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ASTROLOGICAL TIMING
The Transition to the New Age
by Dane Rudhyar, 1969



First published under the title
Birth Patterns for
a New Humanity



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CONTENTS

PROLOGUE
    Where Do We Stand Today?

PART ONE
    1. Three Centuries of Crisis
    2. Planetary Cycles
    3. Cycles of Relationship

PART TWO
    4. Stars, Constellations and Signs of the Zodiac
    5. From Buddha to Christ
    6. The Structure of the Piscean Age
    7. At the Gates of the New Age
    8. The Aquarius-Leo Age

PART THREE
    9. The Zodiacal Earth-Field
        Page 1
      Zodiacal Man and
       Geodetic Equivalents

        Page 2
        Page 3
        Page 4
        Page 5
      The Geomorphic Approach
        Page 6
        Page 7
        Page 8
        Page 9
      The Earth as
       an Organic Whole

        Page 10
        Page 11
        Page 12
  10. As We Face the Future

EPILOGUE




CHAPTER NINE
The Zodiacal Earth-Field - 1


What we know of the past of mankind's evolution should make it quite clear that one cannot separate history from geography and climate, nor mankind from the earth's biosphere. The succession of glacial Ages, the drying up of once fertile regions — the deserts of Central Asia, for instance — and the rise and fall (or drifting apart) of continents are basic, even if not too well known factors in this evolution. We know now that every kingdom of life, every oceanic and stratospheric current, and beyond these, the response of the ionosphere to "solar winds" or other electromagnetic impacts — which most likely follow some as yet undefined cyclic rhythm — are closely inter-related. We are aware that geographical and climatic factors condition, and very likely determine, the fundamental characteristics of every local culture — and all human cultures until now have been the expressions of local environmental conditions. The attachment of still the great majority of human beings to their birthland and to the social-cultural-religious traditions of their ancestors remains a powerfully binding factor, the importance of which is pathetically demonstrated today in the Arabic Near-East and in varying degrees everywhere on the globe.
      In spite of this — and, in the deepest meaning of this situation, because of this — man has been told by the "great religions" now in existence that he is a "spiritual being" quite alien on this planet. He is brought to it, or created by God in it, to learn certain hard lessons and to fulfill a rather tragic part in the great Design of an omnipotent God Who has His being in a transcendent realm, man's only true "home." Somehow the whole earth and all it contains are made by this God for the sake of man's Soul, which nevertheless finds itself an exile on this planet.
      This is not the place to discuss such ideas; they may be only a materialized and vulgarized version of profound metaphysical concepts. What is important for us here is to realize that these religious ideas have made very deep marks upon astrological thought as well as upon history, ethics, sociology and in general upon all that concerns the relationships between man and other living things in the biosphere, and now between man and the very soil, water and air of this planet. We act indeed as exiles or conquerors and plunderers of an alien land; and we have not yet quite abandoned a quasi-mystical approach to the capitalized word, History. We forget that without the earth there would be no mankind, and without continents and specific climatic regions, there would not be the variety of human peoples and cultures.
      Today "ecology" has become a fashionable word; and there is even much recent talk concerning "cosmecology," the study of the relationship between man and his cosmic environment. We are told that a human being should no longer be seen as an isolated individual but as an individual-in-his environment. But the crucial step, psychologically and even spiritually speaking, seems very hard to take for the immense majority of modern people, i. e. the step which would make us accept the fact that mankind plays a functional part within the "being" — or the organized field of activity — of the planet, Earth, perhaps just as the cerebro-spinal nervous system plays a functional part within the body of a human being.
      The collective realization by all human beings that this Earth is a planetary whole, all the constituent parts of which (animate or supposedly inanimate, conscious or supposedly unconscious) have a definite quasi-organic function, has at long last been made possible by the work of geo-physicists and the daring circum-global travels of astronauts. Still more important, the presentation on T. V. screens of the image of our globe as an entity external to the photographers has made the earth as concrete and objectively real a fact of existence and consciousness as a traveler's home is when seen from a speeding train or a plane flying overhead. The fiery re-entry of the astronaut into this global "home" of mankind, as well as the tremendous consumption of energy needed to lift the space-traveling capsule from the threshold of this home, should illustrate how powerfully we are attached to our globe. We may leave it — this is our privilege as thinking men. But so can the mind of an individual thinker leave, as it were (and perhaps literally so), the body within which it has developed and acquired structural consistency, and function outside of this body as an independent entity.
      I believe that this reintegration of man into the quasiorganic "body" of the earth is perhaps the most important fact of our time. It occurs at the threshold of the Aquarian Age, because the basic premise of human consciousness in that Age should be not only the unity of all mankind, but the quasi-organicity of the earth and our united function (as united mankind, or Man) in this earth-Field — which, I repeat, may in reality expand up to the moon. In ancient time, before the rise of transcendent religious philosophies, the earth was considered apparently to be the microcosm of the universe; then the cosmological picture changed under the pressure of the tide of individualization of consciousness within ego-structures, and the individual came to be seen as the microcosm of the universal macrocosm. Now the two conceptions should become integrated, the individual person remaining still a microcosm, but one that is operating collectively in the fulfillment of a definite function within the fields of ever larger planetary, solar-systemic and galactic wholes.
      In other words, we should realize that there is a collective operation of Man-as-a-whole; and that this operation exists at several levels. The biosphere is the root-level at which mankind operates-until now in a fragmented local-culture manner, but perhaps from now on in a globally interrelated way. Then there is the "noosphere" popularized recently by Teilhard de Chardin and representing at the level of the mind the growing unity of Man's psychism and the results of more hidden ("occult") interconnections and rhythmic interplays between races and cultures. And an ever increasing number of individuals are becoming aware, dimly and confusedly though it be, of a still more inclusive and subtle level of planetary existence and consciousness which Sri Aurobindo in India called "supermental," and to which H. P. Blavatsky referred a century ago as "the White Lodge." We might call it the theosphere.





By permission of Leyla Rudhyar Hill
Copyright © 1969 by Dane Rudhyar
and Copyright © 2001 by Leyla Rudhyar Hill
All Rights Reserved.



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