It probably isn’t a controversial statement to say that Western civilization is in a crisis. Well, more like several interconnected crises. At the root of most of them is, in my opinion, the total lack of cosmology that might inform and structure how we live our lives. Many astrologers have written about the ironic impact of the Copernican Revolution on Astrology, both directly and indirectly. By shifting the center of the known cosmos from the Earth to the Sun, Copernicus dealt a blow not only to the religious authorities of the day, but also to the perception of astrologers as being the ultimate adherents of the Ptolemaic, Earth-centric model of the cosmos. In reality, astrologers had always recognized in the Sun the supreme power, the light-giver of the cosmos, and so to them, this wasn’t the catastrophe that it was to the Church. However, if you’re a practicing astrologer, you still need people to pay you for your services, and Copernicus had opened the door to a new worldview, in which astrology was increasingly seem as superstition and charlatanism.
Copernicus’ new model had, over time, a profound impact on the psyche of western civilization. It undermined the authority of both Church and Bible. It tore down what (rickety) belief structures had survived the Medieval period, and briefly replaced them with a hope and faith in the new Science. And obviously, a great many wonderful developments happened, once Science was finally let out from under the thumb of the Church. There was/is just one problem. Science doesn’t deal in meaning. It doesn’t offer the average person a way of structuring their experience of the world and their own lives. And so, over time, Western civilization has fallen increasingly into a materialistic stupor. Pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain have become our guiding lights. Distractions from our existential malaise. And perhaps most problematic, a deep, unspoken dread of death has taken root.
This has never been more obvious than it is right now, with the reaction to Covid, which has morphed into a bizarre war on death, at least from this one particular cause. Western civilization is in the middle of throwing away centuries of social progress, all in the hopes of avoiding death, at all cost. Whatever our views on Covid may be, I think most will agree that it is not the mark of a healthy society to be so terrorized by fear of something so completely inevitable as death.
Astrology, in my view, is an antidote to this mindset. Horary astrology in particular offers a means of convincing oneself that there is some sublime force at work here, which hides itself from objective measurement, but reveals itself via subjective experience. What makes it convincing is the repeatability of the experiment. It works, again and again and again, and often with shocking clarity and accuracy. You can’t experience Horary astrology and see the world as a meaningless random mess. Astrology doesn’t give one the answers to the big questions, but the fact that such a tradition exists and has attracted some of history’s finest minds is a starting point for the re-establishment of a Western cosmology.