into the heart of the sun
Into Inner Space
Over the years, a stream of serious articles, ephemerides, and several books on Heliocentric Astrology have appeared in the USA, thanks largely to the efforts of Michael and Margaret Erlewine, the late Neil Michelsen and T. Patrick Davis, among others. A fully Interdimensional Astrology cannot be developed without the inclusion of Sun-centred energy. It is time to lay aside the outdated notion that we are Earth-bound creatures, and to look straight into our own Solar heart. Initially, work on personal charts, examining the Heliocentric first on its own and then progressed, and then extended to close family members and friends, has suggested that this pattern of energies has something to do with one's state of health, specific health problems, and fundamental moral state. Putting these together, it sounds as if here we have yet another layer of individual karma; yet in experience, the bodily, mental and interactive events timed by the activated Helio patterns have a totally different quality to those met at the Geocentric Tropical or even the Draconic level. Each experience seems to be a "given" in life; the degree of freedom left to the individual to control the experience seems to be almost non-existent. What we are looking at here is the nearest this author certainly has ever come to the idea of pure Fate. Just our Luck? This applies whether the pattern is easy or difficult. The "easy" people seem unable to avoid, for example, getting and giving, without any apparent effort on their part - even against their will, if such a thing can be conceived! Fortune just falls into their lap; they are plain lucky. Whereas the "difficult" people seem doomed to suffer over and over again from a jinx placed on the life. Often this appears totally undeserved, and no act of will on their part, even of dramatic goodwill or the most devout prayer, can lift or lighten their cross. The only way out of these people's suffering would seem to be, literally, Divine Intervention - an act of God. What might one understand by this? A God's Eye View As the Sun symbolises the spiritual reality at the heart of each one of us, then perhaps the Sun-centred chart, distanced as it is from the planet on which we are physically born, offers a significant shift of perspective. Do we here see ourselves as we truly are? Is this as near as we are likely to get to a God's-eye view of our current spiritual state and its inevitable consequences? You see, it would differ from the Draconic patterns of karmic sowing and reaping, in that at the Draconic level we are exercising our spiritual will in a contract made with ourselves and God, prior to incarnation ( accepting that each of us will have our own concept of the nature and existence of God, and know Him by one of a number of names or concepts. ) This contract is to put our acquired skills to best use in the service of our fellows, to stand by our convictions born of long experience, and to put right by appropriate means whatever we have done wrong in given periods of our past. All this work chosen by the soul will go towards the cleansing and lifting and illumining of the Inner Spirit. But the Heliocentric pattern, by contrast, is the state of the spirit, showing graphically and uncomfortably the glaring faults that are often hidden under the layers of incarnate personality, and equally clearly the glowing virtues, gifts and pure motives that may lie under the surface of life, unsuspected by the crowd. This set of patterns, I suggest, may only be changed by the grace of God, or in the higher dimensions once the soul has quit its work and its material body, faced its truth, and has been reborn in the spirit. Meanwhile, in incarnation, it is fated to confront and continually manifest its own virtue or its own evil in activity or in passive suffering until it knows itself for what it truly is. Man, know thyself. Shifting the Viewpoint One question whose answer has become pressing is this: Why do we measure the Heliocentric positions from a Geocentric node? ie the Vernal Point? What justification is there for extending this local, Equatorial point way out into Solar space? We may not yet have our answer to this - but the question has suggested a fresh approach to Helio: to find the Heliocentric equivalent to Geocentric Draco. It seems reasonable to expect a zodiac encompassing the sun itself and bearing on the life of incarnate Man to have its origin at a node formed by the intersection of one Solar and one Terrestrial plane. As the Ecliptic is heliocentric, being the Great Circle of the Earth's orbital path, part of the equation is solved; the next part is provided by a geocentric Great Circle, and there is a choice of two - the Equator once again, or that of the Moon's orbit around the Earth. Nothing seems really to have changed ... but the point that has to be considered is that both of these last are so local to the body of the Earth when viewed across space from the Sun, that effectively their nodes with the Ecliptic are conjunct the Earth itself. One might therefore, for all practical purposes, take the Helio position of the Earth as the fiducial point for a Heliocentric Zodiac that might add to our understanding of the inner, spiritual Man in some way similar to the interaction of Draconic and Tropical/Sidereal in the dimensions of manifest personality. I have called this the HelioMundane (HM) zodiac. Heliomundane Patterns To test this idea, work has been done comparing one set of charts that might be expected to emphasise moral issues with another set whose subjects have had to live with persistent and disabling illness or inadequacy. The first are violent criminals, most of whom have murdered ( data taken mainly from Lois Rodden's ‘American Book of Charts’ and ‘Astro-Data III’ ), the second a collection of sufferers from Epilepsy who gave their own data via Dr. Peter Fenwick of London's Maudesley Hospital, and a group of children born Autistic. The criminal test cases show repeated multiple direct alignments (conjunction and opposition) and squares between the ‘malefic’ Heliomundane planets and the Angles of their Geocentric charts in every example where deep-rooted self-hatred and/ or destructive feeling toward others have externalised in cruelty and homicide. Already the inference is becoming clear - that by identifying the Zodiac level/s from which the strongest energies are flowing or where the greatest frustrations set their blocking patterns, we may determine just how much control, for example, the perpetrator of a crime has over his actions, how long this tendency has been in his nature, and on the basis even - perhaps - how one might approach possible rehabilitation and conversion to a moral and useful life. The Tropical Impulse If most of the activity is at the Tropical level, the individual degree of freedom to control or give in to his or her impulses is actually very, very great. Ability and/ or willingness to exercise this freedom of will, however, depends in turn on self-awareness, which in turn depends on soul-growth. If the offender lives his or her life more or less as a sleep-walker, an automaton, then that life is as fated as if the soul had no part in the decision-making process at all. He hasn't. He has either renounced it, or has not even reached the stage of recognising his freedom of choice and its attendant responsibilities. However, if skilful treatment and counselling (especially with astrology's help) can awaken the dulled consciousness, and if there is also an underlying conscience that can be touched through stimulus of good qualities at this and and the other levels, then it is theoretically quite possible to turn the man or woman around and lead them back to a decent, genuinely reformed life. The Draconic Impulse Where the main patterns are active at the Draconic level, the degree of freedom is again conditioned - this time by the soul's pre-birth contract. Usually one finds the better and wiser nature in the Draconic, but in a few cases even the best convictions are still based on false premises; even after many lifetimes lessons have still not been learned, and an unruly or obstructive ego, instead of repenting and paying for mistakes of the past, may blindly go on repeating those same mistakes and adding to the already painful accumulation of karmic debt. Treatment of such a case needs to go much deeper than with the Tropical offender; for here there is a need to face, acknowledge and redeem the past, to shed finally and forever a mind-set, a personality sheath that belonged to the past and has no place in the present. This can only be accomplished by leading the subject to recall and relive the past-life origin of each flaw and error (under the most carefully supervised conditions, delicately conducted) and to go consciously through his purgatory, so that at last he may let go. Otherwise he will remain the prisoner of his past for the rest of his days. The Sidereal Impulse If there are patterns of violence connected with the Sidereal, we have a curiosity; somehow the perpetrator sees himself as larger than life, sees himself through his actions making a mark on history. This is a phenomenon often found where the individuality is poorly developed or its values distorted, so that normal work and relationships offer none of the expected satisfactions. The only way for the ego to reassure itself of its significance - and its very existence - is to inflate into its own myths and attack the world in a way which can never be forgotten, which will ensure that his name will go down in the annals of history. This will rarely be a fully conscious act, as such a distorted mind cannot, by definition, be properly self-aware; but in some cases the violence will stem from a mighty desire for revenge against real or imagined social injustice, or out of pure, ruthless political or economic ambition that will allow no-one to stand in its way. While the mass-murderer Ted Bundy's offending pattern falls mainly in the Helio and Draconic, there is one very significant Sidereal pairing of Sidereal Mars conjunct Tropical Venus by 1½̊ suggesting that he really did have this image of himself as a latter-day Casanova. But there is more to it than that, for it falls in Scorpio, urging him to become one of the greatest lady-killers of all time ... if you look at Bundy's Sidereal colours (see Astrology in Colour), the Decan and Sign emphasis is almost entirely Mars/Saturn, full of darkness and cold - not the nicest thing to be remembered for. The Heliocentric Compulsion With so much of his destructive energy coming from the Heliocentric in both its forms, ‘Heliotropic’ and ‘Heliomundane’, combined with sexual fantasy in the Aries-Libra alignment, someone like Bundy has a deep-rooted and enduring problem that has lodged itself so far down in his soul that the spirit itself is sick. The only way for such a person to live with any hope of recovery is to come face to face, over and over again, with this intransigent spiritual sickness (even wickedness) and be punished for it by law, until such a time as the misery of his state compels him to seek the Light in his darkness and come home to forgiveness and new life, like the Prodigal Son. Only the working of inexorable fate, extended spiritual counselling, and the Grace of God, can ever change the Ted Bundys of this world. This world ended for Bundy on 24th January 1989, when he was executed. This Heliocentric study of violence not only brought the rewards of a deeper understanding; it also proved that a Sun-centred zodiac based on either the Earth-located or the spatially-extended Vernal Point has full validity; there is no longer any question in my mind on this matter. The Epilepsy and Autism studies have gone even further to support Heliocentric work, and Interdimensional analysis as a whole. A number of these cases are discussed in detail elsewhere. Rainbow round the Sun The next step on our journey is to translate the two versions of Heliocentric into colour in just the same way as before, using the same range of 36 shades to express the energies of the Decans but with the obvious difference that no background colour can justly be added, as there is now no Ascendant in the picture to add a modifying hue. (See 'Astrology in Colour'.) Contemplate each pattern in silence - allow the intuition to flow. Then, as suggested elsewhere, superimpose each over the three ‘lower’ geocentric patterns in turn, under the light. At the Helio level there is no sense of immediate personal recognition as one finds at the Tropical and the Sidereal ... but if you still the mind sufficiently and for long enough, if you are well-attuned and patient, gradually it is possible to feel the truth of this deeply-hidden identity and recognise qualities that vivify the incarnate being and its life, most especially from the original ‘Heliotropic’ ( HT ) chart. This infusion of the outer with the inner life was even more marked when charts were paired as suggested. The Heliomundane ( HM ) pattern adds powerfully to objective analysis, as has been found with the offenders and the epileptics. But intuitive assessment of this level through its colours has proved somewhat baffling. I am still not entirely sure what it is that we are looking at, which has so much to say in Interdimensional analysis, but as it is so definitely Earth-focussed perhaps it shows us the True Self beholding the world and the opportunities and trials that incarnation offers, whereas the HT level is that of the Self beholding and fulfilling nothing but itself ... we shall know as we are Known. Combine the two, and we have the fuller picture of the Self coming into active ( but not yet manifest ) relationship with the arena of material existence. My feeling is that this approaches closely to the truth. Curiously, most of the HM patterns made so far have a rather dull, sad feel, as if the Self felt that Earth-life had little joy to offer and was reluctant to enter the fray and do the Work required. Most interestingly, in a recent discussion of reincarnation, one very young child is quoted as saying, "Being born is black. Dying is golden." The few bright, rich HM patterns stand out like flags of celebration! Are these brave souls? Positive and inquisitive? Eager to put their highest energies to work in this imperfect world? One such is a local priest I know very well, of the Roman Catholic Church; his own HT pattern is delicate and warm and lovely to contemplate, and the HM full of depth and richness. He is one of the finest people I have ever had the privilege to meet - committed, loving, gentle, open and wise, willing to undertake all that ‘the sweet burden of the priesthood’ may demand of him. Examination of the Helio zodiacs, whether analytically or intuitively through this use of colour, provides us with a safe way to pierce the veils of personality to uncover our hidden truths. There is no trauma to the psyche, as nothing is required from the patient or client except to receive and use the profound help that can then be given, to shift perceptions and improve behaviours. It is already well-established in working with phobics that this approach to a deep-seated problem ‘from the outside in’ can effect far deeper, more enduring change than months or years of tortuous analysis . Letting go of the World Unsurprisingly by now, there is still more to discover at the Heliocentric level. If the ‘lower self’ includes a dimension larger than itself, collective, and identified by a Sidereal Zodiac, then it must be that the True Self in its relationship to the Greater Life may be understood through a Heliocentric Sidereal chart - HelioStellar, or HS. Laborious handwork on chart after chart (These were the days before wonderful software! Pam 2013) has born good fruit, as hoped. For some years, one fast-growing file has been of clergy, churches, spiritual leaders, healers and sensitives. Out of these as well as the patterns of family and friends, the spirit of the Heliostellar has slowly emerged. With the majority of ‘ordinary mortals’ its voice through the colours is unclear, even silent; there is no sense of connectness, no particular feeling of life. So perhaps it simply sleeps in these, awaiting that Kiss from the Hero in the Self that strives for - and one day wins - reunion. However, in the patterns of people consciously living the spiritual life, and most especially among the ordained clergy, the Heliostellar level comes fully alive. What one recognises is the nature of that person in their function as priest. What emerges in contemplation of the HS colours is the feeling that particular priest or minister generates when working in the sanctuary. With lay sensitives and non-ordained spiritual leaders, one encounters the individual's presence when at prayer or in private meditation. Once again my friend the Roman Catholic priest is a fine example: his Heliostellar colours are vibrant and joyous and strong, dominated by what, through this same study, I have come to call the Cosmic Cross as it appears so often in the colours of true seekers. This is a cross formed from the scarlet energies of Aries' first Decan, and the last - magenta - Decan of Sagittarius. The bearer's task is to try and achieve their cosmic identity through personal, intellectual and moral courage, unflagging faith, and an open mind illumined by the Intelligence of the Heart. The Galactic Centre energy, resonant with late Sagittarius, in his case also combines with the ice-blue Aquarian Decan of late Gemini, blessing him with a far greater freedom of understanding than many of his equally devout fellows. This Aries 1/ Gemini 3 cross I have come to call the Teaching Cross. On the other hand, there is one bishop of my acquaintance whose HS pattern (in common with Pope John Paul II !) predominates in the greens and blues of Water and Air, showing how strongly the detached intellect and the emotions are involved in the act of worship, how abstract it is for him, and how vital words are to the process of his interlocution with the Divine. To such beings the liturgy of worship, especially its music which alone can fully express religious feeling, is of central importance. The way to test this further has been to recall those clergy known to me who refuse to sing their liturgy, but place much emphasis on symbolic objects, icons, etc. Do they have HS charts strong in the contrasting tactile and visual elements of Earth and Fire? Indeed they do, almost to the exclusion of Air and Water in the two cases before me, and interestingly one of them has an HS cross of Cancer 1/ Virgo 3 (the silver or white of Moon, and the warm, soft peachy-brown of the Venus Decan) and the sanctuary of his church is totally dominated by a huge relief of the Madonna, in wood of much the same colour as his HS chart! A third priest, who strongly advocates an austere and spare presentation of the liturgy, has the leanest, barest HS I have yet seen, elementally in perfect balance, and one of the most alive also, as its energies are those which are most readily recognisable as his. A further point of interest here is that this is a man who advocates the priesting of women, and this pattern carries a cross of Cancer 1/ Aries-Libra 1 Moon and Venus-Mars. (It brings to mind the last page of the Gospel of Thomas - "Unless a woman becomes like a man, she cannot enter the Kingdom.") Jacob's Ladder By now we have six levels of being, all proving themselves both in the processes of Interdimensional analysis and intuitive assessment. The colours can also be approached analytically of course, adding to the intuitive understanding an objective survey of energy-balance through the rulerships of the signs and decanates. Their therapeutic value must also be emphasised, as it is possible for anyone working on the enhancement of a particular planetary or angular energy at any level to invoke it directly by wearing and using the colour(s) through which it is expressed on their own zodiacal palette, either long-term or in those situations where, for example, a little more relaxed Jupiter bonhomie is called for, or a few hours of extra Mars initiative. The picture is surely complete, from the lowest, most material and unconditionally free level of embodied personality to the rarefied strata of the True Man, "a little lower than the angels." What gives pause for thought, however, is that in spiritual structures wherever there are six there is usually a seventh; and a question comes to mind that was put to the Astrological Association by Dennis Elwell at least once - "Is there a Solar Chart?" Not Solar in the sense of Heliocentric, but Solar where the Sun in the Geocentric pattern is taken as the start of the first house, often for want of a birth-time - and forever in the constricted columns of daily newspaper forecasts! The same data as before have been used to test the idea implicit here, but - instead of Solar houses - taking the twelve 30̊ sectors from the Sun as Signs, each again blessed with their full complement of degrees, and three decans apiece. Here is another file of shimmering colour; what can this tell us? As it is Geocentric, we are clearly back in this world; basing this zodiac on the Sun's geocentric position, it must have something to say about the interrelationship of the central Self and the incarnation. So much for theory; the only way it has been possible to test it, has been to open the mind to the pattern with all its colours, while holding in the mind's eye beside it the living image of the person one knows. Eventually a theme did emerge, which has been re-tested on many different people by myself and several colleagues. What we have all been able to recognise, is the person in youth! Remember Wordsworth's wonderful poem, "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" ? It bears re-reading for its wisdom and beauty over and over again, especially these lines from verses 4 and 5: Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream? ... Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close About the growing Boy, But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy; The Youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is Nature's Priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the Man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day." Every verse of this hymn to our human truth has something vital to say; I shall add here only the last four lines: “Thanks to the human heart by which we live, Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, its fears, To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” "The child is father of the man" ... in every case as one works, one meets the Child in the man or woman - sometimes joyous, sometimes shy, sometimes sulky; some loving and generous, some greedy, some bossy - the little playground tyrants with their gangs and their tantrums, the quiet and thoughtful children whose sensitivity to their truth would lead them sooner or later into priesthood or gentle service. In some, the Child lives still only in old family photographs; in others its nature still flashes out in bursts of spontaneous delight, or childish temper. The Child in many is a joyful part of a richly maturing consciousness; in others an unruly central element in a personality that has never properly matured. One thing that has raised a chuckle is reading Alice Bailey's autobiography some months after making her GeoSolar ( GSL ) chart - the term adopted - and finding there such a bossy-boots! ... for she admits in its pages with disarming honesty that in her early days as a very youthful evangelist her cocksureness, her insistence that she knew what was right and wrong for everyone, must have been hard to tolerate! Other parts of her pattern are much more attractive, and the character there extremely appealing. Now, there is a special phenomenon related to the Geosolar pattern that is found nowhere else: because the Sun is the fiducial, and the planets Mercury and Venus zodiacally never far from the Sun, there will be a stronger likelihood of Aquarius, Pisces, Aries or Taurus being tenanted in the Geosolar chart by one or more planets. The Geosolar will always show either a green band of Pisces, the red of Aries, the green-blues of Aquarius, or the pinky-browns of Taurus. Emphasis on one or another of these will suggest a GSL type: assertive natures where a planet is ahead of the Sun within 30̊, retiring and imaginative souls with planets up to 30̊ behind the Sun, and two far less volatile, much more stable groups up to 60̊ distant - ahead of the Sun the matter-of-fact, comfortable ones, and behind the Sun the eccentrics, the analysts, the Human Rights activists. You will find blends of these natures; reds and greens are quite common, but it is only when they are out of balance and harmony with the rest of the colours that the playground bully emerges, still the spoilt child in adult life who will sulk and blubber and rage if he can't have his own way. There is the potential selfishness of too strong and subjective a focus on "I" and "mine" where planets are close to the Sun in an immature personality, with the destructiveness of unruled appetites and passions. David Hamblin wrote a pioneering essay on a tantalisingly similar theme for the Astrological Journal, entitled "Isolated and Congested Suns." He said, "Many people with congested Suns remind me ... of a great boulder crashing through life in an accidental way, following the line of least resistance rather than following a pre-conceived plan. They are more spontaneous and effusive, less poised and collected, than the isolated Sun people." ... ie the Aries/ Pisces folk compared to the Aquarius/ Taurus groups, especially those of the latter at or close to the 60̊ limit, in the Saturn Decans! Do read this article; he is most interesting in his observations. Another point that must be made about the Geosolar is that, at least in respect of the Outer Planets, it is virtually the complement to the Heliomundane; for in heliocentric mode, the Earth lies in exactly the opposite degree to that of the Geo Sun, and so any planets whose positions do not materially alter from the geocentric to the heliocentric viewpoint will, at the Geosolar level, be opposite their HM positions - Geosolar having the Sun as fiducial, and Heliomundane the Earth. The implications of this are intriguing: maybe we have here an exchange of viewpoints - in the HM, the Self's attitude to the experience of incarnation (which will then affect its actions during the earthly life) and in the GSL how the world perceives the incarnated individual as an authentic Self, stripped of all its conditioning, pretensions, disguises and rôles. Behind Necessity which builds personalities through our karmic, social, and voluntary work and play in the world, remains Authenticity, the Selfhood that reveals itself in the spontaneity of the child, and Time and illusion conceal. When we are at our most honest, when we (rarely) allow ourselves to "become as little children", open and vulnerable, emotionally and spiritually naked, then we come as close to the truth about ourselves as we are ever likely to, this far from Heaven. ........................................................................................................................... |