Cherie Blair versus the National Secular Society

Cherie Blair, the barrister wife of Tony Blair, has come under fire from the National Secular Society. Sitting as a judge in a case where one Muslim broke another’s jaw in a fight over a place in a bank queue, she decided to suspend the man’s sentence because he was a religious person and had not been in trouble before. She added: "You are a religious man and you know this is not acceptable behaviour."

The National Secular Society has complained to the Office for Judicial Complaints that her attitude was discriminatory and unjust, and suggests she might have treated a non-religious person less leniently.

I fully agree. Cherie Blair should not be let away with this. No doubt in her own head she is being liberal and open-minded, because the guy is a Muslim, whereas she is a Catholic. But actually she is putting religious people above those who are not, and this is prejudice and intolerance. (Maybe also it's a case of 'Nice Lion', the Blairs being a prime target for muslim extremists).

If anything, I would argue the case the other way around: many people take to religion because they can't handle living in an uncertain universe. With the false certainty that religion provides comes a sense of rightness and superiority that can be used to justify unethical actions. So if I were in Cherie Blair’s position, I would be asking how much this guy’s religion justified the violence that occurred when the other person ‘sinned’ by shoving in front of him in the queue.

Christianity and Islam both have a long history of righteous violence. The recent/current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are a testament to this. In the case of Christianity, there is on the one hand the teaching of Christ, but there is the Old Testament as well, which Islam also accepts, with its eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth teaching.

So I find it ridiculous that Cherie Blair should raise religious people above secular people in this way. Islam, I guess, is her enemy’s enemy (secularism), so for now it is her friend.


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I don’t know much about what Cherie Blair is like, but her chart reveals a Virgo Sun and Leo Rising and Moon. The Virgo Sun gives her the analytical, flexible mind that a lawyer needs, and the Leo gives her the ability to perform that a barrister needs (her father was an actor). Pluto squared her Sun in the last few years, and part of the meaning of this must surely have been the more independent identity that was possible when her husband stepped down from being Prime Minister.

Jupiter is near the Ascendant (also square to Mercury and Neptune), and this gives her religion, but with Uranus also there, I am surprised her religion is so conventional. What I have noticed with the 1955 Jupiter-Uranus bunch is that while on the one hand they are often forward thinking, they also tend towards fanaticism and intolerance – a bit like Aquarians, who are Uranus-ruled. If you mix this in with the sense of rightness that a double fire sign gives, as well as the conservatism of Leo, then I think you have Cherie Blair. She also has a liberalism (Jupiter-Uranus) to her – she is, after all, the wife of an ex-Labour PM, and is famous for saying in reference to Palestinian suicide bombers: "As long as young people feel they have no hope but to blow themselves up, we're never going to make progress, are we?"

Pluto is squaring, and Saturn opposing, her MC this year, so I would expect her career to move forward significantly. She’ll probably be appointed as a full-time judge.

George Bush and my Neptune-Sun Transit

Last night I dreamed I was in a boat at night that capsized, and we were all left swimming in arctic waters. I knew I was going to die. After a while, I hit land off the coast of Norway. I was able to guide everyone else to safety too.

I think that is about right for the end of my Neptune-Sun transit (which has also coincided with my time on the astroblogosphere). With Neptune-Sun it can be like the light has gone out (night-time) and there is no solid ground underneath you. So we’ll see what happens. Pluto conjoining my one personal earth planet – Mars – will no doubt be implicated.

I’m reading American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld. It’s a fictionalised account of the lives of George and Laura Bush in the form of Charlie and Alice Blackwell. It’s a very good dissection of 2 incompatible characters, though how much they correspond to George and Laura is hard to say. It’s written in the 1st person, from Alice’s point of view. She is given the birthday of 6th April 1942, which doesn’t suit the character. Laura Bush’s birthday of 4th Nov 1946, though, works excellently for the Alice character. Sun in Scorpio trine Moon in Pisces: quiet, insightful, truthful, compassionate. Also a bit of a goody-goody and uptight.

It’s interesting that the rich people behave in exactly the same tedious, superior way that moneyed people in England do. I’ve only got to the point where Charlie/George buys his baseball team, but he is obsessed with his ‘legacy’, which Laura cannot understand. As she puts it, some men ‘panic’ about it, which sounds about right. I know glimpses of the feeling from the middle of the night, when I am briefly appalled at my lack of ‘legacy’. Then I return to my senses! It’s just another brainwashing that stops you actually living, and it’s the curse of ‘successful’ families. I’ve spent 30 years undoing this one, and the more I do so, the more I feel I’m connected to life. It’s a Saturn thing – I have Moon conjunct – which gives the ability to apply yourself over a long period and to become good at something. But it also curses you by reducing your self-respect to what you are good at, what you have to ‘show for yourself’, instead of self-respect as a natural part of being human.

A life on this planet is a very short, ephemeral thing in the grand scheme, in the vast stretches of time that have been and will be. It isn’t important enough to get so serious about a ‘legacy’ or an ‘achievement’ or about anything. Your legacy will be forgotten within a short time anyway, apart from as a measuring stick for your children and grandchildren to feel inadequate by! (It’s part of the 8th House of inheritance.) We’re only here very temporarily, so trying to create something solid and lasting is delusional. And it gets in the way of that wonderful, rich, charmed experience that day-to-day living can provide, if we’re not trying to improve on it!

Also spoken like someone at the end of a Neptune-Sun transit.

Jupiter-Uranus and the 2010 Scientific Breakthroughs

I’ve been noticing that both the macrocosmic and microcosmic scientific worlds are abuzz with the excitement of impending discoveries. This is an unusual situation, because discoveries don’t usually happen that way. For example, you don’t know in advance that you’re going to find new remains that reveal more about human ancestry, or a cure for cancer. But in both cases new, far more powerful instruments have just been put in place, so it’s like travelling to new worlds where you are bound to see new things, even though you don’t know in advance what they are.

On the macrocosmic level, a whole bunch of new telescopes, both ground-based and in space, have recently been coming into operation. One of these, the Kepler, is a planet spotter: we are at the point of being able to see earth-sized planets. From there it would only seem to be a matter of time, maybe the next few years, before we start detecting wavelengths of light from those planets that suggest the possibility of life as we understand it. This was pointed out recently by the astronomer Lord Rees, and it would be revolutionary, it would mark an epochal shift for humanity. It would suggest, for example, that life is a universal principle that turns up whenever conditions are right.

Microcosmically, there is of course the new CERN particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, on the Swiss-French border. It is being gradually fired up (after a sticky start that shut it down for a year) and has already set new records for the energy of its experiments. But that is only a start, it has orders of power left, and it is bound to reveal a whole new landscape.

Meanwhile a crucial breakthrough has been achieved by the Americans with controlled nuclear fusion, which is the Holy Grail of large-scale energy production. The American experimental method involves firing lasers at pellets of heavy hydrogen. For decades there has been concern that the resulting plasma would mess up any ongoing fusion, but this has now been shown not to be the case.

The astrological signature for all this is the upcoming Uranus-Jupiter conjunction, which is associated with periods of scientific breakthrough. Uranus is associated with the scientific mind and with brilliant insight, and Jupiter expands whatever it touches. The last exact conjunction (the most powerful of all the aspects) was in 1997, and shortly before that Dolly the Sheep, the first cloned mammal, was born.

This next conjunction begins in June in Aries, and then occurs twice more in Pisces over the following 7 months. The June conjunction is in an applying square to Pluto, empowering it.

So I expect this year’s Jupiter-Uranus conjunction (which occurs about every 13 years) to be unusually significant.

The North Node

I’ve been toying with the idea that the North Node becomes more visible as we get older. The (North) Node, you could say, describes what we are here to become for karmic reasons, it describes the deeper issues that will sort, that will become empowered, if we become that Node. Because these things are deep, they are hard to see; in fact our life may apparently have had little to do with the Node, until after 40 years we look back and see how it all adds up.

So I dragged a few names out of my famous people list to see what turned up. Elizabeth II of England has Angular Node in Cancer, conjunct Pluto and trine to Saturn-MC. That is a powerful placement, and shows how seriously (Saturn) she takes her vocation (MC) that was given to her (trine) by her people (Cancer) who are the source of her power (Pluto). As she has got older, so has she become the matriarch (Cancer) of her country.

President Kennedy did not live long, so his ‘later life’ is his reputation since his death. His Node is in Capricorn, opposite Pluto. He is remembered as a great president (Capricorn, a sign of leadership and authority), and this is partly because of his early death (Pluto).

Rupert Murdoch has Node in Aries, conjunct Uranus and square to Saturn and Pluto. A very powerful placement. He has maintained his ability to fight and to initiate (Aries) into his old age, and continues to be a mould-breaker (Uranus-Node, which Obama also has.) It’s not necessarily very pretty having Saturn and Pluto in square to the Node, and you don’t feel there is much that Murdoch would not do in pursuit of power and wealth.

An odd one: the Batman story seems to keep going, with yet another re-invention in the last few years. I wondered if he has Node in Scorpio (re-invention continuing into old age), and sure enough he has. The chart I use is that for the first publication on 1st May 1939. Note that Batman does not have superpowers, unlike the Incredible Hulk etc. This is reflected in the astrology, where the superheroes tend to have Jupiter-Chiron aspects: superpowers (Jupiter) created by a wound (Chiron e.g. the Hulk’s exposure to radiation, Superman losing his family and home planet as a baby.)

Bob Geldof has the Sun conjunct Neptune of a musician and the Sun conjunct Saturn of someone who is determined to achieve; but as he has got older, so has his compassionate Node in Pisces become more prominent, through Band Aid etc.

Margaret Thatcher has Node in Leo. She was a singular leader, unable to adapt as time went on (fixed Leo) and adopting regal airs (Leo). She is loved by many (Node trine Venus) yet also did a lot of damage on a human level (Node square Chiron).

Prince Charles has Node in Taurus, conjunct the Moon and in a Grand Trine with Saturn and Jupiter. So here we have issues of wealth, which on the one hand Charles is comfortable with and which gives him security (Moon in Taurus), but which he has also grappled with (Node), using his wealth to create sustainable, healthy projects, such as his organic farm and the village of Poundbury in Dorset. This is the aspect of Taurus as Values: what value do I place on money, what do I consider important about money?

The answer that is perhaps predominant in our culture is that money is a value in itself, and the more you have of it, the more ‘value’ you have. The Taurus-Scorpio Nodal axis is interesting in this respect. There is often some kind of struggle around money and material values with this placement. While Taurus Node asks us to look at what value we place on money, Scorpio Node asks us to understand the power of money.

Getting that power right is what it is all about. With money we can have power over others. It can also have power over us, when its lack makes us feel disempowered, or when its presence makes us feel substantial and powerful. Money is a power, and that cannot be wished away, but its real power is as a resource to make things happen. We can do things, meaningful things, with money that we could not otherwise do.

So money in itself is not evil, and being wealthy does not make you bad, despite what Jesus said about camels and eyes of needles. (Who’d want to go to the Christian heaven anyway?) Like anything, it is about why you want it. It is an energy, and it can be used in healthy and unhealthy ways. Getting this one right is the lesson for many Scorpio Nodes, in the context of the general Scorpio inquiry into the nature of power.

Like Batman, however, Scorpio Nodes (such as myself!) also need to continue to re-invent themselves into old age.

The Idea of Sufficiency

My Native American friend Xbox (not his real name, and anyway he’d rather be called Indian) talks about the idea of sufficiency. He does a lot of obscure reading and is a mine of unusual information and original conclusions. Anyway, he’d observed that when a tribal people were largely wiped out through disease or whatever, they would often return to their original numbers quite quickly, and then stay at roughly that number. It was like they would collectively have a sense of what was enough, what number could be supported by the environment. And from that came his idea that humans have a sense of sufficiency, of what is enough. Like when you’ve had enough to eat.

In a way the idea seems obvious and very sane, but our culture has lost sight of it. We no longer have any collective sense of there being enough people, or enough wealth, or having done enough work, or whatever. Prosperity no longer means thriving, it means greed.

Sufficiency is a Saturnian idea. A healthy Saturn sets appropriate boundaries and regulates the proper measure of everything. An unhealthy Saturn is empty inside, and endlessly compensates through ‘achievement’ and hard work and wealth.

It has become central to our collective sense of well-being that the economy is growing. It doesn’t matter so much that it should adequately provide for everybody. No, what matters is that it should be growing, so we are told, and we believe it. This is the negative Saturn at the heart of our culture. Things are bad in the UK at the moment because we are in a recession. No-one says well we’ve all still got enough to eat and a roof over our heads – and we could easily cater for those who haven’t – so what’s the problem?

Working long hours is part of the same thing. We feel good about ourselves when we’ve been working, which isn’t altogether a bad thing. But it is more than that, it is a moral thing, we feel like we are good people because we have been working, and we want others to know. I know a small farmer who will often watch kids TV in the day, and then at night he’ll get in his tractor, put on the lights and start working, and it looks to the neighbours like he is this incredibly hard-working farmer who is at it even in the evening. This over-identification with work is also negative Saturn.

Sufficiency is different to sustainability. The problem with our current western way of life, as we see it, is that it is not sustainable, due to climate change, limited resources etc. That’s a good start, but it’s not the real issue. Because awful things can be perfectly sustainable. The early USA slave culture was perfectly sustainable. Some wars seem to go on and on, they seem quite sustainable.

The reason we have reached a point of unsustainability is because we have lost sight of sufficiency. What we seem to be looking for collectively with all the climate change stuff etc is an economy based on sustainable greed rather than unsustainable greed. As I said, it’s a start, but it is paradoxical, because an economy, a way of life, based on greed always wants more, and so eventually becomes unsustainable.

So I think that the political buzz word needs to be sufficiency rather than sustainability. It takes the pressure off in all sorts of ways, morally and psychologically, as well as materially. But I think it is a mind-set way too far to be accepted, simple as it is. Perhaps Pluto in Capricorn will help, although it could just as easily mean more power (Pluto) to the banks and other financial institutions (Capricorn). Maybe we have to wait for Pluto in Aquarius in 14 years time, which will empower (Pluto) the progressive thinkers (Aquarius).

Sabotage from the Future?

The Large Hadron Collider is almost back in commission after its accident last year. It is the biggest atom smasher in the world and it is not American. It has been designed to discover the Higgs Boson, the current fundamentalest particle of all. For the super-conducting magnets which contain the stream of particles to work properly, it has to be very cold, and it has just been announced that it is now colder than deep space.


The quantum world does not obey the usual rules, and Niels Bohr, one of the pioneers of quantum physics, said that if you are not shocked by the laws of the quantum world, then you haven’t understood them. In this world, for example, certain events can only be explained by time going backwards.

I haven’t got too much of a problem with that, because if you look at neuro-pathology, you start to realise that the 3-D ‘external’ world, together with time, are created by the brain to create order out of our sensory input. As a model, it works pretty well, but that doesn’t make the external world real in a hard and fast way. Astrology also works, a lot of the time, at any rate. But it’s just another model, which is why it doesn’t always work. Just like our senses aren’t always reliable. And even if they are reliable, if you ask 2 people to describe the same event, you’ll probably get different accounts.

Anyway, the Large Hadron Collider. It was just starting to get up and running last year, amid a lot of publicity, when it had an accident. There was a liquid helium leak and it’s taken over a year to sort. And 2 physicists have seriously suggested that the damage may have been caused by Higgs Bosons (which of course have yet to be discovered) travelling backwards in time from a future experiment.

I doubt it is the true explanation, but I liked the idea that real physicists were suggesting it. Of course, the LHC doesn’t ‘know’ that it is going to be used to discover Higgs Bosons. Otherwise it could just as well send back some other particle. Which means that human intention must also be playing a part in creating this future that has not yet happened and from which Higgs Bosons could be travelling back in time to upset our plans.

I don’t know if the scientists are thinking that way. But it makes complete sense to me. Because so much of what we call reality is the product of people’s imaginings, if not all of reality. There is a deep way in which the world is a product of consciousness. Our culture, for example, gradually developed the idea that reality is material and follows empirical, rational laws and sure enough, reality obliged and we find ourselves in such a universe. Some ancient cultures developed the idea that there is a relationship between the movements of the stars and human affairs and sure enough, reality obliged and we find ourselves in an astrological universe.

I don’t mean all this in a superficial way, like reality is simply what you think it is. It’s to do with the imagination. The imagination seems to connect what is ‘in here’ with what is ‘out there’. So that when an idea about how the universe works stirs our imagination, it is because it is in some way real, and it’s probably hard to say which came first, reality or our idea about it. The fact that quantum physics is, properly understood, shocking, says a lot in its favour. If it is shocking, then it touches us, and that gives it reality.

I’ve just turfed up these notes from a Liz Greene seminar I was on probably about 5 years ago:

We are all subject to

Chiron’s pain in the face of life’s inequality and injustice;

Neptune’s yearning, arising from our vision of something eternal that was there before birth and awaits us after death;

Pluto’s realization of our ultimate powerlessness in the face of nature and the collective;

Saturn’s recognition of our aloneness, our separateness, our mortality and our ultimate insignificance in the chain of earthly life.

I don’t seem to have jotted down anything for Uranus. Any suggestions? How about:

We are all subject to Uranus’s sense of existential insecurity, that whatever certainties we have come to rely on can disintegrate without warning.

Of Piggies and Buggers

I have recently read a couple of Orson Scott Card’s sci-fi novels, ‘Ender’s Game’ and ‘Speaker for the Dead’. In the first of these, a young boy is intensively trained to become a military commander to fight ‘the buggers’, an alien race that at one point attacked humanity. Ender is trained for starship battle through the use of video games, and does become the military genius on whom the hopes of humanity are pinned. It turns out, however, that all is not quite as it seems. In the next book, set 3000 years later, Ender has become a Speaker for the Dead, who turns up when asked and recounts the truth of a dead person’s life: their real hopes and aspirations, as well as all the uncomfortable bits you’re not supposed to talk about. Central to this novel, however, is the presence of another alien race, ‘the piggies’, and Ender gets involved in humanity’s relationship to this race.

At one point Ender is a professor at a university, and we are introduced to 4 levels of ‘otherness’ which humanity has come up with in response to its encounter with alien races (so far, just the buggers, who it eliminated, and the piggies, with whom humanity is super-constrained, super-PC even, as a sort of contrition for what happened to the buggers). The names themselves are a parody of how we view the ‘other’. The 4 increasing levels of otherness respectively describe a human from another part of this world, a human from another world, another species that is nevertheless regarded as human and finally another species that is not regarded as human, such as animals.

Science fiction gives a freedom to explore ideas about what it is to be human in ways that ordinary fiction cannot perhaps do so easily. In Speaker for the Dead there is an anonymous commentator called Demosthenes, and a rather brilliant point he makes is that humanity’s ability to declare an alien species to be human is not a comment on the moral maturity of that other species, but on the moral maturity of humanity.

I can’t help thinking of America in this respect, and its list of rogue nations, its ‘axis of evil’ (which the Obama administration is perpetuating). Orson Scott Card is an American. You can just see the generals out of Dr Strangelove calling the alien species ‘the buggers’ and ‘the piggies’, with no sense of irony or parody. The USA sets itself up as the moral judge of other nations. (For the astrology of this, see my audio-blog on America’s Preachiness.) For all Iran’s faults, America makes itself look ridiculous when it talks (as Obama did a few months ago) about wanting to admit Iran to the community of responsible nations. It will be a sign of America’s moral maturity when it is able to treat Iran as a nation just like itself, rather than as ‘other’. Then there may be progress.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t think Iran should be stopped from getting nuclear weapons. I think it needs to be stopped. My point is that in trying to acquire nuclear weapons, Iran is behaving no differently to how America would behave in the same situation. Iran also has an ugly and intolerant ideology, but so does America. In a fundamental sense, nations are all the same, they have very similar motives.

Which is why I don’t want to single out America here, because it is in the nature of nations and of people to consider themselves superior. I once read an anthropological book which cited a tribe in the Amazon who did not consider the neighbouring tribe to be human. These days we tend to idealise indigenous peoples and Tibetans (when you see the word ‘Lama’, think bishop, it cuts through all the hyperbole. And when you think bishop, think Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers!) People have always tended to consider the 'other' to be less than human.

So America is an example of not just how all nations will behave in certain circumstances, but also how people behave individually and always have behaved, and that is really what Orson Scott Card is getting at in what is not just an allegory but also a great story.

Robert A Heinlein uses ‘otherness’ to raise taboo issues in his book Stranger in a Strange Land. What happens is that a human colony is set up on Mars, and everyone dies except for a human baby who is brought up by indigenous Martians, and who eventually returns to Earth. So he is physically human, but he thinks and acts like a Martian, in ways that are completely incomprehensible to humans. This first of all relativises the way we look at the world, but Heinlein goes beyond this and has the Martian human breaking just about every taboo going, including ‘free love’, murder and cannibalism. For him, it is an honour to be eaten after you’ve died, while ‘disappearing’ people who are threatening you is not a problem. In Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott card also looks at the murder taboo, when ‘the piggies’ kill a couple of people in a really gruesome way, but from the piggies point of view they are honouring the humans; eventually both sides have to discover the other’s point of view.

The point about taboos is that they are absolutes, they are laws written in stone, so consideration of their merits and demerits is impossible: to think about a subject, you have to suspend your idea of what you think the conclusion should be, and with taboos many people would think you are some kind of pervert if you did this, like you were half way to breaking the taboo. Paedophilia has entered the taboo zone much more strongly in recent years, paedophiles are the modern witches. I’m not trying to defend them, but rather to make the point that intelligent thought about this subject has become increasingly difficult.

There always have been and always will be taboos, these moral areas that cannot be questioned without bringing the questioner under suspicion. After Stranger in a Strange Land was published in the early 60s (presciently, given what happened later in the decade), half of the USA thought Robert A Heinlein had lost the plot, and the other half thought he was a genius. So these authors are serving a necessary function within the tribe, dragging back into consciousness parts of the collective psyche that have drifted into darkness and judgement. Of course, not everyone will thank them for it. As some guy said a while back, no man is a prophet in his own country.

THE SORTING HAT

I’ve started reading Harry Potter to my 8 year old, and having finished the first book, he is now reading it on his own, which isn’t his usual style unless a book has pictures. Those critics who praise Harry Potter say that the books get kids reading. But they leave it at that, implying that as literature they don’t rate it. I can see what they mean, but I don’t think the volume that I have read is badly written. It’s OK. Lots of originality and invention and making fun of narrow-mindedness, in the form of Muggles. Lack of poetry in her words, though not in her ideas. But unnecessary clichés, like wizards having to have pointy hats and grey beards and half moon glasses. She could make the magic stronger by not being quite so obvious and literal about it, and so bring the reader closer to how magic actually works: its connection to the mind and to intention, in all its complexity, and the lack of predictable, cause and effect relationship: you feel something has to some extent come about through your intention, but you could never prove it or probably want to, and you could never have foreseen the way it came about.

Now Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, that is something else.

I don’t know why so many Christians are anti-Potter (though the Pope has softened his stance in recent years), because if prayer isn’t an attempt to work magic, then I don’t know what is. In both cases you are vocalising something you feel strongly about in the hope of creating a favourable outcome. Maybe there are Christians who want a monopoly on their agent of magic, God. The difference with non-God magic is that you know you’re going to get a result: you can feel the power of your own emotion and desire heading out into the universe, and how could that not produce results? It may take years sometimes, depending on other things, but you know it’ll happen. With God – well maybe he will, and maybe he won’t, and you’d better pray he’s in a good mood.

Anyway, soon after Harry Potter arrives at Hogwarts School for Wizards, the new kids are told what House they will be in. These four Houses are in competition with one another. The House they will be in is chosen by the Sorting Hat, which is put on their head, and it then makes its choice.

As it says:

Oh, you may not think I’m pretty,
But don’t judge on what you see,
I’ll eat myself if you can find
A smarter hat than me.
You can keep your bowlers black,
Your top hats sleek and tall,
For I’m the Hogwarts Sorting Hat
And I can cap them all.
There’s nothing hidden in your head
The Sorting Hat can’t see.
So try me on and I will tell you
Where you ought to be.

The Sorting Hat then characterises the 4 Houses:

You might belong in Gryffindor,
Where dwell the brave at heart,
Their daring, nerve and chivalry,
Set Gryffindors apart;

Astrologically, that sounds like the Fire Element to me.

You might belong in Hufflepuff,
Where they are just and loyal,
Those patient Hufflepuffs are true
And unafraid of toil;

This seems like the Earth Element.

Or yet in wise old Ravenclaw,
If you’ve a ready mind,
Where those of wit and learning,
Will always find their kind;

This is Air.

Or perhaps in Slytherin
You’ll make your real friends,
Those folk use any means
To achieve their ends.

Even the name Slytherin is Watery.

I doubt JK Rowling used astrology when she invented these Houses: it more points to the truth of astrology, that it uses patterns or archetypes that are universal, that are inherent in us, and that anybody creating from that level of the mind will reproduce those same patterns. Even the order in which JK Rowling puts the Houses corresponds to the order in which we find the Elements in astrology: Fire, Earth, Air then Water. (If you think about the first 4 zodiac signs and their elements, you’ll see what I mean.)

These Elements come before the signs, they are a more basic category into which people can be grouped. The zodiac signs corresponding to an element are the 3 different ways in which that element can express itself. And then within each sign there are 3 decanates of 10 degrees each, giving us 3 different types of each sign, but perhaps I’ll leave it there!

Harry Potter himself is a Leo, his birthday being on either 30 or 31st July, so it is appropriate that he should be in fiery Gryffindor. JK Rowling’s birthday is 31st July, so she is deeply identified with her creation, he is an expression of her own unique imagination.

It is well known that Leos often have a father who is in some way absent or wounded. Liz Greene goes into this in The Astrology of Fate, where she relates Leos to the myth of Parsifal and the Holy Grail. It is as if, being Leos, they have something special and unique in themselves to uncover, and the presence of the guiding father archetype would hinder this. The absence of the father is at once a loss of soul, and at the same time a challenge to repair that loss.

Bill Clinton’s father died before he was born, and Barack Obama’s father cleared off when he was very young. Both are Leos, and both have brought their own hard-won and unique values to the Presidency of the USA. (Clinton, Obama’s Democratic predecessor, was interestingly known as the first black President, though not in the way Toni Morrison intended when she said it.)

JK Rowling’s mother developed multiple sclerosis when Rowling was 15, and died when Rowling was 25. I think for women Leos we need to look for absent/wounded mothers. Though Rowling wasn’t that young when her mother became ill, she was still relatively so. From Wiki: Rowling commented, "I was writing Harry Potter at the moment my mother died. I had never told her about Harry Potter.” Rowling said this death heavily affected her writing and that she introduced much more detail about Harry's loss in the first book, because she knew about how it felt.

Both Harry Potter’s parents, of course, were killed by Voldemort when he was very young, so in making Harry a Leo JK Rowling is again expressing an astrological truth. Even Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry Potter in the films, is a Leo, though I don’t know what his father is like.

As I put in a post on Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, Tolkien had them both aged 50/51 when they set off on their great adventure. This is the time of the Chiron Return, and Chiron was the educator of heroes. This doesn’t make Tolkien an astrologer, as Chiron hadn’t even been discovered when he was writing. But it does kind of suggest there is a universality to astrology.

Harry’s enemy, Malfoy, is played by Tom Felton, whose birthday is 22 September, the same as Bilbo and Frodo. But I don’t think that means an awful lot!

Life Creates the Universe, not the Other Way Round

Lynn has put up a piece on “biocentrism, a belief that life creates the Universe… An "external" reality, if it existed, would by definition have to exist in space. But this is meaningless, because space and time are not absolute realities but rather tools of the human and animal mind.” (more…)

It’s good to be reminded of this. In western philosophy, this position is known as Idealism, “the theory that maintains that the ultimate nature of reality is based on mind or ideas. It holds that the so-called external or "real world" is inseparable from mind, consciousness, or perception.” Kant was an idealist, while Buddhism maintains that the universe is Mind created.

Idealism is contrasted in the philosophy of perception with Realism “in which the external world is said to have a so-called absolute existence prior to, and independent of, knowledge and consciousness.” And in the philosophy of mind it is contrasted with Materialism “in which the ultimate nature of reality is based on physical substances.”

All this can sound fascinating but ultimately still just an idea. That Idealism is not just another philosophical position, Buddhist or otherwise, was imprinted on me quite forcibly about 25 years ago when I read Oliver Sacks’ The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.

Sacks is a neuropsychologist, and his book tells the strange tales of some of his patients, all of whom who had various brain dysfunctions. There was, for example, the man who could tell you what something was in general - e.g. that it is a playing card – but not what is was in particular - e.g. that it is the Jack of Hearts. And there was another patient who had the opposite brain damage, so that he could tell you it was the Jack of Hearts, but not that it was a playing card.

Then there was the person who had lost his sense of ‘left’, and could only experience the right-hand half of anything. So he would eat a meal with his right hand, and would eat only what was on the right half of his plate, and then pull his plate round to the right and eat the right half of what was now there, and so on. These patients did not necessarily have a sense that anything that was amiss, even though they had not always been like that, because the part of the brain itself concerned with that function had been wiped out.

As bizarre example piles on bizarre example (including, of course, the man who mistook his wife for a hat), the reader realises in what a profound and basic way his/her external reality is created by the brain. You realise that Idealism is not just a philosophical position, and that the function of the brain is not to order and make sense of a 3-D reality ‘out there’: that 3-D reality itself is created by the brain. It’s quite shocking when it sinks in.

And this brings me back to the start, the idea that “Life creates the Universe”. I find this idea so refreshing. Our basic western conditioning is that the material universe created life, and that is all we are. This deadening materialism is something we all have to struggle against if we have any spark of imagination. So it’s great to see it turned on its head, and see that science itself, pursued far enough, subverts the philosophical materialism that it has done so much to bring about.