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THE ASTROLOGY OF TRANSFORMATION
A Multilevel Approach
by Dane Rudhyar, 1980




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CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

1. The Two Basic Ways of Meeting Life's Confrontations
   • The Yang Way
   • The Yin Way

2. The Two Faces of Astrology
   • An Astrology of Information
   • An Astrology of
Understanding and Meaning


3. Four Levels of Interpreting Human Experience and Astrological Data
   • Four Levels of Human Functioning
   • A Multilevel Astrology
   • The Biological Level of Interpretation
   • The Sociocultural Level and the "Person"
   • The Planets' Meanings at the Sociocultural Level
   • Nodes, Eclipses and the Trans-Saturnian Planets

4. The Individual Level of Interpretation
   • The Mandala Symbol in Astrology
   • The Birth-Chart and the Planets in a Mandala-Type of Interpretation
   • Going Beyond the Individual Level

5. The Marriage of Mind and Soul

6. The Practice of Astrology at the Transpersonal Level
   • The Client's Readiness and the Astrologer's Responsibility
   • The Birth-Chart as a Symbol of Individual Karma
   • The Transmutation of Karma into Dharma

7. Interpretating the Birth-Chart at the Transpersonal Level
   • A Transpersonal Interpretation of Sun, Moon and Planets
     Page A
     Page B
     Page C
   • Planetary Interactions: Aspects and Gestalt
   • Angles: Root-factors in Personality and their Transformation

8. Progressions and Transits
   • Personality as an Unfolding Process
   • Secondary or 'Solar' Progressions
   • Progressed Lunation Cycle: Progressed-to-Natal vs. Progressed-to-Progressed Considerations
   • The Transits of the Planets

EPILOGUE






CHAPTER SEVEN
Interpretating the Birth-Chart
at the Transpersonal Level - 2


A Transpersonal Interpretation of Sun, Moon and Planets
At the biological level of interpretation, we saw that the Sun symbolizes the principle of Fatherhood or the positive and fecundant aspect of the life-force. At the sociocultural level, the Sun represents the drive to social recognition, power, and prestige. It refers to the ambition to become a center of influence around which other persons will gravitate and revolve and thus (symbolically), a "king" with more or less absolute power — that is, the unchecked ability to use the power and psychism engendered by the cooperation and psychomental integration of a more or less large number of other human beings, and that ability is colored by the specific character of a particular culture. When we reach the individual level, the symbol of kingship becomes introverted. The principle of individual selfhood operates at the center of the mandala of personality — where the natal horizon and meridian intersect — but the actual operation of that principle is to be related to the Sun. I have spoken of it as the individualized will; it is also the manifested purpose of the I-center seeking the fulfillment of the innate potentialities latent in the human being whose biopsychic energies it brings to a conscious focus.
      At the transpersonal level, the Sun has an ambiguous meaning, because in actual astronomical fact the Sun is not only the source of the power that rules the solar system up to the orbit of Saturn and whose influence to some extent radiates beyond Saturn through the "aura" of the system; it is also one of the billions of stars constituting our galaxy, the Milky Way.(2) The Sun in the chart of an individual on his or her way to a transindividual state should therefore symbolize a factor which links the individual to the transindividual level. Religious philosophers and moralists have spoken of the "God within", Christ Immanuel — and in India, of the jivatma, the incarnated manifestation of the transcendent reality atman. Transpersonally interpreted, the position of the Sun in a birth-chart thus represents the individual quality of the will-to-be-related-to and participate in the activity and consciousness of a greater Whole. Theoretically this greater Whole is the planetary being of Humanity; but when the mind of the individual is as yet unable to deal with the implications of such a vast and global organism, it has to limit its image of the reality of a greater whole to the community or nation in which the individual operates, either by birthright or by individual choice.
      This solar will to be related to a greater whole finds inspiration and sustainment in the Moon. I have already referred to the Moon as the "soul",(3) and said that this soul represents, at least symbolically, an "area" of the total human being which has developed in polar opposition to the will to emerge from the sociocultural collectivity and become an autonomous individual — a will symbolized by the Sun during the process of individualization. This soul-area has — I repeat — remained related to the collective psychism of the culture-whole; it had to do so in order to develop its potential and future function as a complement or balance to the individual character of the increasingly authoritarian and powerful I-center. But while the soul is rooted in the culture (lower collectivity), it also develops the ability to respond to the downflow of energy and inspiration from the higher collectivity — the encompassing field of activity and consciousness of the greater Whole. The soul links the sociocultural collective to the transcendent reality of Humanity-as-a-whole which, in religious terms, is represented by the Mystical Body of Christ.
      If we use the old Chinese terms, the soul is Yin, the individualized I-center, Yang. The soul is the "Eternal Feminine that draws men upwards," as Goethe states at the close of Faust. But if the soul fails in its function, "she" takes the form of the "femme fatale" who draws the individualized "I" down and back to the lower collective, usually by re-energizing the biological drives of the masculine "I", or by compelling him for her sake (and perhaps for the sake of children born of their relationship) to re-become a slave to the power of the culture, the institutionalized religious organization and/or the traditional patterns of society — thus a "normal person" with the average citizen's standardized interests.
      There are cases in which the spiritually ambitious, yet emotionally unready individual craving to "storm the gates of heaven" needs to be made aware of how unready he or she really is. Then the "feminine" soul may be compelled by karma to act as the Temptress (Kundry in Wagner's Parsifal). In this case, she is used by higher powers within the greater Whole to serve as a tester of the men she unwillingly attracts.
      All processes of transition from a lower to a higher level generate what Carl Jung called the Shadow — a fact that Medieval theologians and Occultists expressed by saying that Satan is God inverted. Satan symbolizes an inversion of the transpersonal process — an inversion in most cases engendered by the pride of being able to develop an apparently totally independent, self-motivated individuality. Such a pride-intoxicated I-center eventually destroys the soul-area, and by so doing cuts itself loose from both the lower and the higher collectivity. It eventually becomes a center without a circumference, a mere abstract point, individuality pushed to the extreme in a quasi-absolute repudiation of the desire for relationship. This is the end of the inverted transpersonal process — the end in store for the "black magician". The "white magician", on the other hand, is produced by the "divine Marriage" of the objectively conscious and centered "I" with the soul. This is the higher kind of alchemical Marriage which, as we already saw, must occur in the "presence of God", that is, in a conscious relationship with the greater Whole, Humanity as a spiritual pleroma of beings.


2. Cf. my previously mentioned book. The Sun is Also a Star: The Galactic Dimension of Astrology.  Return

3. Cf. Chapter 5.  Return





By permission of Leyla Rudhyar Hill
Copyright © 1980; by Dane Rudhyar
All Rights Reserved.



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