Herecles is doing here.  Unless one knows what he is doing, this would be dangerous.

 

What happens next?  He diverts the course of two rivers.  What are they?  These are energies which normally function not in earth at all but in another plane.  The nearest you can come to these energies is in effective prayer.  In this you are calling upon other energies to impinge upon you and have an effect upon yourself.  When Heracles makes himself naked by throwing away supports, he is in a condition where other energies can have their effect – and one day all the filth is washed away.

 

Why does a great being have to cleanse himself?  (Story of missionary …)  As a great being, he knows a great deal more about what is there that shouldn’t be there.  (Like the good housekeeper who does a good job.).  Not everything that comes through the past, in heritage, is clean and there must be a cleansing.  Because a Great Being has a great deal of energy, he’s liable to pile up a great deal of negatives as well as positives.

 

Next story is how Herecles brings back the hound, Cerberus, from the Underworld.

 

The last story is of the Garden of Hesporides and bringing back the Golden Apples.  He goes to the very North near the legendary river, Aridonis.  Herecles pounces on Nerus….Wandered further, came to Arabia – where he found Prometheus chained to Rock (Prometheus brought fire to man – and fire is the upturned emotion, the fire man knows how to use.)  What does fire do normally?  Burns. …. The fire burning is not the heart (that is why the Greeks used symbol of liver).  Why is Prometheus chained to rock?  He is bound to rock by his own devotion.   The rock is something enduring.  (There is nothing enduring except principle.) ………..in man . . . fire . . . own devotion chains him to it.  Suffering has its place but a limited place.  But suffering does not know when to stop suffering.  Then Mind, the Hero, must come along and break the chains.  Herecles frees Prometheus.  Most of us learn through pain.  It is the greatest teacher, but as we grew older, it isn’t necessary.  Herecles is the great free-er – he releases Prometheus.  Then he goes to the lands of the very North to the land of Atlas – bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders.

 

You can perhaps understand that there is a being who has completed evolution.  “What do we complete it for?  MBMayer said “Your being is perfected through this process just as the screw goes through many, many different processes…. For what purpose?  To be admired?  To sit on tho shelf?  No, to become part of some great machine.”  That’s what Atlas is.  Has passed through the human evolution and is ready to serve.  Real service requires great work on the self.  One who is capable of shouldering….

 

Herecles tricks Atlas.  He asks Atlas to get Golden Apples – while he shoulders the Universe.  This is one variation of the story.  Another variation – told by Euripedes – Herecles does not take the world.  One must go through the Atlas condition – have a test of what it means to shoulder – and guide – and direct what goes on behind (and in front) of the scenes.

 

Herecles does not “steal” the apple – there is no idea of morality –

 

Nobody gives the Golden Apple to you – YOU TAKE IT!!

 

 

THE TWELVE LABORS OF HERCULES

lecture given by Spear Kneble

July 25, 1957

 

The Greeks were aware of interaction of – other planes and this accounts for the cleanness and lightness of the times.

 

A real power was always operative back of Hercules.  He was nearing the completion of his evolution.  There is simplicity and wonder in the story of his birth.  Hera went to the peek of Mt. Olympus, met Zeus, conceived and gave birth to two sons, – Itacules and Alciades.  (The latter became Hercules.)  These names stand for earth and water.  The seed of Zeus was implanted in this earth and water.  Alciades was trained by the heroes in the manly arts.  His first great act was to free the city of Thebes from paying tribute to the barbarians and this act gave him much prowess and and personal prestige.

 

Alciades married and had several children of whom Hera, his mother, did not approve.  At the suggestion of Hera, he slew all of his children in a state of frenzy.  (Frenzy, – an opening of the eye of the mind to reality.)  This marks a right angle turn in his life (like Tolstoy) and from here on he is known as Hercules.  To him comes a. new concept of life, a new understanding and he outs off all of his old interests, his great prestige in the city of Thebes and all else that was dear to him.  He severs himself completely from his old life in every way and goes to Delphi where the Oracle of Apollo is.  The Oracle told him his name would now be Hercules and that now his real labors would begin.  Re the name of Hercules, – Hera means the glory of Hera and ‘cles’, – the nature of.  Altogether the name means your true nature is to be the glory of Hera.  He then went to Tyrens to make his abode and serve the King, (the highest.)

 

Then followed the twelve labors.  The number 12 means the completion of a cycle just as there are 12 months in the Zodiac which completes the calendar year.  It indicates fulfillment and perfection.  Many ingredients go into this accomplishment.  Each step toward the goal merges into the next step.  It can not be done all at one time.  All colors are needed to complete the spectrum and to make the brilliant white light.  Also another example of the number 12 is the Twelve Disciples with their various characteristics, – all of which goes to the making of the 13th man.

 

Hercules first labor was to slay a lion which was descended from a primeval monster.  Athena stood behind him in his hand-to-hand combat with the lion.  After the killing he always wore the lions skin as nothing could pierce it.  (In a monster there is always something divine as well as dangerous, too.)

 

The second labor was the battle with the Hydra, the water monster of many heads.  No sooner was one cut off when another reared up.

 

Other labors: The killing of the man eating birds; riding a powerful and unruly bull; the slaying of the man eating horses; the bringing back of the girdle of an Amazon.

 

Re the labor of cleaning of the Aegean Stables, – Hercules first broke down part of the stable, then diverted two streams so that they would flow through the stables and flush them out.  The cattle means energies of body, heart and mind and the cleansing is of the household of the self.

 

Filth, – the droppings of the cattle, – a residue left in the subconscious as a result of not having met one’s problems squarely.  Foundations mean that which supports you, that which bucks you up.  Hercules had to discard some of his own supports.  (To do this however, you have to know when it is best.)  The two diverted rivers, – the energies which normally function in earth…Prayer is made effective when you call on the energies from another plane.

 

Another labor: The obtaining of the golden apples from Hesperides.  On his way he saw the place where Prometheus obtained the fire from heaven.  (Fire-yearning, devotion, aspirations turned upwards.)  Hercules comes to the land of Hyperboreans which lies to the far north, – the ultimate.  By this time Hercules was nearing the completion of his evolution, (the purpose being to become part of a great and intricate machine.  The screw in the machine analogy.)  To do this Hercules had to prove himself capable of shouldering of the burden which was Atlas’.  Atlas offered to help him.  Hercules said that he would take over his burden of holding up the world for awhile if Atlas would get the Golden Apples.  (One of the results of this was that he came to like his freedom.)  Man must have a taste of what it means to shoulder a heavy burden before getting the golden fruit.

The Twelve Labors of Hercules

 

His Ordeals – – Stages in the Development of the Soul

 

 

1. Bringing the hell-hound, Cerberus, from the infernal regions and take it back there again.

The Mysteries conducted man through the death of perishable things, therefore into the nether-world; and, by initiation, they rescued his eternal part from perishing.  Hercules overcomes the dangers of the nether-world in this labor.

2. Overcoming the Nemean lion and bringing him to the King, Mycenae.

Becoming master of purely physical force in man. Hercules overcomes it in this labor,  tames it.

3. Slaying the 9-headed Hydra. Hercules overcomes it with firebrands and dips his arrows in its gall, so that they become deadly.

Hercules overcomes lower knowledge, that which comes through the senses.  He does this through the fire of the Spirit; and from what he has gained through the lower knowledge, he draws power to look at lower things in the light which belongs to spiritual sight.

4. Hercules captures the hind of Artemis, Goddess of hunting.

Everything which free nature offers to the human soul Hercules conquers and subdues.

 

 

MBM

Philosophy of Astrology

Series of seven lectures by MBM

October – December, 1929

 

Lecture I

 

The Great Mother

One end of us touches the Unbounded.  Light from some of the stars takes 140,000,000 years to reach us.  One hundred thousand million years to get around the universe.  Our sun a grain of sand among the other suns.  Thousands of millions of star families, probably thirty thousand million.  If the number of stars in the universe were laid as grains of sand and spread over England they would make a layer hundreds of yards in depth.  Our earth a millionth part of such a grain of sand.

 

Prototype of the Great Mother in the northern skies.  The constellation which writes a great circle, Ursus Major.  These seven stars turn on a pivot and make a mighty circle.  Orbit known as the Great Mother.  Other stars swing around the Dipper.  As the arms swing through the circle they make the four directions.  Bisect the circle into the four quarters.  Are the first four elements, from which all comes.

The seven, the prototype of all other sevens: seven Rishis; the seven Hathors; the seven sutras of the Persian; the seven Rulers, in the Gnostic tradition; the seven Elohim; the seven Keepers, or the Keepers of the seven staircases; the seven horns of the dragon.  Sometimes called the Mother of Revelations, because of the eternal turning of her foetus (?).

 

The Four Rivers that come out of this womb; the Four Rivers of the Abyss.  This four-ness is an opening of the Abyss.  Ptah, in old Egypt, called the Great Opener; (root of the name is put, means to open, or divide.  Superstition of the horseshoe.

 

Why is the constellation called the Great Dipper.  In certain places the constellation dips below the horizon.  It has been called the Great Boar.  The first plow was the pig’s snout.  Plow, sow, both called porca.  Plowing to sow seed.  What the Great Mother did — male-female.  Female Source, – makes the ground by the making of the great circle and its bisection; and is therefore the great Plower.  Khet, in Egypt is for mother, sow, plow.  Often sow becomes the symbol of the Great Mother.  The Great Mother, the Great Dipper, and the Great Digger.

 

Merkhabah, in the Jewish tradition the great chariot.  Comes from the Egyptian, meaning chariot, and is again our constellation, meaning seven.

 

The Great Bear.  Originally the Great Bearer; the first great Chariot, our constellation of seven.  From her chariot all else is produced.

 

Mountain of the North.  The thing around which this constellation turns is a concave mountain, or hole.  Sometimes symbolized by the beehive.  Sign of Omega, or boat upside down.  The navel of the world.  Meru in Sanskrit; mer (north).  Also, that .which had a lake.  Place of birth, and rebirth.  Ru means month, gate; Meru, place of outlet from the Great Abyss.

 

The Great Mother, the primal symbol of all beginnings; do, in the musical scale, – but in what octave!

 

Three great periods of measurement.  The great circle of the Dipper marked time and space.  Man first watched time by the stars.  In that period we have what is known as the stellar mythos.  Not till long afterwards did he reckon time by the moon; later, then, came the lunar mythos.  The third, the sun.

 

What we have in time by the stars is the year; by the moon, the month; by the sun, the day.  In the first period man was oriented in terms of a greater Immensity, as seen in the stars.  Later, as he came deeper into the problems of our third dimensional world, he became near-sighted.  Still later, the sun.

 

This sphere, or circle, on which the Seven turned, was also termed the Great Garden, or First Eden.  The Angel of the Flaming Sword, in the Torah (?) — the four lines made by the double bisecting of the circle.  The Angel makes the limits of Eden; the Flaming Sword, the seven-star constellation.

 

The hippopotamus symbol; the back leg bent, like the bending in the seven stars.  Thigh, the symbol of the phallus, and so used in the Old  Testament.  Bowl, a feminine symbol.  Hippo thigh, a blend of the two parents.  Another aspect of the First Eden.  Lowest Eden, the mating of the two principles.  On the Heights, the mating of the two principles in activity.

 

The north, the symbol of great Beginnings; the east, the symbol of man’s beginnings.

 

The Great Dipper has one direction for each of the four seasons.  In the Egyptian tradition at first, seven gods; then added moon, and then sun, making nine: Ptah, in the Boat, with the Nine.  The Mountain, the invisible gods, who dwell still higher than the first Manifestation.

 

No one yet knows what the Pole is.

The Seven are not the Abyss, but the leaders out of it, – via the Four, or the Four Directions.  The elements are the form side, and the rivers the life side – rivers, streams of energy.

 

Learn the names of the signs of the Zodiac for next week:

Aries, ram                    Libra, scale

Taurus, bull                  Scorpio, scorpion

Gemini, twins                 Sagittarius, archer

Cancer, crab                  Capricorn, goat

Leo, lion                     Aquarius, water bearer

Virgo, virgin                 Pisces, fish.

 

 

Philosophy of Astrology

MBM  Lecture II

October 31, 1929

 

Pole Stars

 

The one constellation that swings around the pole star.  Part of the time it sets.

 

Another seven: the seven pole stars.  There are, or have been, seven pole stars.  They are not in the same constellation.  The present one is in the tail of a constellation called the Small Bear.  That Pole star is only one of seven.  The other six appear in other constellations, not in the Small Bear.  The Great Year is approximately 26,000 years.  Each pole star is about one-seventh of that.  Each period has its pole star; after that a different one.

 

Many thousands of years ago a pole star whose zoo type was the male hippopotamus — one of those stars was the pole star.  In the second period it was in the constellation called Dracona, (Horus).  In the third, the present constellation, the Small Bear, with the pole star in the tail: tail,(jackal (dog), Set of Egypt).  Fourth, Kiefus (or Kiefur), zoo type, ape.  Fifth, in Cygnus, swan; zoo type, the bird, or swan (swan from old fairy tales and folk lore).  Sixth, in Lyra, zoo type, tortoise; or, esoterically, the falling vulture, or eagle (about 14,000 years ago.)  Seventh, Hercules: type, the man.

 

These seven stars never set.  So they are the remote ancestors of the Seven Lamps.  The seven in the constellation of last week are a later form.

 

The pole changes about every 3,700 years.  When the Pole changes there is another central star that takes its place.  The star is only a symbol of the Pole.  The Seven Mountains, Poles, Trees, Grants, all refer to the Poles which are erected when there is a new pole star.

 

The Tower of Babel, really a Babylonian tablet.  The Hebraic version is a distortion.  In the original a mound, and had to do with the erecting of a new Pole.

 

Pole, masculine symbol; and the light, the feminine   Behemoth associated with the Hippopotamus Mother — the zoo type of the constellation we studied last week. (Job 40, 19.)

 

This seven-ness repeats on different levels, until it relates to us.

 

What is a solar system?  A system, or universe, – that which turns as  one.  Our universe is centered by the sun, – our sun.  The bodies circling around it are called planets, or wanderers.  If a shot were fired at the true rim of our universe it would take 500 years for it to cross to the other side.  All stars are suns.  Many suns in the Milky Way.  Some of them 100,000 trillion miles. . . . . How nebulous it is!

 

Our sun 92,000,000 miles from the earth.  Powerful enough to keep the earth going in a special orbit 92 million miles away.  There must be some kind of a magnetic power which is strong enough to function against our earth at a distance of 92 million miles.  The sun (and its power) a symbol, in our universe, of a much higher authority: a simpler octave of what is found in a larger octave.

 

 

Astrological Symbology

 

Circle:  sign of the perfect, the cosmic, the endless, the eternal.  The first womb of all being.  The path marked out by the Chariot of last week.  Graded by the context in which it appears.  When used with regard to our solar system it is marked with a point in the center; the Infinity limited by a (the) point.  Beginning of manifestation in a new and denser octave, called matter.  But if we are working on the aspect of the circle itself we will find it in many other relationships.

Next, the cross.  We met it in the division of the Great Genetrix – bisecting heaven from earth, – earth from the higher.  When the Four Rivers relate to our solar system they relate to matter as we know it – things that belong to our third dimensional state in their form side, whether bodies, elements.  The circle sinks to a cross.

 

Crescent.  The moon sign is the third letter.  Also known as the mother.  In one period the moon was particularly the mother; and she is the mother particularly in regard to earth.  Many forms built on Ma, the mother side of things.  It is a sign born in water; a watery sign, known as Mare, Mary, Maria, Maia.  In the great legends the great ones were all born of someone called Mary, or some variation of it, Buddha, Hercules.  Our lunar (?) areas are related to our outer world, but also to us.  Water world the mother, even in the bag of waters; or the Great Sea, the Unknown, from which all life flows into this world.  Or, from another angle, from the soul.  The soul is the mother of man.  Your soul is your mother.  Soul comes from the psychic world, and is your mother, and is tied to earth, just as the moon is tied to earth.  It is a thing that is ephemeral.  It serves its time.  The moon is lit by the sun.  The sun is the stuff of the Cosmic world.  Our earth is just a wanderer.  The sun has its place in the heavenly spheres, and it gives light to the moon.  They (?) are the immediate seed from which life in earth develops.  But the moon has no permanent, or enduring, significance.  It is a wanderer around the earth.  When it has played its role in regard to the evolution of man in earth, that is the end, as far as man is concerned.  The moon is a luminary by night, the sun by day.  They never catch up with each other.  Each belongs to its own sphere.

 

The dark side, when the moon shines, is allegorical of man’s life in earth, when he can become soul conscious.  You can become soul conscious — you can, through the moon.  In the daytime, or self-conscious state, the moon is replaced by the sun.  “Day” is an allegory of the self-conscious state — a condition in man when he becomes conscious of Cosmic areas.  He can’t become conscious of them at night, in the soul state.

 

The significance of astrology from the philosophical point of view is because of the analogies written in the skies.

 

All the signs that belong to the seven in the solar system are based on a relationship of the first three.  The personal application of these is body, soul and spirit.  But we must not be so limited.

 

Something of that harmony-making quality (symbolized by Venus) can come down, even if not the Cosmic itself.  It makes for harmonious matter (cross) according to the qualities in the circle.  Not unrelated to love.  Venus is the harmonizing, the ordering, the making to work according to the laws of the higher.  The circle a stronger sign than this; that is why we say “over the cross.”  It is above, because it is ordering, symmetrizing, puts the impact of the circle on the lower, – that is Venus.  (the “foam-born”)  Foam is air and water mixed, functioning in air (understanding).  It makes of water a lighter and more delicate thing, – froth.  And the power of Venus can only function then — a sign when you are leaving the lower worlds behind and making a mixture of air with it, and are functioning in the lower air.

Mars.  Cross with its front and sides bent back.  Energy going out, insistently, dynamically, constantly.  It is the great sign of energy.  Starts from the reservoir of all things.  Source spiritual.  Name is Mars. Hidden glyph of all outgoing energy, called Mars, the War Lord.  Much misunderstood.  Great Reservoir; Great Mother.  That is the first Circle; man’s much lower down.

Mars fiery.  Because the first of the dynamic elements is fire.  Fire the philosophical symbol for force; water, for the mother, the feminine side, from which all is born.

Man goes to the Cosmic only through the sun.  The Seven will relate themselves to man through the Three, – the three root natures, because man lives in the environment he does.  Certain ones are in dominance at different times.

Philosophy of Astrology

 

 

MBM  Lecture III

November 7, 1929

Planets, continued

 

Jupiter.  Crescent suggests movement.  Not full or empty.  Slightly above, and in advance of, the cross: soul in advance of the body or i~  the material world.  Not a violent movement but gentle, kindly, harmonious movement; but more dynamic than Venus, which is a modifying relationship.

Most of our ancient lore through the Greek, therefore Greek names. Jupiter (Zeus) head of the Pantheon but not the great God.

Seven different types of movement (represented by the planets).

 

Saturn:  the opposite type of movement.  Matter, body, form, over the crescent.  The form side, substance, weights down the soul.  Cross makes the soul materialize.  We need not only the expansive, outgoing movement but also the form-making movement.  Works for accuracy, decision, organization.  If we had expansion only we would never have organization.  Through sensing we find the ultimate nature, and can deal with it; deal with substance.  If it were not for this particular power man would never know.  Man does not like to be forced to know, and so has made this sign his enemy — Saturn, – by some religions.

Saturn is, in a way, the most kindly of all.  It is not really opposite to Jupiter, though it may work in opposition, for all seven contribute.  Symbol of the forces which operate in our solar system upon our earth.  The seven are seven types of energy.

Three letters make up the alphabet of these symbols.  Different positions of the circle.  Crescent open, or receptive when soul is turned up.

Mercury  Three letters in this sign.  Different position of the circle (as compared to Venus) for instance.  Crescent receptive when soul is turned up.  Body held in the lower position.  Result would be a philosophical life.  Linking the body with the soul side would be the underlying power of the circle, or the cosmic force.  The circle is operating at the core of being.  Very few who have operative the nucleolus inside the nucleus.  Makes the soul turn up to the Cosmic.  Mercury.  Nucleolus, spirit, gold; moon, silver.

Mercury is cup-bearer to the gods; nearest to Olympus; next to the sun.  He should be, if he is to be the bearer of the messages of the god who dwells here.  That is the pattern in the sky of what man will accomplish when he uses his mind philosophically — cup-bearer of the highest intelligence in him.  The “I” principle will not be at the call of every wish but will be the faithful servant of the higher mind.  The potential Mercury in you is the victim now.  That in you which runs swiftly, the intelligent messenger in you, to obey the vision, the understanding of your mind.

 

In the early days, before astronomical science, these were the seven.  Then two more became visible to the eye through the telescope.  Some of the ancients knew them but they were not in the accepted lore of the Seven.  Then the sun and the moon became luminaries (while still seven planets).  The other planets (outside the seven) do not do much to give light to the moon.

 

Uranus (or Ouranus)  Originally pairs of opposites,

 

balance.  The limitation of one aspect of the moon is

 

overcome, and symmetry replaces it.  Now written

 

 

All the pairs of opposites held in balance, and the power to do that arising from the circle, the great Source.  From the Cosmic Source is arising the power to balance the pairs of opposites — to hold them on a point and keep them in balance.  Therefore represents high power, terrific capacity; and the capacity of swinging down and up.  Uranus a great upsetter; does not work gently.  The two aspects of the moon — light and dark, waxing and waning, kept in balance.  Uranus is the great god in the great Circle.

In mythology Uranus is Heaven.  The line of force not blunted, as in Mars, but balanced.  It has achieved mastery.

 

Neptune.  Force arising from the Cosmic has pierced the soul and made it productive; the crescent has something in it.  Spirit impregnates soul, and, in a sense, soul ceases.  Then the soul no longer is; it is something of a different nature.  It (Neptune) is the farthest out of our solar system.  When man has moved farthest out from the nucleolus and moved to the periphery of the solar system he becomes Neptune, Ruler of the Waves.

 

Order of the planets: 1. Mercury; 2. Venus; 3. earth; 4. Mars; 5. Jupiter; 6. Saturn; 7. Uranus; 8. Neptune.  Study the relationships to the sun: Mercury, Venus, spirit made into matter; Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune (energy moving out from?)

 

The seven types of energy: on a lower octave of the original seven we studied the first evening.  Something of the nature of the Great Seven can be seen through these seven.  We can see them as agents of the original seven, working in our sun system, and working in all things.  Man is simply one of the factors on which these energies stream.

 

The planet is merely the outer sign of something.  Man can see how they interact, and relate, and impinge, and gets to know some of the ways of working of Deity.

 

As they apply to man.  Work on man’s activities.  Interesting to study when different types are in the ascendancy, or more active than others.  The seven are not always equally there.  If they were, we would have likeness, – no differentiation.  There is advance and recession, and so (they) bring about differentiation.

In man it is possible to see what different powers and forces are in the ascendancy at different times.  If he sees them as energies he becomes a cooperator.  Ordinary astrology is stupid and cheap.  Mars reminds us that all energy comes from the Source.  In our sun system it is always limited; hence the flanges are bent back.  This sign can work differently in man, in regard to his body, emotions and mind, and embryo spirit.  When man uses them intelligently he can use it (the energy) for his return.  That is what he will eventually do in regard to the seven.  So we can study them from below up and from above down.

 

In Chaldea, one of the central homes of astrology, they used it as a science for many things, even as to the planting of the ground.  But not in Scripture.  There it is seen as contributing the types of energies, or powers, impinging on man from above.

Every one of the seven has endless variations of their fundamental characteristic.  (Here MBM quotes from Thrice-Greatest Hermes by G.R.S. Mead)  “The sun said: ‘I will shine unto my full’” – a constant source, unfailing; waiting until it can penetrate all; the roundness and fullness of its nature forever there.  (continuing quotation)  “Moon promised to pour light upon the after-the-sun course, and said she had already given birth to Fear, and Silence, and also Sleep, and Memory – a thing that would turn out to be most useful for them.”  The moon comes after the light sparks descend (or light spark descends.)

 

Chronos said: he was already the father of justice and necessity.  Saturn, the right effect after the cause.  Solidifying, a necessity if form was to be created.

 

Zeus (said) Order, so that they may not always fight; therefore peace, and the kindly things, though down in matter, so that they won’t suffer under that forever .

 

Mars says: Struggle, wrath, strife, outgoing force.  It would be too simple if it was just going down and coming up.  So Mars makes for trouble, strife, conflict.

 

Venus, born of sea foam (says): I will join to them desire, bliss and laughter, so that the souls condemned to matter may not exhaust their punishment to the full. Add also the beneficent, harmonizing, symmetrizing the things held down too harshly.

 

Hermes (Mercury): I will make men’s nature well endowed; I will give them prudence (result of experience).  So you come to the mind, or thinking, the forerunner of Mercury; versus suaveness; making your way through things that way (thinking) rather than through force.  “Never will I cease cohabiting with ideas,” for it is only the mind which finds ways out, – the messenger in service to the great God.

 

It is only when those Seven cooperate that anything in our human race can be.

 

 

Philosophy of Astrology

MBM  Lecture IV

November 14, 1929

 

Our cycle of seven, in the lower octave, connected up with the week.  Not based on any one tradition.  Sunday, sun day; Monday, moon day; Tues. Tieg (Scandinavian) for Mars, or war-lord; Wedn. Wodensday, Germanic god Odin or Woden equated with Roman god Mercury; Thurs, Jupiter (Thor); Friday, Frya, a Norse version of Venus; Saturday, Saturn’s day — also related to the cycle of the moon.

 

These seven (are) in various traditions.  The seven-branched candlestick.  The seven Elohim.  The seven are referred to as voices, because the word is the pronouncement of power, representing paths of energy, or sources of energy, which emanate from the Great Seven.

 

Seven veils of Isis (Great Mother).  The “seven” are the seven ways in which she is enfleshed, or wrapped up.  None have lifted the veils of Isis.  The “Seven Virgins”, operating of themselves, – active in themselves, – forces which do not mate but which ARE.  Seven Aeonic spheres, – condition of vastness which is far beyond, or above, our state.  Seven rays, or principles.  Egyptian: the Seven Halls (great regions), great conditions, great areas, from which great influences come.  The highest evolution of man moves upward to them.

 

“Wisdom resting on seven pillars” (Proverbs 9)  The Great Mother, Sophia, Wisdom, beginning the creative processes by building, utilizing the seven.  The hills, or mountains, erected when a new Pole arises.  Pillars are related to the Halls of the Egyptian tradition, and go back to one of the earliest forms of the octave.  Book of Enoch . . . .

 

Stobius (Greek) (spoke of) “seven stars in their courses.”  Described how each one of the seven spin on the high Olympian plane: “From these doth Nature flow.”

From Asia: the seven Buddhas.  Seventh son of a seventh son, –

really astronomical.

Seven stones at Stonehenge; the seven grants here petrified.

The Mexicans also have a tradition of seven gods turned into stone.

Could assume a movable shape when they pleased.

Repeated by the Mound Builders.  Belong to the stellar mythos.

Vedas: “Seven bright rays bedeck the brow of Indra.  Seven great rivers from him flow.”

Persian:  Seven Holy Immortals, – surrounding the Supreme God of Light.

Revelations IV

 

 

The Twelve

 

A vast circle beyond the seven orbits.  They are constellations, called the Zodiac, which mark the boundary of the larger sphere.  Zoe, in Greek, means life.  The great belt, inside of which our solar system revolves.  Groups of stars, which once coincided with what are now called constellations.  Actually, a constellation is not necessarily in the sky now where the sign is.  Signs (are) now compartments, or sections carrying the name of the constellations.  A segment 30”.  The full area an influence, inside of which the nature of this particular constellation works.  The Zodiac the sphere of life, inside of which we have our larger being.  Indicates the different kinds of life we have.  The Zodiac known in old Egypt 13,000 years ago.  They named them correctly.  Knew the nature of the constellation and then gave it the animal form.  Types of energy, corresponding with a certain type of energy manifesting in certain animals in earth.

 

Aries:  Beginning of picking out the segments corresponds with March: the Ram.  Male of the flock of sheep; has horns; leads; energizer. In the beginning of a cycle this tremendous urge and verve. Hence, the ram corresponds.  A fire sign–the energizing fire of beginnings.  Matter is arrested energy.  .  All these energies stream toward the center of the solar system.

 

Taurus:  slow, ponderous, weighty.  A kind of corrective of the first.  Slowness to respond to the energy rather than a type of energy itself.  Yet terrifically powerful.  The Bull; again masculine.  Hercules and his twelve labors, one who is trying to become like the sun, enter the Cosmic, moving out of the solar system, and has become spiritual.  Man goes through the twelve unconsciously.  Hercules undertakes deliberately to get through with the human evolution, and learns something of the labors that must be accomplished in each of the sections of the “orange“.  Taurus — energy arrested by matter – an earth sign.

 

Gemini:  Duality.  Not only the forward and backward movement but of a higher and lower.  Duality, forever bound together.  So you also have unity.  Monotheism and polytheism.  Our first dramatization of duality and unity.  Light and darkness.

 

Sign of the Twins.  Duality as the result of Aries and Taurus.  Many Castor and Pollux stories.  Earth nature, heavenly nature.  Both are there as long as you are in the human evolution.  Duality can only be solved by the mind.  This is an air sign.  Energy has gone out; then halted; then divided.

 

Cancer  In this sign energy rests on the bosom of the waters.  Waters are a sign of the mother — same type of influence.  Both the beneficent and the terrible mother.  Mother, in terms of habit, customs, tradition, that holds, binds, constricts.  So this water, in which life has come to rest, is also terrible.  It holds, binds.  Its tenacity symbolized by a little creature which is very tenacious, the crab.  It all depends on the relationship you make with that mother as to.whether she is terrible or beneficent.  The crab goes two ways.  This water, in which life rests, and through which it has to make its way.

 

The stage: signifies conditions of life through which the one who undertakes to become a sun man must make his way.  In the signs which we know by the names of animals are to be found hints, or indications, or condensation into something small, of something immense, – and your capacity to read carefully is a measure of how much you can enlarge a symbol into increasing meaning .

 

The Seven are spheres from which stream forces.  They are operative agents.  The Twelve are areas through which man, when far enough to want to become a sun man, must make his way, or accomplish the labors.  The Seven are influencing him all the time.  The Seven are lamps, or lights; the Twelve, an area through which the sun man must make his way, with the help of the seven lamps.

 

 

Philosophy of Astrology

MBM   Lecture V

November 21, 1929

 

The first four signs a kind of pattern of the processes of life.  The next four give us a kind of picture of great ideals, patterns, states of being.  The first represent the energizing of the Creative Force.    . . . .

Perfected states.

Leo  King of beasts; tawny; concept of the kingly one.  Leo, masculine, – symbol of power, regality, kingliness.  Tawny means like the sun.

Virgo  the Virgin.  Introverted movement.  Queen.  As the Virgin, the Immaculate One.  The celestial woman, but self-contained.  The perfected Mary, Maya, etc.  Glorification.  Perfection.  Because it is the sixth sign, she is the mother of all that follows.  The Immaculate One, being or becoming the Queen, is very important in all scripture, (the one) who has completed the things of earth, and turned away from them.  That state, the perfect mother of all that follows.  Follows the sign of the king.  All that comes after is, in a sense, born of the sign Virgo.

Libra  What must occur when the king and queen reign?  Justice, balance, equity.  Therefore a turning point in our whole work.  Virgo just precedes balance, and follows the king.  The queen is to be understood as between these two.  Following the potency of the king.  Assumption of Mary (R.C. Church.)  The sign Virgo is sucked out, or obliterated, by the rays of the sun.  So the Virgin becomes invisible, as she will be when she is assumpted into the higher, or Cosmic, regions.  The year is born about this time; so that, in another sense, the Virgin is bearing a child.

Scorpio:  Should be supremely revealing after the three before it.  The scorpion kills; there is poison in his tail.  Outwardly, the sign of death.  Scorpio has the greatest power of rebirth (phoenix).  So full of power and energy that it can transform itself.  Death is the death, therefore, of an old form.  Re-born, Scorpio is obviously something else.  In Egypt Scorpio was the sign of one of the goddesses, Selk, meaning “Light of the Great God.”  She is also the goddess of letters, – the Word, – Logos, – Scripture; the “Keeper of Books” — that is, of the great secrets of The Words, spoken by the Logos.  Books and scripture, in turn, mean Wisdom-teachings; and therefore the goddess who is the keeper of Writings, or Books, is the goddess of the power of re-birth.  The enclosing arms of the scorpion, again the arms of Wisdom.  Seven scorpions accompany Isis.  King, Queen, Justice, and Death.  Poison is always in the tail — the tail of our past.

 

The next four an illustration of the way man must go, and what must be done.  The first four were cosmological; the second four, Pattern; the last four processes.

 

Sagittarius, the Archer:  Often pictured as a centaur, the horse-man.  He is really three: The horse represents the animal, and the power of the animal to convey.  To that is added the torso and head of a man, – that is, mind, and the power of that which releases the man from earth; so that the animal becomes obedient to mind.  The Centaur goes where the head wants to go.  The third aspect is the arrow — something sent on in advance.  The man sends it to a place where he, as yet, cannot go.  Sagittarius represents foresight, insight, vision, toward which the desire and will of the Centaur strives to go.  A symbol of tremendous dynamics.  Moving toward a distant goal, the Target.  When he gets that vision of the Target, and coordinates his power toward it, he is understanding the mystery of Sagittarius.

Capricorn (Goat)  A familiar symbol in ancient mystical symbols.  Associated with Pan, – Bacchus, – representing The Vital Urge, which starts the power which is Bacchus — the one who becomes regenerate from below up.  Goat starts in the valleys and climbs to the mountain peaks.  Symbol of the place to which his arrow went in the previous sign.  This is a sign of doing — a practical, applying sign.  Climbs at places alone, where mere man could not go.  His little, slim legs are very sure.  As man follows the way to the Goal he must become very sure, slender, clean.

Aquarius  If man has reached the Heights.  But from there he has a task.  The Water Bearer.  Carries an urn of water and pours it below.  He got to the top of the mountain peak because he saw the vision.

What is the “water” he pours down?  There are many kinds of water.  Here it is the water from above.  Then you don’t thirst again.  The larger understandings.  The one who climbs to the Heights must be in a state to pour that water on all his past, and on his environment.  Not for all mankind; only a superlative, philosophical, mystical understanding can do.

 

Pisces  Two fish.  Going in opposite directions.  Reminds us of Gemini.  Why?  This is the supreme last word of the twelve.  Mystically, it is related to Uranus.  Has to do with the capacity of keeping in perfect relationship two opposites, with opposite moving relationships: dynamics and static; and carry them back into the sea of life, and sustain them in that oppositely moving direction.  Not lax but alive, and pulling in opposite directions.

The one who has understood, and mastered, this sign is able to go back into the great sea and keep the pairs of opposites alive and moving in opposite directions.  In that sense, the sign means Mastery.  We can see now why it could be the last of the Twelve.

If man can do that, – if he has seen with great anticipation the Goal, and faithfully follows it, and climbs to the Heights; if he can erase all his past by the beneficent waters which he pours on himself from the Heights; and can maintain the pairs of opposites in dynamic tension, and return them to the Sea, he is becoming a Son of Man.  And he is the Son of Man, – that is, the fruit of mind.  The fruit of that is the Cosmic capacity — the capacity to return to the Great Sea, – the great Cosmic Sea, and maintain individuation, dynamics, power:  the task of the ages.

 

When man has completed his work be becomes Co-Heir with the Sun, the Father.  When actually completed they are Sons of God.

 

Fishers of men  All great traditions are associated with the fish.  Those who are leaders must act as fishers who gather that which is spawning in earth.

 

The twelve signs are assigned to the four elements – three signs are fire signs, three earth, etc., but each one is different.  Write all twelve with their signs; divide into fours.

 

Philosophy of Astrology

MBM   Lecture VI

December 5, 1929

 

 

This time we will go over the twelve in a higher metaphysical sense.  Later we will take the twelve in a psychological sense.

 

The twelve, first in regard to the four elements; then in regard to three qualities, or three types of movement; third, in regard to the two pairs — positive and negative.

 

What is earth?  In all philosophical language it means solid matter, or dense substance, the manifestation side of things, the objective world, the regions in which man works and learns.  Stiff, hard, because it offers more resistance and better discipline.  Practical reference to the earth element, the material side, material environment around him, and the material side of things in himself.

 

Water:  Plastic.  That which is plastic in man is the psychic world, the emotional.  Symbolizes that which seeks, or is receptive to, stimulus.  Those who seek emotion rather than those who stimulate emotion.  Fire stimulates emotion, the upper psychic.  All that yields more easily than earth to influences.  Man needs it.  In this more pliable world man makes his patterns, which he later carries out in earth.

 

Fire:  Is the symbol and sign of energy, force, life.  It gives stimulus, – in contrast to water, which receives stimulus.  The fiery type is the type that causes emotional reactions; the water type, the type which receives them.  Fire: causation, incites, impels, instigates, activates.  In man it is the source of energy.  On the higher planes it is the source of the gods’ energy.

 

Air:  Truly pliant, ductile.  The only element of the four which is subject to influences outside of man’s world.  Fire goes up, but air rises beyond that.  It is directly responsive to atmospheric pressure.  Moves in the form of wind, and it is worked upon by conditions of the sun, heat, cold, which are, in turn, resultants of the sun’s presence or absence.  Therefore air is the highest of our elements.  It relates man more closely to the higher regions than fire – fire rising up from earth.

 

The three types of activity in the elements:

These are what, in astrology, are sometimes called qualities:  1) cardinal; 2) mutable; 3) fixed.

Cardinal: (from Latin) hinge of a door; that which turns; on which the swivel turns, and hence very important.  They are the most propulsive:that kind of movement — agile, swift, lively; has much stimulus; stimulates the turn.

 

Mutable:  Means change.  The most mobile of all types; the most changeable, sensitive to taking on new forms; adapts itself best, rearranges itself; pliancy; also ephemeral, transient.    In the Zodiac the mutable signs have a duality.  Turning back on itself.  Restless, shifting, undecided.

 

Fixed: The most firm, solid, secure of all the movements.  Sturdy; the most economic; belongs to the established order of things. All the movements are necessary to the evolving of life.

 

Now the positive and negative:  Positive: the active, assertive, virile, hardy, masculine; that which fecundates.  Negative: receptive, delicate, productive, fertile, fruitful.  The positive represents the life side of things; negative, the form side.  The active works on a form in the sense of the positive.  Must work on some form, on some substance, to be effective.

All earth signs and all the water signs are negative

 

Earth signs:  Capricorn, cardinal; Taurus, fixed; Virgo, mutable.

 

Capricorn: Heavy, dense, practical, earthy, solid.  Deals with material things.  It takes the things of earth higher up than any other sign.  It is of the highest service to earth, and brings the earth experience to its richest fruitage.  Therefore, because of its practical nature it is extremely prudent.  It is on the form side also, because it is negative: the feminine, productive form side.  The one who takes earth up is extremely productive of results.  When it is moving forward it is productive of progress in an ascent, lifting earth very high.

Virgo:  Duality; pliable.  That is why it is so serviceable; lends itself very well to earth service.  These people make good nurses, chemists; wind themselves around, and to, things in earth.  Adjust. Adaptive, nurturing.  The nurse must adapt to material things to be effective. Must make many movements like this:   Productive, negative.

 

Taurus:  also negative.   Centralized; rotary.  The energy is, in a sense, inhibited from spreading.  The thickness of matter prevents it from spreading.  It is necessary to have something fixed.  (Man has to learn to work three ways in earth.)  With Taurus, extremely concentrated earth energies, – more concentrated than in any others.  Most pliant in Capricorn; most flexible in Virgo; most concentrated in Taurus; but all three are necessary.  Capricorn pliant, in that it goes forward, to something else.  The flexibility of Virgo more adaptive to any situation it finds.

 

Water signs:  Three water signs.  Also negative.  When the cardinal activity is working on water it meets less resistance than when working on earth.  Water is the psychic world, broadly speaking.  In man, emotion extremely active, but active in a negative way; productive of results in itself.  Indicates an emotional tenacity.  Cancer like the sea, highly impressionable to any influence.  But it stays in the water; it does not go.    That movement is not only to be seen as getting somewheres, but as also within itself getting somewheres.  The ocean reaches from shore to shore; even a ripple covers a large area.

 

Pisces: mutable water.  Negative.  The most dual of all our water signs.  Flows two ways at once.    That is the motion; the psychic world, which is very variable.  Two currents.  Very flexible, in the sense that it flows.

 

Virgo:  Negative, reserved, conserved; held in.  Like a lake in which the water is retained by high walls.  Spiral, circular, rotary movement, makes for conservation, water power; for the lake high up is the place from which water may flow, and so be a source of transformation.  Has great potency.

Aries:  Fire and air are positive.  They are, broadly speaking, on the life side, whereas the others are on the form side.  The higher acts upon the lower (earth and water) and then throws it away.

Aries the most active of all the fire signs: the stimulator, leader, the beginner of the zodiacal cycle; the life giving; an energizer on the life side of things – positive, masculine, the inception of things.  From one point of view Aries is most truly the initiator, beginner, (not the occult meaning.)

 

 

Sagittarius: Also positive; mutable.  Two natures.  The two natures: animal and man.  Struggle between the lower and the higher, the Centaur.  Motion: ↕︎ The movement of the upper psychic, which reaches to the Larger, is between the desire of the water side, the animal, and the higher side – the highest side of the Archer.

 

Leo: fire fixed.  Movement spiral, element, fire.  The potent instigator.  The most economic of all the fire signs; centralized, held back.  Anything that goes forth from it goes forth in spite of it; like light from a lamp.  Fire in a stove, and heat radiates from it.  Fire signs in man the most potent for power.  If you don’t have power you don’t get anywhere.  The more you have the better, provided you know what to do with it.  Feed fire with fire; add fire to fire.

Libra: Cardinal air, is the furthest up from earth and therefore the most pliant of all the elements.  Since it is on the positive side, life side, it, in turn, acts on the earth and water side as the positive acts on the receptive, masculine on the feminine.  The mind side of things in man acts on the form side, of his environment, and on the water side.  Libra is the positive, active air movement.  Cancer, emotional, receptive of changes.

Aries fiery, enthusiastic, stimulating, energizing; Capricorn, applied and practical, in earth; while Libra, like wind, traveling long distances, just as wind does, to establish equilibrium, – to equalize pressure.  Libra strives to establish equilibrium.

 

Gemini: Active, masculine, but dual; moving in two ways.  Minds moving in two ways.  Winds going in two ways in us good when they collide, and we have storms.  These changes have nothing of the water in them.  Compare with the mutable signs, of the fixed and of the cardinal.

Aquarius: Positive; very dynamic, extraordinarily dynamic.  Air, wind, applied.  Like stove with its fire in Leo, so the contained air in the fixed sign Aquarius.  Most centralized of the air movements.  It is mind applied.  As we have water condensed and conserved in Scorpio, here we have air condensed for application, to bring about changes.  Capacity to push through, – carry through, as all the centralized signs have.

 

Philosophy of Astrology

MBM  Lecture VII

December 12, 1929

 

Setting up the chart, and first relationship of the seven to the twelve.

 

The fixed signs at the corners of the wheel the quintessence of their power.  When you have attained power in the position of each sign, and have brought it to the quintessence of each, you will have attained the philosophical ascent.  That is why there is in Scripture always reference to the Bull, the Lion, the Eagle and the Man.

 

In the bull we have all the values of the two other earth signs.  The bull is everywhere the same — the quintessence of all the earth signs.  Not any bull, but at its quintessence, when the contributions of the two other earth signs have been brought in.

 

The lion is the thing which builds up on top of the earth.

 

Scorpio, the quintessence of the cardinal and the mutable signs, or Cancer and Pisces.  When all those values are brought in to the center we have Scorpio.  But in a sense it is different from all the other signs, because Scorpio digs down deep as the mountain lake, or going down into the sea for rebirth.  Becoming re-born, as in the Great Fish.  It is not only the quintessence of all the water signs but, because it is also the place of re-birth, it is named the Eagle, and is the one sign out of the twelve which is referred to in the scriptural astrologies by its super-name.

 

Aquarius  The quintessence of the air signs – the air brought into a place of balance is manas, mind, man.  The quintessence of air, symbolized in mind, for which man is the ordinary synonym.  When man has transmuted the water we have something different, (instead of) Earth, Water, Fire, Air we have Earth, Fire, Air, Spirit (Eagle).  Therefore symbolized by a super-sign, yellow.  For then there is “no more sea”.

When man has been completed in his evolution, has made his regeneration, gone down into the Great Fish, water ceases; and we have the earth sign, or Taurus.

The eagle in Europe, the hawk in Egypt, symbolized the bird which can fly highest, nests high, and can look without blinking into the sun.  Therefore symbol of that in man which can look without strain into the Cosmic.  Like the phoenix, can be destroyed and rises again; capable of re-birth in, and through, itself.  When that work has been accomplished the area in which Scorpio works — lower and higher than any other sign — the work of the water has been done.  Look up some data on these materials.  Early Chinese scripture.

 

Relation of the seven planets to the twelve signs

 

The twelve signs contain in them tasks that man must accomplish.  Over that circle is the seven — they ARE.  The twelve are waiting for man to do them.  Various of the planets have a peculiar sympathy with certain of the signs.

Rulers

Every sign has a planet which acts in a peculiar way in regard to it.  The quality of that planet dominates the kind of work that is going to be done in that sign.  Every sign represents tasks awaiting the Hercules in you.

Aries: suggests great activity.  Related to Mars.

Taurus: The planet that helps keep it still, quiet, smooth — Venus

Gemini: Active; the two kinds of minds going in opposite directions;

Mercury

Cancer: Water cardinal; the thing that belongs very much to the

“thing of the personality; moon the ruler of Cancer.

Leo: fire; of all things fixed (is) the sun, and therefore it is the

ruler of Leo.

Virgo: again Mercury, for the quality of mutable earth is extremely

adaptable, and, in order to be adaptable, must be able to use mind. Libra: makes the balance; harmonizer, order, symmetry, peace.

Again Venus the ruler.

Scorpio: If this is the sign of the deepest depth and greatest height,

there must be something very active that helps it along; and so we

will have Mars.

Sagittarius: Beneficence; looks ahead.  In itself it is not quick and

ruthless.  The Centaur a kindly symbol, and the ruler is Jupiter,

the kindly planet.

Capricorn: an earth sign; activity in earth.  In order to make it

effective, so that the movement of Capricorn is productive, it needs that which makes it economic, – shaves it down to the last, and that is the work of Saturn.  Therefore Saturn is the ruler of Capricorn.

Aquarius: fixed air; in the sense of that which is productive of good;

the water-bearer, bearing water from above down.  That also must have come to a place of high economics; and again, Saturn is ruler.

Pisces:  water mutable; a flowing thing; water adjustment, and Jupiter

is ruler.

 

Aquarian Age:  Air in the fixed position.  If there is a colossal movement in that direction, then we will expect to find, in many ways all about us, characteristics indicating this is true.  Of the nature of Aquarius, we find economy through Saturn; suffering, pain, but also, increasingly, the liberation of activities in air, – and literally in air.  Inventions of the period those particularly of the air element.  Movement by air, whether communication, like radio, or travel by air; or whether investigation or research by air, – increasingly the air motif appears.  How many activities have to do with the air or the ether?  How much is being done through the aid of air?

 

Planets exalted or weak:  Each planet is exalted in some sign.  When it takes relatively little part in it it is weak.

In Aries, Mars ruler — the super-power which would influence this sign must be something related to it, and that is the sun, the central fire.  Venus is weak.

Taurus, the one place where the moon is valid; the dark world, the one place where the personality may be; where you may use any mask, not by fate but out of complete freedom.  Moon exalted; Mars weak.

Gemini: No one knows what is exalted.  Jupiter weak.

Cancer: Moon ruler; Jupiter exalted; Saturn weak

Leo:  ruler sun; exalted Neptune (or Cancer); Saturn weak.

Virgo: ruler Mercury; super (?) Mercury exalted; Jupiter weak.

Libra: ruler Venus; exalted Saturn; Mars weak.

Scorpio: ruler Mars; exalted Uranus; Venus weak.

Sagittarius: ruler Jupiter;  exalted ?; Mercury weak.

Capricorn: ruler Saturn; exalted Mars;  moon weak.

Aquarius: ruler Saturn; exalted ?; sun weak.

Pisces:  ruler Jupiter,: exalted Venus: Mercury weak.  Chaldea, the place of star lore.  Much also from Egypt.

Progressions in qualities and powers, symbolized by the

 

twelve signs of the Zodiac

 

MBM – circa 1927

 

Aries (the Ram):  Steps 1-4.  aimless violence; passion, desire; recklessness; assertiveness; haste; ambition; presumptuousness; insolence.

5. ardor; vehemence; self-will; enthusiasm; self-opinionated.
6. now more refined – alertness, enterprise; earnestness; vigor.
7. resolution; determination; courage; rather intrepid.
8. dauntless; valor; organizing ability.
9. power of attracting others, primarily toward ideals; this type becomes commander, guide.
10. perfect leadership, but wholly submissive to leadership from the Larger. Ram becomes lamb.

 

Negative:  zealots; fanatics.

 

Occupations: lecturers, builders, designers.  At top, pioneers.  Philosophically and mystically Aries is the active fire of the great Architect.  But man builds from below up.  At the high point of the completion he is in perfect relationship with the Great Fire of the Architect.

Taurus (the bull): 1. inertia.

2. dullness; surliness; sloth; indifference.
3. hardworking; ponderous; slow; stolid.
4. stubbornness; submissiveness; mildness (unless aroused.)
5. persistence; retentiveness; secretiveness; acquisitiveness; conscientiousness.
6. trustworthy; faithful; restrained; reserved; loyal.
7. perseverance; concentration (of earth energy); indefatigability
8. constancy; long-suffering; coolness (feeling repressed)
9. fortitude; the dignity of patience; might.
10. the perfected Bull: the foundation stone of the builder; solidarity.

 

Negative: stagnation, regression, indolence, torpidity; all sorts of things we meet in neuroses.

 

Quintessence: Obedience.

 

A few types: laborers, fruit.growers, builders, bankers.

 

 

Gemini:  first conflict of the pairs of opposites.  The work of

the sign is to bring about consciousness through the labor

of the pairs of opposites.

1. conflict of the pairs of opposites.
2. wavering; superficiality; hesitancy.
3. fickleness; irresolution; diffusiveness (because of the many pairs of opposites working, none of which can be solved at that stage.) false mercurial.
4. temperamental; unsteady; changeable. Conflict growing stronger.
5. plastic; affable; suavity; conversational skill, etc. (air sign)
6. Quick wittedness; versatility adroitness; beginning of the professional or mechanical mind; nimble and flexible to a purpose.
7. adaptability; mental effectiveness.
8. genuinely mercurial.
9. the balance between the higher and the lower mind, each functioning freely and easily, according to its own nature. Response and resourcefulness of both are developed.
10. The two pillars, entrance to the Hall of Learning. In proportion as man has learned the lessons of the pairs of opposites, in air, and puts them in their place, he enters into the true hall of learning.

 

Negative: anxiety, nervousness, worry.

 

Types: accountants, newspaper men, secretaries, school teachers, decorators — all have to do with a certain flexibility in the mind.

 

Duality of the sign.

Cancer: water cardinal; ocean; impressionable; sensitive

1. impressionability; sensitive feeling
2. sensitivity; excitability
3. feeling ambition; prejudices; biases; preconceptions, and in all of these a tenacity like the crab.

Negative: greed, gluttony, avarice.

4. impatience; restlessness; fretful; petulant; and, because of its tenacity, it is antiquarian and old-fashioned in its interests.
5. love of luxury; persistence in feeling reactions; selfishness, with it also timidity and shyness because of the feeling reaction.
6. amiability, soft-heartedness (good nature.)
7. tenderness; fellow feeling; emotional sensitivity.
8. sympathetic; kindliness; more active kind of expression; congenial, benevolent stage.
9. graciousness; reciprocity; benignness; a kind of spaciousness in the affections. Not sensitive in the infantile way but through a kind of developed fineness. Psychic sensitivity, freed from the personal.
10. sensitized human soul; the fellowship of the heart.

 

Essence: power, or the motor of the heart; has large power; stays forever plastic, formative, for being like the ocean, it is always open to new impressions, hence it is formed by the Larger, veridically, not psychically.

 

Negative:  suspiciousness; restiveness under discipline; grasping.

 

Types:  mediums, cooks, people who work with the crowd, or supply it; actors; antiquarians.

 

Leo:  fire  fixed.  ruler sun; crude heat; violence; fury; different from the impetuosity of Aries; more concentered; you come upon it rather than its going out to you; ruthlessness of the hottest day of summer; steady heat and violence.

2. exhibitionism; fondness for pomp; haughtiness.
3. pride; love of power; domineering; lavish, regardless of intelligence; diffusiveness; fire. (negative: dissipated types).
4. heartiness; affectionate; over-generosity; respectability; honesty.
5. moral soundness;; faithfulness; firmness of purpose, but through the heart, not through the mind; goodness of heart.
6. generosity; philanthropy; strong love nature developed in this sign because of the sun being ruler.
7. expansive strength of the heart; feeling very strong and deep.
8. stability has been achieved through the steadiness of the heart; lofty conduct; idealists.
9. dignity in leadership; nobility; loyalty being developed in this sign more active and forceful, but works silently; that of Aries more noisy and extroverted.
10. kingly power of matured fire, which nourishes, sustains and preserves, as a king should; fire at its most economic development. Quintessence of fire.

 

Essence:  the fire of the architect or builders concentrated and highly efficient, loyal and sustained.  It serves the will in all constructive organization.  In that sense it makes for warmth and harmony.

 

Types:  jewelers, goldsmiths, musicians, poets or dramatic writers who speak out of the warmth of the heart.  Not pioneers, but command which is stabilized.

 

The higher psychic replacing the water.  This fire has no more need to go out and pioneer (in the self), hence the fire there is highly concentrated, and is a powerhouse.

 

Virgo

1. craftiness
2. shrewdness, sometimes in the unpleasant sense; domineering.
3. hypercritical; carping; garrulous
4. ingeniousness; hardness; practical; all through this sign much repression.
5. preciseness; introspection, methodical.
6. tact, diplomacy; first steps of discrimination developed. With the development of that faculty, a kind of retiringness of the self, or personality, because discrimination is a weapon, sword, that goes out.
7. inventiveness; constructive activity; industry; natural student, one who investigates, tries to put things together.
8. flexibility; practical adaptability and the kind of sympathy that arises out of that.
9. service in earth, of earth. Conscious of power in the lower spheres. Having come thus far, our soul becomes virgin, because it has learned earth wisdom.
10. virgin; earth is now virgin soil.

 

Quintessence: discrimination.

 

Negative:  inferiority complex, and all that goes with it.

 

Types:  entertainers (flexibility) adaptable; students of

hygiene, nurses, physicians, chemists, critics.

 

The higher stages of no one sign can be accomplished without the training of the others.  No indrawing of the arms until, and unless, the other signs have heavily contributed their lessons.

 

Libra;  cardinal air; turning point.

1. lazy; evasive, on the fence, sot.
2. moves, but only to seek personal ease; certain movement of the air; aspect of curiosity will shake up the ease, so that presently this comfort-loving will be of an entirely different grade.
3. carelessness, unreliability; pseudo calmness; conventionality; indicating at a later level the balance seeking tendency.
4. increase of intellectual activity; even tempered, likable, obliging.
5. expansiveness; ambition; affable (more activity than in conventionality); great imagination of the mind; love for the arts, especially music.
6. increased development of the power of comparison, refinement, artistic tendencies; really sweet temperateness and aspiration.
7. sensitized mind, gradually open to what later will become intuitional; inspirational (receptive, whereas aspirational is active); here a beginning of love for unifying influences.
8. passion for order, for cooperation; the beginning of what, when perfected in the fixed sign, where it is passion, here is an affectional love for humanity.
9. justice, dispassionate judgment, sense of equilibrium through the power of the mind; desires gradually transmuted to a devotion of the mind to seek balance and order everywhere. High development of Libra must go out to make for order, balance, justice, symmetry, with great devotion of the mind to it.
10. mind identified with the intuitional, spiritual activities of the air. Have moved upward and are finally drawn in to the fixed quality in the sign of Aquarius. Mind at this stage has grandeur and loftiness.

 

Negative:  quarrelsome, restless, lazy.

 

Types:  sensitives; housekeepers; stage managers in the esthetic world; librarians, etc. in the literary; overseers; must establish balance, not only in themselves but later in the environment around them.

Essence:  Activity in establishing balance, first in the self, and later to project it out and use it in the environment.

 

Scorpio: fixed water; ruler Mars.

1. at the bottom carnal, complete absorption in the delights of the body; sensation loving; passionate, in the animal sense; unrestrained sensualist.
2. tendency toward lust; working evil in itself and in its environment; malevolent; vengeful; coarse, never weak.
3. abrupt, brusque; vindictive, full of hatred, resentment.
4. distrustful; suspicious; severe, jealous, exacting, fault finding; gets a kick out of being plain spoken.
5. great power of attachment; powerful personality; great energy; positive, obstinate, domineering over others; secretive, and usually very attractive to the opposite sex.
6. power of attachment now being developed into power of retention and of keen judgment; power of recuperation; capacity for hard work, not usually physical; conservative; conserving their energy, and at a later stage highly economic.
7. perseverance; courage; self-reliance; interest in occult things. Earlier secretive, now interested in the secret; ability to hold on; conservative in their speech; (earlier sting, but never spread, merely poisonous, virulent, like tail of scorpion; that is continuing still more, so now we have silence, tenacity, accumulating power for what later will be necessary for transformation.
8. dignified, proud, reserved, cautious in the best sense of the word.
9. developed much potency, because their emotions are stable; fixed purposes; mystical purpose greatly at work within them. The sign that makes for transformation and regeneration.
10. complete mastery of the water world, or will dominating desire and transmuting it. Accomplishes second birth.

 

This sign the lowest and the highest, for the greater the animal the greater the man.  He who has the courage to go down lowest goes up highest.  Power of redemption.  The greater the risk, the greater the victory.  Thus accomplishes the true alchemy in the self.  The wisdom of the serpent has been accomplished in learning the secrets of rebirth.  They belong in the, hidden — are accomplished in the fixed signs.  One can’t go to high levels on some and not on others.  Can’t make a bee-line home via Scorpio.  This sign has also been called the sign of th& magician, because in it are hidden the secrets.  Correspondences.  All things that are born, or re-born, are born out of water.

 

Types: chemists, dyers, magnetic healers, detectives; surgeons; wherever there is need of carrying out great things (in the later stages) radical changes.

 

 

Sagittarius:  fire mutable; ruler Jupiter.  Centaur

1. headlong; regardless of danger
2. As the arrow is affected by everything it meets, so gradually a kind of adaptability; hence
3. a kind of impressionability; carelessness; ruthlessness that comes from meeting thwartings; irritability (shunting of the arrow which has been sent out).
4. over-imaginativeness; permissiveness; indiscipline; but a new quality developed, that of a visionary, and the beginning of sincerity; given to fiery anger if really restrained at this stage.
5. fervency, lacking discrimination; castle builders, dreams of where the arrows went, not where they themselves are; on other hand, held by where they are; dual sign, conflict between where they are and where they would like to go; conventional stand patters.
6. fieriness increasing, and if at this stage the energy which has developed cannot be let out they become fanatics, cranks. If able to adapt it they become kindly workers, active, working in service to the castle they have been building.
7. progressiveness, self-confidence; if developed, much foresight; some of their nature is beginning to go with the arrow; have some of the sight which is in the arrow.
8. become religious exultants; they are really a religious type at their higher stage because always anticipating the future; and, being fire, not of earth, it is always given up to the higher things; also becoming now anticipation—inspiration, but not the air inspiration.
9. flexibility and adaptability of the fire; the thwarting of the arrow no longer upsets or disturbs them, but much of fire.
10. complete devotion of the fire of the heart to the highest. Aim is to the bull’s eye of the highest.

Labor of the sign: to establish the law of the future in ‘ the present.

 

Types: fond of outdoor sports, especially in earlier stage; want to go out, out, out; may also be astronomers, photographers, ministers, philosophers; at highest prophets and mystics.

 

Everyone is working in some aspect of every sign.  You may be dominantly working in one sign and incidentally in others.  Like a dominant function (faculty) and a secondary function.

 

 

Capricorn  Cardinal earth; ruler Saturn, contracts, solidifies activity in this sign, even in the earlier stages

1. crafty, capricious, indiscreet; limited activity (tied to rope).
2. penurious, cold, skeptical, yet acquisitive.
3. instinct for business, exacting, egoistic, ambitious;

fond of attracting attention.  Negative: miserly,

extremely selfish.

4. cautious, severe, over-careful in details; at same time self-complacency; peculiarly unaware of feelings in others.
5. severity and cautiousness now modified — careful, industrious; over-detail now becomes neatness; precise, practical minded and yet with an activity developed out of cold, contracting influence of Saturn. When an activity is developed out of the pressure of Saturn we develop a very fine activity in Capricorn.
6. prudence, diligence, independence.
7. steady resolution; coolness, a kind of serenity; undisturbed.
8. impartial; accurate (justice and accuracy different from in Libra. The latter an active sign, and goes out; Capricorn very economic, under the influence of Saturn, does not go out but is highly efficient in its sphere.
9. great perseverance, earnestness, patience and the cream of self-reliance. The goat has come up high — country is barren; patience here different from the lower stage, for here it is in spite of all sorts of difficulties.
10. At the top, contemplation; consummation of the earth man.

 

Associate with the quintessence of Capricorn the idea of service.  “Whoever would be chief among you, let him be servant.”  Sign of earth carried up as high as earth can go.  That is the best service of earth.  Blessed are those who can take earth up to heaven.  Very unpleasant when it is unpleasant, because of the influence of Saturn — morose, lack of honesty, deceitful, melancholia.

 

Types: always practical, more or less stern people.  At the bottom, practical workers, even laborers.  Honor received through action in earth.

 

 

Aquarius:  air fixed; ruler Saturn; also compressive.  Water of the air.

1. chaotic, confused, tricky (air held down by Saturn).
2. eccentricity; erratic (but always for personal ends)
3. self-opinionated, wayward.
4. queer ideas about things; fanaticism; extreme acquisitiveness, but without hoarding (air cannot be held back in the same way as earth)
5. whimsical, odd, unconventional; sympathetic manner in the social world; given to thoughtfulness; rather restrained.
6. become quieter; unobtrusive; intense; carrying out their purpose; and become more kindly.
7. cleared mentality; patient, humane, sagacity, discernment; develop magnetic influence.
8. discrimination; ability to read and judge human character; philosophical activity; catholic, or universal, tastes.
9. intuition; faithfulness through the mind; penetration; understanding.
10. mental service, as against earth service with Capricorn; humanitarian who pours the water of what he has gained on others, the water of beneficence; a certain majesty of the mind.

 

Labor in this sign is to complete the air in man.  He who makes the labor in this sign makes the Man type of the future humanity.

 

Types: political and educational workers.  Have a keen feeling for organization; if inventive organize ideas for the benefit of humanity, managers.

 

Pisces: water mutable

1. emotional unrest, and vacillate.
2. indecision; evasiveness ; emotional flabbiness.
3. over-anxiety; apprehensiveness; open to temptation; addicts, drugs, etc. (water)
4. emotional shiftiness, forebodings, premonitions; feeling which is too susceptible, weak and inconstant; garrulous.
5. easygoing, without stamina, lacking common sense; no stability; fond of new sensations.
6. now domestic, hospitable; dreamy; do not like to reason things out; trustful and affectionate, but they are not to be trusted; no stability; do not think; drawn on by their emotional interests; shift.
7. sympathetic, warm hearted, bountiful, open, fastidious.
8. devout, pious, reverent, meditative
9. emotions become deep and silent; garrulousness has become meditation, and meditation has become devotion.
10. harmonized at last; the mystic. Love for humanity, but different from the humanity of air. Individualized service and adaptability.  Primarily bound for the spiritual; moving toward the spiritual but do not know it; moving toward it via water.

 

Types: these people like traveling; like to cater; hotel proprietors, spiritualists, mediums, musicians; great sensitivity.

 

SHOWING HOW:

the 1st persona   )

 “  2nd persona   )

“  Individuality )

are related in a chart, to the Ascendant and the ⦿, in those who are working in a Process.

 

Detail:

The dividing line is like the threshold between the consciousness and the transliminal, with the upper half as the persona, part of which shares the nature of the Ascendant.  But as the Trainee works with his transliminal (shaded part below horizon), through all those Houses I. to VI., the influence of the Ascendant streams out from that point.  And gradually, as one persists in the work, new qualities, potencies, gather in the 2nd persona, and later, out of this 2nd persona emerges the Individuality ,like a phallus, – drawn up by the invisible rays of the ⦿ or the Light Spark nature…

[The above hold true only for those who are working in a Process under trained leadership.]

                                            d’aprés MBM

                                            fac. E.G.S.

                                               1931

 

 

Symbolism of Astrology

The symbolism of astrology stands in a different category than any other symbolism. The constellations and the planets from which symbology is derived are immune to anything that man can do.  Therefore there is an immutability about the stars.  They cannot be manipulated by man.  They have been called the container of all wisdom.  It is an interesting fact in evolution man was far more concerned with content than the form side of things.  Astrology preceded astronomy.  There was an observation of the effect of the planets on man.  I think it is Wells in his World History who gives this analogy.  The earth is symbolized by a body of 1″ in diameter, the sun 9’, the moon the size of a pea.  The distance between the earth and sun is about 3 blocks.  If we set these up ourselves and made them spin they would have nothing to do with each other.  Now we know there is a terrific impact on the earth from the sun.  So here is some evidence of the influence of gravity on us. . . . We think we know what gravity is by what it does in space.  This is what the ancients tried to compute.  Later there was the computation.of these influences. . . . .

The second point that I would like to use as an introduction to the subject is at the same time as we expand to these immensities, we will laugh at our own ignorance.  We thought of the sun moving around the earth.  Even though we know better, we think it is so.  What do we do about thinking about anything besides earth center.  It takes a long time for thinking to follow along the patterns demonstrated.  Look at the sky tonight.  Stretch you mind.  We don’t grow up all at once.  We have got to go through exercise in our mind.

I would like to turn directly to a realization of our own system.  Let us think that the center of this room has a sun and around it are revolving the planets, and for our own concern our earth, which is third from the sun.  Does anything strike you when you say sun, mercury, venus?  The sun is for man the center of his world until he outgrows this planetary system.  This sun has been worshipped as having all the radiations that make life possible in earth, etc.  Now what is Mercury?  Mind.  Venus is love.  We have the supreme king, the sun; Mercury, the mind; and Venus, love.  This is set up in our own body: spirit, mind, and body.  You have the same pattern in the small undeveloped that you have in the large.  The more you study astrology, the more you marvel at he profundities that can be seen there.

New let us get back to our little universe.  Our universe is our planetary system.  There are thousands of planetary systems.  We are evolving in this one.  Now outside of this system is the belt known as the zodiac, whose constellations are given animal names.  Between us and the cosmos is this belt like the wall of this room is between us and outdoors.  The Chinese developed most of this although the Babylonians and the Greeks worked out the same thing.  (The 12 tasks of Hercules, etc.)  You must go through the 12 to get outside of the belt.  Here we are revolving around the sun.  If we seek anything else, we must understand the 12 signs in the zodiak, or as the Greeks said “do them”.  You will see why in all the great traditions these signs are so important.  This is a crude way to describe it.  We are not used to working in the sky.  Students have it, know it, and then it is gone again.  You must look up in astrology.  You have to counteract the habits of the ages.  The earth will get you completely.  The earth should get you but not completely.

     Now there is one other point that belongs to our general set up that belongs to the wisdom lore of every great race.  The 4 elements.  If you read science, you hear

The signs, general

The signs represent the path which man travels.  Like stages, or steps, on the way, over which the seven are shining in various degrees of power and interrelation.  Seven is not a human octave, the twelve is man’s octave.  There are different stages of development in each task.  In the center you as related to the Pattern.  We are to work on the same Pattern as the great belt of the zodiac.  You may be true to the nature of the light spark, which is magnetically pulling you on toward evolution.

The solar system.  The sun with its tremendous pull, keeping the planets in their circular path around it.  It is because the planets are moving and pulling and, on the other hand, are held to a central principle, that we make a circle.  When we are loyal to a central principle, and are continually progressing, we are describing the Cosmic Pattern of the circle around the point.  If you don’t progress you don’t make a circle.  But if you progress, and are faithful to the central point, so that it holds you to the path of your evolution, you make the perfect circle.

Man, starting the pilgrimage, is young and cannot follow a great scheme.  He has little power.  Therefore the power in him at a later stage in the same sign is different from the power in him in that sign in the beginning.  There are many degrees of endeavor to be expanded in each sign.

Aries:  Leader of the pack.  Ram, who becomes a lamb to the will of God.  That which comes to be commander, leader in regard to profundities.  Power of directing others to lofty goals.  Valor; initiative.

Taurus:  In contrast to the narrow head of the ram, Aries.  Heavy, more stable stolid; quieter.  Enormous fruitfulness of earth.

 

Gemini:  Higher and lower self in you.  Tied together.  Sometimes seen as masculine and feminine (not bodies).  Mystically

Cancer:  Emotional pull.  Crab moves backwards, forwards, sideways; in and out of the water.  Lives near the water.  Hard protective shell, but very sensitive under that shell.  Can attach itself with great tenacity.  At the same time extremely vulnerable.

 

 

The three types of activity in the elements

These are what, in astrology, are sometimes called qualities:

1. cardinal; 2. mutable; 3. fixed.

Cardinal: (fr. the Latin, hinge of a door) that which turns; on which the swivel turns, and hence very important.  They are the most propulsive:  that kind of movement; agile, swift, lively; has much stimulus; stimulates the turn.

Mutable: Means change.  The most mobile of all types; the most changeable, sensitive to taking on new fortes.  Adapts itself best; rearranges itself.  Pliancy; also ephemeral, transient.

In the zodiac the mutable signs have a duality.  Turning back on itself.  Restless, shifting, undecided.

Fixed: The most firm, solid, secure of all the movements . Sturdy; the most economic; belongs to the established order of things.  All the movements are necessary to the evolving of life.

Relation of the seven planets to the twelve signs

The twelve signs contain in them tasks that man must accomplish.  Over that circle is the seven — they ARE.  The twelve are waiting for man to do them.  Various of the planets have a peculiar sympathy with certain of the signs.

Rulers

Capricorn:  Saturn:  In order to make it effective, so that the movement of Capricorn is productive, it needs that which makes it economic – shaves it down to the last, and that is the work of Saturn.

Virgo:  Mercury:  for the quality of mutable earth is extremely adaptable, and in order to be adaptable must be able to use mind.

Taurus:  Venus.  The planet that helps keep it still, quiet, smooth,

 

General characteristics of earth

What is earth?  In all philosophical language it means solid matter, or dense substance, the manifestation side of things, the objective world, the regions in which man works and learns.  Stiff, hard, because it offers more resistance and better discipline.  The material side, material environment around man, and the material side of things in himself.

 

Setting up of a chart, and rising sign, or ascendant.

Houses:

What are houses, and how do they differ in regard to our interpretation?   Houses are very different from the signs.  Houses refer to outer things on the whole, to the form side, to matter; they are related to the physical world, the senses.  You would see earthly affairs from the standpoint of the houses.  See the house as a bottle, the sign as the color of the bottle; planets the contents of the bottle, or container.  The sign refers to emotions, thoughts, feelings, ideas (the thing that colors it) and the planets, the kind of influence working in that bottle, or house.

1st house  represents things as they are going to appear when manifestation begins – a kind of key to the way the soul is going to manifest.  From this point you will get a sense of the potentials in this life, – what has been drawn up into consciousness, and can be drawn out into life.  Represents the degree of energies which are at the point of extroversion, moving out toward the periphery, in the centrifugal movement.  How they relate themselves.  “I”, or persona.

For possible use in introduction to review Philosophy of Astrology by N.J. group.  Taken from 1st lecture on subject by EGS Feb. 194l

 

Not personal astrology

Object: to understand symbology of astrology.  Symbology, one of the guiding threads to meanings hidden to superficial minds.  Not an ancient superstition.  Astronomy is good.  Physical mechanisms: time-space investigation of the heavenly bodies.  In this it has been enormously aided by modern invention.

 

Astrology is a mystical science, based on the concept of the living, radiant energy of a dynamic God permeating all Creation.  Upon our universe radiate the higher psychic and spiritual energies (noetic).  The astronomer notes the lower types and their radiation.  That keeps the planets spinning in their cycles.

 

Astrology part of the teachings of the great Teachers through the ages. In Scriptures.  “Lights in the heavens shall be for signs.”

 

Cosmic rays are only a fraction of what plies its way through space.  There are rays which affect only the psychic of the earth, or the soul, or the mind, or perhaps even nous.  The astronomer could not know them; for these things are recorded on no physical instrument.  Of such is the object of astrology.  Study into the Scripture of all ages. The heavens are truly the scriptures of one mighty God, written permanently above all heads.  They alone are inviolable; not subject to distortion.  They alone ring true through the ages.

 

To understand astrology truly is to know and watch the wonderful drama of life in earth as it unfolds the pattern and purpose of God.

 

The number four is emphasized in astrology; also seven and twelve.

 

The four streams of energy, the celestial outpouring of the Creative Will.  The four sons of Horus; the four directions; the four rivers out of Eden.  At the end of the octave (Paul) they flow around the mystical City of Light; qualities; 12 gates; 12 trees of fruits gathered, after the experience in earth; that is, a sort of fulfillment.  The four essences in the vision of Ezekiel.  In Apoc.  of John: the bull, the lion, the man, the eagle.

 

He who really knows these twelve signs can form some notion of what God is.  The twelve signs move with heaven itself. (Revel. 22)

 

The constellations, and the circle of little animals (the zodiac) are seen mystically as the measure of man’s cycle.  The circle is the great field of heroic achievements which man is to accomplish in earth, and which, when completed, make him the complete man. Inside this circle, the planets which indicate the powers with which man is accomplishing these steps of heroic development.  The constellations and planets form two of the most important factors of astrological symbolism.

 

The moon seems to have to do with the personality, the rising sign with the potentials of the areas just below the mask, and the sun with the result of the relationship arising out of the two.  Out of it rises the individuality, a potent, masculine thing, seen in the sun, which is masculine, potent, the true individuality.  It is never born out of the conscious.  You find freedom in proportion as you obey the laws in your own nature.  You can only be true to a law of assembling and coordinating the dismembered portions of yourself.  “Know thyself.”

 

The writing in the heavens can be found lower down in man.  It is the same writing, whether you know it or not.

 

 

Our job is to learn how to use the forces and powers in the sky.  There are hundreds and thousands of dabblers in astrology.  (This is not like a popular novel of the day.)  How do you suppose you can get to spiritual stature?  By masterhood alone.  Don’t think of the stars as ruling you.  Think of them as a continual variety of influences to give you something to move ahead with.  There are no gifts.  Quote MBM re “Hitch your wagon to next steps but keep the star in mind.”

 

 

Being born under a sign doesn’t mean anything.  It is what you do.  The dynamic is what you do about your potentials.  Every one of you could make a mess of your life, – could, but we propose to do with the things we have at hand.  Astrology shows you what to do, but you must do it.  We are studying this one science which has been seen, through the ages, as the lessons we have to accomplish to become a spiritual being.  We don’t become polyannas.  Actually we have the powers to go about this independently.  Let us imagine we are going into a wonderfully equipped workshop, with all the tools.

 

 

By ourselves we fall down

By ourselves we pain endure

By ourselves we cease from wrong

By ourselves we become pure.

No one helps us but ourselves,

No one can, no one may

We ourselves must work the path

Buddhas merely teach the way.

 

Pole

Think of it as a vortex of forces, immeasurable and invisible.  It must be so because all around this unknown something revolve these mighty constellations.

Seven

We cannot, and never will, get away from the major implication of the seven-ness.

 

A few notes on the positive and negative signs, from same lecture, Dec. 5, 1929, which also bring in qualities of the Four Elements:

All the Earth-signs and all the Water-signs are negative.  Fire and Air signs positive.

Positive:  active, assertive, virile, hardy, that which fecundates.

Negative:  Receptive, delicate, productive, fertile, fruitful.

The positive represents the life-side of things; the negative the form side.  The active works on a form in the sense of the positive.  Must work on some form, on some substance to be effective.

Rulers:

Aries, Mars.     Taurus, Venus     Gemini, Mercury     Cancer, Moon.

Leo, sun     Virgo, Mercury     Libra, Venus     Scorpio, Mars

Sagittarius, Jupiter     Capricorn, Saturn     Aquarius, Saturn

Pisces, Jupiter

Closest octave of the seven to evolving man.  Through the seven we can perform the work of the twelve.

The Zodiac: a belt of influence that marks the outer margins of what we may call our universe – and, spiritually speaking, the outer margin of influence impinging upon us: not altogether, but broadly speaking, the margin.  Therefore, think that you are inside a huge globe.

Our universe is our planetary system.  There are thousands of planetary systems.  We are evolving in this one.  Now outside of this system is the belt known as the zodiac, whose constellations are given animal names.  Between us and the Cosmos is this belt, like the wall of this room between us and outdoors.  The Chinese developed most of this, although the Babylonians and the Greeks worked out the same thing: (the twelve tasks of Hercules, etc.)  You must go through the 12 to get outside of the belt.  Here we are revolving around the sun.  If we seek anything else, we must understand the 12 signs in the zodiac, or, as the Greeks said: “Do them.”  You will see why, in all the great traditions these signs are so important.  This is a crude way to describe it.  We are not used to working in the sky.  Students have it, know it, and then it is gone again.  You must look up in astrology.  You have to counteract the habits of the ages.  The earth will get you completely.  The earth should get you, but not completely.

Our job is to learn how to use the forces and powers in the sky.  There are hundreds and thousands of dabblers in astrology.  This is not like a popular novel of the day.  How do you suppose you can get to spiritual stature?  By masterhood alone.  Don’t think of the stars as ruling you.  Think of them as a continual variety of influences to give you something to move ahead with.  There are no gifts.

Mars:  spiritual energy victorious

Venus:  spiritual forces rolling out discord in the 4 elements in man.

Mercury:  crescent turned up; spiritual being taking message from above to earth, man.

Jupiter:  crescent waxing, pulling the earth

Saturn:  (Satan; dark forces, material over the crescent.)

Bridge to higher planes; tester.

Neptune: spirit in man reaching up to higher forces; symbol of mystical soul searching fire of the water area.  Symbol of the mystic.

Uranus: Spiritual being going up, and having the earth and heaven of the moon in balance.  Symbol of the Master.  (pop; known as upsetter)  Master means mastering of the 12.

Aries:  a cardinal fire sign.  The ram becomes a lamb to the will of God.  The will of God can herewith be received through the mind.

So our ram has gone through a schooling which gives him the power of leadership, made mellow in service to the Larger.  All our growth is from the low to a servant of the high.  With the support of the other 11, the labor of Aries is accomplished.

     That which comes to be the commander, leader in regard to profundities.  Power of directing others in lofty goals.  Valor, initiative.

Taurus:  The second sign is an earth sign.  All signs of the zodiac are divided into the four elements; and the elements are divided again in 3.  A cardinal sign is one which is active and outgoing.  A fixed sign is fixed and stable.  A mutable sign is one which is adaptable.  You see Taurus in contrast to the narrow head of Aries.  Now the bull is a heavy, stolid animal; has enormous fruitfulness of the earth.  Where Aries is transferred into a fire sign, Taurus draws on active Virgo and mutable Capricorn.  They are the two arms that feed into the basic stock of man.  Obedience is essential to man — obedience to the Larger, not the self will.  In the beginning it’s how I feel, what I want, until you learn the pattern; and only after you have done that are you a servant.

     Eventually the essentials of the 12 are reduced to 4, and from 4 to one (ONE).  The One is the 13th man.  13 the most sacred number to man.

Gemini:  This is a mutable air sign.  The twins are tied together.  They are the higher and the lower self in you.  You must see these together as indicating this eternal question in you.  In the beginning everybody “kills” the higher self.  But you can’t kill him.  He reemerges and becomes, ultimately, of spiritual stature.

     Finding the way through the pillars.  Then they become the support of the entrance to the beyond.

Cancer:  This is a cardinal water sign.  Cancer, going in and out of water represents a very difficult series of experiences.  Your 6’s are lying on their side, showing the emotional pulling,

Leo:  the lion is a strong sign, a fixed sign, also a fire sign.  The sun is the ruler of Leo.  Intense fire of the heart.

Virgo:  represents the fruitfulness of earth, and means a high state.  Virgo is a mutable earth sign.  Highly disciplined self, in key with the pattern.  Earth wisdom.

Libra:  We are at a turning point.  Earth wisdom is at the lower half of our.circle.  Now we are going to start with the next six.  We will have to learn these by sixes too.  Libra is the scale, or balance.  It is the middle point.  In symbology we are coming to very subtle things.  Peace.  Cause and effect are in balance; poise.  Equilibrium through the mind.  Justice; dispassionate judgment.

Scorpio:  the only sign of the 12 which has its super character used.  It is the forerunner of the eagle.  This is the region of rebirth.  All things have their birth, or rebirth in water — thus, this is a water sign, and is fixed.  Will, dominance, purification, regeneration to Eagle.  Stability of emotions, mystical characteristics at work in the self.

Sagittarius:  Now certainly, when someone fires an arrow there is much energy.  This is different from Leo or Aries.  The arrow goes where the monad cannot go, or can only follow afterwards.  Think of Sagittarius as the fire that may be sent way off.  Think of it as a fire spreading on a field running everywhere it can go.  Think of Leo as a fire held in leash as a furnace and of Aries as one going out without control.

     Prophets who have the power of mystical foresight in their own right.  Pre-seeing the law of the future.  Mystical foresight.

Capricorn:  Becomes the mountain goat who climbs securely on mountain crags where man cannot go.  Height of the physical side of the human being; perceives from heights the human situation.

 

Aquarius:  The water of the air.  This sign is fixed.  It is mind lifted to the highest.  The teacher, the humanitarian who pours the water of understanding.

 

Pisces:  A mutable water sign.  Two fish showing emotional pulls.  Christ figure represents this in its ultimate culmination.  Goes in service to that which is serving the larger pattern.  Capacity of love developed toward humanity.

 

Philosophy of Astrology

Lecture I   MBM

November 10, 1933

Many people throughout the world believe that astrology is not worthy of the attention of any intelligent person; that it is a fad, or drawing room trick for those temporarily inclined to superstition.  They little dream that astrology is the reservoir, or container, of all the ancient wisdom.  There is no field of study, ancient or modern, which has the scope or the depth of astrology.  Even Carl Jung was recently quoted as saying that astrology was the repository of all ancient wisdom.

Now let us first see what some of the claims are regarding the content of this ancient wisdom, for we must obviously, this evening, make a kind of general approach to this subject.  We are open-minded or else we would not be here.

Astrology contains the ancient physical science, from physics to the most exact science of number and measurement.  I can only refer you to the great structures throughout the world which have been built on the measurements of the stars, whether in England, by the ancient stone-builders in Stonehenge, or Mexico, South America, Ceylon or perhaps, most markedly, in the great Pyramids in Egypt.  No structure in modern times is built with the accuracy of those buildings and they are put up on astrological measurements.

“Logical” means science of.  We, in modern days, think astronomy has replaced astrology.  It has replaced it only to the extent that it has tried to outlaw the wisdom contained in astrology and given itself exclusively to physical matter; that is, the study of mere mechanics.  The ancients, for we inherited it out of the past, had this, plus.

We might make our next approach to its understanding of metaphysics.  Astrology is the repository of the ancient metaphysics, in which our modern metaphysics is just beginning to dabble.  Whether you will find astrology regarding the use of the elements and describing their various degrees; whether you will read that in the Gita or in an ancient Chinese treatise, or in a recovered ancient American Indian treatise; everywhere the indication is that those who were studying astrology were studying number measurement, physics, metaphysics, and construction not only of the universes but of man.  For our elements are entered in the composition of individual man.

And from that developed what was actually inherent in the science itself — the science of the ancient psychology, much profounder and wider in scope than our modern psychology, which, like modern astronomy, has tended to limit itself to those things associated with the body, glands, nervous disorders and so forth.

But the ancient deposit in astrology saw not only the movements of man’s being recorded but also the processes of his development or, as perhaps would be more favorably stated, his evolution.  So we have not only now a static science but the indication of a genetic science, the science of the evolution of man.

Our whole first evening could be taken by a survey of the field of astrology.

We stop to look at the stress put on the relation of man to the solar system, or microcosm to macrocosm, and macrocosm, in turn, to a supermacrocosm.  In this is bound up not only the immediate process of man but that covering vast ages.  It runs in the story of The Twelve Labors of Hercules, in the march through the signs of the Zodiac, and in the story of the first Zoroaster, who, having completed the march through the twelve signs, became the Superman.  Thus, the story of man, of the solar system and its process, and of the macrocosm and its process, are recorded.  This, the genetic science.

How do we know that?  I bid you recognize, and take it into its deeper implication, that astrology is based on the movements of the planets and stars in the heavens; and that these alone, of all the objects which man may see or study, are in no way modified by anything that man says or does.  Everything else experiences the modification of man’s, behavior — but not the stars.

Therefore we may see that in this is the possibility, if we can find it, of an immutable knowledge.  Not only as the astronomer who studies the birth of stars but also as the astrologer who sees the stars as the mere outer form.  Philosophical astrology sees the birth of things of which the physical stars are the outer forms.  The ancient students, and those who understand it today, pursue the course of processes: the birth, the genesis, the development and the teleology that is associated with these processes, is to be read.  In other words, that there is law operating in these processes, and that it can be understood, not only on a physical plane, in regard to the birth of physical stars, but, when the sensitivities are developed, the processes behind these, of which the physical is merely the outer manifestation.

In the profounder aspects of astrology it is said that the bodies in the sky which we think of as having influences — and they have — these are the visible points of invisible sources of influence.  That is not strange.  For instance, your bodies are here, and people recognize you by them, but you would be offended if anyone thought that your body was the totality of you.  So your body is the visible manifestation of something else.  In a similar fashion but of the same key, as the visible bodies in the heavens are of invisible forces.

It need not surprise us, for who has ever seen gravity?  We have all seen gravity function but no one has seen gravity.  And the great physicists, even in our own day, say this is the most mysterious of all forces.

How can we confirm to ourselves that the bodies in the heavens actually have influence?  There is another force, also called gravity, that holds the earth in its orbit around the sun.  You will agree that it must be a powerful force that can hold as big a hunk of matter as the physical earth over a distance of over 92 million miles, not for minutes but tirelessly.  It is pathetic to deny the influences of the bodies of the influences of the bodies in the heavens when their very being depends on these influences.  What would happen if the pull ceases.  If the sun ceased for a fraction of a second…. Remind yourselves that every hour, every minute, every second, your being is supported by an invisible force emanating from the sun and influences from other bodies.  Deny if you can the possibility of the influence from other bodies.

Take the moon.  Aren’t we reminded daily of the influence of the moon?  Note the tides.

We are setting up in this fashion the grounds for astrology.  As in . . . .? the sciences deposited in astrology.  So here, too, I select a few points only.  I select one so vast that we must be ??? The compass, simple or complex.  What happens?  It points always to the North.  What causes it to do so?  Name it if you can, and deny it if you dare. Subtle influences working on that needle.  Later, illustrations outside of our solar system.  The cosmic ray.  Modern physicists never sensed it, and do not now, except through some fine recording instruments.  More spectacular is the harnessing of a ray from Arcturus to light the Chicago Fair.  Arcturus is far beyond our solar system.  This should reassure us that we are not going into a fog of credulity.

So we will pass on to read a little of the mysteries that are recorded in the ancient science.  It is well, in such cases, always to start with the solar system.  What is a solar system?  There are 30 million or more solar systems.  Ours is just one.  A solar system is a group of bodies centering around a central fixed body, called a star to other systems, and a sun to that system, around which other bodies travel.  Because these other bodies travel or wander, they are called planets, which is the meaning of the word,

In the great heavens there are many solar systems, many universes.  A universe is composed of many systems, again traveling around a center.  You probably will have read in physics the various positions of the physicists regarding the limit of the universes.  Until recently, in our modern sciences, little was known about universes.  (Here reference was made to Thompson’s Outline of Science, article on the heavens.)  It describes universes as a thin sphere of bodies, comparable to a lens, like a wheel.

We are leaving these great spaces and coming to our universe or, rather, a small part of it called the solar system.  I have tried to build up for you in this room a simple planetarium.  Our central globe represents the sun, and the various little bodies that you see hanging there are the planets.  They revolve at different speeds about the sun.  We look at these now objectively, but you will please imagine yourselves on the brown body, the third from the center, which is the earth, with the moon.  We are looking from the brown bead out.

In this solar system the ancient wisdom sees an illustration of the microcosm and the macrocosmic forces that work upon us who are living on that little brown ball.

Let us see, if we can, what some of these steps are by which we can enter into an appreciation of the content of these planets.  For our thesis is that these planets are not only physical bodies, which we can see when they are close to us, except the outer ones, but that they are far more — sources of different types of influences.

We all know something about the frequent use of 1he number seven.  Whether in our seven-day week, named after the planets incidentally; whether in the seven-branched candlestick, or the profounder scripture of the various rays, we see influences that must modify the life of man.  So those who have studied these things in the past began to work out symbols that made clear these influences.

Have you ever tried to express yourself and found you had to have a compound word to make clear your meaning?  As you tried to make up the word that fit your thought, so in ancient days the wise ones began working out the symbols that would indicate the nature of the influences that impinge on us from the ethers.

We are, all of us, frightfully egocentric.  We do not care what happens on Jupiter.  We are interested in how these things work on us.  We are, each one, a small world too, like this solar system, on whom an infinite number of impacts occur daily.  It is possible to see those impacts in terms of planetary influence.

(Here MBM referred to prominent people who have been interested in astrology but have kept it to themselves, including many presidents of the U.S.)

There is thus what we may come to recognize as a mixture of influences, as in a bread, that makes a good bread, and types of mixtures that do not.  You know when you get a good brew.  But you don’t know when you get a good mixture in the great bowl of the heavens. In the ancient days this was studied carefully, especially in Babylonia but also virtually throughout the world.  There this right mixture in the great bowl of the heavens was watched, and when it came, they obeyed.

We are going to watch how the people in ancient times tried to record that which they had observed over long periods, and that which they too had learned from their instructors, for there was a Golden Age.  In that era many in that Golden Age were instructed by wise ones, learned in astrology.

When they looked out into the heavens, as you and I look out, we see everywhere circles; the great circle of the heavens, the lesser circles in the heavens.  All bodies do not make perfectly circular orbits.  But there was something, and there is something, about the circle that implies perfection.  Not only that, but endlessness.  For one reason, every point of the circle is at the same distance from a given point, its center.  Therefore a symmetry that is contained in no other design, except the sphere, which is a three-dimensional circle.

This circle became a symbol for that central scheme of things, which seemed to be endless, in which there was all good, namely the sun.  The sun is necessary for all of us for heat, light, life and the almost infinite varieties of magnetism that emanate from it, a few of which we are beginning to know.  The circle became the symbol of the cosmic, the perfection, the ideal.

But since the ancients also knew there were many circles, they put a dot in it to indicate the sun belonging to our system.  It also represents eternity because the line could be passed along without coming to a block or halt and therefore also connotedspirit.

The next body that concerned the students of astrology was the moon.

It is a dead body, or cold, and has no light of its own.  It gets its light from the sun.  Therefore the moon receives.  The sun is a giver.  They had to have some symbol that indicated a receiver.  Ideally, a cup, – container turned upward or sideways – a crescent.  They put it this way because the moon does strange things.  It does not keep all the light it gets, but pours it out.

So the moon was seen as not of the high quality of the sun.  It was an unreliable factor – sometimes it held the light for a while, then gave it up; it was a variable.  And so this crescent became the symbol of the moon, but also, in relation to man, the microcosm, of the soul.  And we can begin to see the relative relation between spirit and soul even now.

The premise is, via the wisdom deposited by these ancient sciences, that the microcosm is like the macrocosm.  We are studying an intermediate macrocosm, our own sun system, and, so says the ancient science of astrology, we can see the makeup of man.  So we have spirit and soul.  And man spends the power of his soul.  He gets and spends.  The moon is variable, unreliable.  So is the soul.  Moon lights man in the night.

The third important factor in the sky: the sun gives the essentials for living, light, life, heat and the magnetism; then the moon, because that is close to us and lights man in the night, is the great night luminary.  What about the earth?  When man looked about him and measured the directions: East, West, North, South – and he drew lines that indicate this position.  And so we have the equilateral cross.  This symbol for the earth is, as in psychoanalysis we saw about other symbols, overdetermined.

In the long run only those things that are true, endure.  Now, when we have signs like this, enduring over thousands of years, you can be sure that they have stood the test of those years; because otherwise they would have been discarded.  All these signs are overdetermined.  The overdetermination of this symbol is that it also indicated the division of the (philosophic) elements – the four elements.  So, often, we have this as the symbol of earth – . .  The very stuff on which man is based.

Those are called the planetary alphabet.  And it is the building on these three that indicates the further influence of the other planets within our system.

What about the new planet, Pluto?  In the ancient wisdom nine planets were known.  We shall have to wait till modern astronomy catches up.  But in the feasibility, in the immediate functioning capacity, the seven, like, the seven of which they are the lesser illustration, outside of the solar system, these are the major forces operating on us.

Thus seven is an important number; also eight, also nine.  That, too, has lived down the ages.  Even though in the ancient time eight, and nine, planets were known, those two were off, because they are lesser for man at present.

We begin with the planet nearest the sun, Mercury; then Venus.

Mercury has been associated with the sun because it is closest to the sun.  We rarely see it.  It is small and near the sun.  It is called Mercury, in the Greek phraseology, because it has been likened to the Cup-bearer to Zeus, the sun.  Mercury has the three symbols combined.  You will see that the moon is on top.  Mercury is the Cup-bearer to the gods.  Therefore the soul is turned up, or receptive, and is in service to spirit, sun, or, in reference to man, to the spirit in him.

The body is the servant of both.  It is below.  That is the psychology and philosophy of the ancient wise, applied to the macrocosm and to man.

This is the ideal picture of man.  Why?  Because in the ideal picture man has come close to the Source, like the sun, in that the soul is turned up and receptive; and like the moon (crescent) that is sometimes spilling the light; and uses to that purpose the body, or matter, or the four elements, or the four directions in which to go.

The four directions in which to go are the pull of the four natures in you.  What are the four natures?  Earth, water, fire, air.  And those four natures pull you in different directions.  Water is tied up with your feelings.  You are crossed and they tear you asunder.  That makes the earth-man of you.  The man who comes closest to the sun must be in this position – the sign of Mercury

Everybody in the Greek pantheon was not permitted to be so close to the god in Olympus.  I am using the names of the Greeks because the lore comes to us largely through the Greeks.  But they (the planets) all had ancient names.

Venus – The circle really means a sphere.  If you roll a ball, it makes the other thing flat.  The cross represents going in four directions.  Along comes the circle and begins to smooth it out.  We call that Venus.

And the ignorant folk think Venus is the Goddess of Love.  She has been much maligned.  Venus is not love in the ordinary sense at all.  It represents the love of Spirit smoothing out those difficulties or ills or irregularities or conflicts in that which belongs to earth.  And so, of course, to man.  You can think of it as applying to earth or to man.  If you are out in the sun you have the benefit of the sun’s rays.  If we are all out, we all get them.  A certain universal application.

What I am trying to aid you to do is to work your ways into the meanings of these signs by an appreciation of the significance of the parts.

Mars – This is also a maligned sign.  It is no more a war-lord than Venus is the goddess of earthly love.  This planet is represented by a circle with an outgoing line, an arrow.  The line, just as with a river – a path of force.  In larger, no top or bottom.  It does not matter whether it is this way or that, –       .

Wherever there is force there is, sooner or later, an obstacle.  If it persists, it is blunted.  That is indicated by the arrow – the wings that go backward – streamlined – the back flow from the forward movement.  Mars is therefore the symbol of outgoing energy from Spirit.  Therefore a highly beneficent thing.  War lord?  Not at all.  It is the symbol of spiritual energy going out into activity and meeting the inevitable frustration that substance of any kind, whether physical or etheric, presents to it.  And sooner or later it gets blunted.

Jupiter –  usually said to be a nice sign and Saturn said to be bad.  Do we know why?  It may be the other way, if we once were wise to it – Saturn the beneficent sign, Jupiter, the superficial one.  Remember our alphabet.  It looks as if the two were having a battle but one of them is having the upper hand.  Because Jupiter is made this way, it is beneficent.  The soul in this case has the upper hand over the body.  The planetary body, symbolized by the moon, has a stronger influence than the substance side in the macrocosm.  Therefore Jupiter is said to be beneficent, expansive.

Saturn – the reverse of Jupiter.  Therefore these two are seen, usually, as two opposites.  Not exactly, but their influences, seen superficially, are sufficiently in contrary directions to be popularly so named.  Here the four elements are over the soul.  Dominate.  Means pain, difficulty.  The things of the material side are at that moment on the upper hand.  Is that always evil?  You want the water in the refrigerator made more solid.  Sometimes you are mighty thankful for the constructing influence represented here.

The different types of influence that are molding individual man, you and me, mass man, are molding the macrocosm of our own solar system.  There are different types at work.  You can’t pull a thing only one way and get it into satisfactory order.  You have got to have what is symbolized by Mercury, modeling.  You have got to be open to the idea of modeling a foot (reference to modeling in clay at summer place.)  That is the moon turned up.  You have got to be harmonious toward it, to put effective thought into it.  Also determination.  And all these types of forces, in just a little way, are being expended in the simple thing you are doing on your plaster.

Take with you tonight the realization that the microcosm and the influences upon it, and the macrocosm and the influences upon that, are strangely alike.  And it is because of this perception of likeness that is one of the precious reasons for studying astrology.

The further we go into it, the more we see that the wisdom is in it — not only the wisdom of the psychology and construction of man but of the influences, or types of energy at work upon him.  We will see not only that, but the whole process of his evolution, marking the early stages from genesis to the consummation.

 

Philosophy of Astrology

Lecture IV

MBM – December 14, 1933

Note – The last two lectures in this series were devoted to the Seven Churches in the Book of Revelation, Apocrypha of the New Testament.  In the three earlier lectures MBM explained the philosophic meaning of astrology as compared with astronomy and mundane astrology, the “alphabet” used in the construction of the symbols for the various planets and signs of the Zodiac.  This data was repeated, in part at least, in other series on astrology given by MBM before this present series, and these have been transcribed.  In the last two lectures in the present series she shows the correspondence of the Seven Churches with the processes of the soul’s evolution.

– – – – – – – – – –

I have been trying to give only a philosophical perspective in this course.  I cannot go into the interpretation side of a chart.  Therefore I have chosen tonight certain passages out of old Scriptures which illustrate very well the philosophical application of astrology, and at the same time are going to answer some questions regarding this particular Scripture that have been in your minds for a long period of time.

A few words about the chart in the Commons.  Distribution of the planets.  Mercury and Uranus in Aquarius.  I had in mind the Aquarian period, with Mercury and Uranus as the two major operating forces.  Mercury, symbol of the ideal Cup-bearer, closest to the sun; and Uranus, the one who, for mighty purposes, upsets again and again, the set forms which had become stabilized.  An indication of the influences that are at work at this particular time.  Note also some of the interweaving influences at this time.  How the heavens look in regard to the Aquarian period, (evidently a comment re the chart.)

I want to show you how the philosophy of astrology is drawn upon in great writings, visions.  I have chosen the Apocalypse of the Christian Bible.  There is no book in which the number seven appears so frequently and significantly, and in which we may read the influences of the planets, though they are not named.  My purpose is to show you how, in this ancient language, you may read, if you have the intelligence, the old, and for us new, lore of star-wisdom.

The writer of this book starts out by saying, “This is a vision.”  Whether this vision came in deep sleep or in a waking state, the same factors are involved.

You recall how Dr. Jung speaks of the collective unconscious, and how, in the later years, even Freud would make gestures in that direction.  But Freud says that when you pass beyond the boundaries of your personal experience, you come into that which is rudimentary and elementary.  Dr. Jung says that when you pass beyond this, you get into the collective unconscious, or primordial, or world images.  Both premise that it is possible to touch regions different from the ordinary dream state.  Jung finds in it the engrams, or imprints, of old patterns.

I suspect that our author of this image, be he John or anyone else, touched something that is indeed a primordial image, or series of images, but touched it in a slightly different way.

Some of you will remember that it is our premise that there is a pushing beyond the boundaries of the personal, the record of this life — not only that but that there is a possibility for pushing into states that are of high spiritual import.  Not therefore merely the collective engrams of a past, or the racial pictures, which may be good, bad or indifferent, but of a spiritual world in which great visions are always.  And he who comes in contact with those vast and lofty realms sees, and says it is a vision, if he does not know better; but it is of the eternal verities.

I suspect that the author of this book was drawn into this state.  He speaks of the Angel of the Lord coming to him.  (Here MBM quoted from the Apoc. a long and complicated quote which I did not take. GB)  How can one write it down in black and white!  He can just try to represent it in some way.  He does not represent the matter but colors the story.

Let us follow the story of what our author saw.  He heard one who spoke to the Seven Churches in Asia, and it becomes quickly obvious that these Seven Churches are not particular points in geography — that these Seven Churches, which were organized by the early workers following the advent of Jesus, were an allegory — to symbolize what is in the cosmological pattern.  And that it is true for all organization that belongs to cosmic pattern.  That it is true of the individual man, and therefore what is said to these Churches applies to you individually.  That it is true of our planetary system, or solar system, and that it is a true Pattern sent out from cosmic sources, whatever they may be.

In this picture we find something that gives us quickly a clue to the planets, and I want to give you a clue as to how it is done.  These seven, of the Churches, are by no means the only sevens.

(Here MBM lists some of the sevens.)  Seven Seals, Seven Churches, Seven Candlesticks in Chapter 1 and all through the Book, Seven Spirits before the Throne, the Seven Stars, the Seven Trumpets, the Seven Vials, the Seven Dooms, the Seven Horns and the Seven Eyes, Chapter 5, which have to do with certain attributes of that entity who is called the Lamb.  These are all aspects we would find if we studied all the Sevens (all the number-symbolism of the seven?)

I have chosen the Churches because they are first in the Book, and they are so broadly expressed that they will give you a key to something else.  They touch the evil side of every planet and the good side, and indicate the way to use the planet, and finally indicate the ultimate victory-side of the planet: (1) Praise; (2) Blame; (3) Warning; and (4) Reward.  This is always repeated in regard to the Churches.

The seven centers in man.  They have really meant the seven aspects in man which are the points upon which these seven impinge.  They are of course implicit in every story of Creation written by any of the great races.

Do not think of the Churches, although they were actual, but these seven were used for reasons that belonged to old lore.  Had influences upon them from the Mesopotamian valley.  Were already associated with star-worship.  Lent themselves, thus, to the allegory.  And the one who looked into these pictures, which always are, is the Angel speaking to the Seven Churches.

Ephesus – The first Church is Ephesus.  And every time this Angel speaks he identifies himself with something that is significant of that particular Church-Planet. . . . . and are walking among the Lamps.  Ephesus is a city in ancient times given over to Artemus, or moon-worship, and the Angel is speaking to this church, or Ephesus, or people who are under the tutelage of the Moon.  Moon-students.  Associated with the soul-node.

The object of the soul is to become Spirit, or the 13th Man who walks among the Lamps as the stars, or is of the Star-World.  The soul, just before it comes to its completion, or the 13th Man, suffers extremely.  The Angel credits the Church for what it has accomplished.  It has applied its energies to its own evolution.  Has developed patience, steadfastness and discrimination.  That is the state of the Moon, but it is not yet complete.

Now the blame:  You have left your first love, abandoned it.  Go back and live the life that you lived before.  (MBM):  After there.has been a certain development, radiance from the soul, with it comes a certain egoism.  Then you have betrayed your first love.  You must live the life you lived before – that is, before you became egocentric.  If you do not turn back to your first love, “I will take the lamp from before you.”  The lamp is the vision of the Light.  Just as the lighthousekeeper must keep that glass pure, so the Light from the lamp is the same thing in yourself, and is that thing which must be watched with a careful care.  If you go off that track, you blunt that faculty, lose your sensitivity, and the light which you had is taken from you.

Superbly accurate from a psychological-philosophical process.  It is taken from you by your own condition.  This even true of conscience but is on a higher level when the soul-node has been developed and you turn from its purpose, which is to move to Spirit.  The lamp is taken from its place.

Praise: or promise – The perfect fruit of right living, won at Ephesus, is to eat of the Tree of Life.

You wear the Ankh Cross in truth.  To have crossed the boundary of the Firmament is to eat of the Tree of Life.  Moon, as the symbol of the soul, is that which should reach spiritual levels, and the dangers of which the Angel speaks are the dangers to the soul.  Promise (Reward) – Perfect Fruit is to eat of the Tree of Life, to attain the firmament. The ideal fulfillment of the soul is to attain the cosmic.  These words bear all the signs of speaking in moon-language.  They speak of the dangers to the soul, (repetitious from ABG notes).

Now speaking to Smyrna, the Angel calls himself: The first and the last, and One who is dead and the One who is alive again.  And in between is all else.

The influence from Syria generally, as of this particular town, was of a cult that worshiped Ishtar and Tammuz.  Tammuz is the Spirit, the Sun, and the Son who dies and is reborn.

Again, our Angel identifies himself with the particular influence that is symbolized by the sun, Spirit.  Spirit is first and Spirit is last, and in between is everything else.  But it is first and it is last.  He was dead because, when you are down in earth and have not attained the again-state, you are dead.  Just as Tammuz, in the old allegory of the Babylonians, was dead and came to life.  So Spirit is the only Son of God. – that is, the Son only of God.  That is, Spirit is not born as you are now, of the flesh, or the sensual desire, but is born only of cosmic principles, – that is, of Deity.  Begotten of God, when you have reached that stage of Spirit.

In the story of involution and evolution, the Prodigal Son becomes dead, Spirit is held temporarily in abeyance, presently becomes awakened and returns.

Let us see what the Angel says to Smyrna.  He has no criticism to offer.  He speaks evil of Smyrna’s poverty but adds, paradoxically, “But you are rich.”  This could be said only of one planetary influence, Spirit.  Every great Teacher said the same thing — those who are poor, or appear to be poor, if they are of the Way, are really rich; or, things are not as they seem.  The poor ones on the Way are not to be pitied.  Like the city of Smyrna, they are to be understood.

There are extreme testings, and therefore that which is going through these last supreme testings must suffer, and must seem particularly poor.

He speaks of the temptations.  From the Jews.  That is, those who claim to be Jews but are not of the true stock.  But the spirit begins to know who is of the true stock and who is not.  The others Smyrna throws out.

The Angel warns of suffering.  Smyrna, the Twelfth Man, on the eve of becoming the Thirteenth, will be blocked and frustrated, throw into what is allegorically a prison; suffer persecution for ten days.  When that complete stage of suffering is over, they are out.  Just as Tammuz, who is released from his death and reborn the next year.

Reward – The Promise is the Crown of Life.  And again a curious occult statement: He who conquers all, who wears this Crown, shall suffer no hurt from the second death.  Because they are through with the human evolution, have attained the cosmic stature.  Unmistakably the influence of the sun (Spirit).  He who conquers all, shall suffer no danger from the second death – he is through with the human evolution.

3rd city, Pergamus – the Angel again changes his appearance.  He must have, because if he is the one who speaks as the completed being, and therefore represent mastery of all the seven, he can at any time identify himself with any one — the Houseless Wanderer.  The words of him who holds the two-edged sword.

Who carried the two-edged sword?  The Jews learned their lore from Chaldea; earlier, in Egypt.  The Apocalypse started with Chaldean lore, the source of the latter-day astrology.  Other countries had it too, but the particular source here is Chaldea.  It started out here.  In the Chaldean lore Jupiter carries the two-edged sword (Jupiter the planet) – the symbol of mastery.  Sword is always Force but it represents the outgoing word of Force from Deity when it belongs to cosmological pictures.

It is therefore the conquering word.  And the conquering word has two edges.  Those two edges belong to the Master, Jupiter.  Like the sword given to Arthur, Excalibur.

This duality is, on the one hand, knowing and being; stature and power; discrimination and action; knowing and loving; or Wisdom and Gnosis.  It is with that influence that we may conceive Jupiter as the head of the Greek pantheon.

The Angel speaks – “You held true to the nature of Jupiter, even under great difficulties.”  Even when there was a danger of martyrdom.  The Angel speaks, “This is the supreme test.”

Blame – However you have succumbed to a sin (the blame), you have succumbed to the sin of Balaam.  Cf. the Book of Numbers, about Chap. 22 ff. Balaam plays a dramatic part.  He was a medium, a supremely valuable (?) medium in the kingdom of Balak.  An Amorite.  He saw coming up in (to?) Syria hordes of Isrealities.  They were up their way from Egypt.  Balak saw what happened to Moabites (were wiped out).  He sent for this medium to tell him what is going to happen to avoid suffering for his people.  “God” spoke with him (Balaam).  The latter was between Balak and Deity.  Balaam said he couldn’t go.  “Deity” wouldn’t let him.  Altars were built and sacrifices made – were of no avail in changing Deity.

What is the sin of Balaam?  The use of powers on behalf of those who are not the chosen people of Deity.  (Instead of cursing the hordes of the Jews threatening Moab, he blessed them.)

Is that the Jews?  No.  The Jews were simply another figure, like the Churches, in a colossal allegory, which was written purposively by entities on the other side, to see whether they could drive home certain lessons already written in the heavens.  They began to write those lessons via a peoples down on earth.  And the Jews have had to suffer for that pattern they wrote in that ancient time.

Balaam’s sin, the use of power on behalf of those who are not God’s people.  The “licentious acts” of the Jews (Chap. 25, Numbers).  Of the mind, for this is Jupiter’s sign.  Jupiter’s lesson is mastery, and the one who would learn mastery must learn to make everything serve one master.  At later stages you will know you can have only one Master.  The lesson of Jupiter is apropos of some of these profound later stages.  Everything that is done must be done for the people of God, not using any of your power for Balak.  Adultery is condemned – adultery of the mind, not body; intellectual cohabitation of the Moabites.  Conscious living in latter stages seems difficult but it is not.

Reward or goal – the goal of Jupiter, if you know his mystic character: “I will give you a share of the mystic manna, and a white stone.”  The bread from heaven is the food that helps man to become spiritual.  The goal of all the planetary system is one – the ultimate attainment.  The spiritual nature cannot grow without this food.  There is alchemy, besides mysticism, in this.  He will receive a new name, a spiritual name, after learning the lessons of mastery (the two-edged sword).  Eating spiritual food and learning the lessons of mastery, he must attain the goal, spiritual stature.

4th city, Thyatira – Here the speaker identifies himself with the perfection of this planet, Venus.  He speaks as one “whose eyes are flaming fire and whose feet are brass.”

The writer (the dreamer) has gotten beyond the personal, or even the collective unconscious and sees the pattern that belongs to cosmological set-up and therefore sees what we might call a condensed drama of the evil and the good of every force.  For every force has an evil and a good, and you can only come to its.goal if you are able to keep on a straight line.

And the object of the Angel in speaking to these Churches is not to speak to these particular churches (but to give) the patterns which are as true today as anciently; therefore you have to look at them in big ways.

The speaker again identified himself with this planet, Venus, as having feet of brass.  They had no brass those days – more like copper.

Venus is the brightest planet in the sky.  The metal associated with it is copper. Strikingly brilliant in morning and evening.

What are the evils and what is the good of this planet?  The circle smoothes and is beneficent.  Venus in earth – sensuality.  Venusberg, the negative or evil side of Venus.  The good side – harmonizing, smoothing.

Praise – “I know your life, your love, your faith.  These are qualities belonging to the upper psyche, the higher heart regions – love, kindliness, good-will; and I know that your life of Light (?) has been better than it was at first.” Already a recognition of the advantages of Venus wiping out the evil.

Blame – “But I have this against you.  You tolerate the woman Jezebel, who declares she is a prophetess.  Servants commit sin.  Will kill your children.”

Who is Jezebel?  Now we are in the realm of adultery, sensual bodily pleasures.  Jezebel, a sensation extrovert.  How beautifully they spoke in favor of what they were doing!  Self-righteous.  Justified their enjoyment of pleasure.  That is the woman Jezebel who is preaching her teachings of the sensation function.  She “misleads my people.”

This, the evil side of Venus.  The people who are caught by the pleasures of the body, do not like to turn from them.  So what occurs?  They must suffer.  “Laid out on a bed of suffering.”  Who are her children?  Those things that are the result of her teachings.  Not therefore physical children but the results of what she taught.  There is no life in them.  They have no life that endures.  So Jezebel will be on a bed of sickness.  Her children will be killed.  Do not accept the teaching of the body, the false teachers. Jezebel, the inversion of Venus.

Illustrated in Wagner’s Tannhauser, who comes back somewhat changed; has learned the lesson and has turned from that life.

Reward – “I look into the hearts and souls of men.”  Venus belongs to the psyche.  “If you conquer and live my life to the end; that is, the life of ideal Venus is the goal – the faithful, kindly – to him I will authority over nations.  And he shall rule with an iron rod.  I will give him the morning star, the dawn of a new day.”

Why will one who has worked out the Venus in himself to the highest point, become a ruler?  Because a ruler over himself.  From the philosophical pattern you can never do anything until you have done it yourself.  Therefore those who have learned to master their earth and water, become the rulers of nations.  Because they have done that, they receive the morning star, the dawn of a new day.

He who has learned the completed lessons of Venus will “rule with a rod of iron.”  Strength, unflinching, discipline, self-disciplined.  When you have disciplined yourself, you may use it over nations.  Rod of power-symbol of self-discipline – rod of power over self first, then over nations.

 

 

Philosophy of Astrology

Lecture V

MBM – December 8, 1933

 

Introduction

MBM began this lecture by referring to the more delicate instruments of measurement science is now using, for things we do not know through our senses.  An instrument to see a candle ray 30 miles away.  The chemistry exhibit at the Grand Central Palace.  Influences must be about us but we cannot sense them.  Cf. the new type of window glass which lets in light and keeps out heat – separating the two.  Again something to be noted in the sense of delicate perception of influences about us.

Sardis is associated with Mars in our ancient sources from which all these things are built up.  Mars is known as the planet which is and which is not.  It comes and then disappears.  We also know something about Mars from the alphabetical language.  (Circle = spirit; arrow = outgoing force; flanges turned back by the meeting of obstacles.)

The speaker again identifies himself as the Leader.  “You (the Church) have the name of those who are living and who are not living.  You are actually dead.”  Mars is the sign of great activity.  So we understand the subtle play on words – you appear living but you are really dead.  A very fine accusation that belongs very well to this time.  So many people busy, busy, busy about something that is not constructive.  Hence they are dead though they appear to be living.

Warning: So be on the watch and strengthen that which is alive in you.  So much energy has been expended, and has gone out in a bagatelle, things of no account, that you must hold what you still have.  Battles too much, it disrupts.  If we don’t correct that we have the adverse side of Mars.  Unless you are on guard, “I come like a thief in the night,” – that which cannot be seen.

The reference is to the dead side of Mars – the Mars who is not, though he is.  There are people who destroy themselves with their own wrath.  And the Teacher in this case does not destroy but discovers that they have destroyed themselves.

What are some of the things that destroy?  Wrath, ambition, anger, wrong desire, jealousy, hate, malice – they are our thief in the night who is taking away the life side until there is very little left.  Therefore look to it that you don’t spend all that you have.

People who are like that are people who are associated with ambition, ego.  If they haven’t that, they are without that which desires to put on the false front and are, in the ancient language, pure in heart.  Those who have not soiled their robes.  “They shall walk with me, robed in white.”

In purity.  Represents completion, fullness.  Because in white are all colors.

Therefore those who wear white are those who are making for completion or fullness.  They have those qualities of the heart – the plus side of the influence.  Their names will not be struck from the Book of Life, because the life-side of Mars will carry them on.  The praise that belongs to a true worker.

(6”) Philadelphia, the next Church.  The sign for that is Saturn, whoopens and shuts.  No one shall open . . . . . Key of David, the one who is holy and true.

In the ancient understanding, Saturn is the true trainer, or discipliner.  He is therefore called the bridge.  And no one goes to the Larger except through the training and discipline of Saturn.  The one who has crossed the bridge of Saturn has become whole and trued.  To the laws.  Hence have crossed the bridge.  Therefore one who has mastered the lessons of Saturn, gotten the powers, is able to open the doors that no one else can open, and to shut those no one else can shut.

Make it a little more simple: If you have suffered anguish in your heart, if you have learned from it, that is something that no one can take from you, something which you possess.  Beyond all time.  A little inkling of the power of Saturn to open.  So Saturn is the symbol of the Teacher, par excellence.  He has the key of David.  The lessons of Saturn may harm the body, not the rest of you.  If you have suffered anguish of the heart, no one can take the lesson from you.  Doors opened through your suffering that nothing can close.  (Repetitious phrases – from ABG notes).

Who is David?  David represents the king of natural man.  The fullness of natural man, and it is only on the fullness of natural man, on him, that the future, or the spiritual man, can be based.

Some orders, like masonry, will not take a sick person as a member.  They are literalizing what is meant in this symbology of the Keys of David.  There is no such thing as a perfect physical man.  But there is it, relatively.  He is through with the lessons of the physical world.  The one who has learned the lessons of David (the physical world) has a key.  You may literalize and say it is only the perfect physical man that can go on.  Or you can say, what is really the meaning, that the one who has learned the lessons of David has a key because from him comes a fullness that comes in no other way.

“Tho you have but little strength, you have kept my teaching in mind.”  The one who is being strained by the power of Saturn, almost exhausted.  As in the allegory of Jesus on the way to the Cross.  Too weary to carry the Cross.  With Saturn it is almost impossible to carry on.  In spite of the narrowing down, you keep steady.

“Those who are in your congregation of Jews of the Old Scripture” – making a sharp distinction between Jews and Israelites.  Those who are not, as you are, under Saturn.  But if they are, the time will come when they shall bow down at your feet and learn that “I love you.”  Though you seem now to be an outcast, the time will come when it will be revealed that it is just the opposite.  “Those whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth.”

Those who are far on their way, come under the strong influence of Saturn.  The condition comes when the picture will be reversed; when it will be seen that the work was beneficent.  “People will kneel before you.”  “He who conquers I will love.”  “Because you have kept in mind the story of my endurance, I will keep you.”

Then the idea of the trial of the whole world, the time that is near in the testing of Saturn.  When you are close under Saturn.  Now is the eleventh hour, the end is quickly.  “He who conquers I will make a pillar in the temple.”  He who is able to stand the full testing of Saturn is able to cross the bridge, is on the thither side, and will never come back.  He is so strong he is able to bear his part in the cosmic structure.  A pillar is one who has been able to stand the test, able to behold the Teaching.  Every profession has its examinations, degrees (in masonry).

In the planetary symbolism, which is a true symbolism, from which the others are derived, the one who has crossed the bridge is so strong he is able to bear his part in the great cosmic structure.  Doing that, he will of course never again leave it.

Three interesting bits: “A new name – the name of my God.  The name of the City of my God.  And my name.”  The name of Deity, of his origin, and of the Messenger.

What does it mean to receive a new name?  The completion of tests and complete entry into a new region.  With that were accessible profundities that are not accessible before.  At such a time it is the pupil or the one who is moving, who has learned the actual nature of the Teacher, the region toward which he has been working….You haven’t been in them before and knows something closer up to the nature of Deity.  Study that paragraph closely.

Saturn and Mercury are the last, and the two important ones, though none can be left out.

L~z.ad ice&

Laodicea – 7th Church – The planet here is Mercury.  “These are the words of the Unchanging One.”  How differently the speaker speaks of himself!

Mercury, the closest to the sun.  Moreover Mercury, in its symbol, is the only one here, except Uranus and Neptune, who contains the three letters of the alphabet. (Crescent, circle and cross of the elements.)  So we catch our key to some of the things said here.

This witness, the Unchanging One, is.      , the beginning of Creation

of, by God.  Only one planet to whom that would refer: Mercury as the Messenger, the Cupbearer, is the True Word.  Therefore the word of Deity is the means of Creation.  This audible word (which the Angel spoke?) is the humblest, or most earthy illustration of a concept.  So the witness or the Word, is the source of Creation, and its messenger, or the one closest to the sun, the center, that is able to carry these things on.

The adverse side – swiftly.  And I know no more scathing accusation of intellectuals in literature anywhere in the world than in the next few sentences: “I know that you are neither cold nor hot.”  The intellectual.

There is no place in the evolution of the thinking faculty that is so dangerous or so difficult to pass as the intellectual rung of the mental faculty.  Because, having attained this high, the one who has it has a certain sense of power, facility, and with it, a sense of superiority.  Such people do not really live, because they are superior to it in their own minds; but the one who is a seer knows that these things are true.  “Would that you were either hot or cold.”  There is nothing so terrible as to be lukewarm.  If you are hot or cold you are on one opposite.  Better to swing on a pendulum.  If you are in the middle, without life, you deserve this accusation.  “I must quickly spew you forth.”

There are in the picture four points to be considered: the middle, which is out of action; the pairs of opposites from which we have been oscillating; and the ideal state, which is on the further side of the opposites.  The middle state is not the ideal state – getting too quickly into the middle.  Through the violent movement, with the help of the planets, you are learning.

Presently comes Saturn, and you pass to the other side of the opposites.  You only come to the ideal position afterward.  You pass out between the calmness and superiority of the before state and the true mastery of the after state.  You say, “I am rich, I want nothing.”  They know everything.  What can you tell them?  They have skill to turn an argument.  Sophistry, but they do not know it.  “You do not know that you are rich or miserably poor, blind, naked.”

Most people do not know it but this is written, not from the physical point of view, but from the spiritual point of view – from the point of view of the spiritual attainment, not psychic.  But spirit, after mind.  They are naked of anything belonging to spiritual value.  Poor, miserable, the node of spirit in them is sick at its core because the outer man is thinking in this superior way, thinking he is rich.

Therefore, says the speaker, “I counsel you to buy gold of me.”  Not physical gold.  The gold of spirit.  Like the water of Jesus, from which one, having drunk, never thirsts again.  The eternal values.  “Get these treasures from me.”  That alone makes you rich.

“I counsel you to buy the gold which has been refined by fire.”  You can’t get the gold of spirit except through the travail of evolution in earth.  That is the trial.  It finally becomes intense, as when it is called the trial by fire.  Then you will grow rich.  That is the only riches there are.  Then the white robes, completion will be given you.

If people could see themselves from other planes, it would be shocking.  Therefore, says this speaker, who is giving the last word: “Get this gold, the white robes, be pure in your purpose, and then will your shameful nakedness be hidden.  Ointment for your eyes that you may see.”  Insight, the beginning of true sight.  See no longer the form of things.  That is only incidental.  But you see the content, or meaning.

“Therefore be in earnest.”  The intellectual is not in earnest.  He fools the majority of people.

“I am standing at the door and knocking.”  The messenger of the sun.  “If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will enter in and feast with him, and he shall feast with me.”

This is not a religious thing, unless your religion has become based on a metaphysical science, but so literal on another plane that nothing physical is to be compared to it.  The feast of air and fire; the cosmic fire is the feast to which this speaker refers.

Some of you have tasted this on a lower level, when you begin to like books instead of physical things.  But this is different.  The Banquet to which Dante refers.

“To him who conquers, to him I will give the right to sit beside me on the throne.”  Mercury sits beside the sun.  And the one who masters these lessons comes into the same mystical position as Mercury.  It does not mean the planet Mercury.  This is an allegorical picture.  If you press deeply into it, you will understand the process of man’s evolution toward spiritual stature.

“As I, when I conquered, took a seat beside my Father.”  Because the speaker is a forerunner on his Way, which everyone follows.  Just as Jesus is the forerunner of those who reach this stage, and likewise are anointed and become Christs.  There can be therefore be many Christs.  Let us hope so.

The writer of this book, being versed in star-lore, it became the best illustrative material by which he could make the comparisons of the training of the individual soul called from man, from its humblest to its fullest stage.

Whether our writer was a profound astrologer was transfixed (?) that he saw this without having it, we are in no position to know.  But I suspect that he must have been, in any case, someone who had the great values in heart and mind, and therefore was conditioned to get the subtleties.

Some of those subtleties I hope you have seen. . . . . . And anyone else who attains that stature is therefore in the same category and is co-heir with Christ — he who illustrated the allegory by doing it.

Philosophy of Astrology

Lecture VI

MBM   December 15, 1933

….with what might be called mundane illustrations of the applications of astrology, in spectacular ways.   ….  Many illustrations of the powerful effect that certain readings of the stars and certain great events corresponded.  That of the London Fire in 1666. Foretold by a man of the name of Lully, born 1602.  Became one of the most eminent English astrologers.  Was rather disturbed in the latter days by what was going on in the country (he and some of his friends were disturbed.)  Computed the effect of the stars on London and the House of Commons.  Was horrified and would not state what he saw.

In 1656, in a magazine published by him, appeared several pictures.  One: of two children falling into a big fire, and many older people pouring water on it.  Another page, opposite this picture, three corpses in tight shrouds.  Another picture, of two graves.  His friends understood this sign.  Did not want the people generally to understand it.

Shortly after, the fire and great. . . . . Lully was called to the House of Commons to explain whether he knew how this fire came about, and by what means.  He did not foresee the year.  Saw the northern horns of Taurus bumping into Gemini.  He was an able reader.

Some names with which we might associate astrology.  It is probable that a horoscope was made for our country before it was set up as a country.  An allocational (?) horoscope, to see what would be the right time to start.  Also with Theodore Roosevelt.  In his own private study he always kept a chart which he had worked out for him.  The Japanese used astrology intensively during their war with Russia.  Others who used it: Admiral Dewey, General Miles, Cleveland, the Czar of Russia, Mussolini, who consulted an astrologer in 1918.

The stars and planets do have an effect on man, and it is a profound study.  But to go into it is likely to become lost in it.  It can be applied to ourselves, and if you are safely grounded in the profundities it is all right.  But do not do it until you are stabilized in the big.

Our constellations.  Fixed stars.  More or less arbitrarily grouped.  Eighty-five, more or less, known to astronomy.  Mostly have names of mythological figures.

How did the constellations come to be associated with the myths?  We have to understand something about life in those ancient days — about psychology in those ancient days, and imagination in those ancient days.  Life was not crowded up into cities as at present.  Those interested in the stars and the heavens had more ready access to them.  The more we build in the earth, whether theaters or trains, the more our eyes are drawn from the heavens, both literally and philosophically.  In the ancient day star lore was as common as radio now.  The major subject of common interest among those who were the leaders of the state or of the army.