Toward Ecosophy

There are times when I wonder why so many people seem so freaky these days, and then I remember this. 

This is the future we were supposed to get.  Two generations of Americans grew up being told that this was what they could expect, in newspaper ads like this one and in countless other venues. Next time you go for a walk or even look out the window, compare what you see to the image above, and measure the gap between them. The cognitive dissonance between the future we were told we were going to get and the one that's actually arrived is, I think, the single largest cause of the collective nervous breakdown unfolding around us right now. 

I've been rereading my collection of Ivy Goldstein-Jacobson astrology books, and it occurs to me that astrology is approaching a historical bottleneck at least as serious as the one that nearly extinguished it as a living tradition at the end of the Renaissance. 

That bottleneck? Latin. Until William Lilly published Christian Astrology in 1647, pretty much every significant work on astrology in Europe was written in Latin, which meant that they were only accessible to the educated. When astrology dropped out of fashion at the end of the reality wars of the late Renaissance, the educated stopped studying it, end of story....except that Lilly's book was in plain English, and that meant that in Britain, Ireland, and the American colonies (once those were founded), astrology remained in common use among folk practitioners. It's the same story traced out by Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy, which also got translated out of Latin into several vernaculars around the same time, and preserved Renaissance magical philosophy straight through the dark ages of rationalist materialism that followed. In both cases, it was the folk practitioners who kept things going, and it was from there that astrology and magic both revived in the nineteenth century.

The bottleneck this time? Mathematics. It's not actually that difficult to calculate an astrological chart by hand -- in fact, if you've got a table of logarithms and a few other old-fashioned helps, and aren't afraid to use them, it's a very quick process -- but next to nobody knows how to do it any more. 

I was thinking about this while rereading Goldstein-Jacobson's Foundations of the Astrological Chart, which gives detailed instructions on how to do the thing. (So do dozens of other old books on the subject.) As the computer age winds to its end, and the capacity to type in some data and get back a fully calculated chart goes away for the foreseeable future, astrology will drop dead in its tracks if nobody knows how to crunch the numbers themselves. That seems worth doing something about. 

...and more generally it's got me wondering about how today's occult traditions are going to weather the Long Descent and the deindustrial dark ages ahead. Much to think about...