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.
