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ASTROLOGICAL TIMING
The Transition to the New Age
by Dane Rudhyar, 1969



First published under the title
Birth Patterns for
a New Humanity



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CONTENTS

PROLOGUE
    Where Do We Stand Today?

PART ONE
    1. Three Centuries of Crisis
    2. Planetary Cycles
    3. Cycles of Relationship

PART TWO
    4. Stars, Constellations and Signs of the Zodiac
    5. From Buddha to Christ
    6. The Structure of the Piscean Age
    7. At the Gates of the New Age
    8. The Aquarius-Leo Age

PART THREE
    9. The Zodiacal Earth-Field
  10. As We Face the Future
        Page 1
        Page 2
        Page 3
      The March of Civilization
        Page 4
      Wave or Waves?
        Page 5
      The Oceanic Age
        Page 6
        Page 7

EPILOGUE




CHAPTER TEN
As We Face the Future - 4


The March of Civilization
A number of astrologers have done so, believing that one could trace the westward progress of great centers of civilization in terms of the precessional rhythm of one degree every 72 years. If one considers it feasible to project the constellations of the zodiac upon the Earth- globe in a permanent, "fixed" manner, then the signs of the zodiac can be said to progress westward; that is to say, the vernal equinox point is seen to move one degree every 72 years on the surface of the globe, completing the round-the-world trip not in "80 days" but in less than 26,000 years.
      This long round-the-globe advance would be what I once called, in a series of articles in the American Astrology magazine (1946-47) "The March of Civilization". I was careful, however, to point out that we should not think that great historical events, as factors in the rise of civilization, occurred only at the assumed passage of the moving equinox point (the "crest" of the wave of civilization) over a particular zone of longitude, and that, if the location of this moving wave-crest at a particular time did not correspond to a most significant high-point in the evolution of the mind and in the cultural achievements of the people living in that location, then the whole scheme was meaningless, or the given point of departure was obviously wrong.(1)
      The point of departure used by the Pyramid-oriented group of astrologers was and is still the correspondence between the mid-point of the so-called Taurean Age (Taurus 15º) and the longitude of the Great Pyramid (32º08' east longitude). This means that the crest of the wave of civilization would have been passing through the longitude of the Pyramid around 3500 BC. Egyptologists apparently believe that the Pharoah Menes whose reign supposedly began the First Dynasty of the Old Kingdom lived near that time; Memphis is said to have been founded then. If this were the case, however, the wave-crest would have been forty-five degrees west of the Pyramid's longitude in about 360 BC (i. e. 45 times 72 years later), thus at nearly 13º west longitude — which means in the Atlantic Ocean, or leaving the west coast of North Africa. Does it sound logical to make the crest of the wave of civilization leave the westmost land in Europe and enter the ocean when tremendously significant developments were occurring in Greece, and as well in Persia, India and China?
      According to Edward Johndro, Aries 0º is supposed to have corresponded geographically to the meridian of west longitude 29º plus, some thirty years ago, Paul Councel said it corresponded to about west longitude 36º. He wrote that the crest of the wave was reaching the extreme eastern tip of Brazil, adding: "Can it be doubted that this point is the mean geographic and spiritual focus of civilization and world evolution today?" ("Cosmic Causation in Geophysics," page 5). This hardly seems to be a very logical statement, considering where the main centers of civilization are today.
      What I attempted to show in the series of articles written about twenty years ago was simply that there seems to be indeed a westward march of civilization and that the precessional measure of "one degree equals seventy-two years" can be used quite significantly to map out the progress of this westward march.1 What I then suggested was that, on historical grounds, we could significantly assume that the crest of this wave of civilization was passing through the longitude of Greece in the middle of the sixth century BC. I took 550 B. C. as a convenient starting point.
      From 550 BC to 200 BC the Greek culture marked the apex of human progress in the Western world. Then the emphasis began to shift toward Italy. The Rome meridian was reached around 303 AD , just before the reign of Constantine the Great who made of Christianity the imperial religion. As the Roman empire disintegrated, the spotlight kept moving westward and northward, and when Charlemagne's rule began the cycle of our Christian-European culture, the wave-crest had reached the Rhine, and the capital of Charlemagne's empire Aachen (6º east longitude). It reached the meridian of Paris about the time of the first Crusade (eleventh century), whose leaders were mostly noblemen from the Paris and Normandy region. This was the great age of Medieval France.
      The wave-crest came to the Greenwich meridian around 1177 AD, near the time of the beginnings of the Oxford University and the Magna Charta (1215), foundation for the English brand of democracy. As England grew in power, the wave-crest moved westward, crossed Ireland after 1600 AD and it left the western most coast of Ireland (10 1/2º longitude) in 1933, the very year Hitler came to power in Germany, and F. D. Roosevelt in America — and suddenly the spotlight of history seemed to turn to the East coast of the United States.
      If we go back from the sixth century BC we see that the westward moving vernal equinox point (the crest of the wave) reached the shores of Egypt on the Red Sea at about the time of the great religious reformer Akhnaton (eastern longitude 35 1/2º); as this Pharaoh might be called the father of Western monotheism, this correlation may mark the beginning of this part of the Egyptian past which belongs truly to our Western civilization. Before that time, the wave-crest moved through Mesopotamia (longitude 44º-45º) at the time of Hammurabi in Babylon; and it was located at the Indus Valley around 3800-4000 BC which was presumably the period during which an important culture developed, whose ruins were discovered not so long ago. Earlier than this no dates are really reliable.


1. A westward motion is also found on a much smaller scale in the growth of cities, at least in our historical period. Cities, and especially their residential sections for the "elite," tend to develop westward, unless blocked by natural obstacles.  Return





By permission of Leyla Rudhyar Hill
Copyright © 1969 by Dane Rudhyar
and Copyright © 2001 by Leyla Rudhyar Hill
All Rights Reserved.



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