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So -- the "New Zodiac" question. (kind of long and musey)
This started in a comment thread on my LJ, which is friends-locked to reduce my exposure to Russian Phishing 'bots and random facebook linkage (facebook's nonchalant attitude toward privacy scares me).
This has been several days brewing (ever since Craig Ferguson mentioned it in his Monologue whenever-it-was) and include a hike down a trail of Wikipedia links. I wandered through:
As I understand it (and I don't really understand it), the theory of how astrology effects personality is based on a geo-centric view of the universe, where the soul of each infant comes from God (who is outside the Universe) as a blank slate, and then drops down through the various celestial spheres, picking up influences of stars and planets as they pass, depending on which constellations intercept them in the journey. So that the attributes of each sphere "Stick to" the soul, and what started out as a blank slate ends up as a complex, multi-faceted person at the moment they emerge from the womb and take their first breath.
In more recent (aka 20th Century New Agey) interpretations, this has been translated to "The gravitational and magnetic influences on our sun from distant stars, and the changes in the sun effect the physical and emotional lives of everything on Earth, because it's all connected."
It's kind of messy, but the image in my head is of a person dropping down through a cosmic ice cream parfait, and getting bits of fudge sauce, marshmallow, jam, nuts and various flavors of ice cream stuck to her as she goes... Or maybe I'm just craving a sundae.
If you follow this school of thought, then, well: the actual stars that were dripping influences onto your soul had already changed between the first conception of the zodiac by the ancient Babylonians and the time you were born. It's just the labels and the names never kept up. So nothing has really changed.
But:
It could be that the power of the zodiac to influence our lives comes from the Mytho-Religious-Poetic stories we tell about them (Capricorn is the memorial Amalthea, the goat that fed the infant Zues while he was being kept hidden from Chronos, Taurus represents Zeus when he seduced Europa, etc.), and the magical energy attracted by those stories "sticks" to the child by association.
If you follow that school of thought, then, well: the stories told for you and about you in the past as you were growing up are the ones that mattered. At the time of your birth, you were born under sign ____; that's still your sign. So nothing has really changed.
Unless you want it to. If you want to reexamine the stories behind the zodiac, and decide whether or not to look at the course of your life though a slightly different lens, then this moment of heightened cultural awareness might be a good time to try that. But it's up to you.
BTW, Ophiuchus, mythologically and narratively-speaking (if you want to go that way), is linked to Asclepius -- the Greek god of medicine. According to one myth about him, he was struck down by Zeus because he accepted gold for bringing someone back to life, but put into heaven to honor the good he'd done to benefit humanity, in spite of his sins. Apparently, our complex relationship with Medicine, and the whole tangle of ethics and money that goes along with that, is nothing new.
*Eyes Andrew Wakefield on one side of the Atlantic, and Congress and the Health-care bill on the other side.*
This has been several days brewing (ever since Craig Ferguson mentioned it in his Monologue whenever-it-was) and include a hike down a trail of Wikipedia links. I wandered through:
- Ophiuchus (constellation) and
Ophiuchus (Astrology),
13-sign zodiac,
Sidereal astrology,
Jyotish,
and
Sidereal Time
As I understand it (and I don't really understand it), the theory of how astrology effects personality is based on a geo-centric view of the universe, where the soul of each infant comes from God (who is outside the Universe) as a blank slate, and then drops down through the various celestial spheres, picking up influences of stars and planets as they pass, depending on which constellations intercept them in the journey. So that the attributes of each sphere "Stick to" the soul, and what started out as a blank slate ends up as a complex, multi-faceted person at the moment they emerge from the womb and take their first breath.
In more recent (aka 20th Century New Agey) interpretations, this has been translated to "The gravitational and magnetic influences on our sun from distant stars, and the changes in the sun effect the physical and emotional lives of everything on Earth, because it's all connected."
It's kind of messy, but the image in my head is of a person dropping down through a cosmic ice cream parfait, and getting bits of fudge sauce, marshmallow, jam, nuts and various flavors of ice cream stuck to her as she goes... Or maybe I'm just craving a sundae.
If you follow this school of thought, then, well: the actual stars that were dripping influences onto your soul had already changed between the first conception of the zodiac by the ancient Babylonians and the time you were born. It's just the labels and the names never kept up. So nothing has really changed.
But:
It could be that the power of the zodiac to influence our lives comes from the Mytho-Religious-Poetic stories we tell about them (Capricorn is the memorial Amalthea, the goat that fed the infant Zues while he was being kept hidden from Chronos, Taurus represents Zeus when he seduced Europa, etc.), and the magical energy attracted by those stories "sticks" to the child by association.
If you follow that school of thought, then, well: the stories told for you and about you in the past as you were growing up are the ones that mattered. At the time of your birth, you were born under sign ____; that's still your sign. So nothing has really changed.
Unless you want it to. If you want to reexamine the stories behind the zodiac, and decide whether or not to look at the course of your life though a slightly different lens, then this moment of heightened cultural awareness might be a good time to try that. But it's up to you.
BTW, Ophiuchus, mythologically and narratively-speaking (if you want to go that way), is linked to Asclepius -- the Greek god of medicine. According to one myth about him, he was struck down by Zeus because he accepted gold for bringing someone back to life, but put into heaven to honor the good he'd done to benefit humanity, in spite of his sins. Apparently, our complex relationship with Medicine, and the whole tangle of ethics and money that goes along with that, is nothing new.
*Eyes Andrew Wakefield on one side of the Atlantic, and Congress and the Health-care bill on the other side.*
no subject
no subject
(as long as it stays inside my head, I'd don't mind)