When a planet is located in the upper part of the 12th house, it influence is confined entirely to that department of life, but when close to the Ascendant, it acquires dominion also over the physical body, for the Ascendant is the degree which held the Moon at conception and serves as an avenue of ingress for the life forces until the severance of the umbilical cord. The planets in aspect to that degree during the 9 months immediately preceding birth each had a share in forming the organic constitution of the child. This is particularly true of the planets which formed a conjunction with the Ascendant during the prenatal period. After birth, health is influenced by aspects to the Ascendant and conditions of the 6th house; but the organic constitution which was determined by the prenatal aspects mentioned above is almost unchangeable for these aspects are the ripe vintage of our past which must be drunk to the dregs no matter how we squirm, though proper care, particularly if applied in childhood, may considerably decrease suffering from that source.
Neptune really signifies what we may call "the gods," commencing with the supernormal beings we know as Elder Brothers, and compassing the innumerable hosts of spiritual entities — good, bad, and indifferent, which influence our evolution. Its position and aspects denote our relation to them, if any; malefic aspects attract agencies of a nature inimical to our welfare, benefic configurations draw upon the good forces. Thus, if Neptune is placed in the 10th house, trine to the Ascendant, the person involved will have the opportunity to become a leader or prominent in a movement along mystical lines as denoted by the exalted position of Neptune. His body will be capable of receiving the finer vibrations and coming into touch with the spiritual world, as denoted by the trine of the Ascendant. On the other hand, when Neptune is placed in the 12th house, whose nature is passive and productive of suffering, it indicates that at some time, perhaps under a square from the Midheaven such as we are considering, the evil forces among whom are spirit-controls will be drawn to that person and endeavor to obtain possession of the body. The conjunction of Neptune with the Ascendant will make the body sensitive and usable for spiritual purposes as well as the trine. Given the opportunity afforded by the first aspect mentioned, the man may become a pupil of a Mystery School and a factor for great good in the uplift of mankind; placed under the affliction of the second aspect, he may become a helpless tool of spirit-controls, an irresponsible medium.
But there is one factor which is never shown in the horoscope, and that is the will of the man. He is bound at some time in life to meet with the experiences denoted by his horoscope, and the opportunities there indicated will be placed before him by one in orderly succession, as the clock of destiny marks the appropriate time, but how he, the free and independent spirit, meets those fated experiences, no one can determine beforehand. The man in whose horoscope the first mentioned benefic configuration occurs may not be sufficiently awake to the great opportunity before him to catch it on the wing, it may have flown before he realizes that it was there. Yes, he may even never become aware of the fact. On the other hand, the person in whose life the square indicates the assault by spiritual forces mentioned, may develop his spiritual muscle by resisting the onslaught and become a victor instead of being vanquished. Forewarned is forearmed; if the parents of the boy whose horoscope we are considering understand the gravity of the situation and foster the spirit of independence in him from childhood up, they may lay up great treasure in heaven by saving him from the deplorable fate of mediumship.
Question:
(You are welcome to e-mail your answers and/or
comments to us. Please be sure to include the course name and Independent Study Module number
in your e-mail to us. You will find the answers to the questions below in the next Astrology Independent Study Module.)
1. What do you think would have been the effect if Neptune had been in the 7th house? Squared by Progressed Midheaven?
When a planet is located in the upper part of the 12th house its influence is confined mainly to that house and if the planet is very near to the 12th house cusp it will tend to exert some overlapping influence into the 12th house also. The 12th house alone indicates such things as opportunities for self-sacrifice, potential sources of self-undoing and secret sorrows, also those things which we keep hidden within ourselves. When a planet is in the 12th house but close to the ASC it acquires dominion over the physical body and personality.
Supplemental Student
Material:
Architecture
Architecture is, in essence, manifestive art as
expression of man's consciousness of cosmic protectiveness.
Whatever man builds, through his expressions in
this art, is a symbol of his instinctive desire to enclose, enfold, and
protect that which he cherishes. This art differs from the other three-
dimensional arts — dance, sculpture, and drama — in that it fills and encloses
space. There is a certain utility in the essential nature of this art which
also differentiates it from the other arts. Buildings, to fulfill their
reason-for-being, must be occupied by something or lived in by someone. Hence,
of all the arts, architecture is the least abstract, the most useful, and it
is the one that is most basic to the needs of humanity.
An analogy — the blue of sky and the brown of earth
are ceiling and floor of man's habitation on this planet, the vast house of
our physical living provided as creative expression of God. Because all share
this ceiling and floor, man as an individualization of consciousness and as a
"spark of Divine Fire," must microcosmically reproduce this pattern as an
expression of his God-hood. So, he builds "ceiling and floor" to enclose the
heart of his creativities (home and work) and that of his reverence, the
church. Since home and church symbolize the core of man 's awareness of
relationship to humankind and to God, these "buildings" from time immemorial
have stood as the two essentials of architectural endeavor.
The God-hood of human kind is the permanent seed
atom which endures throughout the cycle of incarnations. The first house that
is built for it is within the maternal body prior to birth. The maternal body
is the enclosure of protectiveness with nurture for the incarnating Ego. The
etheric matrix is the "outer body" in which we live during incarnation and our
physical flesh-body has the enclosures of skin, skeletal, and organic
structure in which the seed atom is enshrined. The male parent functions in
correspondence to his mate by providing the enclosure of home to protect his
two "most beloveds" and the home is a specification of space in which the
relationship-life of persons magnetized to each other by specific vibratory
requirements is perpetuated. All of these "buildings" (the etheric matrix,
the womb, the physical enveloping, and the home) are the "humanity" of that
which is "architecture"in manifestive art. Man has never built for himself
alone — he has always built, as God builds, as an expression of his octave of
Cosmic Protectiveness. As water and, subsequently, air were the original
"homes" in which we lived as physical involutions so the great "sea of
electrical magnetism" is the "home" of our relationship consciousness and
"home" is the individualized chemical expression of man's consciousness of
focalized relationship on the generative octave of being. During incarnation,
man abides, or can abide, in many houses but relationship with other humans is
the "home-life" of his consciousness. We feel "at home" (and this is not just
a figure of speech) with those we love, we feel "out of (our rightful) place"
with those we dislike. With those we love we "build easily" the fulfillments
of relationship — on whatever octave of experience or consciousness. To build
beautifully is to express love. To "build unbeautifully" is to emphasize (pile
up) the congestions in consciousness of desire-ignorance; the resultant
buildings are "shrines to ugliness." Man expresses his "architectural
best"when he builds (anything) as an expression of his heart's and mind's
highest and best. The soaring spires of temples and cathedrals are designs
which symbolize man's spiritual aspirations toward his "lost Eden" — toward
which he returns on the upward spirals of evolutionary progress. These spires
are variations of the basic design of the pyramid, which we will discuss in
this discourse.
That which is intimately external to us is the
outer reflection of inner building. Consciousness — and nothing else — is the
material we use to build anything, in whatever octave, cycle, or dimension.
The result of material building is the effect from the way the man has imposed
his mind, talents, and abilities on malleable substances; and mind, talent,
and ability all are octaves of consciousness. He imposes his consciousness on
the "stuffs of art" to embody his concepts of archetypes in manifestive
artistry; he imposes his consciousness on the "stuffs of relationship" as his
"embodiments of relationship-consciousness," to enfold, protect, and
perpetuate that which is unregenerate or regenerate in human relationships.
We can build "caves for jackals and dens for thieves" just as we can build
"homes for the beloved and shrines for the adored." All of these, in their
myriads of expressions, are building with the materials of consciousness.
Since each human is an individualized
consciousness, we are the builders of everything that is manifested in our
lives. By incarnating, we serve to build a new identity for our parents as
they were instrumental in building a vehicle for us. Each child contributes
relationship-material and relationship-experience to the "building" of his
parents as individuals and as a couple. He expresses his consciousness, they
react; they express, he reacts in the years of his development and for as long
as his relationship to his parents endures. The child was magnetized to his
parents by law and he built the particular quality of parentage-consciousness
by his exercises as father and as mother in past incarnations. In other words,
his parents are a chemicalized expression of his consciousness of "parents;"
they, in a sense, and in relationship to him, are something he himself has
built. Each human being is, therefore, the architect of his own parentage.
Concretely this is pictured in the horoscope by the vertical diameter of the
cusps of the fourth and tenth houses. The "parentage" of the archetype,
humanity, is the zodiacal diameter of Capricorn-Cancer focalized by the
planetary architects, Moon and Saturn, the "form-builders" of our vibratory
archetype. This diameter is, of course, complemented by that of Aries-Libra as
the vertical diameter of a horoscope is complemented by the horizontal
diameter of the Ascendant and seventh cusp. Further astrological illustration:
we can think of the chart as the blue-print of an edifice, so architectural
are the symbols.
A circle with vertical and horizontal diameters;
the symbols for the cardinal signs at the structure-points, Aries as
Ascendant-sign. Connect the structure-points with straight lines forming a
square. The four right angles are the "enclosures" of the angles made at the
center by the diameters of the mid-points of the fixed houses (Taurus, Leo,
Scorpio, and Aquarius); the right angles of the fixed sign square are the
enclosures of the central angle made by the vertical and horizontal diameters.
The sides of the two squares are the same in length. The cardinal points
bisect four semi-circles; the fixed points bisect four quadrants.
The circle is, at one and the same time, the
perfect idea "Humanity" in Divine Mind. the perfect manifestation of that idea
in form, the perfect objectifications of all the potentials inherent in the
Central Point; by the perfection of its beauty it is the archetypal symbol of
the Golden Wedding Garment which will be worn by the archetype humanity at the
dawn of liberation from this manifestation, or which is worn by each
individual at the timing of his liberation. The Golden Wedding Garment is the
perfected habitation of the seed atom — all humans have an etheric matrix, but
not all humans wear a beautiful matrix; it is the perfect beautification and
purity of this matrix that identifies the Golden Garment, the result of all of
our building in incarnation.
Previous reference has been made to the author's
conviction that the circle which circumscribes the cardinal square and its
"lines of force" (the Cardinal Cross), in combination with the Central Point,
is a "bird's eye view" (looked down upon from above) of a pyramid. The
archetype humanity involves from innocence — the state of Virgin Spirit — to the
utmost of chemicalization by a spiralic process downward from the point in
ever-widening (separative) circular windings. The essential perfect potential
remains throughout but man, incarnated and new to this plane, sees only the
chemicality of life and of his own nature. He does not know his unity with
life and only dimly senses it in his feelings of instinctive togetherness with
other humans with whom he is closely associated by ties of blood-relationship
or clan-affiliation. For the most part he is aware of the differences between
himself and his father, mother, and other people: stronger and weaker, older
and younger, male and female, etc., but his similarities to other people,
regardless of outer appearance, are not recognized until evolutionary
processes have been in effect. To know relationship is to be aware of the
"inner" of human life, and that awareness is the beginning of wisdom. The
consciousness of involving humanity is not aware of the circular essential
shape of the beam of light on which they are traveling; it is always circular
but when it "strikes the screen of materiality " the undeveloped human
consciousness sees only square — the sharp differentiations between people, not
the unity by which all are affiliated in spirit.
The two representations of the symmetrical square
in our mandala symbolize the structure of the human family and the material
from which that structure is built. The family is outwardly the male and
female of human generative manifestation; inwardly it is the masculine and
feminine of generic consciousness.The structure points of the fixed-sign
square symbolizes the focalizations of the diameters of desire-love which is
the food-substance of the total of our human relationship — life — the equipment
we use to build each home of relationship-exchange. The cardinal structure-
points are the four focalizations of human identity — mature and immature of
male and of female — Father, Mother, Son, and Daughter; also the male and
female as causer and reactor to the effects of causes. From this Cross of the
Polarity of Identity, fed by the desire-love resources of the fixed sign
diameters distributed by the unsymmetrical diameters of the wisdom octaves of
the mutable cross, the upward spiral of evolution starts. As long as a human
being must incarnate he participates in these three crosses; but to the degree
that separative identity is transmuted into unity, desire into love, and
ignorance into wisdom, will the squares get smaller and smaller, continually
approaching resemblance to the circle which, in turn, is the perfect
outpicturing of the smallest of all circles, the point. You can get a picture
of this disappearance of the square by drawing a fairly large circle enclosing
the cardinal square. Within the square draw a circle, within that circle
another square, and so forth until the figures get so small you can't draw any
smaller. Remember that "square" is an archetypal design; "cardinal
square,""fixed square," and "mutable square" are three variations of one
design; fixed and mutable are sub-archetypes of the cardinal as archetypal
design of human identity and relationship. So, in drawing these smaller and
smaller squares within smaller and smaller circles, you are really picturing,
in essence, all three forms of the square on all evolving octaves. When you
drew the first circle for this illustration (and the enclosed cardinal square)
you pictured humanity ready to evolve; each successive smaller square and
circle, in pairs, represents one higher octave-like the stories of a building
that is pyramidal in shape. If you can draw or imagine a pyramid being cut by
horizontal planes one above the other you will get the essence of how each
spiralic level of the circle-and-cross is analogous to the floors of a
building, each floor having many rooms in which different activities take
place — or in which different expressions of Consciousness take place. In this
drawing indicate "primitive" at the first level, and designate the different
levels of the pyramid, cut by planes, as representing different periods in
history in which men made noticeable evolutionary progress. On each level the
cardinal cross of human relationship-exchange, the fixed cross of desire-love
resource, and the mutable cross of wisdom-distillment are found in
conjunction, or synchronization, with the eternal ideal that enfolds and
interpenetrates them. With approach to the top point (the center point of the
astrological wheel as we know it) love and wisdom become more and more fused,
and the four identities lose their separative quality and merge more and more
into the relationship ideal of fraternity, which is what our relationship to
each other really is. We are all fraternal to each other because we are the
"sons and daughters" of Father-Mother God; our "sonship" and "daughtership" is
our bi-polar essential nature — "male and female" pertain to our nature only
when we are incarnate, and in the upper octaves of being it applies only to
our spiritual generative state, and the powers of bi-polarity are fused when
the perfected awareness of the "one love" is attained. We are aware of
"loves" while we are on the lower levels of the upward spiral — we identify the
existence of love with the existence, in our lives and experiences, of other
people. Actually, love, is one aspect of the circle and is omnipresent in
perfect purity on all levels of being. As the top of the pyramid is
approached the "separateness of loves" is transcended and the point at the top
of the pyramid — the end of the upward spiral — is the perfect consciousness of
the " one-ity " of love as Divine Attribute. As wisdom is distilled from
experiences on the spiral, the congestions of fear and hatred are dissipated
by the light of reason and understanding, which, in turn, are the
illuminations of the mind by the power of love and the inspiration of beauty.
Make a copy of a twelve-housed wheel, connect the
cusp-points in sequence by straight lines creating twelve isosceles triangles.
Each one of these triangles is half of an equilateral triangle, the arms of
which are alternate house-cusps. There are two sets of these equilaterals:
those of the fire and air trines and those of the earth and water trines.
Think of the "Aries equilateral" as being: "masculine Aries and feminine
Taurus" and so forth around the wheel. These equilaterals, three of each
generic element, having polarity by division into two equal parts, are the
real basic houses of the wheel as far as generic consciousness is concerned.
Because each of the twelve mundane houses focalizes the principles of one of
the zodiacal signs we recognize that they are specializations of the two-fold
generic sections of each trine. Get this picture by drawing four wheels and
"black in" (in each one) the three signs of an element and the succeeding
sign. There is much food for thought in this representation of houses as
generic divisions of experience.) The regular appearance of the twelve houses
pictures a much more objective representation of cycle-experience during the
years of incarnation. They are, in whatever form, rooms on a particular floor
of your life-building. To the degree that the vibratory elements of your
chart are congested will you be seen to be "living on a lower floor in your
life-building."
Think of your horoscope as a floor-plan blue-
print of the evolutionary mansion (building) that you are now inhabiting. Your
chart symbolically represents your potential for being a spiritual architect;
the contents of your wheel represent the soul-materials you are using to build
your pyramid — your Golden Garment — the composite of the best of your
consciousness distilled from all previous levels of experience and
realization. Become more aware than ever before of the beauty of
architectural art — let yourself appreciate the aesthetic values of fine
buildings and, philosophically, let yourself become more than ever aware of
their significance to human experience.
Dance
To dance is to signify, by rhythmic bodily
movements, one's consciousness of participating in the world of Nature. To
dance is to make the physical body an instrument for the manifestation of
archetypes as expressions of emotional states and of spiritual concepts. These
emotional states are focused points of spiritual awareness of such intensity
that they "must out" through the instrumentality of the physical body.
As man applied himself to manipulate material
substances to express, by building, his octave of "enclosing protectiveness"
to house that which he loved and worshiped, so did he dance to express the
inner life of that which his physical body enclosed — his consciousness and
heart with their dreams, fears, loves, challenges, aspirations, and
understandings. "Living" is not just moving through time from place to place
in space. It is moving through evolution from point to point in
consciousness. To dance means to identify one's self with cosmic movement,
which is the alchemical action of life, by rhythmic sequences of archetypal
bodily postures. To dance does not mean, as some think, to "outpicture
music." Man moved his physical body on this plane long before he ever
invented a musical instrument; music and costume are vibratory accompaniments
which serve to intensify and clarify the dance-artist's expressions which are,
by their very nature, extremely personal. However, dance essentially
expresses through its own merits — it does not need other adjuncts to fulfill
its basic purpose. Dance is everywhere seen in the natural world; let us
personalize a little to study a few examples:
The natural dance of life-expressions is the
sequence of unfoldments that follows upon birth and which is concluded at
transition. Every manifested factor in the natural world has its timing for
un-foldment of potentials and when that unfolding is made without unnatural
interference, the plant or animal alchemicalizes its physical form through all
the stages of experience according to the rhythm of its basic pattern. So
with human beings; we have a "timing pattern" for the unfoldment of our
potentials in the stages of growth, but individual qualifications vary the
timing for fulfilling experience-patterns. However, human or sub-human, we all
dance through these unfoldment-phases of natural growth.
If we think of "dance" as the movements of a
physical organism we see its evidence everywhere in the world of Nature. The
branches of a tree move to and fro, responding to the wind-forces which play
through them — we say that the tree is making beautiful movements with its
arms. The waves of the ocean give the impression of dancing by their
endlessly busy running up the beach and withdrawing in pulsating sequences of
movement, each wave resembles a line of dancers rushing across a stage and
back again. The Moon performs a long "bourree" (serene and legato) across the
sky at night. The sportive dolphin leaps from the water in beautiful arcs;
who is to say that he doesn't feel the same "joie-de-vivre" that boys and
girls feel who "dance" by skipping down the street. Skipping and leaping are
archetypal movements which symbolize the challenge to gravity and, as
movement-symbols, they represent aspirational urges. The whirlings and
spiralings of autumn leaves are fine illustrations of dance-movements-
sweeping, gliding, up-soaring, fluttering down to momentary rest, then away
again in new spirals and arcs. Billowing clouds dance in an eternal dissolving
and remolding of shapes as the wind drives them across the stage of the sky;
clouds are a perfect out-picturing of alchemical changes — silent and smooth,
they melt from one aspect to another in an incomparable beauty of motion. A
galaxy of colorful garden flowers, bending and swaying on their stems, is a
natural "corps-de-ballet." Think of the many kinds of movements of animals and
birds; the haughty parade of the peacock; the circular gliding through the
water of fish and seal; the staccato flight of the butterfly; the fluid
pacings of cats, and the virile prancing of horses.
How do human beings dance? We all dance according
to cosmic plan in our unfoldments of physical and psychic potentialities
through the various phases of our growth as organisms. But every individual
dances according to the quality of his consciousness. Some people,
harmoniously integrated, dance through life in an extraordinary beauty of
rhythm. They accept experience as it comes, deal with it, and learn from it
to the best of their ability; then, being forward-looking by nature, they pass
on to new experience, rhythmically. They exercise a minimum of inner
congestion and a maximum of dynamic expression; the entire span of their
incarnation is a beautiful arc of evolutionary progress. They work with
integrity and idealism — their work-contribution is a true service, a radiation
of goodness and true value to all who are affected by it. They love with
intensity, amplitude, and joys they are open-minded, receptive to the values
of new ideas. Kahlil Gibran, inspired artist and poet, had the soul of a "true
dancer;" he said: "Dance with freedom and joy, but tread not on another's
toes."
In the metaphorical sense, "poor dancing" is the
result of inner congestions. In the physical sense, a person who is afflicted
with excessive shyness, self-consciousness, or physical defect does not — and
cannot — dance beautifully, with spontaneity and joy. "Spiritual
awkwardnesses" are caused by such emotional and psychological congestions as
ignorance, negative selfishness, fear, hatred, greed, envy, materialism,
possessiveness, frustration and its attendant cruelties, disappointment-
patterns, inertia cynicism, and congestion on form-identity. This latter is
one of the deepest-reaching sources of "unrhythmic life-dancing" there is.
Its essence is a congestion on appearance as reality; it makes the
consciousness focus on form rather than on essence and it serves to throw
evaluation completely out of line. People who "dance according to form" rather
than "according to Spirit" are those who accept the imposition of standards
and evaluations by others, rather than by the establishment of standards from
the exercise of individuality. They are the people to whom that which has
been established is the symbol of security and rightness; they are crucified
by caste-consciousness; they tend to evaluate human personality, character,
and experience by a materialistic philosophy which congests them on the outer
at the expense of awareness and appreciation of inner truths. The corrupt
social and religious standards of past centuries picture this kind of
congestion. Hereditary value rather than personal value; family, tradition,
and social position represented the focus of appreciation rather than did
individual worth. Look almost anywhere and at any epoch and you will see
congestion on form as the source of perverting and deflecting the natural
rhythmic flow of human development and fulfillment. One perfectly superb
example is seen in the misinterpretation of a certain spiritual allegory which
had the effect of subjugating women for ages — a karmic device by which man's
congestion on form reacted upon himself during his female incarnations.
This congestion on form is symbolized
astrologically by the planetary scope of "Moon-to-Saturn." Persons who are
karmically or evolutionarily conditioned to live within the confines of this
"scope" are those to whom individuality is practically an un-opened book. The
patterning of the standards by which they live is, for the most part,
according to that which was established by others in the past. Education,
work, religious thought and ceremony, marriage, training of children,
relationship-factors, etc., are prescribed for all, generation after
generation. The feudal system of Europe and the effect of Confucian philosophy
on the Chinese nation are good examples of this formalization of human
experience. Esthetic expressions (and all peoples have them to some degree
because the esthetic urge is too basically instinctive to be completely denied
by anyone) are, for the most part, highly formalized and traditionalized. The
esoteric essences of religion are submerged in accretions of rituals and
ceremonies which are performed or participated in with feelings of awe and
fear rather than as exercises of spiritualized intelligence. Marriage — which
in essence should be the most intensely individualized expression of human
life-is for the most part for the perpetuation of estate and name.
We recognize, of course, that there is no
"injustice" in people incarnating under such a regime; their consciousness is
aligned to the structuralizing of Moon-and-Saturn or they could not be
attracted into incarnation through it. But, karmic justice aside, such strict
formalizations do inhibit the free flow of expression and unfoldment because
fear is such a strong factor inherent in them. For a time on every
evolutionary cycle "Moon-and-Saturn" hold the reins; they, together, symbolize
the "formal back-bone " of all cyclic experience; but, eventually the
individual potentials must be released by transcendence on "that which was;"
the planets Uranus and Neptune are the vibrations which represent the
"decrystallizing of outmoded form" and the "revelation of the inherent
spiritual essence," respectively.
Our subject at hand is dance but let us
remember that all participants in a particular art-expression are members of a
spiritual family — a "fraternity" of kindred artistic endeavor. Like any other
human group, the artistic family (of whatever kind) is just as subject to the
tendency to formalization (and crystallization) as in ally other family-group.
When form, structure, rule, and traditional standard are emphasized at the
expense of inspiration and spontaneous manifestivity, congestion of artistic
value sets in. Look anywhere in the recorded history of artistic endeavor of
the human family and you will find many periodic points of congestion on form
and tradition, at which times a dearth of inspirational power was evident.
Folk-dancing originated in the attempt to perpetuate tribal history and
religious belief and tradition in a sort of dramatic representation. These
"dramas" subsequently became formalized by inculcating the factors of rhythmic
movement and vocal or instrumental accompaniment into what we call
"traditional dance" and some of these dance-forms in various parts of the
world, are ages old.
The ballet is a more cultivated and intricately
stylized expression of European "rhythmized drama." Originating in Italy as a
factor in operatic representation, it was carried to France, developed into an
exquisite formal technique as an indispensable part of representations of
music-drama. The plots of these "danced-dramas" were, for the most part
centered on fantasies of an "out-of-this-world" romanticism depicting
allegorical or mythical subjects. In the later years of the last century the
ballet, as a cultivated art-expression, was adopted by Russia and through the
inspirational and dramatic powers of artists of that country it was amplified
tremendously by the exploitation of its own resources as a dance-art, divorced
from dependence on the opera. We still speak of the best of this art-form as
the "Russian Ballet;" the manifestive and interpretative artists of that
country stamped it with the brand of their particular quality of genius. The
ballet companies of the principal Russian cities were recognized as the
supreme exponents of this art and their great soloists occupy conspicuous
niches in the hall of those immortally renowned by art-lovers throughout the
world.
Then toward the last years of the last century, a
meteor blazed across the sky of European and American culture and artistic
endeavor that shed a radiance of intensified inspiration on the world of dance
that was to decrystallize the hyper-formality of ballet tradition into a new
octave of dance-consciousness. This "meteor" was Isadora Duncan an inspired,
inspiring, and intrepid artiste, and through her dance-service, — one of the
foremost "decrystallizers" of the past century.
Astrological students will be interested in her
horoscope; it is well worth studying. Data: May 27,1878, approximately 1:00
A.M., 38 degrees N., 1221/2 degrees W. Jupiter should be in the twelfth house,
Sun in third; Pisces, ruled by Neptune, is the Ascendant-sign, and
Sagittarius is on the Mid-heaven. Suggested reading for information
concerning her life-experience and artistic ideals: her auto-biography, My
Life, and her Art of the Dance; also many books and brochures by
other writers, which are available in most libraries and book stores.
Note that the ruler of the chart, Neptune, is the
principle of instrumentation, and one of Isadora's basic artistic tenets was
to regard the physical body as a vehicle for inspirational powers. She was
intensely sensitive to music, but it has been said of her that she could dance
without music because her movements were so harmonious and "right" that she
"made music visible." Two factors in her chart picture the universality of
her influence: Jupiter, ruler of Midheaven, in the twelfth House in the sign
Aquarius is trine to her uncongested Gemini Sun. Her spiritual power was
enormous — both as a performer and as a teacher; this aspect pictures the basic
religious purpose of her incarnation. You will recognize this when you read
testimonials written by people who saw her dance. She incarnated to re-
stimulate, through art and beauty (and she was, in her person, one of the most
beautiful of women), the pure religious aspirational urge through
contemplation of the human body as an "installment of the Divine" and as the
vehicle for purely inspired gesture and movement. She brought to the social
and esthetic congestions of her age the refreshment of a consciousness which
had its abiding place in beauty, truth, and love. She reminded men and women
of the essential purity and goodness of their spiritual being and she sought
in many ways to encourage people to recover the naturalness of their own inner
truths, by living in terms of sincerity, friendliness, and inspiration.
On the world of concert-dance, her influence was
almost cataclysmic in its regenerative effect. Her artistic truth was that of
sincere inspiration, not that of accrued tradition. Many other manifestive
dancers had their part to play in the regeneration of dance-concepts, but
Isadora blazed the trail by the exercise of her individualized inspirational
powers (Venus-trine-Uranus, in fire signs).
She said in effect: "Live fully and courageously;
free yourselves from the fears of out-worn traditions; love from the center of
your consciousness with joy, respect, and generosity; live with courtesy and
grace; champion the poor, and the oppressed, and heal the wounds of the
spirit; lead children to an awareness of their innate beauties of body and
soul and help them to know respect for their individual powers and abilities;
let women perceive as never before their powers to inspire by the exercise of
beauties of heart and mind; let men open their hearts to a renewed adoration
of the Beautiful in Nature and in Humanity; let the fraternity of artists work
a consecration on human life through fellowship and sincere efforts."
This great logo would have us all "dance" with
joy, grace, health, and inspiration. We perceive, in our charts, the rhythmic
movements of the planets from time of birth through the cycles of unfoldment
and maturity, the patterns of our relationship-life, the challenges which we
have created for ourselves and the powers which we have developed to transmute
those challenges into triumphs. The fulfillings of these patterns comprise
our "dance of life;" let us move with the cosmic forces rhythmically, with
joys with courage, and with the inspiration of faith and understanding. This
is the dance on the ever-upward spiral of evolutionary progress.
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