Exegesis Issue #5

Mary B. Downing - Exegesis
John Hammelton - Exegesis

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

Excuse me for my late self-introduction. Mary B. Downing: b: 1/28/38 8:02 PM St. Louis, Mo. The Anglic last name is acquired, the one I was born with starts with four consonants.

Standard WWII childhood in the Midwest – winter in the city, summer on the farm. Moved to Washington DC in my teens, worked off my college debts with Uncle Sam in Europe. Until four years ago lived in NYC environs. Have been (and still am) a commercial artist, graphic designer, editor, etc.

Re astrology: The cycles repeat, one event generates another. Events concatenate. Places attract people.

Example: Three astrologers: Fran McEvoy, who, as a youngster from Arizona; myself from St. Louis; and Chris (?-name) from Chicago (who currently does the AFA’s bulletin) all spent summers around the town of Catawissa and neighboring Pacific, Missouri. Fran and I overlapped in time, Chris is younger. We are all editors, writers, and Fran and I both do portraiture - not the most common fine-art specialty. Catawissa had a general store, a dozen houses and two churches. Pacific was much larger, a few hundred people at least. It had an A&P, icehouse (Fran’s grandmother owned it) and a paved main street. I’m the NCGR "publisher" and produce the Journal and Geocosmic, Fran is the Geocosmic editor and Chris edits/ produces AFA publications. (Obviously just trifling coincidence.)

I worked for DOD Europe (as a civilian) mainly in the town of Gelnhausen, Hesse, W. Germany. Ken Negus, who was a professor of German at Rutgers, spent a contemporaneous period researching Grimelshausen, the author of Simplus Simplissimus, who was born – wouldn’t you know - in Gelnhausen. Gelnhausen was larger than Catawissa – perhaps 10,000. Smaller odds, but interesting when you consider we’re both now on the board of NCGR, an American astro org with 3,000 members thereabouts.

There seems to be something very much like the oriental concept of chi that animates or infuses material reality. It seems to have eddies and flows and affinities. Perhaps a visible and measurable expression is planetary positions and periods, but it’s really only a sliver of some whole for which we have no cohesive charting format. When we talk about "aspects" in the traditional astro sense we’re really only using a crumb off the loaf. We only consider round and round and totally ignore up/down and in/out.

We even ignore obvious groupings. Mercury, Venus and the Sun form a three-body set of geocentric permutations. Wouldn’t it seem obvious that there would be a difference between groupings with all in the same sign, versus one leading the sun and the other following, or vice versa, ad infinitum? Mars is mostly in the same hemisphere as the Sun. Doesn’t that make Mars/Sun oppositions something very special? Perhaps we have problems predicting because we’re only taking the most obvious orbital elements into account. We really do astonishingly well given our limited techniques. I think a hundred years from now astrologers will chuckle over our attempts to diagnose a particular planetary configuration much as we are astonished that anything at all was achieved by medical men as late as the Civil War.

When I try to visualize this model I think of 3-D Julia sets. Little attractors whirling off patterns. The patterns themselves are identifiable as types, very much like those specific mineral solutions create. Saturn in Aries would be one type of attractor that would operate through a time-medium on other unnamed "particles" to congregate in a place. Sound too fatalistic to be astrologically politic?

Since I’m strictly a pop-physics aficionado, I’d find it very interesting what someone who knows what they’re talking about has to say.

Fran has struck a chord that I have been trying to fine tune for many years. Indeed, what is the ultimate nature of an astrological influence? As an astrology student many years ago, this question burned in my mind. I felt like Diogenes carrying my lamp during the day looking for an honest man. I asked many leading astrologers just what was the nature of these influences, or vibrations, or whatever. I received many answers. Some said they simply didn't know, nor were they interested in finding out, so long as astrology worked. Others talked of gravity, or gravity waves, or the most popular, electromagnetic radiation. I had to eventually rule out these physical forces so obvious in nature, as they simply didn't answer the question adequately.

One day while sitting in a graduate course in philosophy at Cal State Long Beach, it hit me like a ton of bricks. We were studying the philosophy of Plotinus, the father of Neo Platonism. He had outllined a structure of reality that could be understood as the model we know today as the solar system. I began an immediate search of his writings, and low and behold, found several lines of thought that supported this view. I have subsequently gone on to work this out. Basically it begins with Plato, and his belief that reality is fundamentally mental, that the ultimate nature of this reality is Mind. This view allows us the liberty to say that we live in a Spiritual Universe; hence that astrological influences fall into the category of a form of spiritual or mental event.

These events are two-fold, that is, objective, or relating to the physical structures of the universe, and subjective, pertaining to our indivudual minds in which these concepts or archetypal images have meaning. I have also attempted to work this out through Jung's psychology.

And finally, my outlandish theory that the missing mass in the universe is actually Cold Dark Matter. That would make the ultimate nature of reality about ninety percent Mind and ten percent Matter. At this point science is still trying to describe it as matter, but I think they are about to discover this substance as what the ancients called it--the aether.

Naturally I have many critics, and have been called many things, and rejected by every publisher that has looked at my book: "The Philosophy of Astrology." You can decide for yourselves; I've taken my book to the Internet. Take a look at http://www.tcd.net/~johnk/

------------------------------------------------- John Hammelton E-mail: johnk@tcd.net Southern Utah Astrology & Books http://www.tcd.net/~johnk/ -------------------------------------------------