Page 19 - The Gluckman Occasional Number Four

well as where, by reference to other species’ mechanisms of
spatiotemporal reaction, should guide such investigations into human
manifestations of astrological dependence and influence.
But “astrology” is a misleading term. No appropriate single-word
referent exists for the reliance of biosphere on sun-moon-earth cycles. It
has very little to do with individual stars (polar navigation, based on
fixity) or the other planets in the solar system (too slow-moving, too
weak in perceptible forces), and nothing to do with imaginatively
conceived constellations or their apparent movement through the
tropical zodiac owing to nutation (the meaningless precession of the
equinoxes). Further, calendars (and therefore astrological cycles) based
on arbitrarily-determined lunisolar calendars cannot have any application
to the real history of life on earth—including human beings. Practitioners
of astrology make use of a variety of calculations to qualify and
temporize their assertions with a pseudo-scientific gloss of arcane
relationships and ever-finer detail: progressions (impossible), transits
(affect everyone and everything equally, if at all), nodes (fictional points
in space), parts (utter fabrications), houses (multiplicity of systems, all
2
syncretized with mythological qualities of signs and “planets” ), aspects
(other than those regularly produced by the sun and moon). The result is
a miasma of equivocation (“the stars impel, they do not compel”) and
contradictory predictions and personality traits, woven together by the
astrologer’s obscure powers of intuition and potential deception into a
Jungian mandala equally applicable to spider hatchlings and the King of
Romania.
What, then, are the sun-moon-earth aspects worthy of consideration,
how might they operate in an organism, and why would they be of any
evolutionary advantage to a species? On the first question, one need not
go beyond the basics: the solar year and its seasons, sliced into two half-
years or four quarter-years at the solstices and equinoxes, with the
possible halving of each of those quarters (peaks or valleys of the rate of
change between the length of day and night), providing a means for

2
I presented this criticism of the zodiac’s misuse epigrammatically, in 1975:

Astrolodger

Connect the dots some priest
Did not before the fact
Of learning like which beast
Those born beneath them act.