Rod Blackhirst, Astrology, Autochtony and Salvation (note de lectura)

Published at www.religioperennis.com

The moto is: “Not only in the plants that grow from the earth but also for animals that live upon it there is a cycle of bearing and barreness for soul and body as often as the revolutions of their orbs come full circle, in brief courses for the short-lived and oppositely for the opposite. But the laws of prosperous birth or infertility for your race, the men you have bred to be rulers will not for all their wisdom ascertain by reasoning combined with sensation, but they will escape them, and there will be a time when they will beget children out of season.” (Plato, Republic 546A-B)

The Byzantine writer Julius Firmicus Maternus gave us the symbolic horoscope or geniture of the world (the Mundi Thema). Prognostications and diagnoses are made on the basis of the similiarities and differences between the Mundi Thema and the particular geniture in question.

“The therapeutic correlative of this method is that each individual soul must, given the gifts with which they are born, attempt to bring their particular "distorted" horoscope back into a realignment with the primal horoscope. In so doing they participate in or are reunited with the creative cosmic moment and lose, so to speak, their particular nativity and are instead born with the cosmos, with the world, with the earth. In other terms, they reunify microcosm with macrocosm, healing the primal breach between the two.”

Plato, the cosmological treatise Timaeus.

The system of Firmicus Maternus is an astrological extension of the platonician idea that cosmic sphere corresponds with microcosmos.

How the measure practicaly: “In the Mundi Thema, for example, the planet Saturn is located in the (diurnal) zodiacal sign of Capricorn. If the planet Saturn is located in, say, Libra in the nativity of any given person, one judges according to the character of this relationship (or deviation from the ideal), in this case a deviation of ninety degrees. Similiarly, if the Moon, which has its pristine abode in Cancer, is in Capricorn in any given nativity, it stands at 180 deg. or in opposition to the ideal, and so is judged accordingly.”

In the Mundi Thema the planetary "homes" are their places on the day of Creation, the places where they were first placed in the heavens by the Creator.
According to Plato, we can by “assimilations” restore the planets to their homes and our souls to their original state. This is salvation. It is the Pythagorean doctrine of the harmony of the spheres.

In Judeo-Christian and Islamic terms the Mundi Thema is representative of the Edenic state, and the deviation of the planets from their original homes is indicative of post-Edenic deviation.

Mundi Thema is also the horoscope of the primordial being.

“In astrological terms, salvation is to cleave to and identify with the centre-point of the horoscope, no longer tossed around in the to-ing and fro-ing of the periphery. And this is, at the same time, to realise within oneself the primordial man: to make as one's own the horoscope of Adam. To be saved a man must overcome or put aside - make irrelevant - his individual nativity and adopt the nativity (and spiritual anonymity) of Adam, everyman, who, in turn, has the same nativity as the very soil from which he was made.”

The doctrine of autochtony: primordial man was the product of a creation directly from the primordial soil. Transposed to the astrological framework, the great souls of the Golden Age are those primordial beings made at the creation who, therefore, all have the Mundi Thema - the Creation - as their geniture.

“The distinctive Christian development of the themes of autochthony deserve special mention. Like Islam, Christianity takes from Judaism the Adamic autochthony but adds to it Christ as the new and regenerated Adam. In this Christ appears as the primordial plant-man, firstly by being crucified (imposed) upon the Tree of Life which grows from the place where the skull - noting the physiological resonances of this detail - of Adam was buried like a seed, and secondly, and more obviously, in being resurrected from the grave in the Christian adaptation of ancient vegetative mythology.”

The New Year is to the solar cycle what the day of Creation is to the cosmic cycle.
The Western astrological tradition - following Roman models - is accustomed to thinking of the zodiac starting with Aries in Spring. Firmicus Maternus, using a much older arrangement, has the zodiac starting in Cancer in midsummer.

Traditional social and religious orders seek to cling to the state of primordial purity, resisting the inevitable decline of the Ages. One of the ways in which they do this is by the deliberate calculation of conceptions and births to try to give their children horoscopes that deviate as little as possible from the best of horoscopes, the horoscope of the Origin.

Conclusion: “The system of astrology recorded by Firmicus Maternus, with the primordial horoscope, is clearly a key within this broader tradition and illuminates many of the most important but least understood aspects of ancient and esoteric astrology, exposing a fundamental vein of traditional symbolism that is rarely if ever explored in contemporary astrological thinking.”