Articles
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Toward
a Physical
Basis for Astrology
by
John Townley
Before going on to the practical applications of cycles in astrology,
it would do well to take a look at the one glaring deficit this art
displays -- the lack of a known physical basis for operation. Most
sciences have a structure which explains exactly how they work
(physics, chemistry, biology) and those that partially don't are often
called "soft" sciences (psychology, sociology). In what is considered a
"real" science, if you make a mistake, you can trace it back through a
string of causal events, find your error, and correct it. In astrology,
to date, you can't do that, because no one knows exactly how or why it
works (or why it doesn't when it fails). If you make a mistake, you
have to shrug your shoulders with a sheepish smile, or if you are less
honest, try to do a lot of spin control or just cover it up.
Why/how do the planets have effect on events on earth? How is the Sun,
Moon, or Jupiter linked directly to the events in our lives? What
mechanism explains the associative links between what goes on up there
and what goes on down here?
A variety of explanations have been put forward over the years, ranging
from the provocative to the ineffable. In the former category, gravity
or electromagnetism, sunspots and the solar wind are favorites. In the
latter, spiritual rays emanating from the planets which are ensouled
higher beings is my favorite. None has much evidence to go on, despite
the sincerity of their followers. There might be another approach,
however, which may subsume them all (as all good general theories do)
and provide a new way at looking at the structure of reality with room
for all.
The problems with linking astrology and modern science has been their
mutually incompatible paradigms, or world-views. Science has not
admitted to a structure of physical reality that would allow distant
planets to have any appreciable effect on life on earth, and astrology
has assumed a reality in which much of the principal structure of
earthly behavior is linked to the planets in a manner unknown, but
demonstrable in its visible effects. When challenged to be more
specific about this unknown link, astrologers most often retreat into
vague concepts like a proposed "collective unconscious" or "acausal
synchronicity," both concepts attributed to Jung, who tried to walk the
fence between science and spirituality with only limited success.
Hard science, of course, rejects this outright -- it insists on having
a formal theory that can be demonstrably described and tested in
physical reality. That is the way the modern scientific method is
constructed. Furthermore, it rejects any astrological "results,"
statistical or otherwise, without this series of theory-to-reality
deductions. Astrology, intuitively knowing itself to be on to something
and getting surprisingly good results, rejects science for being too
stuffy about the whole thing and playing too limited a game. Two
hostile paradigms of reality, but both existing and functioning rather
well in the actual world (real reality, one might call it).
These mutual criticisms can be quite valid, however, if there is a
larger picture that includes both points of view -- a larger, inclusive
paradigm that allows both approaches to work without invalidating
either. This expansive trend has persevered throughout the history of
scientific and spiritual thought and it is clear that another inclusive
paradigm leap is in the making.
Where will it come from? Perhaps from pivotal concepts found in two
places: First, in the visionary work Das Gesetz der Serie (The Law of
Seriality) published in 1919 by biologist Paul Kammerer, which has
remained virtually unstudied. Second, in the burgeoning field of
fractal geometry and chaos theory. Kammerer searches for a true order
of causality behind regularities apparently due to random causes, while
chaos/fractal theory seeks to give apparently irregular phenomena a
causal basis. Kammerer's work is conceptually consistent at the deepest
level while remaining completely unmathematical; chaos theory employs
an elaborate descriptive mathematics although its own conceptual
foundations often seem incoherent. In many ways these two approaches
seem to complement one another, and both have profound implications
when applied to astrology and modern science. Indeed, what differences
they have can be reconciled and unite under the umbrella of a much
larger unified theory which will,it is hoped, literally explain
everything. This is a very big bill to fill, but here, in a nutshell,
are the pertinent concepts as they bear on astrology.
Since theoretical astrology, such as it has been, so often leans quite
heavily on Jungian concepts in general and "acausal synchronicity" in
particular, it is well to trace this latter concept to its originator,
Paul Kammerer. Jung credits Kammerer with this concept and understands
him to be proposing a new principle of nature, co-existent with
causality and finality, that would explain the apparently random
groupings of similar events that are called coincidences, such as runs
of luck or the concurrence of planetary patterns and human behavior. In
actuality, Kammerer clearly and repeatedly stresses a hitherto
unsuspected side to the workings of causality itself, and to extend the
range of accepted natural law by its means.
When one event follows another event and resembles it without any
commonly acting cause, traditional causality teaches us to attribute
their individual occurrence to special causes in each case, their
concurrence to chance. Kammerer's beautiful and simple idea is that
often we should be looking to the persistence of antecedent conditions
instead, the tendency of any given system (a "complex of bodies acted
upon by a constellation of forces," as he puts it) to maintain its
initial conditions after the forces have ceased to act upon it, as long
as other forces do not intervene. This appears to be merely a
restatement of the classical law of inertia. But as Kammerer sees it,
in a body-complex the persistence need not be uniform and rectilinear
as it would be for an isolated body. On the contrary, the initial
conditions would usually be persisting in a non-linear manner. They
would fade in and out in intensity, part of the time being beneath the
threshold of our consciousness or our ability to observe them directly.
When they resurfaced to comprise an event similar to the first one,
their identical reappearance would only seem to be due to new and
unrelated causes.
But since nowhere on earth do we ever have any totally isolated
systems, Kammerer took his line of thinking one step further. When
other forces did intervene, the formal aspect of the initial conditions
-- their organization spatially and temporally -- would not simply
disperse, but transform itself into self-similar configurations that
branch out into larger or smaller forms, or are even seemingly absorbed
into the background as part of a higher order structure, only to
resurface later as close reflections of the original (or sometimes,
again, even the original itself), well after the track of the original
had been lost to view. This accounted for repetitions of events that
were more distantly similar: in many cases they were just
transformations of the original conditions where we are unaware of the
intermediate links. And again, one needs not invoke any new set of
causes to account for the coincidence, only Kammerer's ambitious
generalizations of the inertia law.
Although he gave an elaborate, almost Mendelian template of how these
interactions should work and in so doing should explain most of the
strange occurrences we attribute to extreme coincidence, Kammerer
admitted that it was impossible for him to trace or even recreate the
elaborate detail these transforming flow lines of causality would
follow until they came back to their original forms or something close
to them. Nevertheless, in theory, form or information put into the
environment should mesh and fold over repeatedly and yet come back
again nearly whole in various spots at more or less the same time.
This, of course, would explain all sorts of anomalies if true, but it
ran into something in its time (1919) that would have made it
completely unacceptable to science, and that was the Second Law of
Thermodynamics, which states that order tends to decay into disorder
and doesn't come back -- non-conservative systems (which comprise most
systems we meet in daily life) decay into randomness (through friction,
heat loss, interaction with other systems) and that's that. Sooner or
later, randomness just takes over and the universe grinds to a halt, a
conclusion which seemed to be justified from the observations of the
time. As far as anyone had seen, once turbulence and randomness
occurred in a system, it was, by itself, irreversible.
The recent observations that have led to modern chaos theory, have
noted quite the opposite, however. Systems that have apparently, in the
classical sense, gone random show a high degree of order when looked at
by this new set of methods. Moreover, systems which go into seemingly
total randomness (untraceable even by chaos theory methods) often come
back whole or in fractal permutations of their original order when
pursued further. In large part, chaos theorists with the indispensable
computer tools that enabled them to do this work, brought to earth what
Kammerer had theorized half a century before. The only person of
Kammerer's time to touch on this was Henri Poincare, whose topological
transform work displayed this long-term fold-over and resurfacing
tendency of form and information, much referenced now but largely
ignored in his own time. Kammerer also envisioned a related extension
of the law of action and reaction -- which he thinks of as a law of
"imitation" -- that further develops his elaboration upon causality.
Any two proximate bodies or body-complexes tend to become increasingly
like one another through an equalization of the various energies they
possess, and this is not only true of their formal and material aspect.
Any two oscillating systems also tend to interact and imitate one
another in their periodic or "serial" character, growing closer
together in their temporal organization over time, with the less
regularly periodic tending to assimilate to the more strongly periodic
(just as larger gravitational bodies tend to increasingly control the
motion of smaller ones).
This is just the phenomenon called mode-locking or phase-locking,
long-known to science but still not well-explained. It was noted as
early at the 17th century by the Dutch scientist Christian Huygens
(inventor of the pendulum clock) when he found that a room full of
pendulum clocks, if left alone for a time, always end up in perfect
lock-step, no matter how out-of-sync they were to begin with. This same
phenomenon is found in orbiting bodies whose period of revolution is a
small multiple of their period of rotation (the moon always presents
the same face to the earth, as increasingly does Mercury to the Sun,
for instance), and in the behavior of various waves (quartz crystals
and radio waves, certain ocean and tide wave configurations, and even
coordinated firefly flashing). Though a variety of transfer mechanisms
may be invoked in each specific instance (sound waves through the walls
for clocks, gravitational tidal pressure for the moon) the principle
seems to hold -- stronger more regularly periodic systems tend to bring
smaller less regular ones into line.
The novelty of Kammerer's understanding of these phenomena lies in the
way that he sees an inertial principle even here: eventually, the
periodicity that the lesser system takes on from its surroundings will
be held fast; it will retain its new periodic character as something
endemic or indwelling even after its link with the larger system is
broken.
By putting together his generalized inertial principle and his special
understanding of mode-locking, Kammerer can begin to make sense of a
host of anomalistic phenomena; in biological evolution (why it goes in
spurts), gambling (beginner's luck, runs of luck), geology and
mineralogy (crystal formation), medicine (epidemic patterns), even
history (why major ideas surface together, how wars evolve), and lots
more. He only alludes to astrology and the possibility of making it
scientific on his grounds, but here are how his principles might be
applicable:
Starting at the largest level, the biggest bodies we as a planet have
to concern ourselves with even remotely in our vicinity are the other
planets, the Sun and the Moon. Although their direct gravitational
influence on individuals on earth at any one moment is minuscule (as
scientific debunkers of astrology are so quick to point out), their
effects on our entire planet as a whole are considerable, to the extent
of perturbing its very orbit through space. Thus, the entire planet is
subject to a series of strong, regularly repeating cycles/waves of
gravitational pressure which should, by Kammerer's thinking, tend to
mode-lock other larger systems on the earth (land and water tides,
weather, geological cycles, etc.). These, over the eons, continue to
mode-lock downward to smaller systems, not as a single homogeneous unit
but singly by planet depending upon the nearest associated frequencies
or resonances (just as different crystals lock onto different radio
wavelengths). Over millions of years, multiple series of integrated
systems are set up and continually reinforced.
In the old way of looking at physics, these smaller systems would tend
to decay quickly because of friction, heat loss into space, and so on,
but if pattern and information, as suggested by Kammerer and by many
applications of chaos theory, is not lost but only diverges into other
related forms, the whole system and all of its parts, no matter how
detailed, would be evolving directly in tandem, motivated and encoded
by the pressures of the planetary system long ago and continually
refueled by it still. The original gravitational rhythm of each planet
upon the earth would be stepped down into a multiplicity of lesser
systems originally associated with its frequency (somewhat like an
overtone series, but more pervasive), all of which interact into
diversity but continually resurface in forms closer to the original and
in sync with it and each other. Thus, "synchronicity" is indeed a
cause-and-effect situation, but over time rather than space. One might
say that when Mars returns to a given place in its orbit, for instance,
earth-based systems receive the effect from that event as a
reinforcement of a pulse developed over eons more than just a
particular transit happening right now -- the time of the current
transit simply indicates when a particular set of Mars-related systems
is in sync and reinforcing the same set for later step-down effects.
Naturally, under such a plan the effects of an individual transit would
not always be instantaneous and exact, but varying and approximate
according to the developments of the stepdown systems -- an inexact
sort of reliability which is so often observed in astrology and which
so befuddles astrologers and comforts debunkers. It may, in fact, be a
key to how the whole system actually works.
This approach would certainly allow for a profound cumulative influence
of other planetary bodies upon even the finest of systems on earth,
living and otherwise. But what about a natal horoscope -- how does it
explain that? What happens at birth that provides something for these
other systems to interact with all your life? The answer is in
Kammerer's "persistence" or just plain inertia. At the time of birth
(first breath, in fact) the child becomes an independent system, a
constellation of elements and forces that tends to maintain the fabric
of its initial conditions, that fabric being the entire set of
conditions present at its initiation. Moreover, since life systems are
recursive systems (feedback systems that maintain themselves), the
subsequent development of that system is greatly more resistant to
change than that of a non-recursive system like, say, a whirlpool. In
fact, this would apply to any other system that is recursive or at
least tends to maintain itself, such as a ship, a country, or a
corporation, for which horoscopes are also commonly used. Naturally,
transits are simply times when certain parts of the rest of the picture
overlap that initially-established condition and so may affect it.
Furthermore, it can easily be seen, in this sort of view, that the
otherwise mysteriously-invoked astrological techniques of various form
of progressions are simply a form of viewing transits and their future
implications through a single fractal transform (of a day equaling a
year, for instance), an approach that would be logical from either a
chaos or a Kammerer point of view.
Conveniently, many of these suppositions easily lend themselves to
various experimental exploration such as comparison of birth patterns
and/or events with mean planetary cycles vs. observed positions and the
like. It is much easier to get results when working within such a
theoretical framework than when merely floundering around looking for
unattached phenomena, because you know what to look for. The Gauquelin
data might be an easy place to begin such experimental analysis.
The idea is simple, once the foundation concepts are in place, but it
needs to be explored in a methodical way using the combined mathematics
of chaos theory and waveform analysis within the structural approach
pioneered by Kammerer, efforts toward which are underway (some of them
explained at the conference, the subject of a separate paper), but
there is not enough space to report on them here. Making all the pieces
fit smoothly will require further efforts to fill gaps in a variety of
areas: the avowed (though not necessarily correct) limits of chaos
theory at the quantum level, for instance, and what the real parameters
(if any) of truly entropic form or energy loss are, to name two
important ones to be addressed but which are too lengthy and technical
for treatment here. But although this is only a thumbnail sketch, the
advantages to this approach are obvious: it provides a new vision of
both astrology and physics which contradicts the tenets of neither--
and since it is directly mathematizable it should be able to be brought
down from theory to application without leaps of faith, gratuitous
elimination of inconvenient anomalies, or reliance upon conflicting
views of statistics.
[This
piece is adapted from an article in
Matrix Journal #1, (c)copyright 1989 by Matrix Software, reprinted by
permission.]
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Cycles of
the Moon & Sun