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THE ASTROLOGY OF TRANSFORMATION
A Multilevel Approach
by Dane Rudhyar, 1980




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CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

1. The Two Basic Ways of Meeting Life's Confrontations
   • The Yang Way
   • The Yin Way

2. The Two Faces of Astrology
   • An Astrology of Information
   • An Astrology of
Understanding and Meaning


3. Four Levels of Interpreting Human Experience and Astrological Data
   • Four Levels of Human Functioning
   • A Multilevel Astrology
   • The Biological Level of Interpretation
   • The Sociocultural Level and the "Person"
   • The Planets' Meanings at the Sociocultural Level
   • Nodes, Eclipses and the Trans-Saturnian Planets

4. The Individual Level of Interpretation
   • The Mandala Symbol in Astrology
   • The Birth-Chart and the Planets in a Mandala-Type of Interpretation
   • Going Beyond the Individual Level

5. The Marriage of Mind and Soul

6. The Practice of Astrology at the Transpersonal Level
   • The Client's Readiness and the Astrologer's Responsibility
   • The Birth-Chart as a Symbol of Individual Karma
   • The Transmutation of Karma into Dharma

7. Interpretating the Birth-Chart at the Transpersonal Level
   • A Transpersonal Interpretation of Sun, Moon and Planets
     Page A
     Page B
     Page C
   • Planetary Interactions: Aspects and Gestalt
   • Angles: Root-factors in Personality and their Transformation

8. Progressions and Transits
   • Personality as an Unfolding Process
   • Secondary or 'Solar' Progressions
   • Progressed Lunation Cycle: Progressed-to-Natal vs. Progressed-to-Progressed Considerations
   • The Transits of the Planets

EPILOGUE






CHAPTER SEVEN
Interpretating the Birth-Chart
at the Transpersonal Level - 4


Whatever is necessary — and this may mean a crucial crisis or total upheaval in the personal life or in the society in which one is active — can be attributed to Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto acting as "agents" for the galaxy. These transformative planets may operate in a great variety of ways. They often operate through a particular type of individual who (whether they want to or not, and often against their conscious intentions) relate to men and women who are at least partially ready to embark on the transpersonal voyage across storm-ridden seas and act as arousing or even deeply disturbing factors.
      As I have stated elsewhere,(4) each of the trans-Saturnian planets acting as an agent (or "ambassador") of the galactic greater Whole (which, I repeat, symbolizes Humanity as a planetary Being), is particularly meant to disturb and transform one of the other planets. Uranus seeks to break through the fortified walls Saturn has built to give maximum security to the reign of the kingly "I", and to bring a new perspective and a breath of "fresh air". Neptune is especially adept at dissolving Jupiterian pride and pomposity. And Pluto can act most effectively as a purifier of Martian emotional drives. As a cathartic agent, Pluto seeks to remove from the personality (which has become individualized through often devious means generating heavy karmic "toxins"), whatever does not strictly belong to the archetypal character of the emergent individuality — and Pluto's action can be drastic and relentless. But Pluto in its cosmic aspect can also reveal to the purified, but probably rudely shaken individual the true archetypal form of his or her individual selfhood and/or destiny.
      At the transpersonal level, Uranus, the iconoclast, deals with the image of the "enthroned I" and its "courtiers" bowing to its every desire. It tries to show the mind how actually ineffective, ridiculous, or empty of meaning this image really is. During the seven years of its passage through a zodiacal sign, Uranus tends to either discredit, deeply disturb, or challenge the traditional character or meaning of the mode of activity represented by that sign — at times in a direct manner, at others by forcing repeated experiences of this mode of activity and its by-products upon the consciousness, until the "king-l" is satiated or disgusted.
      The natal house in which Uranus is located in most cases points to the type or field of experience where the iconoclastic and revolutionary impact of the planet is most effective or most likely to operate. For instance, in terms of the transpersonal process, Uranus in the 12th house evokes the possibility that the individual's ability to act as a transforming agent will be in some manner closely related to a public crisis or to the process of transformation of society or some aspect of its culture. On the other hand, Uranus in the 6th house suggests a more personal kind of transformative upheaval and the need for a special type of service, perhaps of total surrender to a cause or guru.
      In any house, a planet can be transpersonally interpreted as a message conveyed through the soul to the I-center open to the reception of such communication from "above" — or released by the mind having realized that it can reflect a transcendent kind of consciousness — a message suggesting how the field of experience symbolized by the house should be reoriented.
      Neptune, the universal Solvent, in many but obviously not all cases, tends to lower the effectiveness of the biological energies operating in the part of the body related to the zodiacal sign in which it is located. It throws doubt upon the validity of what the individual's community or nation considers valuable in the field of socio-cultural activity and everyday living associated with the sign. According to the house in which it is located, it often brings deep confusion and a sense of futility that no rational explanation can quite dissipate. Yet Neptune can inspire compassion and the desire to participate in large and impersonal organizations. It universalizes and perhaps unfocuses the type of experiences related to the natal house through which it slowly moves after birth. This is particularly the case when found at one of the four Angles.
      Pluto, the cathartic agent clearing from any field of activity the unnecessary or decaying material that has accumulated in it, can be seen at work in mankind as a whole as it passes slowly from one zodiacal sign to the next. While in Gemini (1834 to 1912-13), it revealed how superficial and incomplete were the intellectual pictures physical and psychological scientists had drawn during the century of triumphant materialism. As it became a publicly known fact of existence while transiting the sign Cancer (1913-1938), it produced an intense upheaval in the ideal of the family, and it gnawed at the roots of the concept of the classical, monolithic, and morally responsible individual personality through depth-psychology and the popularization of technological gadgets expected to solve personal problems at least in routine matters of everyday living — which inevitably leads to a subtle kind of automatism. In the name of the need for law and order, it produced — as an answer to the fear of the unknown — the negative and obsolete concepts of Fascism in politics and neo-classicism in the arts. To the new craving for the abundant life, it answered with the great Depression, and to a mechanical approach to world-organization and the hegemony of the victorious powers of World War I, it answered with the Nazi armored-divisions and Hitler's biological paranoia and political pride.
      The character which Pluto's entrance into Leo took had been conditioned by the way mankind had responded to the planet's passage through Cancer. What had been issues basically concerning new and larger schemes of organization and the release of forces uprooting the collective past became issues more specifically aimed at the way individuals were made to experience and give value to their lives. These lives were now increasingly controlled by technology and technocrats (from medical doctors and psychologists to politicians and business specialists), by the media and by the result of a new general acquaintance (through movies, radio, air travel, and later TV) with all the countries and cultures of the world.
      At first this was revolutionizing and often intoxicating — in different ways, depending on whether one belonged to a victorious or vanquished country, to the Communist or "Free" World. But as Pluto entered Virgo in 1957 and later (1965-66) was joined by Uranus, the sense of global crisis began to pervade the new generations; they rose in protest, intoxicated by rather naive hopes and Utopian dreams. Virgo is a sign of transformation based on the criticism of what one has come to feel subjected to, whether be it as a result of one's previous actions or of what the preceding generations have built.
      We have not yet seen the full effect of the passage of Pluto through Libra (1971 to 1984), nor can we estimate what challenges it may bring to individuals who will have to face in childhood or adolescence the possibility of crucial world-events as Pluto passes through Scorpio and comes closer to the Sun than Neptune, while making a 90-year long sextile aspect to this planet (1943-2038).
      This penetration of Neptune's orbit by Pluto — I have spoken of it as a cosmic fecundation or impregnation occurs approximately every 248 years. It occurred during the 18th century and what has become known as "the Enlightenment" period which saw the rise of modern science and industry, the American War of Independence and the French Revolution. It led, in Europe, to the Napoleonic concept of a totally centralized bureaucracy and to a violent political reaction after the Emperor's downfall. An era of popular revolution and the spread of Romanticism followed, and modern individualism arose on the foundation of the power of bourgeoisie and of Business — a foundation based on greed and productivity at any cost.
      Mankind, of course, has to deal with all the direct and indirect results of these 19th century developments. It has to deal with them collectively at both the sociocultural and (through pollution and impaired health) the biological levels. This, under present circumstances, inevitably means some kind of world-crisis. If I have repeatedly mentioned this fact, it is because I must stress that the possibility and the character of radical individual transformation is largely conditioned by the crises through which our society and today mankind as a whole are passing. Individual transformation does not occur in a vacuum.
      If, in this year 1978, I am writing a book on an astrological approach to the problems arising from the process of transformation of individuals or would-be individuals, it is because Pluto in Libra, Neptune in Sagittarius, and Uranus in Scorpio (more or less at the midpoint of the long Pluto-Neptune sextile, exact on the day I started this chapter), represent the possibility for my consciousness to tune up in a particular way to the downflow of new creative impulses that seek to renew, individually and collectively, the still prevailing patterns and ideals of human living. Many individuals evidently do now respond, and have responded, to such a release of transformative energy; each responds in his or her own individual way. But all these transformative concepts and formulations are individual interpretations of the reflections cast upon the minds of the transforming agents by the descent of spiritual forces emanating from the greater Whole, Humanity — astrologically symbolized by the galaxy — in answer to the developing needs of nations, communities, and individual persons. Their need "rises to heaven," as it were, as an unconscious (or in some cases conscious) prayer; the answer "descends" from one aspect or another of the planetary Mind — the pleroma Mind — in order to evoke the possibility of a radical change of consciousness and of our everyday approach to personal living and interpersonal relationship.


4. Cf. The Sun is Also a Star: The Galactic Dimension of Astrology.  Return





By permission of Leyla Rudhyar Hill
Copyright © 1980; by Dane Rudhyar
All Rights Reserved.



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