Why Aren't We There Yet?

Some ten years ago on this blog I mentioned a book titled "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.

Chapter 22 touches upon 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 such a pretty turn of phrase too! Look:

"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."

After explaining 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."

Dr. Grossinger's final words 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".

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 was 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...

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, still, ten more years later, if it is yet time for a new star-cult, more appropriate to this ever more digital age? Nuclear weapons still threaten, the environment is in even graver danger, now.

Annual music festivals survive, Glastonbury festival in the UK is still going strong. The Bonnaroo in Tennessee, Woodstock and others - merely left overs from that old star-cult Dr. Grossinger wrote about. Aren't we ready yet for something new - something slightly different and more appropriate to 2018?

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 recalled. Neptune's stay in Airy Aquarius was perhaps a tad too intellectual to spawn its own star-cult. In 2013 Neptune entered its own domain of Watery dreamy Pisces. That's when I'd have expected a new version of star-cult to burst upon the scene, different in many ways from the old one, but retaining some common factors. I haven't yet been able to identify it! Neptune is around halfway through Pisces.
Why aren't we there yet?

Stars and Hermits

Robert Frost's poem Choose Something Like A Star will probably appeal to poetry lovers who also love astrology. The poet appeals to the star, "Say something to us we can learn by heart....", a plea an astrologer might make when contemplating an astrological chart! I'm particularly fond of the last five lines of the poem.
(Illustration: The Hermit card from The Ancestral Path Tarot . Artist: Julie Cuccia-Watts)

O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud --
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.

Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says "I burn."
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.

It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats' Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

"Keats' Eremite"... ?

Eremite is another word for hermit. This is, I understand, a reference to an excerpt from a poem (Bright Star) by John Keats. Keats wanted to take a blissful moment with his lover and store it way like a hermit hides from civilization, to make it last forever. So when Robert Frost says "and steadfast as Keats' Eremite/ not even stooping from its sphere", in the poem Choose Something Like a Star, he's describing the star's constant place in the sky for us to focus on in difficult times. (HERE)

The poem by Keats:

Bright Star
By John Keats

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

Back to THE HERMIT of the Tarot deck, card # 9 of Major Arcana:

Astrologically Hermit links to Saturn, Aquarius and Virgo & the Earth element. Numerically Hermit connects to its card number: 9 (produced by 3 engaging with itself: 3 x 3).

Generally interpreted as a withdrawal into solitude, or retreat from the everyday world, seeking wisdom, self-reflection, introspection, hopefully finding guidance. Negatively, a running away from people or things, leading to loneliness.





In art, a hermit:

 St Anthony the Hermit by  Albrecht Durer

More about St Anthony - several of them in fact, HERE.
I rather like Anthony the Great, but I guess the image above is, as titled,
Anthony the Hermit (c.468–c.520).
I suspect legends of all Saints, St. Anthony included, become entangled over time.

Temptation of St Anthony (or one of 'em) was a popular subject for painters of centuries long gone. Here's an example, this by Bernardino Parenzano (c.1494). Click on image for bigger version.

 The Temptations of St Anthony

Finally: last lines of a poem, Hermits, by James Galvin. The full poem is at
Poetry Foundation, here.

When hermits die
They close their eyes. They never hear
The parson sermonize how somewhere
There is hope where no hope was.

Tanglefoot,
Dead-On-Your-Feet,
A chance to be alone for a chance to be abandoned,
Everything is lost or given.

Hermits never know they’re dead till the roof falls in.

Stargazing In Perspective

From my recently acquired "Stargazing With Jack Horkheimer - Cosmic Comics for the Sky Watcher" comes this information which put things astronomical into perspective, using familiar items as yardsticks. I don't know how others feel, but once astronomy buffs (or economy buffs) start using B-I-G numbers, my mind closes down. Mr. Horkheimer's explanations hit the spot for me, they are primarily aimed at young people, but do the job they're intended to do irrespective of a reader's age.



Mr. Horkheimer tells us that:

We could line up 11 Earths side by side across Jupiter's middle, and could fit 1,300 Earths inside Jupiter, were it a hollow sphere.

If our Sun was an orange, Earth on the same scale would be one grain of salt circling the orange 30ft away. Jupiter would be a cherry pit circling 200ft or a city block away. Saturn another cherry pit another city block away and Pluto one speck of pepper 10 city blocks away

Our galaxy would consist of 200 billion oranges, grapefruits, melons and football-field- size pumpkins occupying a space 20 million miles in diameter.



But there are at least 100 billion MORE galaxies in the universe.

If we could fit our entire solar system inside a coffee cup, our galaxy would be the size of North America.

I feel a chronic mind boggle coming on!

Now that relative sizes are clearer, I looked for something depicting just one galaxy out of the 100 billion...ours. See the Sun? The, to us, enormously important Sun upon which we rely for every single thing in our lives - it's a tiny little speck on just one section, the Orion Arm, of the galaxy, a galaxy which is just one out of at least 100billion.

Losing To The Light ?

Look Ma,
What's that star?
It's just a passing plane.
Grandma sighs so sadly,
The nights just aren't the same;
I'm sure they used to be darker;
Wonder filled the skies;
Where have all the stars gone?
Could it be my failing eyes?
Too many of our children
Haven't known a true dark night;
Will they ever see the beauty
We're losing to the light?

Poem: "Blinded by the Light" by Sarah Williams.

Around New Year (I think it was New Year's Eve or the day previous)we read that there'd be a good chance to watch the Moon and Venus close together, soon after sunset, with Jupiter and Mercury appearing shortly after. We drove westward out of town, so as not to "lose anything to the light" and parked in a deserted country road at around 5.30pm. We blinked into the rapidly setting Sun, then, as it grew dark the Moon appeared with Venus shining very brightly, a short distance below. Then, straining at first, we identified Mercury and Jupiter by following the line of the ecliptic. My husband tried to get some good shots of the lovely sight. It wasn't possible to get all in one frame, so he has here combined two photographs,
click on it to enlarge.




Earth's lights




And.....a golden oldie touching on the same theme: from 1969 "Light Flight" - by Pentangle

Moon and Stars

The Moon and stars have always represented something for which to reach - a level of achievement not easily attainable but worth the effort, and one doesn't have to be an astrologer or astronomer or astronaut to appreciate this:


"Oh Jerry, don't let's ask for the moon. We have the stars"
(last line in the film "Now Voyager" - Bette Davis and Paul Henreid)

James Thurber's fable "The Moth and the Star". A story of a little moth who, against advice from his peers insisted on attempting to reach the light of the moon rather than that from a street lamp or candle. He had the last mothy laugh though - his peers were fried, while he lived to a ripe old age - didn't reach the moon but had fun trying.
James Thurber's moral to this tale: "Who flies afar from the sphere of our sorrow is here today and here tomorrow."

"His gaze wandered from the windows to the stars, as if he would have read in them something that was hidden from him. Many of us would, if we could; but none of us so much as know our letters in the stars yet - or seem likely to do it, in this state of existence - and few languages can be read until their alphabets are mastered." {Ain't that the truth!}
(Charles Dickens - the Mystery of Edwin Drood)

Even a fool knows you can't touch the stars, but it doesn't stop a wise man from trying. (Harry Anderson)

When you reach for the stars you may not quite get one, but you won't come up with a handful of mud either. (Leo Burnett)

Shoot for the moon - if you miss you'll end up in the stars. (Artie Shaw)

Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.

(Harriet Tubman)

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. (Oscar Wilde)

AND some salutory warnings ( someone always has to spoil it!)

A man gazing on the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road. (Alexander Smith)

Be practical as well as generous in your ideals. Keep your eyes on the stars but remember to keep your feet on the ground (Theodore Roosevelt)

Stargazer, you with your head in the heavens,

You'll never get by walkin' that high off the ground.

Moon dreamer, I've been around and I've seen it;

The higher you get--the harder they let you down.

(Neil Diamond "Stargazer" lyrics)