Exegesis V07 Issue 100

Exegesis Volume 07 Issue #100

In This Issue:

From: Patrice Guinard
Subject: [e] Astrology Conferences: the Circus

Exegesis Digest Wed, 06 Nov 2002

Date: Wed, 06 Nov 2002 13:32:44 +0100
From: Patrice Guinard
Subject: [e] Astrology Conferences: the Circus

This mail has been written for ISAR's International Newsletter & effectively appeared in Vol. 204-a (Nov 6, 2002) in a truncated version. Please, find below the entire version. Hope it will be of some interest for Exegesis members.

We have to agree with the recent postings of Blake Finley and Bill Mayer, as we observe with some amusement the pathetically defensive kneejerk reactions that they have provoked. It is evident that not only numbers of young people, but also those of all ages, are either unable or unwilling to attend such grandiose and expensive conferences. Many are simply not interested in participating in what tend to be in numerous cases the summer re-runs of the tedious and unimaginatively redundant conferences of years gone by.

It is well-known that a highly rigid cadre of antiquated and incompetent true believers is controlling most everything in today's prevailing and torpid popular astrology scene. Not only are new points of view and fresh perspectives unwelcome at contemporary astrological conferences, but attendees are force-fed the same old boring and static recycled material.

Anyone expressing any creative or original ideas is either shunned as a heretic or shamed into silence. It is the same situation everywhere, in the U.S., in the U.K., in France...

We would add that the U.S. community may have a curious image of what constitutes astrology in France, just by noting the "French" astrologers engaged at the next conference: Lynn Bell, an American who is hardly known in France (by the way, we have nothing against this individual), and pop media astrologer, E. Teissier.

It must be asked if any kind of serious research at all is ever proposed or discussed at these gatherings, which tend more to resemble in their mentality a hybridization of the standard backwoods fundamentalist revival meeting crossed with a senior citizens' bingo game, rather than serious assemblies which might foster any kind of genuine intellectual inquiry. This pertains not only to ISAR, but to all conferences of which we are aware. We submit that the prevailing astrological community (if such a group can really be said to exist beyond that which provides a limited social identity for a small, often culturally disenfranchised minority of practitioners and students) is very far away from the requirements necessary to engender any kind of scientific or intellectual RESEARCH, whether in a conference format or in any kind of established learning environment.

For such a focused and productive discourse to ever, in fact, take root in any fertile soil, would require a direct confrontation with the doctrinal mentality of the self-appointed Astrological Inquisition which, in its narrow and rigid fashion forbids any challenges to the arthritic, even intellectually atavistic tendencies of an orthodox astrology. Any discipline which forbids discourse in which people agree to disagree for the sake of a lively exchange and for expansion of knowlege is inexorably doomed to the state of stuperous calcification in which we see today's astrology lingering.