Past Articles

AR 38
Uranus In
Pisces
2003-2011

AR 37
Twelfth Planet, Plutinos or
Planet X

AR 36
Eclipses – Promise or Peril?

AR35
Solar Fire

AR34
The Lunar Mansions of Vedic Astrology

AR 33
Children of the Gods

AR 32
Wheels Within Wheels

AR 31
Horoscopes of Destiny

AR 30
Zodicac of Dendera

AR 29
A Star Is Born

AR 28
Age of Aquarius

AR 27
Persia's Royal Stars of Ancients

AR 23
The Lore of a Shaman

"The gods may throw the dice; their minds as cold as ice . . ."
—  The Winner Takes It All, ABBA

Babylonian astronomer priests fixed the spring equinox in Aries four thousand years ago, and the Astrology we have inherited in the West is a legacy by way of Greece. In more ancient times the skies were interpreted on behalf of the collective with the king representing the destiny of the realm. Since the time of the Greeks horoscopes have been cast for individuals, assessing talents, gifts and pitfalls portended in the life.

The Greeks made the sky personal by giving the gods almost human natures and foibles, peopling the heavens with a host of heroes, animals and monsters who enacted cyclical morality plays. While Egyptian gods seem more purely archetypal, the Greek gods inflict the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as archetypal energies interact in finite and vulnerable ways with far-reaching consequences. The gods are often jealous, but they can also be kind.

Creation and Dynasties of Divine Beings

In her classic work on mythology (Mythology), Elizabeth Hamilton remarked, "The Greeks did not believe that the gods created the universe. It was the other way about: the universe created the gods." Before there were gods Heaven and Earth had been formed and were the first parents. The Titans were their children, and the Olympian gods were their grandchildren.

Ancient Greek cosmogony viewed the world as having passed through several ages from Creation in the dim mists of antiquity. The tradition belonging to the legendary poet Orpheus described the concept of Time as emerging first, seeming to exist from the beginning. Out of Time came Chaos, an infinite space which contained Night, Mist and Aether. At Time's command Mist spun in the empty space, forming an egg. (This is hauntingly familiar to the Qabalistic description of the origin of the Tree of Life as "the beginning of the whirlings.") The being Phanes (Light), mated with Night, creating Heaven and Earth. Some sources say the egg split, with Eros (Love) emerging from the center, and Heaven (Uranus) and Earth (Gaia) being formed from two haves of the egg shell.

The Titans - Elder Gods

The Titans were "Lords" or "Kings" and as such the first divine race. Rhea was the earth goddess, daughter of Uranus and Gaia, and sister-wife to Cronus, with whom she bore Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon and Zeus. These children of the Titans became known as Olympians because of their heavenly dwelling place.

Cronus (Saturn), was the son of Uranus (heaven) and Gaia (earth). This eldest Titan castrated his father and threw the phallus into the sea, resulting in the birth of Aphrodite (Venus). Having rendered his father impotent, Cronus liberated his Titan siblings and is said to have ruled over a Golden Age.

Since Time devours all, not to be outdone by his own sky father, Cronus (Saturn and Time) swallowed every one of his children as they were born. Rhea tricked him into swallowing a swaddled stone instead of Zeus, the youngest, and then she helped Zeus trick him into vomiting up the rest of the godlings. So Cronus too was dethroned, and the Olympian era began.

World Ages

The Hindu Yugas were named from an ancient Indian game of chance and implied, that at some level, existence itself is a crap shoot. Similar to the Hindu Yugas, the earliest Greek age was also golden, descending into a time of strife and conflict. The first and Golden age was ruled by Cronus in a time when even humans were immortal. Zeus introduced the Silver age, instituting the Seasons (Horae) along with work and labor. Another invention of Zeus was the Bronze age which was characterized by war and violence. The so-called Heroic age, peopled by demigods, was filled with derring do and fabulous exploits. The Iron age, like the Hindu Kali Yuga, and sounding much like modern times, reeked with crime, suffering and toil.

Olympus, home of the gods Olympus was said to include the "heavens" the sea, and the underworld. The entrance was described as a great gate of clouds kept by the Seasons, Horae in Greek. Mount Olympus was a heavenly dwelling place, a twelve-roomed mansion in the skies, which was home to twelve Olympian gods and their consorts. Olympus corresponds to the Norse Valhalla. Zeus was declared supreme over all the Olympians, claiming the upper world of the heavens for himself, bestowing the sea and rivers to Poseidon, and relegating the lower world to Hades.

Today's astronomers use the term Celestial Sphere to denote the heavens. The skies have a "watery" section, an underworld inhabited by stellar water snakes and other mythical creatures, as well as the vault of heaven where the circumpolar stars rotate around the pole.

Grist for Hamlet's Mill

Hamlet's Mill is a scholarly work and a daunting piece of research, accumulating myths from around the world, demonstrating similarities of theme and imagery, and showing how knowledge of the stars was encoded into stories. The authors (Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend), demonstrated repeatedly that myth was never intended to be fiction or fable, but rather to serve as a clever mnemonic device, enabling people to recall and transmit complex astronomical information through stories. In other words, using sky lore as the mechanism, and the night sky as the canvas, myth became a brilliant device, an astronomical allegory, for teaching and transmitting sky lore over vast periods of time.

The mechanism of myth

"The word myth derives from the Greek mythos and means 'spoken word'." The root word is the Indo-Germanic Mu. In German the word "mutter" means mother. In earlier times myth was the language, the "spoken word," and provided the mechanism for communicating knowledge. In ancient times people watched the skies and told their stories like we watch the evening news. Myths were a way to describe what occurred in the sky, so constellations were drawn, or dots connected between the stars to form pictures, facilitating stellar stories. In the Native American lore of the Wasco Indians Coyote drew the star pictures. As the "age of reason" expanded, and eclipsed older ways of knowing, this priceless legacy was unintentionally secreted.

Myth functions on more than one level. Myth as metaphor teaches truths about our spiritual selves through the archetype of the hero's journey. Myth as sky lore was a mechanism to teach technical information about the stars in an manner that was easy to remember. Star pictures and characters made the yearly sky a familiar landscape.

Framing Time

The mythical earth is conceived as a flat plane intersected by the "frame" of the equinoxes and solstices, the cardinal points of the year. This is why the earth is often said to be quadrangular. The intersections are the four corners, the four directions, and the four winds. The four corners, or zodiacal constellations rising heliacally (before the Sun) at both the equinoxes and solstices form parts of the frame and determine the ' earth.' This frame is one of time and is not to be confused with the physical globe which is the planet.

Hamlet's Mill states that " . . every world age has its own 'earth.' It is for this reason that 'ends of the world' are said to take place. A new 'earth' arises, when another set of zodiacal constellations brought in by the Precession determines the year points." The zodiacal constellation which rises before the sun at the equinoxes and solstices constitutes the frame of the current age. The conceptual image might be seen as a platter surrounded by two wire hoops, intersecting the platter at ninety degree angles. Time can be thus seen as circular and its frame as a sphere where the seasons intersect the circle of the year.

The magic of myth

What we call science today has established a technical language of its own and maintains stewardship over knowledge which in the past was available to everyone through the magic of myth. The authors of Hamlet's Mill observed that "Magic material withstands change, just because of its resistance to the erosion of common sense." Rather than integrating and synthesizing "modern" knowledge with traditional ways of knowing, we have discarded earlier truths as primitive or invalid.

Planets and Gods

The familiar planets of our solar system bear names which have come down to us from Greek and Roman myth. It's a testimony to the power of naming that the manner in which planets are interpreted in modern Astrology still carries the archetypal significance bestowed on their heavenly counterparts thousands of years ago.

The planets orbit (except Pluto) the Sun in a flat plane of space roughly fourteen degrees of arc thick. From our perspective on Earth the Sun appears to move through the sky on an annual trek. The apparent path of the Sun is called the Ecliptic. This area of space is divided into twelve by the constellations of the zodiac. This twelve-roomed mansion where the sky gods interact is likely to be Mount Olympus.

Forces of Nature

There were twelve Olympians; six males and six females. The Olympians correspond in part to the planets of our solar system and to the archetypes of Astrology. There are some exceptions. Uranus and Cronus (Saturn) were Titans who fathered and grand fathered their Olympian offspring. Hades (Pluto) was a member of the group by lineage, but did not reside in Olympus, rather ruling his underworld domain. The mythical stories showed how the archetypal pantheon of energies combined in love and war.

The Twelve Olympians

Asteroid goddesses -- Return of Feminine Divinity

The gods and goddesses were energies which manifested in both genders. For example Iris, goddess of the rainbow, was the feminine messenger of the gods, but she doesn't get equal billing with Hermes (Mercury), her male twin. It wasn't until Greek (or Roman) law was established in Egypt that the feminine lost its equal status. In a fascinating manner, several of the female Olympians are staging a comeback, returning to mythic power in the form of asteroids.

On the first day of January of 1801 Astronomer Guiseppe Piazzi discovered what he thought was a new comet. The object was named Ceres and was to be the first of thousands of asteroid discoveries. This tiny planet, fortuitously named Ceres, orbits in what we now call the asteroid belt, was. The next three in sequence, Pallas (Athena), Vesta and Juno, were discovered in the next few years.

Several hundred thousand asteroids have been discovered so far which are categorized by their spectra (light signatures) and position in the solar system. Only the four largest are being added to the horoscope in interpretation. Getting in touch with your feminine side Mythologically Ceres (Demeter) is a grain and fertility goddessthe and represents the great Earth Mother in both her nurturing and withholding aspects. Pallas Athene (Minerva) is the archetypal daughter and goddess of wisdom who sprang from the head of her father Zeus. Vesta (Hestia) hold the archetype of virgin and sister, symbolizing femininity complete within herself. Juno (Hera), represents the sacred marriage, and indicates the balanced union of the feminine and masculine principles.

These goddesses, representing four aspects of the feminine experience, round out the missing spaces in the halls of Olympus. Increasingly these asteroids are used by modern astrologers to enrich interpretation and insight. If the correct birth time is know the asteroid goddesses can be place in the birth chart for expanded understanding.