CHAPTER ONE

1.There has been a considerable upsurge of interest in Astrology in recent years. As the twentieth century man is beginning to find out that his ancestor was not the fool he has been painted, Astrology is again being practiced BECAUSE IT WORKS; but this is only the tip of the iceberg. Astrology conceals a way of life infinitely more sophisticated than the one experienced and found wanting today. Astrology conceals a magical way of life, a life in harmony with the world and the cosmos. The modern use of astrology for the interpretation of an individual’s nativity is and always has been but an offshoot of this royal art. The true purpose of astrology in the great civilisations of the past was to predict the right time for the inception of anything from the building of temples and great cities to the conception of children. Modern astrology is a blurred remnant of a Golden Age whose passing was witnessed by the pharaohs, and yet time has not adulterated its truth nor impoverished its symbolism.

2.The planets, Zodiac and associated symbols reflect the history of mankind. As each new planet or relationship is discovered or rediscovered, a parallel factor in the nature of humanity is isolated. With the discovery of Neptune, Uranus and Pluto came on a reawakening of the transcendental nature in man and woman. With each planet discovered came a new factor. Neptune gave us the mystic defined, and Uranus the magician. With Pluto we have the unity of these two approaches, the Stellar magician.

3.Astrology is magic and magic always has its roots in astrology. Many modern astrologers have attempted to divorce astrology from magic and have tried to align its concepts with more primitive systems such as psychology. The results have been a pathetic mish-mash of great archetypes squeezed like toothpaste through a tube and made into a cheap cosmetic for the edification of the Narrow of thought.

4.Astrology cannot be honed down to fit with any of the trashy disciplines of psychology. Freud’s man is based on sex: Jung’s individuation, Adler’s Power-Complex - none of these are disciplines, they are the ravings of small minds just awakening to the mystery of life from a mechanistic 19th century.

5.No! Astrology when applied to the soul reveals it clear and transparent without the bias of man’s personal ignorance. It needs no props, It does not require hedging about with absurd modernistic half-baked and ill-tested disciplines. It is centuries older than the recorded history of mankind. Astrology stands alone and complete, its signposts indicate a Golden Age of total integrity; it is and always has been the Royal Art, and its practioners should be capable of accepting that it needs not the comfort of fitting in with modern fads and fancies.

6.Astrology conceals the Soul of Man the Soul of Man reveals his physiology and the history of man never transcends his physiology. Any astrologer who can still accept psychology as a valid system is either a liar or a fool. Astrology is the royal road to Truth, if you take it without bias or preconceived notions. If you pass its many tests then you will transcend its archetypes and come to know that mystery of All mysteries - the Will of God.

7.Consider the proposition implied in a complete interpretation of an individual’s natal chart. The astrologer will read therein not only the personal characteristics of the individual, but also those of his parents, his children, his spouse, and his employers; and his relationships with them all. Traumas, accidents, criminal tendencies, home environment, good and bad fortune, changes in the preferred lifestyle are all predictable from a careful study of the nativity.

8. Let us return to the basic principles of astrology and its origins in the dawn of prehistory, and examine in some detail the development of this ancient and most royal art.

9. As a baby will have the life ordained in the moment of birth, so anything begun at a particular time will have the characteristics and destiny of that moment.

10.Everything that lives is a pioneer in time, an explorer in unknown territory.

11.Nobody has existed in this time before.

12.Each individual is exploring time anew.

13.Humanity is born to explore his own particular time-span. It is not like anyone else’s experience. His experience of time will be uniquely his own. Some of the rules of time he will know: puberty, adolescence, adulthood, middle and old age are some of the signposts, but by far the majority of what is going to happen to him will be a mystery.

14.Man has devised many magical systems to try and make life more comprehensible and more understandable. He has attempted to make more and more elaborate maps of the unknown territory of Time. There are systems of divination - I Ching, Tarot, Geomancy, Astrology; all props to the insecurity of the pioneer of Time. Vast fortunes have been made by insurance companies who simply offer to soften the blow of possible future misadventure. Medicine was created to ‘‘keep the vehicle on the road’’ and prolong the journey as long as possible.

15.To the modern man his pioneering through the medium of time consists of careering from one blunder to another. Everything is new to him, there are no parameters as there were of old; religion is dead, modern philosophy is meaningless. Yet amid all this chaos there is a glimmer of meaning, a strange but coherent light from the mists of prehistory.

16.Ancient man was not the fool that modern man is. He had the courage and honesty to face up to the insecurities of life, and he made some attempt to deal with them; not like modern man with his pathetic beliefs in half-baked Holistic ideas, based on nothing more than the fads of multinational conglomerates bent on selling him anything. No, ancient man faced his destiny head on, and by trial and error over many centuries he learned that life was not meaningless. He learned that there was a pattern to be discerned from his pioneering work through Time. He learned to read those dots of light in the sky. He came to understand that there was a relationship between all things celestial and terrestrial: that with the changing position of those lights came parallel changes upon the earth. He began to record the changes in stellar relationships and the parallel events upon the earth, until he had a considerable wealth of data for this primitive stellar science.

17.The first cycle that primitive man noticed was the menstrual cycle of his mate. He noticed that as the Moon moved through the sky, it gave rise to different moods in his woman. Early man was a little short on entertainment at night; apart from the Moon, the Stars and his woman, there was little going on. It was no great feat that he noticed a correlation between the position of the Moon against its background of stars, and the moods of the one most important to him - his woman.

18.His interest would have been aroused by the fact that every time the Moon was in a particular constellation his woman bled. This would have been magical to him. He would have been utterly amazed that this creature could affect the Moon’s position. He would not have made the assumption we do in Astrology, that the Moon’s cycle coincides with the lunar cycle. His assumption would be different: he would link his woman with the Stars and assume some form of relationship. The evidence suggests that human intelligence hasn’t improved much down the centuries.

19.So here we have a man noticing his woman linked in with those mysterious points of light in the sky. In a spirit of scientific interest he decides to see if there is any other relationships between this strange creature who bears his children - already he is in awe of her on that score alone - and lunar and Stellar phenomena. He notices that as the Moon moves through the Zodiac her moods change: he has nothing better to do, so he makes a note of the changes - it’s fascinating. In this vast alien world where nothing seems to relate to anything else, he finds his mate and the Stars playing out a sequence of events he can relate to. To him she has become a clock: she is magical. He begins to realise that after thirteen of these bleeds Spring comes around again; and it dawns on him that the Sun also follows this female cycle except instead of the flow of blood, the leaves fall off the trees and it becomes cold.

20.He begins to see all kinds of relationships between his woman and the whole of nature around him: he concludes that Nature and the Stars must be female.

21.He becomes the wise man of his tribe - after all, he has the edge on them, he can predict when spring is going to be, indeed he knows when all the seasons will occur: he is becoming a very important man indeed. He may not be the strongest man in the tribe, but he is the wisest. His knowledge has given him great stock with his neighbours. He studies his embryo astrology still further, observing and interpreting the appearances and interplay of certain stars which move across the night sky in regular slow patterns; and he teaches his children the Art.

22.From these tentative and tender beginnings the whole Art of Astrology depends.

23.With time our primitive astrologer found that the stars concealed living archetypes or Gods that could be propitiated by the right course of action. He found that by his knowledge of the correspondences between terrestrial and celestial phenomena he could influence and propitiate these celestial entities that ruled men’s lives. The magician was born, the leader of the tribe. This was the man or woman who could read the stars and by sympathetic magic influence and propitiate the Gods that the stars concealed, and thus make the tribe’s passage through time more secure.

24.Make no mistake about it, this magician of old was no con man. He knew what he was doing. He understood the universal character of the experience of Time. Ancient man was not the fool he is today. His life depended upon the directives of his magician King, and if the prognostications that his King made were inaccurate then that King was sacrificed to the Gods and another, more effective magician reigned. If the magician-King was to survive he had to be good!

25.This ancient magician found that different physical substances - such as plants, stones, animals, etc - could act as storehouses for the various astral forces that surrounded him, and thus the art of making talismans was born. He found that if he manufactured a talisman when the stars were propitious his future became more fortunate.

26.In the prehistoric past, the past of pyramids, straight tracks and standing stones, man was civilised - considerably more civilised than he is now. He lived in a harmonious universe, where everything was interrelated by magical ideas and interdependent by necessity. Time was a much more intimate mystery to him; he dealt with it with his magical philosophy. He invoked the Gods to make his future secure.

27.Ancient man’s mode of mentation was nothing like ours. To him, half hallucinated by diet and experience, the world was a much more intimate place. Through vision he understood this curious subtle relationship between things, the intricate web of relationships that has been long lost to modern man.

28.From these early beginnings came the great edifice of Magic that ruled men’s lives for thousands of years. The magical view of life survived not because of the naivety of ancient man but because of his sophistication - anyone who may doubt this should go and try to find the man alive today who can REALLY explain how the pyramids were built. Should an attempt be made to build them today with ‘‘modern methods’’ it would be doomed to failure - such is the celestial and geocentric accuracy of their building.

29.No! Ancient man was no fool: his magic worked, ours does not. The technology that has led modern man down one blind alley after another for three hundred years would not have been

tolerated by his ancestors for five minutes. It leads not to freedom but to slavery. The Gods of old when worshipped showered benefits upon their worshippers. Where technology should provide a healthy society and a healthy individual it has given us a diseased society and a corrupt individual. Ancient man through his magic lived in harmony with the world around him, not at odds with everything as modern man is. This magic that explained our ancestor to himself became a comprehensive and coherent way of life based upon the realities of his experience, not superstition as it is seen today.

30.Ancient man knew that if he did certain things at certain times, results would follow that were consistent with his desires. The ancient pioneer of Time knew that for any project to succeed it must be started at the right time with the right ceremony. It was not enough to choose the right moment, the ceremony also was needed.

31.Let us explain this concept in more detail. Suppose you want to catch a train. The train will be standing at the station at a specific time just as the planets are in aspect at specific times. But to use the train one has to go through the ceremony of buying a ticket, or one will not be allowed on the train. The same is true of Stellar magic: without the ceremony one cannot take advantage of stellar configurations and one must simply remain a victim of them.