Andrew Smith has kindly given permission to post Bill Darlison’s excellent review of Planetary Types: the Science of Celestial Influence from the latest issue of The Gnostic: a Journal of Gnosticism. Check it out at www.the-gnostic.com
Bill is the author of The Gospel and the Zodiac www.thegospelandthezodiac.com and you can find him at this weblog www.billdarlison.com
When I began my study of astrology over forty years ago, I sought an answer to the most basic question of all: ‘How does it work?’ The whole edifice seemed to rest on the most insubstantial of foundations. The influence of the sun and moon upon terrestrial life was obvious and demonstrable, but planetary ‘influence’ was another matter altogether. How could these bodies – much smaller than the sun, much further away from us than the moon – possibly affect us? What occult rays did they emit that were able to determine the character and destiny of a human being? I remember hearing Patrick Moore the BBC’s astronomer saying that the midwife’s gravitational pull upon the newborn child was stronger than that of any of the planets, and this fact, he said, should put paid to the preposterous theories of the astrological charlatans. And yet, not only did astrology postulate the existence of such planetary influences, it even ascribed influences to non-substantial entities like the zodiac, the moon’s nodes and certain angular distances between planets. Some astrologers, alert to the problems associated with planetary influence, opted to explain things in less physical terms. The doyen of 20th century astrology, Dane Rudhyar, for example, described astrology as ‘the algebra of life’, and many offered the vague suggestion that ‘symbolism’ or Jungian synchronicity could somehow account for the phenomena.
These foundational problems are addressed by Tony Cartledge in this intriguing book, and his conclusions are quite astonishing and eminently plausible: it’s not a matter of ‘influence’ or of ‘symbolism’ but of ‘resonance’. The ‘harmony of the spheres’ of Pythagoras and later of Kepler is not just poetic metaphor: the universe sings its song, and the resonances of the individual planetary notes are picked up by the ultra-sensitive glandular system of the new-born child.
However, Cartledge is no apologist for astrology, which, he says, has failed every scientific test it has been subjected to. Instead, following the lead of the redoubtable French investigator, Michel Gauquelin, whose work he describes in some detail, Cartledge rejects most of the astrological tradition – including the zodiac and the astrological houses – but hangs on to the ancient theory of ‘planetary types’ which, he says, has been proved statistically by Gauquelin’s exhaustive work with thousands of accurately timed births. What is more, says Cartledge, numerous attempts by sceptics to undermine Gauquelin’s conclusions have been in vain: it would indeed seem that ‘martial’ people tend to be born when the planet Mars is either rising in the east or culminating directly overhead, and the same applies to the saturnine, the jovial and the rest.
Cartledge then goes on to describe these planetary types, detailing their physical and psychological characteristics and illustrating them with photographs and planetary data of numerous celebrities. This is the most enjoyable part of the book, and I now find myself almost obsessively categorising my friends, acquaintances and television personalities according to Cartlege’s scheme! I am undoubtedly a Jupiterean. In my natal chart, Jupiter is close to the ascendant and making square (90 degree) aspects to four planets and the midheaven. Consequently, I am ‘intelligent, creative, discriminating….flamboyant, gregarious and entertaining’ as well as ‘vain and self important’! I am also completely bald, which, says Cartledge, is almost a defining characteristic of the male Jupiterean. He deals similarly with martial, mercurial, saturnine, venereal, solar and lunar types, along with sub categories such as Jupiter/Moon, Saturn/Mars.
This book is no coffee table astrological primer. It is a serious attempt to establish the foundations of SCI, the Science of Celestial Influence, free from the restrictions imposed by what the author sees as the debilitating weight of unscientific astrological tradition, and from the prejudices of the scientific community which rejects a priori all talk of correspondence between celestial and terrestrial phenomena. It describes the work of Pythagoras, Kepler, Gurdieff, Ouspensky, Rodney Collin, and Percy Seymour, and it examines musical theory and the physiology of the human glandular system in some depth. The author is scrupulously fair. He acknowledges the inadequacies of his own attempts at putting his ideas to statistical tests, and even anticipates the objections that members of the scientific community might bring against his theories. He’s not trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes, or to sidestep criticism; he’s simply trying to find what is worth salvaging from what he considers the confused jumble of unscientific ideas which comprise contemporary astrology.
I found some parts of the book heavy going. The chapters on musical theory and on glandular structures found my skimming a little, and I would have liked a comprehensive appendix giving the birth data (date, time, place) of all the celebrities mentioned in the book, so that I could check Cartledge’s findings for myself. But these are minor complaints. The book is well researched, well written, honest, enlightening and entertaining. It is beautifully produced, well illustrated and comprehensively indexed. I strongly recommend it.
Bill Darlison
