Constellation at Goethe's birth

"On the 28th of August, 1749, at mid-day, as the clock struck twelve, I came into the world, at Frankfort-on-the-Main. My horoscope was propitious: the Sun stood in the sign of Virgo, and had culminated for the day; Jupiter and Venus looked on him with a friendly eye, and Mercury not adversely; while Saturn and Mars kept themselves indifferent; the Moon alone, just full, exerted the power of her reflection all the more, as she had then reached her planetary hour. She opposed herself, therefore, to my birth, which could not be accomplished until this hour was passed.

These good aspects, which the astrologers managed subsequently to reckon very auspicious for me, may have been the causes of my preservation; for, through the fault of the midwife, I came into the world as dead, and only after various efforts was I enabled to see the light."

The Autobiography of Goethe, 'From my Life: Poetry and Truth', 1811

In a curious passage in his optical writings Goethe maintained that the astrologers were wrong to ascribe evil results to the presence of Sun and Moon in opposite corners of the heavens. "The full moon does not stand opposed in enmity to the sun but sweetly returns the light it lent to her; it is Artemis, gazing in love and longing at her brother." In his view the apparent opposites need not be in conflict. ('Paradoxer Seitenblick auf die Astrologie')

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

Humans in the magic circle

And by this magic little thread

That cannot be torn apart,

The sweet and playful girl

Holds me fast against my will;

In her enchanted realm

I must now live as she dictates.

Ah, what a monstrous change!

Love! Love! Let me free!

Goethe, ‘New love, new life’

Anyone seeking alternatives to an existence in stoical self-sufficiency, or individual self-arrest before the mirror, would do well to recall an epoch in which all reflection on the conditio humana had shown  evidence that between humans, whether in familiar proximity or on the open market, a restless play of mutual affection was in progress. Long before the idea of the individual as a separate entity established itself, the philosophers  of the early Modern Age had made it clear that the interpersonal space was overcrowded with symbiotic and erotic energies that fundamentally deny the illusion of the subject being autonomous. The central law of attraction from person to person as experienced in premodern attitudes is the enchantment of humans through humans. For them fascination is the rule and disenchantment the exception. In the language of tradition this figures as the law of sympathy, which states that love cannot but awaken love, and hatred likewise generates its congenial response. It was the magus of the Renaissance who supplied the vocabulary but already from Plato’s time on it was seen as the realm of the daimonion and was interpreted as the work of eros.

Where desire flares up, an already existent, latent belonging of the subject to the desired becomes manifest, and whatever humans desire from the other is as well a response to the attraction from the other side. In this sense, being and attracting are the same thing. This intersubjective magic is based on the magic of completion as described by Plato in the Symposion with the myth of the human halves passionately striving towards one another. The human is caught in the dramaturgical rhythm of primal completeness, the catastrophe of separation and restoration. This archaic story shares the formal law of the mythical narrative, which is also that of dialectics. Ficino, following Plato, assumes a lost primal presence of the soul in God. Without this ineradicable experience the lover could not carry within himself any guiding idea of the state at which his desire is directed.

Platonism and psychoanalysis, despite their differences as to when the amorous drama originated, do agree in the definition of its form: both teach that the primary eros has its source in an obscured, never entirely forgotten past that could be aroused at any time anew.

Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) philosopher, priest, astrologer

More than a century after Ficino, Giordano Bruno embedded the magic of intersubjectivity in a general theory of discrete mutual bonds between people. They were drawn to each other, according to his treatise ‘De vinculis in genere’, by a universal bond, vinculum, a cosmic as well as erotic force. It stands for discrete multiple attractions, a play of constantly moving and manifold affiliations, of people caught by magic threads. For the thinkers of that time, magic was a cipher for the art of conceiving of things and living beings as being entangled in interdependencies. At all levels of being the bond of relationship - the power to bind or being bound - took precedence over any being in its solitary state.

What the sixteenth century called the magus was the inquisitive and open minded man who, attentively and artfully, developed his skills in tracing the discrete interdependencies between the things in a highly communicative universe. The magus, the prototype of the philosopher as artist, doctor, alchemist and astrologer, is no less than the intermediary in the world of correspondences, influences and attractions. He is agent and meta-psychologist of the world’s soul, whose universal expansion can be experienced “ by everything being in contact with everything else”.

Giordano Bruno (1548-1600)

(abbreviated version from the chapter in ‘Sphären I', by Peter Sloterdijk, 1998

Dante and astrology

In Paradiso, the third part of his Divine Comedy, Dante describes his journey through Paradise, accompanied by Beatrice. The astrological allusions abound throughout the text and their sheer frequency has been cause for surprise, dismay, and sometimes disdain. Scholars, in their embarrassment, chose to focus solely on the astronomical side and neglect all things astrological. To be fair, this neglect of astrology may be due not only to prejudice against the occult but also to ignorance of its literature. Dante’s sources were Arabic, Greek and Latin texts not easy to come by, to say nothing of understanding them.

What now are considered as two distinct (and unequally valid) inquiries - astronomy and astrology - in the Middle Ages went by a single name (Dante used the term astrologia). To the medieval mind, celestial influence was not supernatural at all but rather a fact of nature.

When Dante enters the Seventh Sphere of the planet Saturn, he encounters the spirits of the contemplative, ascending on a golden ladder into the higher heavens attaining to a higher mind. “The mind that here is radiant, on the earth is wrapt in mist”.

Elsewhere in his writings (‘Convivio’) Dante makes Saturn the emblem of astrology. He gives the following reasons: First, that it has the slowest movement of any planet, and is, therefore, comparable to astrology which requires a longer period for its study than any of the other sciences. Second, that it is higher than any other planet, and thus can be likened to astrology which is the highest and noblest among the seven sciences.

Dante’s famous condemnation of two astrologers in the Twentieth Canto of the ‘Inferno’ should not be seen as disbelief in their art but as a repudiation of any kind of divination which went against the doctrine of the Church and was seen as an impiety. They had to suffer for their being fraudulent soothsayers.

Bodleian Library, University of Oxford

Paradiso, Canto XXII.
Gemini; Dante and Beatrice look down at the seven planets; Dante and Beatrice conversing.

Goethe quoting the astrologer Manilius

On the occasion of having ascended the mountain top of the 'Brocken' Goethe wrote these lines in the visitors' book, quoting the Roman astrologer Manilius:

"Quis cœlum possit nisi cœli munere nosse?
Et reperire deum nisi qui pars ipse deorum est?"

"Who could know heaven save by heavenly grace, or find God if he were not himself a part of God."

Schopenhauer on character

“Since a man does not alter, and his moral character remains absolutely the same all through his life; since he must play out the part which he has received, without the least deviation from the character; since neither experience, nor philosophy, nor religion can effect any improvement in him, the question arises, what is the meaning of life at all? To what purpose is it played, this farce in which everything that is essential is irrevocably fixed and determined?

It is said that a man may come to understand himself, that he may see what it is that he seeks and has sought to be; what he wants, and what, therefore, he is. This is a knowledge which must be imparted to him from without. … Life is the manifestation of character, of the something that we understand by that word. ... Life is only the mirror into which a man gazes not in order that he may get a reflection of himself, but that he may come to understand himself by that reflection; that he may see what it is that the mirror shows. Life is the proof sheet, in which the compositors’ errors are brought to light. How they become visible, and whether the type is large or small, are matters of no consequence. ...

I have described character as theoretically an act of will lying beyond time, of which life in time, or character in action, is the development. For matters of practical life we all possess the one as well as the other; for we are constituted of them both. Character modifies our life more than we think, and it is to a certain extent true that every man is the architect of his own fortune. No doubt it seems as if our lot were assigned to us almost entirely from without, and imparted to us in something of the same way in which a melody outside us reaches the ear. But on looking back over our past, we see at once that our life consists of mere variations on one and the same theme, namely, our character, and that the same fundamental bass sounds through it all. This is an experience which a man can and must make in and by himself.”

Arthur Schopenhauer, 'On Human Nature', 1850

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

Up there and down here

"European astrologers made use of a cosmology, which came originally from Greece. According to the scheme first laid out by Plato and then elaborately developed by Aristotle and others, the universe has two main parts: the upper realm of the celestial spheres, which revolve around the earth, and the lower realm of the four elements. In the upper realm, "tout n'est qu'ordre et beaute, luxe, calme et volupte". The stars and the planets, embedded in crystalline spheres, make the unchanging music of eternity. In the lower realm, by contrast, things and creatures composed of four elements - earth, air, fire, and water - are born and grow, become old and die. Down here, things change incessantly; the elements play an unending drama, which seems to have no clear script.

But that which is complete, does not change and moves in a uniform way is higher than that which changes. And the higher rightly rules the lower. Accordingly, the music of the spheres in the upper realm extends its influence to the living creatures in the lower realm. They dance to it - at least to the limited and imperfect extent allowed by the messy and changeable matter of which they consist. The cosmology justified the hermeneutics. It explained, why the astrologer could infer from the smooth and predictable movements of the planets the jerky and uneven future movements of plants, animals, and humans on earth."

Anthony Grafton, 'Cardano's Cosmos; The worlds and works of a Renaissance astrologer', 1999 (Italics mine)

Astrology applied // Charles de Gaulle

World War II: After the liberation of France by the Allied Powers, Charles de Gaulle returned from exile to France. On August 24th, 1944, visiting the town of Toulon and being greeted by the army band playing the Marseillaise, the general wanted to shake hands with the music conductor. General Lattre de Tassigny, having himself a deep interest in astrology, introduced him to the general with the words: "Maurice Vasset, soldat, musicien et astrologue". De Gaulle then ordered Vasset to see him right away and had his chart read by him. This was the beginning of a confidential relationship that was to last for the next 25 years. 

In November 1944, just before embarking with Churchill to see Stalin in Moscow, he handed Vasset, who was chef of the bataillon at the time, his birth chart with the words scribbled on the backside; "Vasset, vous etes un bon soldat mais aussi a bon astrologue."

Vasset later was invited to the Elysee Palace many times, to discuss current events as well as the charts of prospective ministers. To what effect Vasset's readings actually affected de Gaulle's decisions we do not know. But that de Gaulle gave credit to astrological interpretation is without doubt.

Le Nouvel Observateur, August 2000

Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970)

The astrological text

"The continuity of the astrological tradition is, perhaps, unmatched in the intellectual history of the West. All astrologers - whether in ancient Babylon or Hitler's Munich - assume that they understand the language of the stars, that they possess a set of rules which enable them to decipher the book of the heavens. This analogy may sound very modern. Current intellectual fashion dictates the comparison of texts to events. But in the case of astrology, the analogy itself forms part of a long-established tradition. Giovanni Gioviano Pontano, who published his treatise On Celestial Things in 1512, argued explicitly that the language of the stars conformed in all essential ways to the language of humans. The letters of the Roman alphabet, he pointed out, could be combined in thousands of ways to form new words. Very simple alterations in spelling caused major changes in sense. Every transformation of the sign transforms its meaning.

Stars and planets, Pontano argued, formed the letters of a cosmic alphabet. Clear simple attributes - color, external appearance, speed and direction of motion - expressed the character and revealed the influence of the individual planets. Every planet played the role of a letter with defined qualities. Every astrologically significant configuration of two or more planets resembled a word or a phrase, the sense of which the astrologer could determine."

Anthony Grafton, 'Cardano's Cosmos; The worlds and works of a Renaissance astrologer', 1999

Giovanni Gioviano Potano (1426-1503)

Defining astrology

"Astrology is neither a religion, nor a philosophy, nor a system, even though it overlaps with these three elements. If anything, astrology is knowledge of specific techniques related to its practice. Some of the methodologies on which astrology is based are in the scientific domain of logic and mathematics, without any link to the occult or magic. Even though astrology originates from ancient astral religions, it secularizes their contents."

Ornella Pompeo Faracovi, 'Scritto negli astri. L'astrologia nella cultura dell'Occidente, 1996 (Italics/bold mine)

On image and imagination

"In mediaeval philosophy imagination, not intellect, became the defining principle of the human species, as the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben points out in his book 'Nymphs'. Thought alone was not able to grasp it and express it. Imagination is thus assigned a decisive role where sensation and thought meet, at the crossroads between the individual and the collective, and it is in these encounters when the image becomes alive. One could also say that life is given to everything to which an image is given.

However, this encounter carries the danger of images crystallizing and turning into specters, haunting man. Concerning astrological images, the observation of the sky carries both grace and damnation, the celestial sphere being one of the places where men project their passion for images. In these highly charged encounters, Agamben concludes, "...the capacity to suspend and reverse the charge and to transform destiny into fortune (fortuna) is essential. In this sense, the celestial constellations are the original text in which imagination reads what was never written."

Georgio Agamben, 'Nymphs', 2011 (Italics/bold mine)

The cosmos is a vast living body

"The cosmos is a vast living body, of which we are still parts. The sun is a great heart whose tremors run through our smallest veins. The moon is a great nerve-center from which we quiver forever. Who knows the power that Saturn has over us, or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time."

D.H. Lawrence, 'Apocalypse', 1931

Horoscope // Ted Hughes

You wanted to study

Your stars -- the guards

Of your prison yard, their zodiac. The planets

Muttered their Babylonisch power-sprach --

Like a witchdoctor’s bones. You were right to fear

How loud the bones might roar,

How clear an ear might hear

What the bones whispered

Even embedded as they were in the hot body.

Only you had no need to calculate

Degrees for your ascendent disruptor

In Aries. It meant nothing certain -- no more

According to the Babylonian book

Than a scarred face. How much deeper

Under the skin could any magician peep?

You only had to look

Into the nearest face of a metaphor

Picked out of your wardrobe or off your plate

Or out of the sun or the moon or the yew tree

To see your father, your mother, or me

Bring you your whole Fate.

Ted Hughes

Art of translation

Leonardo Bruni was one of the first humanists who refused, when confronted with translation, to give a certain term a once and for all fixed definition. The meaning of any term, he insisted, can only be grasped in reference to the context in which it shows up. ‘’All words are solemnly connected to each other like in a colorful inlaid floor or mosaic”.

The same holds true for the translation of astrological symbols in any interpretation of a chart.

Leonardo Bruni (1369-1444)

About "correspondence"

"When we had laid down beside the spring the landscape became the object of an important conversation: we asked ourselves what - for God’s sake! - may be the reason that when we had arrived at this place one of us turned silent and melancholic as Bellorophon did but Naugerius was about to start singing and was nearly overcome by mania … The problem is ...why the same place impels one towards poetry but the other towards philosophy. The surroundings, surely, are the same: why then do they not evoke the same consequences?"

G. Fracastoro (ca. 1478 - 1553), Naugerius

Portrait of Fracastoro by Tizian

Stage fright

With the act of birth he was gripped by stage fright. The fear to step forward, to be a person. To be sent on stage into a totally unknown play, not knowing which role to play, what text to say to the world out there.

His dream had been having become a spear, a catapulted lance, its spike being drilled into the ground, which his feet never stepped onto nor ever would. His only joyous vital movement would be the long vibration of the high shaft. A spear on foreign lands! A marking, an exclamation, a scratch, a jolt, a projection: Him.

  Botho Strauss, 'Oniritti Cave Paintings', 2016

Volo ut sis

‘Amo: volo ut sis.’ (I love you: I want you to be)

Augustinus

“Ich will, dass Du seiest, was Du bist”.

“I want you to be what you are.”

Martin Heidegger in a letter to Hannah Arendt, 1925

Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, ca. 1925

Ananke

Αναγκη, [Ananke] Nötigung

Da ist's denn wieder, wie die Sterne wollten:

BIst nur ein Wollen, weil wir eben sollten,

Und vor dem Willen schweigt die Willkür stille;

Das Liebste wird vom Herzen weggescholten,

Dem harten Muß bequemt sich Will und Grille.

So sind wir scheinfrei denn nach manchen Jahren

Nur enger dran, als wir am Anfang waren.

Goethe, 'Orphic Sacred Words'

Αναγκη, Νecessity

Here we find again what the stars demanded:

Law and necessity; and all of our will

Is only willing what we were meant to do,

And in face of it the arbitrary will is silenced;

Man’s heart forsakes what most was loved by him,

The harsh ‘You must’ obey both will and whim.

Thus, while feeling free, we are, after all the years,

Closing in even more than when we began.

[translation C.C.]

Time, the hound of the gods

Time, the hound of the gods, after their demise would roam upon the World and the cities...

Lord Dunsany, 'The Bird of Doom and The End', 1905

Circular writing, circular reading

At any page a book should manage to begin, in each event the whole story contained. It would mean to write a spherical book... Such a many-headed and hidden beginning would be like a nerve-cell reaching out its fibers, dendrites and axons to other areas and thus forming a living nervous system. That would allow for a reading in different directions, with the exception of the one from front to back, the most unproductive direction in worldly affairs.

Botho Strauss, 'Oniritti Cave Paintings', 2016

M.C. Escher (detail)