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The idea of
Fate can seem like an affront to our self-respect as human beings, to the idea
that we have Free Will, that we make our own choices in life. It can seem like a throw-back to primitive superstition.
And this
polarity is understandable when you look at our religious background with its
all-powerful, all-determining God. We want none of that, and rightly so.
Our destiny
is no longer controlled by God but by ourselves, we have Free Will, and we are
guided by reason.
It’s said
that we become that which we oppose, and in our flight away from God and towards
reason and science, we have created a determinism just as rigid: a universe
governed by immutable physical laws, with human beings as just one more
expression of those laws. And without even the divine element that God, for all
his faults, brought.
But that
determinism tends to be hidden because, at least in the West, in our day-to-day lives we do have the freedom
to choose (up to a point) and to have opinions. We don’t have to be on our guard,
whatever people say about government snooping. Of course, we CAN be brainwashed
by all sorts of factors, and many of us are in different ways, it seems to be
part of how large societies work. But the point is we don’t have to be, we have
the option of thinking and acting independently without being sent to prison or burnt or beheaded.
These sorts
of contradictions fascinate me. And I think they often arise because we think
in rigid, literal, black-and-white terms. Life, hopefully, teaches us not to
think like that. Education should also teach us not to, but I don’t think it
does, generally speaking, because it has its own agenda.
And so Fate
and Free Will can appear as irreconcilable opposites. I don’t think I need to
argue for Free Will, because it is self-evident. Or is it? In one sense it is
self-evident, in that from moment to moment we choose our actions. The devil is in the
word 'choose', and how much of ‘us’ is involved in that choice. We can truly and
genuinely and sincerely think we are acting out of Free Will, and then one day
we realise we’ve been living out a programme we were brought up to live, or
reacting against it, which is sort of the same thing. And the programming may
have been making the choices to a greater extent than the little bit of
consciousness we called our own.
And that is
Fate, a certain kind of Fate, masquerading as Free Will.
So it’s
complicated.
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And often we
wake up to Free Will through crises, which are Fate in a rather different
sense. As an astrologer, one sees this kind of Fate all the time through the
transits of the outer planets to the natal chart. A god enters the scene. He is
wild and bad-mannered and can’t be locked in his room, and a few years down the
line you find you are a different person, maybe aware of the real reasons you’ve
been like you are all these years.
And these
crises are, to a certain extent, predictable. They are writ, they are Fate. It’s
part of the astrologer’s box of magic tricks: so what happened to you around
1992, what major life change did you go through? And out it all comes, usually.
Not always, because astrology isn’t mechanical and people aren’t mechanical.
Or take the financial
crisis, the mother of all meltdowns, that began in 2008. Any half-way literate
astrologer could see that with Uranus coming up to square Pluto at a degree
that significantly impacted the charts of all the major powers, some sort of
big crisis was on the way. And astrologers were in fact talking about it years
in advance.
We’d have
probably all had different ideas as to the nature of this crisis, although
Uranus-Pluto has a way of being economics, so that would have been a reasonable
guess.
So you can
see that the future was both writ and not writ on a collective scale.
It’s mysterious.
What is the chart if not our Fate? But it is not set in stone. It is more like
a set of stories that have their own flavours and lessons and turning points,
and that can even to a great degree be predicted in advance. And these pre-writ
stories are not a denial of our Free Will, but rather contain points at which events
seem to have guided us to the possibility of an accession of Free Will.
The chart is
not literal, it is a divinatory lens. It is objective, in that many astrologers
would accurately see the same sort of meaning in a chart. It is not just a lens
for the astrologer’s personal dialogue with the gods, though it is that as
well, making every reading unique and particular.
Through
feeling and reading the relationship between the earth and the sky, astrology
has over the millennia built a divinatory sea that anyone can tap into, a sea
that points to our origins, in fact to the origins of everything, as lying
behind the apparent material universe. For how else could we possibly know
these things about people and world events from the chart? Certainly not from
any physical cause.
As
Wordsworth says in Intimations of
Immortality:
There was a
time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth,
and every common sight,
To me did
seem
Apparell'd
in celestial light,
The glory
and the freshness of a dream...
Our birth is
but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul
that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had
elsewhere its setting,
And cometh
from afar
So I think
this is the sort of context in which the Fate element in astrology needs to be
seen. Astrology gives us glimpses of the deeper stories behind our life, the
intentions of the gods, if you like, the bigger cosmic picture behind who we
think we are, that Aries has forgotten and that Pisces is privilege to, and that
all the other signs are a progression towards.
Fate in this
sense is not something that can easily be put in rational, logical terms. Even
Free Will cannot very easily be expressed in those terms, not when you view it
as the urge to enlarge consciousness.
We may not
be able to explain Fate, but we ignore it at our peril. The ancient Greeks
understood this well, though human rationality was given more power as time
went on.
The ancient Greeks acknowledged the
role of Fate as a reality outside the individual that shaped and determined
human life. In modern times, the concept of Fate has developed the misty halo
of romantic destiny, but for the ancient Greeks, Fate represented a terrifying,
unstoppable force.
And they
were right. Cataclysmic natural events apart (which nowadays we are largely shielded
from, we forget the raw power of nature), you see the suffering people go through
because they don’t know how to listen to themselves, the self being much larger
than everyday consciousness and often how we have been taught to be. Life
exacts its revenge, or tries to pressure us into submission. You get cancer,
your wife leaves you, your kids disown you, you get fired, you lose your home, anything
you try goes wrong, maybe you even die.
Sometimes a
crow is just a crow, and sometimes it means something. Sometimes these things
just happen. It is a basic mistake to think that outer events always mirror
inner events. No, the whole point is that reading signs is an art, and knowing
when a sign is a sign and when it isn’t, is part of that art, and part of astrology’s
subtlety.
That larger
self is just one way of putting it. It is the gods knocking at the door. It is
life itself and its need to move on. It is the Unconscious trying to further
the process of individuation.
Whatever it
is, it is not necessarily ‘nice’. Astrology in this auguristic sense disrupts
our domestic sanitisations, the habitual and the safe, by revealing the intentions
of the gods.
So the
ancient Greeks understood Fate to be a dark god when resisted. Even, at times,
when not resisted. The concept of Fate brings us closer not to that which is ‘nice’
but to that which is real.
As science
and its ordered universe has progressed and tightened over the last 200 years,
so have the outer planets, reality as uncontrollable Fate, emerged.
Bernadette
Brady, in her book Cosmos,
Chaosmos and Astrology advances the notions of Cosmos and Chaosmos. Cosmos is the
ordered universe. Chaosmos is that aspect of the universe – eg weather systems –
that do not obey the laws of predictable cause and effect and that science has
had to find other ways of describing. Hence Chaos theory, and the Chaosmos, to
which she proposes that astrology essentially belongs.
You
could
say that Free Will belongs to Cosmos and Fate to Chaosmos. Not that it
is a
rigid distinction. And Chaos theory seems to me to contain an inherent
contradiction, in that is attempting to describe in rational terms that
which
defeats rationality. But at least it constitutes some kind of
acknowledgement
by science that there are aspects to reality that will forever be beyond
its
grasp. Quantum reality has similar implications. Chaosmos, however, is
not merely the special case that science can't reduce to an equation: it
is the larger reality within which the very specialised methods of
modern science take their place.
But people
aren’t always interested in philosophy, and why should they be, so these kinds
of implications don’t always filter through. All the same, Fate as that larger
reality beyond human control that needs respecting seems to be implied by both
Chaos Theory and Quantum Theory. And Chaosmos seems a very evocative term for
it, that also has a measure of scientific respectability.
Free Will
can to some extent be explained in rational terms. Scientists can do brain
studies on how we make decisions, for example. Free Will is an idea. But Fate
in its deeper sense of the gods barging through our front door cannot be
explained, merely described and evoked.
In
1996 I
encountered the Norns in a book called ‘The Wisdom of the Wyrd’. They
are 3 women who live in a hall by a well at the foot of Yggdrassil, the
World Tree of
Norse Myth. They take care of Yggdrassil with water from the well and
sand from
around it. They and other Norns determine the destiny of new-born
children.
The
author, Professor
Brian Bates, called the Norns ‘Daughters of the Night’. I knew nothing
about
these figures, yet the imagery stunned me. For weeks afterwards it was
like I was left reeling whenever I thought of these Norns. Even now I
sort of go weak at the knees :)
I
responded
so strongly partly because Germanic/Norse myth is in me and probably in
all
northern Europeans. That is the strange thing about myths: we may not
have
heard them, but we recognise them all the same. The Lord of the Rings
has that sort of quality, and it would, for Tolkien was deeply versed in
European mythology.
And my
response was to an image of Fate. But also more than an image. These ‘images’
(which is what nowadays we reduce them to, like one more defined thing to have
ideas about) are also beings, they are presences that we can experience. I have
that with Pluto. I often feel his presence when I am writing.
 |
| Norns |
And I don’t
think that is just a ‘subjective’ thing. These beings are real, they can be met
and talked to. Yet they are also elusive, they do not just come at our bidding. And that is
how I feel about the Norns. They belong to what Patrick Harpur calls Daimonic Reality.
And if I
were southern European I might well feel the same way about the Moirai, the
Fates, the 3 women who in ancient Greece allotted the Fate of everyone at
birth. They each have a different function: one spins the thread of life onto
her spindle, the other measures it, and the other cuts it: Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos.
 |
| Moirai |
The
Norns
and the Moirai suggest to me that in ancient times Fate was understood
and even feared as
utterly real, yet it was not taken in the literal way that we think
nowadays. For
us, something is only real if it is literal, if it is ‘out there’ in a
solid
way and can be measured. From that point of view, Fate can seem like a
product
of primitive ignorance. The modern perspective can seem to be above and
beyond all that has come before, but I think it is an anomaly, a
peculiarity that will right itself - maybe not for a while yet - because
human nature will inevitably also right itself.
So I think
the Norns and the Moirai, understood in a non-literal way, bring us a long way from Fate as a sort of primitive
determinism, that we moderns with our understanding of the way the universe ‘really’
works can afford to look down on.
I don’t
think the relationship between Fate and Free Will can ever be pinned down. It
is a dichotomy that is there for us to reflect on, to muse on, and in so doing
to reach down below the surface of life and observe consciousness in its
mystery and elusiveness.
(First published here in 2014)
