Astrology, Death and Human Sacrifice

Just watched the series Vikings on DVD. It’s drama, not documentary, about the semi-historical, legendary figure Ragnar Lothbrok. And at one point 9 men are sacrificed to Odin in the temple at Uppsala. They go willingly, and after their throats are cut they are hung upside down from an ash tree in the way that Odin was hung upside down from the world ash Ygdrassil in his search for wisdom:

“I hung from that windswept tree, hung there for nine long nights; I was pierced with a spear. I was an offering to Odin, myself to myself. No one came to comfort me with bread, no one revived me with drink from a horn…Then I began to thrive, my wisdom grew; I prospered and was fruitful…”

I never thought I’d find myself defending human sacrifice – it’s not exactly politically correct – but this event, at least the way it was portrayed, had archetypal power for all concerned. For the Vikings the afterlife was real. If you died as a warrior, for example, then Odin would take you to his hall where every day you would go out on to the plains to fight, you would be killed, and Odin would raise you up again for a night of feasting and drinking.

Well, Odin took half the battle slain, and the goddess Freya took the other half to her fields, and those who died a dishonourable death went to Hel. And as myth, there are plenty of loose ends.

Maybe it depends how you view death. But if death has this sort of myth behind it, who is to say that it is better to live than to die, why not be part of a religious sacrifice for the sake of your people?

Of course, the spectre of Islamic suicide bombers immediately raises its head, with the prospect of all those virgins waiting for them in paradise.

So human sacrifice is not a simple issue, and I think a major factor is the degree of brainwashing involved and the degree of narrow literalism behind the way the myth is taken, so that only your race or religion are saved.

All the same, the reason I am defending it was because I could feel the archetypal power behind the event, the sense of the forces of a greater reality being invoked. Maybe I’m just a sucker for Norse mythology.

And then I thought well which is better, having this sort of myth around death, or the nihilistic bleatings of the existential psychotherapist Irviv Yalom, that death is an extinction, and you’d better believe it, because any other view is a false comfort? And that there is no meaning in the universe apart from what we artificially add on? And he gets his poor patients to think like that as though these are ‘facts’ they need to come to terms with, rather than just his own prejudices.

No, it’s a puny way to live and die. Humans need great myths to live and die by, it is the way we are built. We are diminished as people without such myths, myths that are real without being hard ‘facts’, the curse of our Gemini Age, facts without meaning, lacking the the opposite sign of Sagittarius.

[We live in a Gemini Age because that is the sign in which the last conjunction of Neptune and Pluto took place around 1890; and the conjunction 500 years before that. The Spectre of Facticity, largely through the medium of science, has been pursuing us for a long time now.]

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So what myths around death does astrology have? First of all, anything around astrology is myth, rather than fact. The planets as gods, influenced by starry constellations, telling us stories about our lives down here. How could that ever be ‘fact’? But to the degree to which that sort of cosmology has imaginative power for us, to that degree it will tell us things that are real, far more than mere facts ever could.

This is an important point. Truth is an imaginative act, and there can only be a small degree of truth in anything that does not have imaginative appeal, that does not infuse the universe with meaning. And when a collective has a common set of myths, such as those of the astrological community, then I think those myths gain power almost as entities in themselves. So in some sense your mythology is “what does it for you”, but it needs to be more than that if it is to have much power, it needs to come from a deeper, collective source that will therefore also appeal to others.

I don’t think astrology does have a set of explicit myths about what happens when you die, which is why it can be used as an ‘add-on’ to say Christianity or Buddhism. But I think there are implied myths through the fact that the planets are named after the Greek and Roman gods, and astrology derives its power from that, whether or not we have reduced the planets to a set of principles and keywords. They are there lurking in the background, and it is interesting that by transit ALL the planets from Jupiter outwards can be involved in death one way or another. Jupiter because he takes us up to the realm of the gods when we die; Saturn and Pluto because they ARE death; Uranus and Neptune because they can represent that life-changing disruption or dissolution respectively with which death can appear. The inner planets may be the trigger for death, but the outer planets ARE the death that the inner planets are triggering.

If you are an astrologer then you are living mythologically, so it would not make sense to have a non-mythological view of death. That said, I think there also needs to be room for the idea that actually we don’t know what happens after we die, there is an honesty to that if we live in modern times. And therefore a dishonesty to insist in a literal way on any particular mythology, including the materialist myth of extinction.

And let’s face it, some of us KNOW that life continues in some form after death, we have experiences of people after they die. They turn up, and it feels good, it feels right, even though we don’t probably know what happens to them next, but that doesn’t matter, it’s unknowable anyway because it’s happening outside of time and space and form, which are just temporary constructs that we use.

But back to the mythology of death and astrology, what we do have is Mercury taking dead souls to the Underworld where Pluto takes them in, once you’ve paid Charon’s fare across the river Styx. And that’s why I want to be buried with a coin in my mouth, in honour of that mythology, because Pluto turns up regularly for me and these sort of things continue after death. And I’m quite happy to have these 2 different things going on strongly: that I don’t know what will happen when I die, but I can trust it because life has taught me to trust whatever major stage comes next, and why should death be different?; and that I need a coin in my mouth to get to Pluto’s realm. I don’t need to add it all up logically, logic gets left far behind once you’re dead. Or thinking mythologically, something many people have forgotten how to do.

And when I say Pluto is mythological, I don’t mean any less real than ‘factual’ reality. Myth means a story about a divine being, and you can experience these beings, they really are there, and they are powerful.

So if you’re an astrologer, it’s worth thinking about how you feel about death in the light of Greek mythology, because you are plugged into that mythology, though not necessarily exclusively. And some parts of those mythologies are more primal, more archetypal then others, like descending to the Underworld and being taken there by Mercury; while other bits, like the description of the Underworld, with its different places such as Tartarus and the Elysian fields are more culture specific and less universally archetypal, and therefore I think we can put them to one side if we wish.

The Geography of the Underworld Part 4

You can find the 1^st 3 parts of this blog here, here and here.

But let’s move out of the ‘psychological’ in the sense of a purely inner experience. I don’t think Pluto and the Underworld can be fully understood in those terms, for Pluto is a god and the Underworld is a place, and the natural way to understand them therefore is as ‘outer’ rather than ‘inner’. And as I said at the start, let us not separate those 2 categories too rigidly. It is an artificial distinction that is necessary for everyday life.

Under a major Pluto transit (or Neptune for that matter) it can be as though our soul has gone elsewhere. We can say it has withdrawn deep within, or we can say it has gone somewhere else. We are probably the only society that has ever existed that has a predominant belief that material reality is the only reality, with all the rigidity around space and time that comes with that. For such a mind-set, our personality is confined to and identical with the physical limits of the body. I suspect that not many of my readers believe that. Well, you can’t believe that if you are an astrologer, our art is based on the synchronicities between inner and outer. Reality is subtle and without set boundaries. When I write about him, Pluto often turns up as a presence behind my shoulder. That experience is just as real as the desk I am sitting at.

So under a Pluto transit our soul is called to another place, to the Underworld, that is somewhat like the Greek one. It is ‘over there’ in some subtle reality, in the Otherworld, if you like. A world in which a few of us almost seem to dwell full-time, or at least be aware of all the time as an ongoing part of who we are, as in a way more real than the very solid material world around us.

And there are powers in that place, there are gods which as astrologers we identify as the Greek/Roman gods. And we are ‘called’ there, or even forced there kicking and screaming, under a major Pluto transit. We ‘have’ to go there, and if we have sense we do so willingly, albeit with teeth gritted and fingers crossed. And a coin in our mouth!

It is our Fate. A narrow notion of an all-powerful ‘free-will’ is absurd beside this psychic reality. And Fate seems to have a much better idea of where our life needs to go than does our Free will, particularly at times of major change.

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And that change is not necessarily rooted in the need for personal, psychological change. It may be just one of those things that life throws at us because that is what life does. Everyone dies, everyone goes to Hades, and that is associated with the 5 rivers of pain. Even if we are psychologically well-balanced and living according to what our vocation demands, what the gods want of us, painful events can still occur under Pluto transits. Close relatives die, we lose our health and so on. Those outer events may have inner correspondences, or they may not: it is part of the astrologer’s art – or the readers of omens – to be able to tell.

The Three Fates

I think this idea of the gods – of Pluto and his Underworld – as a kind of Fate that informs our lives, connects us to a qualitatively different way of living, that free will alone cannot provide. Fate not just as material laws like physical death, but as any event that has a synchronous quality. And since Fate, in the sense of the mysterious purposes of the gods, is much bigger than our personal free will, it makes sense to view our lives more as being directed by the gods than by ourselves. Or by the Unconscious, or just by Life itself.

The astrological chart is a map of the claims, sometimes harmonious and sometimes conflicting, that the gods make on us individually: the chart reveals how unique we are, at the same time as revealing our Fate. Wisdom is the awareness of those claims, and the ability to respond to them, and in a way the ability not to question them, to know that the wider purposes involved are beyond one individual’s understanding.

As a kind of sop to rationalism, astrologers can be eager to deny that the planets cause events; rather, we sometimes say, they are a synchronous reflection of events in our lives and in the world. But I think this does not do justice to Fate. Neptune caused the storms that obstructed Odysseus on his journey home. This seems clear from the Odyssey. 

Odysseus clings to a raft in an ocean storm.

The planets/gods are more powerful forces in our lives than is our individual will, so it is more true to say the planets cause events than it is to say that we do! Of course we need not to be rigid about this, but at least let us not allow our philosophy of astrology to be determined by modern notions of rationality -  a term which originally meant proportionate, as in ‘ratio’, rather than dryly logical and ‘scientific’.

So I think this kind of Fate vs Free Will perspective is needed to have a productive relationship with Pluto and the Underworld. The Underworld is life itself, it is a kind of ever-present nourishment that we can feel if we are connected to it: it provides the power to live our life as it is right now, and it provides the power to change it when the time comes. And that power has its own purposes, that also involves the creative spark of Uranus and the continuous re-imagining of life and the universe that is Neptune.

The Geography of the Underworld: Part 3 of 4

You can find the first 2 parts of this blog here and here.

River Styx, Kentucky

Finally, there are the rivers of Hades – Styx, Acheron, Lethe, Phlegethon and Cocytus – associated with hatred, pain, oblivion, fire and wailing respectively. The rivers appear in both this world and the Underworld.

“Their names were meant to reflect the emotions associated with death” (Wiki). Presumably that means the emotions associated with dying rather than being dead, for otherwise there wouldn’t be the Elysian Fields. Psychologically, they partly seem to describe the painful emotions associated with a Pluto transit that is being resisted – and that is often an unconscious thing. It even happens to us good guys who think we are up for change (ha ha! Pluto soon shows us where we are not.)

And the rivers are also unacknowledged pain that gets dredged up by Pluto. Rivers of pain: that is the metaphor that the Greek Underworld presents us with. Rivers that flow through us, and we need to go with them downstream to the ocean, to the bigger identity that Pluto is pushing for. Pluto is never just helping us sort our psychological difficulties in a narrow sense. There is always a bigger agenda, a new perspective on ourselves and on existence that is the real meaning of the transit. The Underworld is the place from which we move on to the next stage of life, and our psychological difficulties are a gateway to that. They are like fissures under the earth, represented by Pluto’s brother Chiron, through which the molten lava of the outer planets, of life, can break through. Their father Saturn is the guy who has the responsibility for giving shape to the results of all this seismic activity. In this way Saturn and Chiron are each in their own way bridges to the outer planets, as their places in the solar system, on the borders between the inner and outer planets, suggest.

Rodin: The Three Shades

Hatred, pain, oblivion, fire and wailing. A graphic quintet of suffering through which we pass into the Underworld. Oblivion is the forgetting of our previous earthly existence that occurs when we drink from the river Lethe, a requirement for the shades who have entered the Underworld. “Shades”: that is, in a sense, what we can become under a life changing transit, at least for a while. We may go through the motions of day-to-day existence, but our energy has been taken elsewhere for transformation. That is what I often suggest people try to tune into at these difficult times when ‘normal’ life no longer seems to work. It is as though the energy has all gone into a crucible deep within us, and if you can tune into that, you’ll see that life is there just as strongly as it was before, but in a different form, a natural form that we are not used to, but which constitutes winter in the myth of Persephone. Like the bulb of a tulip or daffodil, or the chrysalis of a butterfly.

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And the Oblivion, the Forgetting, is part of this. You may notice, as a Pluto transit begins, that some activity that was very important to you starts to lose its appeal. The energy and interest that were there have leached away, almost without you noticing. This can be very painful if, for example, your sense of who you are, or your livelihood, or your marriage, are involved. But the ‘old you’ has gone, you have forgotten him/her. And this is necessary in order for the new eventually to be born.

Gustave Dore: Matelda immerses Dante in Lethe

This is always an interesting period – when we are a Shade – because we often can’t define ourselves in the usual way. The standard props that make us ‘normal’ – career, marriage, earnings, reputation – may fall away, and in a way we are dead to the world. So how do we define ourselves in this period, how do we value ourselves when we have nothing to show? Pluto humbles us, and we have to look within for a source of value. He is the destroyer of Saturn the worldly taskmaster, who says you are only what you earn, your social standing, that which can be measured. Painful as it is, we can emerge from the Underworld with a looser and more open sense of who we are, with less of a need to define ourselves, and more open therefore to the outer planets, to the gods.

The Pluto transit can also reveal a forgetting. For whatever reason – self-doubt, perceived expectations of others, lack of courage, unbalanced sense of values – Pluto’s riches, our gifts and talents, can be put to one side, dismissed as nugatory. This can go on right through life. And it seems to apply particularly to talents that are very particular and personal to us, for which there are no recognised certificates to re-assure us that we are indeed competent. You and you alone have to be the judge of that, you have to find a confidence that is independent of others. And I get this issue regularly in readings, for it is often a stopping point for people, they can go no further unless they go through the fires of self-doubt, which may last for years: that sort of fire almost seems to be part of the initiation into one’s own gifts. And into one’s individuality, another of Pluto’s gifts: that which makes us distinct from the collective, which pursued far enough makes us distinguished, like the beings in the Elysian Fields.

Gold Mine

So in this sense the function of the transit is to get us to remember that which we have forgotten. Not usually entirely forgotten: sometimes it is like a niggle that we have put to one side, maybe for years or decades, that can seem like a small part of us. But then that niggle turns out to be something much bigger than we ever thought under a Pluto transit. All we saw was Chiron, the fissure, and not the molten Plutonian lava underneath. And this ignoring can be a like a deep pain that we are sometimes aware of, Tartarus, repressed aspects of ourselves; and the river out of Tartarus is Phlegethon, the river of fire that we may need to go through in claiming our gifts.

There can be a make-or-break quality to this encounter with Tartarus. In the words of saying No 70 of the Gospel of St Thomas: "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." 

The Geography of the Underworld: Part 2

You can find my first blog on the Underworld here.

I began this series with the idea that with astronomers naming Pluto’s Moons after different Underworld figures, maybe it is time to take a look at the structure of the Underworld, to understand its complexity.

It is easy to have a vague idea of the Underworld as a slightly dark place where we are dismembered and put back together under Pluto (and other) transits, and leave it at that. And it works. But maybe that’s not enough.

At the same time, the Greek Mythology is only of limited help. The planets are named after Greek/Roman gods, but when you look into the stories behind them, there is not necessarily a lot there to go on. There is virtually nothing in Greek mythology, for example, about the Moon, certainly not in our modern-day astrological understanding of her. Or Neptune – what there is about him bears very little resemblance to the astrological Neptune.

And philosophically, as I said earlier, our notion of Pluto is taking us away from a notion of progress in consciousness that involves a 'liberation' from the body.

So I’m not quite sure where that leaves us. But it does in a way free us from the past. It is important to know the past, but we are not bound by it. At the same time, we need myths – what else is astrology but the intersection between timeless stories and personal lives? – and I think we can feel free to draw on whatever myths, from any part of the world, that illuminate our astrological symbols. We can look, for example, to the Norse tradition in which Odin hung himself upside down from the world tree without food or water for 9 days in order to gain wisdom. That seems to have elements of both Pluto and Neptune transits.

I like to think of astrology as I like I think of all spiritual traditions, as a hodge-podge that has built up over the centuries, containing both gold and dross, even though we may sometimes feel tempted to search for some kind of pure origin or solid foundation.

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So while Greek Mythology may be a good starting point for our modern understanding of the Underworld, I don’t think we should assume it will be sufficient. At the same time, there is some quite good stuff there. The Underworld is structured, it has geography. There are 5 rivers associated with it, as well as Tartarus, the Fields of Punishment, the Asphodel Meadows, the Elysian Fields and the Isles of the Blessed.

And there are various figures associated with the Underworld: Pluto/Hades, of course, who is King; his wife Persephone; the Erinyes, Hermes, Minos, Charon and Kerberos. The Hydra guarded an undersea entrance to the Underworld and Nix (the other Moon) is not strictly Underworld either, but she is the mother of Charon, is the goddess of darkness and night and was there near the beginning of creation. So I think we have to give her honorary membership!

I’m not going to attempt an exhaustive correspondence between the Greek Underworld, and what we understand of Pluto/Scorpio astrologically. But we can draw quite a lot from a consideration of the figures and geography.

The Figures in the Underworld

First of all, there is the myth of the abduction of Persephone, which is one of the myths that every astrologer knows, along with the story of Chiron. Persephone was the daughter of Demeter, a nature goddess, and Pluto abducted her into his Underworld, raped her (in some accounts) and married her. Demeter spent ages looking for her and in her despair the world turned to winter. Eventually she found her, but Pluto would only let her back for 6 months of the year, which is summer, while the 6 months of winter, when Demeter mourns, is when her daughter is back with her husband.

So there is a big theme here, almost like the Fall from primordial innocence of both Demeter and Persephone, that at the same time allows life to change, to progress. Persephone grows up, she becomes a wife, and it happens by force – life has to move on, and if we don’t want to, well it will happen anyway. It’s not really force, it is just natural progression – it is just experienced as such when we resist it. And through this Fall also comes the seasons – the continual death and renewal that is life, and you can’t have one without the other. Every stage of life, however well-balanced and stable and happy, eventually tips over into a new stage, and for that to happen the old has to go. And there may be a bleak winter stage that is more appearance than reality, for life is continuing in another form: it has withdrawn into the trunk and roots where it is being re-imagined, re-dreamed. And the astrologer’s job when someone is undergoing a major Pluto transit is often to point this out, to encourage them to tune in to the inner alchemy that is occurring outside of conscious control.

People with a strongly Plutonian/Scorpionic chart experience this Underworld continually, for them it is not a separate part of life like a hospital, it is an integral part of things: Plutonians are always tuned in to this more basic, survival, life-as-it-is aspect, they are not persuaded out of it by mere ideas and social norms.

Even then they may have to start off by learning this about themselves. For someone unused to it, a major Pluto transit can be a traumatic experience.

And part of this is the initial death, the loss of home or health or relatives or career – all these can be Pluto’s work. This can be the price we have to pay to enter his transforming world; this is the coin we give to the ferryman Charon. There is always a price.

And Hermes/Mercury may have brought us to the gates of the Underworld in the first place. He is the messenger of the gods: Pluto has called us, and Hermes persuades us to come. He may even trick us into coming. I had a dream in 1996 telling me what to do next with my life, so I did it, and quite quickly it all became successful yet very painful and conflicted and my whole life changed, I started over.

Cerberus or Kerberos is the 3-headed hell hound whose job is to let the dead into the Underworld, but not to let them out again. And it is indeed like this once you’re in your Pluto transit: you try and carry on as before, and it won’t work. In 1994, as Pluto was squaring my Sun, I kept trying to get up and do things, and everything turned to pain and poo. That was Kerberos. It was only when I gave up (to some extent) identifying myself with how much I did that things were able to come right, and then I had the 1996 dream!

The Places in the Underworld.

Tartarus “is described as being as far beneath Hades as the earth is beneath the sky. It is so dark that the "night is poured around it in three rows like a collar round the neck, while above it grow the roots of the earth and of the unharvested sea." (Wiki)

I think Tartarus represents deeply repressed aspects of ourselves. That repression is painful. The usual reaction, which is unconscious, is to find ways to avoid that pain. Alcohol and drugs, victimising others, health issues, keeping busy. A Pluto transit, if we’re prepared to be aware, brings us to the point where all those diverting strategies are gone, they are dead, taken away from us, and we are just left with the pain that we probably don’t understand.

There is no redemption in the Greek Underworld, once you are there that is it, and the other place of suffering, the Fields of Punishment, doesn’t seem any better than Tartarus. (Tartarus, however, with its sheer depth beneath Hades, best symbolises repression.)

So at this point, where we begin to emerge renewed from the Pluto transit, I think we need to leave the Greek mythology behind, though of course the story of Persephone tells us a certain amount, and in a kind of way, the Elysian Fields.

The Underworld is not just a place of suffering. The Elysian Fields are for those who have distinguished themselves. “Usually, those who had proximity to the gods were granted admission, rather than those who were especially righteous or had ethical merit.” (Wiki)

And a Pluto transit is by no means just about dismemberment and suffering (suffering which has often been there all along, but which we have been unconsciously avoiding.) You see some people going from strength to strength under these transits, it is not a deep internal journey. And some seem able to put up with the difficulty and suffering that comes along in the form of external events and then carry on as before.

And you also see that while on the one hand some people are feeling dismembered (Tartarus), they are also experiencing an accession of their gifts and talents (Elysian Fields). The gifts that are central to you, but which maybe you and the world haven’t sufficiently valued, classically come to the fore during a Pluto transit. In a way, that is what the transit is about: a purging of the old personality to make  way for a more authentic self, and the gifts that come with it, whose time has come.

The Elysian Fields are for those who have had proximity to the gods, rather than ‘good’ people. This says a lot about the process of life changing and moving on. It happens not by being a ‘good’ person and following the social and religious rules you were born into, though that may get you worldly rewards. It is about sensing what the gods want of you and having the courage to act on that. It is about doing what you ‘have’ to do.

It is about finding that level in yourself, that is often revealed by Pluto transits, that is a new type of identity: not the easy, unconscious one formed by aligning oneself with social norms and expectations, but something that is purely within you – the Self, the Dreambody, whatever you want to call it, perhaps it’s best not to call it anything.

That is what Pluto is really trying to do when he takes us to his Underworld, because that is what Life is trying to do. It is that something, that solid, alive, creative foundation within, that knows how to live, knows the answers, and in a way our only task is to be loyal to that, which is also being loyal to the gods and to Pluto.

This is where distinction and the Elysian Fields lie. For ordinary mortals we have the Asphodel Meadows, whose descriptions vary, but in the Odyssey its inhabitants “flit like shadows” and have lost the power of independent thought – but did they truly have it in life?

There is no redemption or transformation within the Greek Underworld, but there is a kind of parallel to the emergence from a Pluto transit, strengthened and renewed, in that those who enter the Elysian Fields have a choice to either stay there or be reborn. If a soul was re-born 3 times and achieved Elysium each time, then he/she could enter the Isles of the Blessed, and eternal paradise.

So emergence from a Pluto transit is a bit like being re-born from the Elysian Fields, which is for those who have lived close to the gods. You have been touched and changed by a god, and you come back to your life again, but renewed and on a different inner basis.