THE FOLLOWING IS COPYWRITTEN MATERIAL
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This is Part 8 of an 8-Part Series
Previous posts in this series include:
In the Face of Glacially Slow Paradigm Shifts
In the Face of Cultural Inertia
Within the Astrological Community
Against the Astrological Community
Tracking the Soul Armed With An Astrology of Consciousness
Tracking the Soul Astropoetically
Tracing Astrological Symbolism to Its Source in Astronomy
The Mythological Dimensions of Astrological Symbolism
A second source of astrological symbolism can be found in mythology, as for example, through the association of Mars with the Roman god for whom it is named and its Greek counterpart Ares, as well as warrior gods of mythological traditions around the world. Again, this source of symbolism is a trigger to the poetic imagination in ways that inform and illuminate the appearance of Mars in both astrological scenarios and the life experiences to which they refer. This association of astrological planet and myth often underscores our experience, even when we don’t have any conscious awareness of it – which in and of itself is a remarkable confirmation of its validity.
The last time that the planet Mars crossed my Midheaven (the highest point in my chart), for example, I wrote a poem called “The Last Hurrah,” in which I described the heroic scaling of a wall – a feat that could be seen as one of many possible astropoetic depictions of Mars:
The last hurrah
echoed against the stone wall of the courtyard
like cuckoo burros in a canyon.
a touch of mocking laughter,
a hint of malice,
a cockeyed warble
in the otherwise stoic stillness
of time
ticking
breathing
trying to take it all in
failing
being born again
on a slow climb toward a distant horizon
obscured by mental graffiti
on a wall begging to be scaled,
a wall familiar
a wall on the far shore of memory.
so up the wall and over
into a field of cheering minions,
the ancestors gathered round
craning their necks to see
their grandsons and grand-daughters
conquering heroes one and all,
fall into the gaping bottomless mouth
of the last hurrah.
Unbeknowst to me when I wrote it, this poem happened to describe very well the battle of Thebes, where the Greek hero Capaneus, notorious for his arrogance, was the only one of the seven warriors storming Thebes that made it to the top of the wall. As he stood on the wall, he boasted loudly that Zeus himself could not stop him from invading the city. Zeus promptly struck and killed Capaneus with a thunderbolt. At the time I wrote my poem, Mars (represented by Capaneus in the myth) was 8° from an exact applying square to Jupiter (the Roman counterpart to Zeus) – suggestive of this bond, born of conflict, between the two characters in the Greek story.
In the story, Capaneus was one of a band of seven warriors storming Thebes, each with his own powers and strengths. In the end, the attack failed because, except for Capaneus, the seven warriors wound up killing each other. This was prophesized by Tiresias, who saw the battle as the vengeance of Ares for the death of his serpent – the guardian of the sacred well – by those who founded the City. The ultimate salvation of the city and the defeat of the Seven of Thebes was the result of the self-sacrifice of Menoeceus, one of the descendants of the city founders. Thus the entire story – documented by the Greek playwright Aeschylus in his tragedy Seven Against Thebes – is an astropoetic depiction of a Martian moment of both triumph and appeasement of anger, culminating in the scaling of a wall – an image that appeared in my poem as Mars was scaling the wall (the meridian) of my chart.
But the story does not end here, for about a month later, just as transiting Mars was squaring my own natal Jupiter, I experienced an astropoetic depiction of this same mythological scaling of the wall of Thebes. At an annual meeting of the land cooperative where I live – which could be understood as analogous to Thebes – two burly loggers, one especially arrogant and Capaneus-like – presented their case for logging in the wake of storm damage. Although many cooperative members were opposed, there was enough support within the community to give a confused go-ahead, and over the course of the next two years (a full Mars cycle), the forest in which we live came under siege of our local version of the Seven (Martian chainsaw warriors).
Although I was aware of my transits, both when writing my poem and during the annual meeting of the land cooperative, I had no conscious knowledge of the existence of Capaneus or the Seven of Thebes before I considered this example to illustrate the role of mythology in underscoring astrological symbolism. The fact that what happened in my life in reflection of the movement of planets with these mythological overtones, beyond the reach of my conscious mind, suggests that these mythological and astronomical roots to which they are related, have archetypal origins that precede the symbolism. It is to dive to the bottom of the well of these a priori archetypal sources, that I am writing The Astropoetic Series.
I will discuss the astronomical roots of astrological symbolism in Volume Three of The Astropoetic Series, and the mythological roots in Volume Four. In Volume Two, Parts One and Two, my focus is a less obvious, but more fundamental basis, not only for astrological symbolism, but also for the astronomy and the mythology from which it is derived – the archetypal power of numbers.
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