Reply to Sue Ward
I have been enjoying a severe summer cold, and have returned home from our summer place in Maine.
In our pursuit of defining first principles, a good place to start, we need to keep in mind where we might be headed for. Astrology is as complex as "man" himself/herself becuase it is a seeking of relationships and meanings of the one to the comos about us. If that is accepted than we have to expect that our discussion will encounter "branches" in our directions of inquiry.
First principles will lead us, then, to sets of second principles or disagreements over what is "in" what is "out". So, I'll propose a few principles that we might, as a group, consider acceptable.
** We human individuals are connected through our physical selves to the universe around us (taking "universe" as a collective body) through the materials in our bodies, through our reaction to the Sun's light and spectrum of energies, through our response to the Moon's motions, and through our less-measurable physical reactions to the other members of our solar system and the starry skies.
** We humans also seem to be influenced in our awareness and thoughts in varying degrees by the cosmos (again, taking cosmos as a collective) depending upon our family and cultural conditioning, education, individual inclinations and curiousity, sense of spirituality and wonderment about our interactions with the environment we see, sense, and do not understand.
Being what we are, seeking order and meaning in our lives, we have a proclivity to name and associate perceived and imagined things in our lives. Part of this process has been to name the more noticible objects in our sky and associate their appearance, motion and cycles to ourselves. In doing so, we might feel that we are defining some first principles.
1) Life and the Cosmos works in cycles. Some of those cycles we can relate to such as the Earth's daily rotational cycle, the Sun's yearly and seasonal cycle, the Moon's cycles, as well as planetary cycles. (Planetary cycles here being taken to include a greater or lesser number of bodies to be definded later).
2) Certain cycles appear to have relevance to us when we break them down into parts. "Twelveness" for example works well when related to some aspects of astrology such as the Sun's declination cycle where that cycle (as a sine wave depiction) is related to the seasons. We have adopted and applied that cycle division to houses as well. At this stage, I only want to point out that in cycles, "twelvess" seems useful. "Eightness" is another useful cycle division that is used with the Moon. We might want to explore 360-ness as well. But, the point is, "cycles" have caught our attention and we see importance in them.
3) Astrological bodies, we call them planets even though they include non-planets, have individual influences upon us. In making this statement, this linear text is limited in that it cannot show the other accompanying sets of principles at the same time that are required to support this statement.
Neverless, planets have influences that a cultural consensus recognizes in terms of core descriptions. Some relate them to archetypes, some to myths and legends of ancient cultures. Whatever their source, they have common recognized core influences -- each of them.
4) These influences have been applied to the health and physical viability of people in how they live and experience physicality, in how they interact with other people, in how they think, in how they raise families, in how governmet is carried out, and in many other areas of application. What this priciple is about, then, is "commonality" among men. We all tend to follow these cycles and influences in some way, to make progress when the cycles are with us, to struggle and make less headway at other times.
This "commonality" of influences from astrological bodies and their cycles then seems to serve as some kind of personal schedule of action on both an individual basis and in a more common way for a collective influence.
5) In our world, we all seem to have our personal differences from each other. In our attempts to understand commonality and difference in relation to planets and cycles, we have come to see that "uniquess" is related to the point within these broad cycles that we were born, and the location where we were born. We have tested and accepted that this is a truism.
From this, we have to accept that we have common influences as part of a greater communal group as well as individual cycles and influences as part of our individualism. This then is a principle that says we both act on our own cycles and that we interact with other peoples cycles.
****** I will interupt myself here and will continue later. Dave *****