Ben Dykes's Medieval Astrology

[bendykes]

This article criticizes Glenn Perry’s recent NCGR article, “From Ancient to Postmodern Astrology: Toward a New Synthesis.” Due to the nature, prominence, and length of his article, my response will not only defend traditional astrology, but also traditional thought generally, and will introduce some concepts of fate, freedom, virtues, and traditional psychology. I hope the ideas here will counterbalance the ignorant and superficial categories found in Perry’s article. First though, a few observations about Perry’s overriding sense of contempt and his ignorance of traditional views.

Perry barely bothers to learn what he sets out to criticize. His contempt for traditional astrology leads him into carelessness, so that untrue or misleading arguments are mixed in with a number of basic astrological errors. I will not go into detail into these errors, since Chris Brennan has already done so admirably on his blog. But it is worth at least mentioning some of them: that Venus in the 8th is in the house of her detriment (due to Perry’s confusion between signs and houses), that the predictive technique of firdariah is a system of primary directions through bounds, that a planet in the twenty-seventh degree of a sign is always in the bound of Saturn, that a dispositor is equivalent to the Lord of the exaltation, and so on. These are the kinds of mistakes that make a traditionalist shudder. He also makes many assumptions about what traditionalists must believe “below the surface” in order to believe in their Art, and it is clear he has not thought them through. But more than that, he winds up unwittingly attributing to traditional astrology what is actually more true of modern psychological astrology, and comes across as a whiny teenager puffing himself up about the wisdom only he has—not the sort of thing we’d expect from someone immersed in a superior, Evolved, self-aware form of astrology.

Thesis
Normally in an article that promotes a certain point of view, we expect to see a thesis that can be shown to be proved. But Perry’s article does not really have a thesis. Rather, he has a starting assumption from which everything else automatically flows. At many points his exposition stumbles on many errors which would show him to be wrong, if he knew about them. But for him it seems his starting assumption is all that matters. What is that assumption?

Perry says that (1) stages of astrology reflect (2) stages in the evolution of consciousness, which in turn reflect (3) the stages of an individual’s development. By definition this means that whatever is older historically is both intellectually less sophisticated and emotionally and morally childish. Whatever is modern is “evolved” and mature. Everything in Perry’s article is shoehorned into this model, so there is really nothing to argue about, in his view. For him it is simply self-evident that, like a stereotypic child, traditional people were unintellectual, unintrospective, childish, fearful, made simplistic moral judgements, and only thought about themselves and their own needs. Therefore, traditional astrologers think only in terms of good and bad, have haphazard and foolish beliefs, only tell people about satisfying pleasure and pains (in the form of money, marriage, etc.), have barely any psychology at all, and seek control over the external world because they are afraid of it. Q.E.D.

Below I will be addressing many of these topics, but I want to direct attention immediately to a recurring theme in Perry’s article: his constant projection onto traditionalists of faults he and modern psychological astrology exhibit (at least, the psychological astrology he describes). Let us address three of them right now: being self-oriented, seeking control, and being generally immature. On the matter of being ego-oriented, Perry criticizes earlier people (and children) by saying they are ego-oriented and have a need for control due to their sense of helplessness and weakness. But this is actually a description of the modern astrology Perry promotes. For instance, Perry claims that for traditionalists, the chart is the native. But Perry has it exactly backwards. Traditional astrology does not believe that the chart is a description solely of the native (or especially the native’s mind)—that is what modern psychological astrology believes. For a traditionalist, only a certain set of features in the chart signify the native’s mind. Everything else signifies events and people who are not the native. For instance, traditional astrology says the 2nd house signifies the native’s movable assets and allies. These things are not the native. But in modern astrology, the 2nd signifies the native’s feelings about assets, or else his values in general, reducing assets and allies to reflections of the native’s mind. This subjectivization of the chart is rampant in modern astrology. How much more true then, to say that modern astrology is self-absorbed!

Nor does traditional astrology have an overdeveloped sense of the need for control. In fact the very division of the chart into the native’s mind and things not in our control is an example of traditional astrology not thinking the native can control everything—even if the native can occasionally harness good opportunities or mitigate bad things predicted by the astrologer. Normal people do this all the time in non-astrological settings. In fact one could go further and argue that modern astrology craves control, is more fearful and has a sense of weakness: how else to explain the fact that modern astrologers often look first to Pluto and Uranus to find terrible traumas and abuse and crises in the chart, and then constantly need to talk about their escapist fantasies about how they create their own destinies—sorry, I meant to say they are engaged in “transformation” and “evolution.”

In terms of traditional astrology being immature, it is worth noting that despite Perry’s boasting about how Evolved and adult and conscious psychological astrology is, his attitude and claims unwittingly turn him into a smug teenager angry with Mom and Dad. What sort of things would such a teenager say? Mom and Dad have too many rules, many of which make no sense to him; they overcomplicate matters; they are too old-fashioned in their views of good and evil, unlike the sophisticated teenager who sees all the grey. He would be dismissive and pretentious. He would say that Mom and Dad have forgotten about really feeling life, being free, envisioning alternative experiences. Their world is one of straight lines and sharp corners, whereas his life is full of curves. Their life is cramped and fearful, but he stands before the glorious horizon, bravely greeting the dawning Sun. Mom and Dad make too many judgments about people, and love giving advice—why can’t they just leave people (and especially him) alone to make their own decisions? Adults are always worrying about money, jobs, health, but only he really understands that it’s the process, the experience, that matters. Or more to the point, why can’t they understand how Wise and Evolved he is? All of these themes abound in Perry’s article: traditional astrology has too many rules, is rigid, has black-and-white thinking about ethics, is fearful and full of worry, and doesn’t care about process or experience. All of these charges are false, and I will be dealing with them below.

But Perry conforms to the teenager type in an even more amusing way. Although this modern, Evolved, adult period allegedly began around 1600 (I guess that makes William Lilly an Evolved, modern astrologer?), Perry later corrects this and says the proper psychological astrology really only came onto the scene in the 1980s. That would make Perry’s whole movement literally teenaged, too. And what is more appropriate for a teenager than to think that real time only began with his own birth? Poor Mom and Dad listen to stupid stuff like Miles Davis—can’t they see Miles Davis has nothing on P. Diddy? Perhaps then, Perry is just going through a phase; he’ll grow out of it if we’re patient.

It is worth asking, though, whether Perry’s belief that modern astrology enhances creativity and freedom makes much sense in light of his childishness-maturity model. According to Perry, modern astrology is more creative because it tells people they have an undetermined, spontaneous free will. And modern astrology is allegedly more adult. But isn’t it rather characteristic of adults that their lives are overburdened and limited and less creative? In fact, isn’t it usually children and teenagers as a group who are most able to envision creative alternatives, even if for a variety of reasons they cannot produce them?

Back to the notion of evolving consciousness. Perry says consciousness is a capacity for forms of experience and awareness, and it shows purpose, intelligence, and intent to learn. Over time, this produces “higher” and “more integrated” states of awareness.

I am sympathetic to some of this, due to my traditional (and Hegelian) background. But we must be careful about what exactly is meant by this, and where this so-called evolution takes place. The general thrust of Perry’s statements (and that of modern psychological astrology as a whole) is that this evolution takes place in our own personal subjective sense of individual selfhood. Now this is correct, so far as it goes: after all, it is still we who are thinking, feeling, and acting in the world. So whatever is meant by this “evolution,” it must be at least reflected in our subjective sense of self. But what we mean by our “sense of self” makes all the difference in evaluating this notion of evolution. For example, we have a sense of ourselves and the world through the lowest forms of awareness and sensation, through social relationships, as family members, by exercising our conscience about what is good and bad, as individuals pursuing economic and educational goals, as citizens, as members of groups, in religious activities, and so on. Not all of these outlets for our sense of self were as available or clearly differentiated in former times as they are today. So in some sense we might say that evolution has taken place, though with my Hegelian hat on I would use other terminology. Many of these forms of self-awareness and experience are also found in traditional astrology, and they are objective features of a person’s life, not just instances of mere free will or pushes and pulls between different drives inside of us.

By contrast, my impression of Perry is that he is mainly concerned with the identity of the single individual qua individual. This is a very limiting point of view, and we can see that he would have difficulties going beyond this limitation because he thinks the chart is a description of the mind of the native. And it must be even more difficult for him to describe these dynamics anyway, since according to him we can make all sorts of free will choices that allegedly would make these dynamics in the chart moot.

That said, these kinds of self-identity and freedom may have little or nothing to do with astrology, strictly speaking. It could still be that while the story of humanity is one more and more complex forms of social and individual choice and expression, the greater events of history itself have a determined course, and we are determined in many fate-like ways by the very institutions through which we have these freedoms. Even as individuals we could be fundamentally determined in fate-like ways, however we use our puny faculty of arbitrary free-will. Put astrologically, traditional natal astrology could still be giving us an accurate, on-the-ground picture of our fundamentally fated lives, and not have anything concrete to say about the story of the meaning or trajectory or “evolution” of humanity as a whole. That is certainly possible.

So while some of Perry’s psychological remarks are interesting, sadly they are not only tendentious and unfair (relegating most of human history to childlike and adolescent forms of life), but they have little to do with astrology—especially since it is clear he understands little of the astrology he wants to call childlike. Is there anything more tiresome than someone in the present dismissing the human past as foolish, and “proving” that only their own time is good, responsible, and adult? As I will mention below, ancient philosophers (many of whose ideas were used in traditional astrology) had sophisticated and subtle understandings of the mind and emotions. Having used them myself and having taught them to hundreds of college students, I would take any of their works over virtually any of the modern, feel-good, create-your-own-reality casserole of psychobabble I have been hearing in astrological and New-Age circles for the last twenty years.


Fate
Fate is a concept that astrologers need to understand and investigate more. Perry’s comments on what fate is have some validity, but the conclusions he draws are unnecessary and historically inaccurate. For instance, Perry claims that fate must be some external force that inexplicably and irrationally throws obstacles (or good things) at us. That is not true—that is more the view of a polytheistic cosmos in which competing gods act according to whim. In views of fate developed by the Stoics at least, fate is a rational structure that is woven through the entire cosmos, and we are a part of it. Our actions help to enact fate, because, being the types of beings we are, we participate in certain ways with the cosmic structure we are woven into.

We can call fate a power from a cosmic or God’s-eye point of view, but on the ground whatever is decreed by fate can only be brought about by human action (as well as natural occurences, etc.). If then the natal chart shows what kind of person the native is, and what the normal expected outcome of such a person’s life is, then we are entitled to say that such a person will, by and large, perform in accordance with cosmic fate. The native participates in fate—it is not external to him. It is actually a function of Perry’s psychological prejudice that he believes that the individual would be external to the cosmos—an indication that self-centeredness and undue pride is actually a part of the psychological worldview he himself holds. The ancients did not hold this egocentric view.

Nor does this view of fate I am suggesting mean that the chart has to show absolutely everything that is in some sense according to fate (as Perry suggests). The chart will not show how many cigarettes I just smoked, nor will it show by any counting mechanism how many hairs are on my head. Many things in the chart show kinds of things, not individual things: it may show I will date a redhead this year, but if I walk past ten redheads today it will not necessarily show me which one—and this is perfectly compatible with a view of cosmic fate.

This view of fate does not offer a perverse view of human nature. Quite the opposite, it accords with some common-sense assumptions we already have. For one thing, we are already used to understanding ourselves as members of groups and classifications of certain types, and we can be expected to have values and exhibit behaviors typical of them, even if we do not fit stereotypic patterns to a ‘T’. Moreover, it is clear for anyone to see that most people—no matter how self-creating they fancy themselves to be, often conform to a consistent personality type that is evidenced from youth. So people already do not act as radical self-creators. Finally, most of us implicitly recognize that it is sometimes more praiseworthy to be a good person less capable of change, than otherwise—but I will defer this to my criticisms of undetermined free will below.

Even more important for Perry’s general evaluation of traditional views versus modern ones, he draws a wrong and historically ignorant conclusion. On the one hand, he says that traditional astrologers made a kind of dishonest or inconsistent compromise: namely, that they wanted both fate and free will, so they wanted to use free will to avoid or exploit fate. But everything depends on what is being avoided or exploited. For instance, suppose you want to go on a walk, and it rains. It is perfectly consistent with fate that clouds should act according to their nature by raining, and that at the same time you should want to take a walk. Both you and the clouds are playing roles assigned by the cosmos, based on what types of creatures you are. It is also consistent with fate that, being the kind of person you are, you will decide that being wet is to be avoided, and that you should get an umbrella. There is nothing inconsistent here, and talking about “exploiting” fate in some bad, manipulative sense is not pertinent. The person with an umbrella cannot assume he is “cheating” fate.

But on the other hand, Perry praises modern psychological astrology because it is about free self-creation and co-creation with the cosmos, instead of avoiding or exploiting the cosmic system. But his position is actually the ancient and traditional view, as expounded by Stoics and Neo-Platonists—being in harmony with cosmic rationality, being co-creators with the Demiurge, living in accordance with nature, and so on. In fact one could argue that Perry’s modern view is one of cosmic disruption and contradicts his fundamental premises. In fact the source of the dishonest or problematic compromise here is Perry himself. He thinks arbitrary free will, self-creation, or whatever, as a main mode of being is not only possible, and desirable, but that this arbitrary free will somehow is consistent with being co-creative with the whole cosmos. If the cosmos is integrated and an organic whole in the way that he believes, then radical self-creation as a central goal and defining feature of human life is contrary to such a system. For a system has interdependent parts that are combined according to a rational structure. Within certain boundaries, the parts may undergo alteration and change; but large-scale, radical, undetermined change is disruptive to the notion of a system as a whole.

Of course the kind of rational structure in play says a lot about what changes are consistent. As a Hegelian, I would say that certain political revolutions are socially disruptive, but because they manifest something important about the historical trajectory of human beings and fundamental human nature, they do not contradict the notion of a cosmos as a whole. But Perry offers nothing along the lines of what the purpose of humanity is, or what structures matter, besides platitudes about evolution and ego-transcendence. The point is that claiming radical free self-creation as a central principle on the one hand, and harmonizing with something like cosmic rationality and organization on the other hand, is either contradictory or empty without a further argument. At any rate, in Perry’s formulation it has little to do with astrology, since by assumption the rational and organized movement of the planets do show that we are part of a cosmic system.

None of this should be taken as though I do not believe we have choices. Philosophical therapy, especially in light of what is shown in the chart, is important. But we have to have some common understanding of what is possible. From the Stoic view, the chart could show many of your particular traits and talents, along with predictions about things you can’t control, and Stoic therapy leads you to use these things constructively in such a way that you live in accordance with nature, and avoid the kinds of emotional traps that cause unhappiness and distress. You are still the person shown by certain features in the chart, along with all of the external events and relationships shown there; but you can improve your mind so that you are not distressed or thrown by events of life, and you are able to better express the gifts you have been given. Another more Aristotelian point of view is that we can strengthen or weaken certain psychological traits in the chart, and try to handle the accidents thrown at us in a better way—we might not have a chance to be truly happy, but we can maximize what we have. Nothing in this says that “adversity” has no role, as Perry claims traditionalists believe.

It is true (as Perry notes) that some thinkers like Plotinus thought astrological influences had a limited effect—especially upon our souls. But we cannot simply leave things there and assume that traditional astrologers were wrong. We have to know what people like Plotinus thought the soul was. One reason for Plotinus’s statement is that he believed the “real” human being was a rational, incorporeal part of the soul that never fully descended into the world as we know it—therefore, since the stars can only affect this world, the soul is unaffected by them. In order to accept or reject this argument, we need to take a stand on what the soul really is. Perhaps some psychological astrologers believe in a purely rational, undescended, incorporeal soul that is distinct from worldly things, and that whatever psychological traits are shown initially in the chart, this rational, undescended, incorporeal soul can make free choices about what to think and feel after birth. This is their right, and they should say so. So far as I can tell, Perry does not believe in such a thing—so his appeal to someone like Plotinus is a dead-end.

But what about free will? Perry gives us a clue as to what he means by free will, and it is exactly the kind of free will which was posited by theologians all the way back in childish antiquity. It is the undetermined, spontaneous, uncaused, arbitrary free will. Perry himself justifies its existence through appeals to modern quantum theory, and the theologians did so through Scripture and traditional arguments, but it is the same thing. This faculty in us allows us to countervene the normal course of things in our physical world, and do fundamentally different things. Theologically, it is akin to introducing miracles into the world that make the rule-bound natural world veer off into another direction.

This is a complex topic. But because platitudes about free will are so common and so beloved, I want to make two critical comments in order to let modern readers think about the personal appeal of such radical free will. First, free will is overrated. Arbitrary, undetermined free will is ultimately a low-level concept or faculty. It is precisely because it is undetermined (that is, unrelated to other things, self-caused, and spontaneous), that it says little about a person. It is uninformative. The person who identifies primarily with spontaneous free will is a superficial person, someone who stands for little or nothing, precisely because nothing is causing him to behave or think in any particular way at all. He does not need a reason to do or believe anything, or point to anything independently existing and real, simply because the reason only exists if he arbitrarily and spontaneously decides to engage with it. Once he is engaged in something, the value or belief automatically exists and is validated by mere fiat. There are no standards of success or failure, because anything could be equally counted valuable or unvaluable. Values, emotions, deeds—all of these are granted only by an inexplicable arbitrariness.

Second, philosophies and psychologies based on arbitrary free will (e.g., 20th Century existentialism like that of Sartre) sound good at first and can be helpful in guiding a person to take responsibility for his own thoughts. But they are largely devoid of real content, because their notion of being free, “authentic” people is vague and largely uninformative. When I taught college-level philosophy, I used to teach some Sartrean ethics after a unit on Aristotle and the Stoics. The ancients had all sorts of ideas about what the soul and mind are, how they work, they have interesting advice and therapies to offer. But on the level of the individual, existentialist ethics, while offering good analyses of problems, has little constructive to offer beyond the importance of being “authentic.” We are not supposed to react in stereotypic ways, feel other people’s emotions, and take for granted prevailing values. Instead, we are supposed to be spontaneous, creative, exercise our arbitrary free will. But no one really knows what such a life would be like, especially since the content of such an authentic, unique life would hardly apply to other people trying to be authentic. Everyone (especially college students) loves the idea of being spontaneous, radically free, and unique—but is there anything more trite than a conventional, middle-of-the-road person proclaiming his or her uniqueness and freedom?

We might oppose to this the traditional view of the virtues. Traditional people thought that a key to being happy was developing states of character called virtues. Examples would be courage and temperance. These virtues had to do with how the soul handles competing emotions and interests and values in a given subject matter. For instance, Aristotle said temperance had to do with the right management of pleasures and pains in the area of food, drink, and sex. Such virtues had to be built up over time, were concerned deliberate choice (rather than accident), had to be mediated by rational thought and judgment, probably required good role models, and demanded we recognize that some things are helpful to us, and some things not. Aristotle also thought some good luck was required in order to express the virtues, too—you need money in order to know how to handle money responsibly, and we do not always have money. On this view, adversity is not good in itself, but encountering adversity may help us learn how to develop virtues, and when we actually exercise virtues we will be able to handle further adversity with equipoise and confidence.

This traditional notion of virtues relates to free will in the following way. According to the modern point of view, it is a hallmark of modernity and maturity that we have the spontaneous free will to do something totally different at any time—that defines the undetermined, uncaused free will. But a question arises: how much should we praise someone for doing a good deed from their free will, when by definition they were equally capable of doing the opposite? If I refrain from murder simply because I arbitrarily choose to, that is like saying I should be praised because, though I did not murder, I am easily capable of it. From the traditional point of view, a mature person does not become more capable of being immoral and changing drastically, he becomes less able. People ought to be praised because they are less capable of changing drastically—assuming that they are good people. We neither want nor expect a well-trained and seasoned soldier, who has the virtue of courage, to exercise his power of free self-creation and indeterminacy by suddenly walking off the battlefield and letting his friends die.

We do need to have a lengthy discussion of fate and free will, if only to figure out what in the world we mean by these terms. And the simplistic fate-freedom dichotomy does not just pertain to one’s overall view of life either—it touches directly on technical issues in astrology: for instance theological concerns and what makes elections and horary advice possible. And we can only really discuss them intelligently when we examine primary texts and ideas of smart people who have made important contributions to the subject. This means reading works by philosophers and theologians.


Ego-Centered Concerns
In this section Perry comes off as both irresponsible and paternalistic. The basic thrust of the section is that traditional astrology only deals with self-centered concerns of the native (like money, love, etc.) and has no therapeutic content.

As for irresponsibility, Perry offers the example of an astrologer who sees that a certain relationship would be bad for the client. In his view, traditionalists would advise against a bad relationship because they believe “adversity serves no purpose in life.” Of course this is complete nonsense. But consider what it must mean for him: the Evolved, conscious, adult astrologer should not advise against a bad relationship, so that the client can have the benefit of living through adversity. Can you imagine telling a client, “Go ahead, it will be an abusive, bad relationship, you will regret it all—but hey, you’ll have the benefit of really experiencing life!” Not even your best friend would treat you this way.

But the really insidious thing is his paternalistic attitude, which yet again shows that Perry’s view is actually the opposite of what he claims. Perry wants to say that we should be free self-creators, and he implies there is much strength and “empowerment” in this. But on the other hand, he says that telling a client a relationship will be bad is dangerous, because it will “reinforce neurotic fears” and “subvert a natural developmental process.” In other words, giving accurate news about something unpleasant will damage the client! This is the very definition of saying that reality is bad for people, because they are weak and incapable of handling the truth. But the fact is that clients appreciate hearing the truth, because they are grownups. Most clients already have an inkling of possible problems—or they can imagine them. Telling the truth to clients is what empowers people and respects them, not assuming they are weaklings, neurotic, and can’t handle life.

Descriptions of Temperament
Here Perry makes two claims: that traditional astrology, unlike modern psychological forms, can only describe but not explain; and that for traditionalists, the natal chart simply is the native—or rather, it is the native’s mind. Both of these claims are false and yet again highlight both his shallow understanding of the material and that he accuses traditional astrology of believing what is actually true of the modern sort. As for the chart being the native, I have already dealt with this above. Below I will sketch a more traditional view of the native’s mind, and the reader can decide whether it is “flat” and “simple” and “fixed in time.”

In terms of descriptions and explanations, Perry thinks a description takes the form of something like this: “The native is X,” or “The native behaves in the manner X.” This is supposed to be “flat” and “simple.” An explanation is allegedly something that states the reason for such behavior in terms of underlying psychodynamics, which take the form of something like this: “The native behaves in the manner X, because of psychodynamic Y.” So, Perry says temperament is merely descriptive, because it merely says how he will behave, and not why.

I agree that explanations seek causes. Explanations show why. I wonder if I should be ashamed to agree with this, because all sorts of people from allegedly childish times also believed this—people like the Atomists, the materialists, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Epicureans, medieval theologians and natural scientists—and traditional astrologers. So why should we think traditional astrology be so childish as to deal only with descriptions? If you read Perry’s argument, you see the answer: he thinks an explanation must appeal to psychodynamics.

But do traditional astrologers ever appeal to causes and psychodynamics? Yes. In delineating a native’s temperament, or quality of mind, or what Robert Zoller calls the “prime motivation,” traditionalists do appeal to causes. But they are not always the causes that Perry wants. If a native is choleric, the astrologer may say “the native is choleric, and will behave in such-and-such a way.” But the astrologer is too busy to explain to the client that this is because the rising sign is fiery, etc. The configurations described in the chart explain why the native is choleric, and so why he will behave in a certain way. (This is true primarily for astrological views of the planets and signs as causal rather than merely signifying things.)

Nor is this all. Temperament is only one factor in delineating the human mind. It is more of a physiological backdrop to the mind (which is why it is associated with the physiological humors), showing certain features of energy level, outlook on life, sense of motivation, and sociability. Other techniques include the Lord of the Ascendant and planets in the Ascendant, Mercury and the Moon, the planetary significator of personality (along with their quadruplicities, aspects, and so on), and many others. No one of these simply describes the native’s mind, and together they show a very sophisticated and nuanced psychology. Nor does this traditional psychology mean that the native cannot respond and develop. In fact, some features might show the native adapts and develops easily to new situations, others not.

It is worth re-emphasizing that part of the traditional background is the assumption that the purpose of life is not to become more “evolved,” but to be happy. Traditional philosophers and astrologers assumed that certain things were good or bad (or neutral) insofar as they helped or hindered people from realizing their potentials for happiness. Some things were typically considered good and helpful: money, good relationships, honor, health. Others were typically considered bad and unhelpful: poverty, isolation, being despised or enslaved, sickness and death. You can look at the natal chart and assign these conventional goods and evils to various houses.

But the ancients were not so stupid as to think all of these could be described wholly independently of the individual’s mind. In fact, Aristotelian and Stoic ethics would be incomprehensible without taking into account exactly those things Perry thinks were invented by people like him: intrapsychic integration, flexible and considered reactions to external things, achieving emotional maturity and balance, and so on. We are supposed to evaluate, integrate, deal responsibly with the world, and form good habits and emotional responses that will reliably allow us to deal with the world. Mere “free will” reactions from moment to moment are not enough: we need thoughtful reactions and emotional balance in a consistent state of character, based on harmonious values. If Perry cared to crack open some books on ancient ethics, he would find that these noble masters were offering sophisticated therapies 2,000 years ago, and they had never heard of Ken Wilber or Carl Jung.

Traditional astrology describes both the external things the native is expected to encounter, and the internal faculties and traits that the native typically has to deal with them. Different natives have different talents and interests, and some interests may clash with other issues in the chart: the parents or spouse, for instance. A therapy-oriented traditional astrologer has a long tradition of philosophical thought to draw on, if he wishes to help the native figure out strategies for coping, enhancing or de-emphasizing various features of the chart. This is not really a matter of undetermined, uncaused free will, but more a matter of working on the native talents and expected external events, within the boundaries of the place in the universe the native occupies. Intrapsychic integration, development, and all of the things Perry mentions can be part of this process, but the process is not the goal: the goal is happiness, which some people attain more successfully than others. Hard news, perhaps, but true.


Rigid, complicated, and qualitative techniques
The remainder of Perry’s treatment of traditional astrology makes three points that continue earlier themes I have raised. First, traditional astrologers use value judgments about planets, and this is bad. Second, traditional delineations are one-size-fits all, not nuanced. Third, contradicting the previous point, is that traditional astrology is overcomplicated because it makes too many qualitative refinements in planetary analysis.

I have already addressed some of the first point above. Perry seems averse to giving clients advice about bad situations because it prevents them from having learning experiences. But these later sections also add something new: that it is wrong and immature to say that planets perform better or worse in certain configurations, houses, signs, and so on. Now, I know that in some circles it is taboo to say that anything is bad or good; we are not supposed to make moral evaluations at all. But Perry seems to misunderstand completely what traditionalists are doing when they “judge” a chart, and he does not understand that “bad” and “good” can be meant in at least two distinct ways.

On the one hand, traditionalists try to “judge” a planets performance. Planets signify various things. But just as it is one thing to be merely alive, and another to live well, so the planets can be helped and hindered in many ways when they are trying to produce their significations. Traditional concepts allow us to analyze different perspectives on this activity. So for instance, in medieval astrology angular houses allow planets to operate quantitatively at a high level of strength, while cadent houses are very weak. Thus it makes a big difference for the native whether he has an angular or cadent Mars. Likewise, the planets are affected qualitatively by their dignities and debilities of all sorts. If various debilities and afflictions are likened to a planet acting erratically and drunkenly, then just as it can make a big difference at a party whether the guest are drunk and loud or drunk and quiet, so in a chart an angular afflicted planet differs from a cadent one. That is one meaning of “judging” the chart: taking all of the testimonies into account, in order to figure out exactly what the planet is doing for this native. Perry must have a cartoonish notion of moral categories and functioning, because he thinks that balancing the various good and bad features of planetary functioning is “characteristic of toddlers” and an example of black-and-white thinking. But in fact the various layers of planetary analysis in traditional astrology is characteristic of nuanced thinking. Perry should not blame us because he doesn’t understand these concepts and is averse to “value judgments.”

The second way in which traditional astrologers judge using categories like “good” and “bad” is when we say what a configuration means for the native, in conventional senses of what is helpful or hindering. I hope Perry will excuse our naivete in conforming to normal standards of good and bad when we say that dying, or being abused, or falling into poverty, or being attacked by secret enemies are “bad,” and that having a happy marriage and good friends are “good.” Likewise, we think many situations are mixed: we say that having friends you fight with can be an example of having a “good” thing (friendship) that is mixed with occasional bad things (strife). These things are conventional goods and evils that most people recognize. Perhaps Perry can enlighten us as to his notion of whether anything is good or bad, and whether we should not think abuse is a bad thing because it just might be a “learning experience.”

So yes, traditional astrology is complicated. It has lots of rules. But that is because planetary situations are complicated, and so is life. We do not have to apologize for recognizing reality.

All of this should be enough to show that traditional techniques are not one-size-fits-all, flat, rigid, and all of the other things Perry claims through his slurs. But I do want to address one final point, and that is Perry’s quotation of other people quoting Maternus and others, allegedly showing such rigid delineations. For instance, he quotes Barton’s Ancient Astrology on Maternus, showing that a certain relation of Venus and Saturn will show sexual depravity. It is true that traditional texts have many of these cut-and-dried rules—so do modern astrology books. But no serious astrologer thinks that all of these rules apply equally, because charts differ. Venus squaring Jupiter might have some generalized meaning, but in traditional texts these take more the form of instructive principles, and are not meant to be taken at face value. If Venus is the Lord of the Ascendant, it will mean something for the native directly; if she is the Lord of the 2nd, something about wealth. Likewise, just as losing $10 means one thing for a rich man and another for a homeless man, so some predicted hardship will mean something to one native and another to another—and their likely capacities to cope or avoid the trouble will also differ. Again, if you told me that if I drove at 60 miles per hour for 1 hour, I would go 60 miles, this is true enough. But if I lived on a street full of potholes and had a flat tire after 500 yards, I could not assume that mathematics or physics were nothing. Context and details matter. Perry’s attack sounds more like what we would expect from the ignorant astrology skeptics than someone who knows his trade.

The traditional revival is in full swing, and I do not see it stopping anytime soon. I think it has something to offer all astrologers, but we cannot come to terms with it if we approach it with contempt or ignorance. Nor will we be able to have insight into it, unless we explore other notions of psychology, the purpose of human life, fate, free will, virtues, and other ideas. I’m sure other traditional astrologers will agree with me, and I hope that modern astrologers will be intrigued enough to find out about them.

[Bonnie]

This is a masterful response, Ben. I have printed it out for multiple re-readings.

I would love to be proven wrong, but be prepared for a lengthy piece-by-piece riposte from Perry, who relishes the manipulation of words, even in the absence of content; he tends to write reams of rebutting diatribes, and in that way keeps people responding to him until they simply give up (at which point he seems to believe he has trumped all argument). Though reasonable people might hope that even Perry would not quibble about matters of fact, he skews others' words and arguments to serve his own purposes. I have seen him do this time after time in astrological publications and newsletters.

You and Chris have done students a great service by correcting Perry's errors and misperceptions, even at the risk of drawing his bulldog-like attention.

[Steven]

Ben, I can only add my own respect to Bonnie's with regards to this rebuttal! Well said!

I would only add these philosophical thoughts from Kusyar Ibn Labban's "Introduction to Astrology";

[Ken Johnson]

Let me join the others in adding my thanks and regards for Ben's reply. Good work!