LEARNING CURVE ON THE ECLIPTIC: Richard Grossinger

Showing posts with label Richard Grossinger. Show all posts

Thursday, January 07, 2016

Resonance

Thoughts on astrology which resonate with

me. They come from Richard Grossinger in his book The Night Sky - The Science and Anthropology of the Stars and Planets. There are several posts, from 2008 onward mentioning Dr. Grossinger's writings - they are all easily accessible via the Label Cloud in my sidebar. In recent years I notice, from his website (which is mentioned in my 2010 post) that he has joined astrologer Robert Phoenix (see astrology blog links in sidebar) for interview on occasion.

Although responses to the planets of the Solar System cannot be demonstrated experimentally in the way that patterning by the Sun and Moon can, we cannot overlook how much electrical, magnetic, and gravitational material is supplied by them, especially those that are particularly close to us (like Mars and Venus) or particularly large (like Jupiter and Saturn). Each of these bodies helps to maintain the overall equilibrium of the Solar System, and each of them gives off varying forces as it passes nearer to and further from the Earth. Jupiter cannot be seen by a bird in flight, nor can Mars be heard by a mole in its tunnel, but these planetary bodies generate resonance, perhaps of a discrete and profound sort not yet discovered, and that resonance makes up part of the overall environmental background in which the Earth occurs. Unquestionably, the influence upon us of Jupiter is small, and the influences of Uranus and Neptune are respectively smaller still, but they are not nil. And it is not their present resonance that matters so much as the repetition, for millions of years, of the same complex pattern in watery mirrors on Earth.

I've quoted this paragraph before, but it bears repeating:

Astrology is patient and long-standing. It tries to coordinate large dynamic blocks of time, space, and personality. It is an attempt to say the impossible, a system for measuring the immeasurable. If it fails, it fails the biggest task of all: to define the simultaneity of life, thought, creation, and space-time. It is better to attempt such a measurement than to pretend it could have no relevance at all.

Monday, March 03, 2014

Music Monday ~ We Need Star-Cult Part 2!

In the penultimate chapter of "The Night Sky" - The Science and Anthropology of the Stars and Planets by Dr. Richard Grossinger, the author wanders into the realm of pop culture, the chapter's title: The Pop Star Cult of the Fifties and Sixties. What he describes was also the start of a culture of youth which, before that point in history hadn't existed. He writes about growing up with the legacy of World War 2 and the atom bomb. Being a War Baby myself I understand where he's coming from. He describes the development of what he calls a star-cult.

Some excerpts:

"The sirens warned us of another holocaust for which the atom bomb was the emblem. For all the times they accidentally went off, we still survived into the sixties..........................the nuclear war we seemed to have evaded, against the odds, was happening to us anyway, as radiation leaked into the rivers and the air, and Joan Baez sang "What have they done to the rain?"

This was the dark Plutonian half of the era, when a star cult began...... ......There was a star-cult because we needed a star-cult, and a star- cult alone would do. We were born into a tremendous heat and a prophecy. We knew that we were going to be something different because the world had become absurd. The passion we felt went beyond anything we could feel the passion for, so we transformed each other into angels and messengers, and we listened to the inter-stellar debris.........................

When the heavens cried out for their "stars above" and tens of thousands of jukeboxes and radios wailed variants of the word "love", didn't we understand that our whole civilization was praying for the return of the gods, the return of those powers within us that had brought us into being?

Yes, it is love which brings us here and love which gives us life.

Yes, we stand, every man and every woman, within the stars. Who else has survived the incredible galactic and atomic violence to be here for a day of song?

Bobby Darin called his "Dream Lover" from a faraway world; a zodiac figure, like Paul Anka's Venus...Frankie Laine "gambled for love in the moonlight", Elvis went to Heartbreak Hotel, as remote as the house of Cepheus. There he dreamed of "a warmer sun" in a world long past his own brief life. The melodies and the dances were otherworldly and exotic......

The baseball cards changed to tarot cards, and they fell like meteors across an older sky. "Do you believe in magic?" the Lovin' Spoonful asked at a cusp of changing times. The Beatles visited India, and they returned with a cosmic instrument. Jimi Hendrix arrived with his songs of the outer Solar System.....other visionaries flocked to the deserts to watch the ancient ceremonies of the Native Americans...........So the new tribes gathered at Woodstock. It was no costume party. The stars were coming to claim their own, as they had with the Sufis and Cherokees for millennia. If the magic was in the music, the music was in us.

When the astral prophecy of the sixties made it to Broadway with the nude dancers of Hair, the message to the stars could not have been clearer: "You twinkle above us, we twinkle below" and in 1980, in a movie called Fame, thirty years after the beginning of the cult, the chorus sang "Someday we'll all be stars". The magicians and astral priests promised likewise...........By the late sixties the star music had disintegrated into acid rock, atomic residue, and things were to get crazier....."

I wonder, was it Neptune's transit through in Scorpio, from the mid-1950s on, that kick-started the star-cult Dr.Grossinger describes? Since that time Neptune has traversed Sagittarius, Capricorn and Aquarius, during those times descendants of the original star-cultists have carried on the tradition in broadly the same way. Now, Neptune is transiting the first Water sign since Scorpio: dreamy Pisces. This transit could bring a far more fertile decade music-wise.

Will some new version of star-cult emerge? One fact that could play into it, loosening up the creaky, cranky muscles of the music scene and bringing in some sweeter, gentler dreaminess: legalisation of marijuana in some states. Colorado has done it, with maybe other states following, in time. Nuclear weapons still threaten, the environment is in even greater, darker danger now. I say we do need another star-cult - star-cult part 2!

Saturday, June 11, 2011

Music Festivals, Richard Grossinger, Star-Cults

It's that time of year again - time of the music festivals....Glastonbury coming up in the UK, Bonnaroo already underway, in the USA, in Tennessee...with countless others, great and small, on the calendars for coming weeks.

A couple of years ago, around this time, I quoted from a favourite book: Richard Grossinger's The Night Sky - a chapter where the author ponders upon what he calls a "star cult".

I didn't know Dr. Grossinger's date of birth, but later on stumbled across his newly opened website complete with bio and birth date. I'd noted that Dr. Grossinger's writing style had much in common with Carl Sagan's (of whom I'm also a fan), and I later posted as follows:

Born in New York City on 3 November 1944.

I was right about Scorpio then! I'd sensed a similarity in writing style to that of the late Carl Sagan who had Sun/Mercury/Venus/Jupiter in Scorpio at 16, 3, 14 & 6 degrees respectively. Dr. Grossinger has Sun Mars and Mercury at 11, 14 and 19 degrees of Scorpio.

Dr Grossinger's natal Moon would have been in Gemini (sign of the communictor) whatever time of day or night he was born .

So, licking my index finger, I mark up a point for myself in the air. Like the A-Team: "I love it when a plan comes together!"

Back to the book, and star-cults!

In the penultimate chapter of The Night Sky Dr.Grossinger wanders into the realm of pop culture, the chapter's title: "The Pop Star Cult of the Fifties and Sixties". What he describes was also the start of a culture of youth which, before that point in history hadn't existed. He's also talking about early Baby Boomers. He writes about growing up with the legacy of World War 2:the atom bomb. Being a War Baby myself I understand where he's coming from. He describes the development of what he calls a star-cult.

Some excerpts:

"The sirens warned us of another holocaust for which the atom bomb was the emblem. For all the times they accidentally went off, we still survived into the sixties..........................the nuclear war we seemed to have evaded, against the odds, was happening to us anyway, as radiation leaked into the rivers and the air, and Joan Baez sang "What have they done to the rain?"

This was the dark Plutonian half of the era, when a star cult began...... ......There was a star-cult because we needed a star-cult, and a star- cult alone would do. We were born into a tremendous heat and a prophecy. We knew that we were going to be something different because the world had become absurd. The passion we felt went beyond anything we could feel the passion for, so we transformed each other into angels and messengers, and we listened to the inter-stellar debris.........................

When the heavens cried out for their "stars above" and tens of thousands of jukeboxes and radios wailed variants of the word "love", didn't we understand that our whole civilization was praying for the return of the gods, the return of those powers within us that had brought us into being?

Yes, it is love which brings us here and love which gives us life.

Yes, we stand, every man and every woman, within the stars. Who else has survived the incredible galactic and atomic violence to be here for a day of song?

Bobby Darin called his "Dream Lover" from a faraway world; a zodiac figure, like Paul Anka's Venus...Frankie Laine "gambled for love in the moonlight", Elvis went to Heartbreak Hotel, as remote as the house of Cepheus. There he dreamed of "a warmer sun" in a world long past his own brief life. The melodies and the dances were otherworldly and exotic......

The baseball cards changed to tarot cards, and they fell like meteors across an older sky. "Do you believe in magic?" the Lovin' Spoonful asked at a cusp of changing times. The Beatles visited India, and they returned with a cosmic instrument. Jimi Hendrix arrived with his songs of the outer Solar System.....other visionaries flocked to the deserts to watch the ancient ceremonies of the Native Americans...........So the new tribes gathered at Woodstock. It was no costume party. The stars were coming to claim their own, as they had with the Sufis and Cherokees for millennia. If the magic was in the music, the music was in us.

When the astral prophecy of the sixties made it to Broadway with the nude dancers of Hair, the messge to the stars could not have been clearer: "You twinkle above us, we twinkle below" and in 1980, in a movie called Fame, thirty years after the beginning of the cult, the chorus sang "Someday we'll all be stars". The magicians and astral priests promised likewise...........By the late sixties the star music had disintegrated into acid rock, atomic residue, and things were to get crazier....."

Time is ripe for a new version of star-cult, more appropriate to the the 21st century.

Today's festivals are but leftovers of that old star-cult. Aren't we ready yet for something new yet?

It could well have been Neptune's reign in Scorpio, from mid-1950s on, that kick-started the star-cult Dr. Grossinger wrote about. Neptune's transit through Airy Aquarius was too intellectually-oriented to spawn its own version of star-cult. Next year Neptune will establish a transit of its own domain : Watery, dreamy Pisces. That's when I'd expect a creative new version of some form of star-cult to enter the scene. The "old guard" will still be with us for a while, of course - but watch what else happens.....

All four archived posts mentioning Richard Grossinger can be easily accessed via the Label Cloud in my sidebar - click on Richard Grossinger, listed under "R" because my Label Cloud didn't ever take indexing lessons.

Richard Grossinger now has a blog: Reality Sandwich where there are all kinds of goodies to sample.

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Wish granted ~ Richard Grossinger ~ Words of Wisdom

A wish I once made, in passing, was granted the other day. In a June post from 2009 I wrote:

I'd love to know Dr Grossinger's birth date, but the internet, so far, has given up only that he was born in 1944 and in New York City. I feel sure he must have some Scorpio magic threading through his natal chart - or Pisces, perhaps.

The writer in question: Dr. Richard Grossinger who has been mentioned in three archived posts - my wish appeared in the second of these:

The Night Sky
Star Cult of the '50s and '60s
Scorpio to 2012 via William Lonsdale.

Seeking inspiration t'other day I picked up Dr Grossinger's The Night Sky once again, with a view to finding something for a new "Astrologers' Words of Wisdom" post....even though Dr Grossinger isn't a practicing astrologer. He certainly has studied the subject though, and its history, and in depth. I was struck once again by the writer's beautiful style, which I'd admired before. Wondering whether he has written anything recently I Googled for information.

Lo and behold ! - Dr Richard Grossinger now has a website. What's more, his birth date appears in the biography section:

"Welcome to my website. It was officially launched on March 18, 2010."

Born in New York City on 3 November 1944.

I was right about Scorpio then! I'd sensed a similarity in writing style to that of the late Carl Sagan who had Sun/Mercury/Venus/Jupiter in Scorpio at 16, 3, 14 & 6 degrees respectively. Dr. Grossinger has Sun Mars and Mercury at 11, 14 and 19 degrees of Scorpio.

Dr Grossinger's natal Moon would have been in Gemini (sign of the communictor) whatever time of day or night he was born .

So, licking my index finger, I mark up a point for myself in the air. Like the A-Team: "I love it when a plan comes together!"

A few more of Dr. Grossinger's words of wisdom, from The Night Sky:

Astrology represents a synchronicity between the ancient calendars of the farming communities of the Near East and a theory of cosmic or celestial influence. From our point of view, it may look like two systems, and it may well have been two systems at various times, even originally, but in practice astrology treats the two systems as one. As long as the heavens are divine and the planets are destiny-bearing gods, the units and "houses" they measure are identical to the archetypes they sow.

The measurement of time does not require a theory of celestial influence. Calendars became astronomical tools during the Stone Age quite separate from any system of astral cycles and rhythms.

But astrology maintains the measurement of time as sacred, or, in present-day parlance, psychic and archetypal, and it assumes that measurement as a basic harmonic linking microcosm and macrocosm. As civilization moved out of liturgical and ceremonial space into days, months and years that were purely political and scientific, the sacred sense of time was occultated.

The theory of celestial influence DOES require calendars and ephemerides, for they are the mathematical representation of the wholeness and interrelatedness of our cosmos. Without them the "idea" of celestial influence can be honored, but there is no rigorous method for recording its degrees and variations. So astrology evolves as the statement of the synchronous relationship of all events in creation and the means of predicting and understanding fragments and cycles by their relationship to the whole. The stars as the projective background of the creation, stand for the functional unity..................................

In calling astrology a "science", we do not mean that it is a science in the same sense that chemistry and physics are. It is a science in the old etymological sense of "a system of knowledge".......Modern physics might take issue with the cause-and-effect postulates behind the measurements, but it could not challenge the basic algebra of chart-making and planetary relationships.

(And the author's beautiful last words in the section on Astrology)

Astrology is our rune on the hollow surface of infinity, or we are the shadow play of astrology upon the dream of cosmic night.

A list of all Dr Grossinger's books can be found HERE, including his latest:
2013 - Raising the Earth to the Next Vibration
Gotta get me one of those!

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Scorpio to 2012 via William Lonsdale...

In a few days we'll move from the sign of Scorpio into Sagittarius. As a parting gesture to I'm copying some words from a fascinating book by anthropologer Dr. Richard Grossinger: "The Night Sky". The good doctor is not an astrologer, but he respects astrology's doctrines, it seems, which is a refreshing change from the attitude of most academics.

"Then Scorpio comes in Autumn bearing Antares on its spine, exactly counter the Bull - he is destroyer, resurrector. To Taurus, Scorpio answers, "Nothing is forever". The quintessential Scorpio characteristic is to fall into utter gloom and despair and then, at the moment of greatest hopelessness, to rebound with tremendous energy, to transform everything that was dark into light - but ultimately to descend back into the abyss. (Astrologer William) Lonsdale describes three ways we contact Scorpio:

In the best love experiences we ever have, in the best relations with other we ever have, and in the deepest darkest crannies of our psyche that we've ever explored. ........The world of Scorpio is the solitary individual in a kind of inferior reflective relationship with all of being.....It takes us through total total underworld experiences and then there's a moment where we emerge and we realize that, oh, there's a whole other side, there's a whole other way....."

I'm not familiar with the writings of William Lonsdale, so after typing the above I did a quick Google search.

No information available about the man himself, but curiously I was led to astrologer Molly Hall's blog, to a page where she had listed several quotes from "2012. Crossing the Bridge to the Future" by Mark Borax. In his book Mr. Borax attributes these quotes to astrologer William (aka Ellias) Lonsdale. Molly's post is an interesting read, and moreso because this week the movie "2012" is showing in cinemas, and depicts a quite different version of imagined events of 2012.

I particularly like this snippet from Max Borax's book:

"The Atlanteans knew the great secret that Earth, like the human body, is a fluid medium, awash in tides of electromagnetic force, composed of invisible meridians, energy frequencies that weave together matter and can be manipulated for various purposes. Everything here is energy."

We're awash in tides - I think so too - tides we don't understand, but struggle to do so by using ancient, and what will surely turn out to be crude, astrological tools.

PS: And regarding the other "2012" - we saw it last evening. It wasn't as bad as some reviewers have suggested, it was every bit as scary as expected, like a long white knuckle ride at the fairground. One thing it does is make the world outside seem a whole lot less depressing as you walk out of the cinema after two and a half hours, Adam Lambert's "Time for Miracles" still fresh in mind. It was good to feel the earth solid beneath our feet, all buildings still in place with no tidal wave about to rush over the sleepy Oklahoma landscape. If for no other reason, it's worth seeing "2012" to bring it home that we are lucky, in spite of our individual difficulties and frustrations - but we are fragile. One thing that has to be kept in mind all the way through the movie though: IT'S A PIECE OF FICTION, and doesn't profess to be anything else - especially not a prediction!

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

"STAR-CULT" of the '50s and '60s ~ A new one in the wings?

About a year ago I posted a couple of snippets from a book I'd just bought, "The Night Sky" by anthropologist Dr. Richard Grossinger. (Here's the relevant post).
I've continued to read the book, random-fashion, whenever at a loose end. I'm always impressed by Dr Grossinger's writing style. He reminds me a little of Carl Sagan, whose book "Cosmos" I can similarly pick up and become engrossed from any random page. Both writers have, at times, what I can only describe as a magical turn of phrase. Dr. Grossinger has a much kinder approach to astrology though, as I pointed out in my earlier post.

I'd love to know Dr Grossinger's birth date, but the internet so far has given up only that he was born in 1944 and in New York City. I feel sure he must have some Scorpio magic threading through his natal chart - or Pisces, perhaps.

In the penultimate chapter of "The Night Sky" Dr.Grossinger wanders into the realm of pop culture, the chapter's title: "The Pop Star Cult of the Fifties and Sixties".
What he describes was also the start of a culture of youth which, before that point in history hadn't existed. He's also talking about early Baby Boomers. He writes about growing up with the legacy of World War 2:the atom bomb. Being a War Baby myself I understand where he's coming from. He describes the development of what he calls a star-cult.

Some excerpts:

"The sirens warned us of another holocaust for which the atom bomb was the emblem. For all the times they accidentally went off, we still survived into the sixties..........................the nuclear war we seemed to have evaded, against the odds, was happening to us anyway, as radiation leaked into the rivers and the air, and Joan Baez sang "What have they done to the rain?"

This was the dark Plutonian half of the era, when a star cult began...... ......There was a star-cult because we needed a star-cult, and a star- cult alone would do. We were born into a tremendous heat and a prophecy. We knew that we were going to be something different because the world had become absurd. The passion we felt went beyond anything we could feel the passion for, so we transformed each other into angels and messengers, and we listened to the inter-stellar debris.........................

When the heavens cried out for their "stars above" and tens of thousands of jukeboxes and radios wailed variants of the word "love", didn't we understand that our whole civilization was praying for the return of the gods, the return of those powers within us that had brought us into being?

Yes, it is love which brings us here and love which gives us life.

Yes, we stand, every man and every woman, within the stars. Who else has survived the incredible galactic and atomic violence to be here for a day of song?

Bobby Darin called his "Dream Lover" from a faraway world; a zodiac figure, like Paul Anka's Venus...Frankie Laine "gambled for love in the moonlight", Elvis went to Heartbreak Hotel, as remote as the house of Cepheus. There he dreamed of "a warmer sun" in a world long past his own brief life. The melodies and the dances were otherworldly and exotic......

The baseball cards changed to tarot cards, and they fell like meteors across an older sky. "Do you believe in magic?" the Lovin' Spoonful asked at a cusp of changing times. The Beatles visited India, and they returned with a cosmic instrument. Jimi Hendrix arrived with his songs of the outer Solar System.....other visionaries flocked to the deserts to watch the ancient ceremonies of the Native Americans...........So the new tribes gathered at Woodstock. It was no costume party. The stars were coming to claim their own, as they had with the Sufis and Cherokees for millennia. If the magic was in the music, the music was in us.

When the astral prophecy of the sixties made it to Broadway with the nude dancers of Hair, the messge to the stars could not have been clearer: "You twinkle above us, we twinkle below" and in 1980, in a movie called Fame, thirty years after the beginning of the cult, the chorus sang "Someday we'll all be stars". The magicians and astral priests promised likewise...........By the late sixties the star music had disintegrated into acid rock, atomic residue, and things were to get crazier....."

I wonder if it's time, yet, for a new star-cult, one more appropriate to the digital age? Nuclear weapons still threaten, the environment is still in grave danger, now more than ever.

Annual music festivals survive, Glastonbury festival in the UK is still going strong. The husband's grandson was at Bonnaroo in Tennessee at the weekend. Woodstock celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. These festivals are but leftovers of that old star-cult Dr. Grossinger writes about. Aren't we ready yet for something new - something slightly different?

I like to think that it was Neptune's reign in Scorpio, from the mid-1950s on, that kick-started the star-cult Dr. Grossinger is recalling. Neptune's in Airy Aquarius now - too intellectual for its own star-cult. In 2013 though Neptune will enter its own domain of Watery dreamy Pisces. That's when I'd expect a new version of star-cult to burst upon the scene, different in many ways from the old one, but retaining some common factors.

Thursday, June 05, 2008

"The Night Sky"

On our last little drive-about trip, in Texas I picked up a second-hand book: "The Night Sky" (The Science and Anthropology of the Stars and Planets) by Richard Grossinger, Doctor of Anthropology. The book was originally published in 1981. I don't pretend to have read it from cover to cover - yet. I have rifled through the index though and read Chapter 22, on Astrology. It was a relief to realise that, although Dr. Grossinger doesn't exactly "endorse" astrology, he doesn't try to discredit it either. He puts it into context. He has a pretty turn of phrase too!

A couple of quotes which particularly appealed to me:

"Astrology is patient and long-standing. It tries to coordinate large dynamic blocks of time, space, and personality. It is an attempt to say the impossible, a system for measuring the immeasurable. If it fails, it fails in the biggest task of all: to define the simultaneity of life, thought, creation, and space time. It is better to attempt such a measurement than to pretend it could have no relevance at all."

And after explaining about the two zodiacs, sidereal and tropical (or, in his terms Constellation Astrology and Zodiac Astrology) he writes:

"The zodiac stays within Earth history and tries to hold onto its meanings, but the sky rushes ahead into new time. Eventually, though, the Earth "adjusts" to its actual place in the heavens, and the two astrologies pull together. The continuous pattern of pulling away and pulling together produces a moire pattern of effects, so that the truth of any situation lies somewhere between the two, depending on how true a given culture or era of history is to its absolute meaning in an objective perspective in the stars."

"The Night Sky" is the kind of book you can open at random, start reading and become immediately engrossed. Good readers (of which I'm not one) would start at page 1 and read steadily through to page 412, then read all the 35 pages of notes. I feel certain they'd be well rewarded.

Dr. Grossinger's final word on astrology:

"Astrology is our rune on the hollow surface of infinity, or we are the shadow play of astrology upon the dream of cosmic night".

Beautiful!