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Evokation
  
 
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A

MAZE

IN

ZAZAZA ENTER ZAZAZA

ZAZAZAZAZAZAZAAZAZAZAZAZAZAZ

ZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZ

THE

MAGICALALPHABET

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526262524232221201918171615141312111098765432

 

A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
 =
 =
 =
 =
 =
 =
 =
 =
=
 =
 =
 =
 =
 =
 =
 =
 =
=
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
1+0
1+1
1+2
1+3
1+4
1+5
1+6
1+7
1+8
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
 =
 =
 =
 =
 =
 =
 =
 =
=
 =
 =
 =
 =
 =
 =
 =
 =
=
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
I
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
9
1+9
2+0
2+1
2+2
2+3
2+4
2+5
2+6
ME
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
 =
 =
 =
 =
 =
 =
 =
 =
=
 =
 =
 =
 =
 =
 =
 =
 =
=
I
ME
I
ME
I
ME
I
ME
I
9
18
9
18
9
18
9
18
9
=
1+8
=
1+8
=
1+8
=
1+8
=
=
9
=
9
=
9
=
9
=
I
ME
I
ME
I
ME
I
ME
I
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
I
ME
I
ME
I
ME
I
ME
I

 

 

A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
                  1+0 1+1 1+2 1+3 1+4 1+5 1+6 1+7 1+8 1+9 2+0 2+1 2+2 2+3 2+4 2+5 2+6
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
                                                   
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z

 

 

YHWH

THE BOOK OF KNOWLEDGE:

THE KEYS OF ENOCH

J.J. Hurtak 1973

Page 578/9

I AM THAT I AM

Heb. " EHYEH ASHER EHYEH."

1The highest statement that a mortal can use in this world. It expresses the "covenant" between the human self and the Christed Overself, and a knowing of one's true identity, ones destiny and the keys to the higher thresholds. 2A/ holy mantra/salutation working with the holy Brotherhoods and Hierarchy of YHWH

 

15
EHYEH+ASHER+EHYEH
-
-
-
5
EHYEH
51
33
6
5
ASHER
51
24
6
5
EHYEH
51
33
6
15
EHYEH+ASHER+EHYEH
153
90
18
1+5
Add to reduce
1+5+3
9+0
1+8
6
Reduce to Deduce
9
9
9

 

 

15
E
H
Y
E
H
-
A
S
H
E
R
-
E
H
Y
E
H
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
8
-
-
8
-
-
1
8
-
-
-
-
8
-
-
8
+
=
41
4+1
5
  
5
FIVE
5
-
-
8
-
-
8
-
-
19
8
-
-
-
-
8
-
-
8
+
=
59
5+9
14
1+4
5
FIVE
5
15
E
H
Y
E
H
-
A
S
H
E
R
-
E
H
Y
E
H
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
5
8
25
5
8
-
1
19
8
5
18
-
5
8
25
5
8
+
=
153
1+5+3
9
-
9
NINE
9
-
5
8
7
5
8
-
1
1
8
5
9
-
5
8
7
5
8
+
=
90
9+0
9
-
9
NINE
9
15
E
H
Y
E
H
-
A
S
H
E
R
-
E
H
Y
E
H
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
--
-
-
-
-
1
1
-
-
--
-
-
-
-
-
-
+
=
2
-
2
-
2
TWO
2
-
5
-
-
5
-
-
-
-
-
5
--
-
5
-
-
5
-
+
=
25
2+5
7
-
7
SEVEN
7
-
-
-
7
-
-
--
-
-
-
-
-
-
  
-
7
-
-
+
=
14
1+4
5
-
5
FIVE
5
-
-
8
-
-
8
-
-
-
8
-
-
--
  
8
-
-
8
+
=
40
4+0
4
-
4
FOUR
4
-
-
--
-
-
-
-
-
  
-
-
9
-
-
-
-
-
-
+
=
9
-
9
-
9
NINE
9
15
E
H
Y
E
H
-
A
S
H
E
R
-
E
H
Y
E
H
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-

 

 

4
YHWH
-
-
-
-
Y
25
7
7
-
H
8
8
8
-
W
23
5
5
-
H
8
8
8
4
YHWH
64
28
28
 
6+4
2+8
2+8
4
YHWH
10
10
10
-
-
1+0
1+0
1+0
4
YHWH
1
1
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
4
ZION
-
-
-
-
Z
26
8
8
-
I
9
9
9
-
O
15
6
6
-
N
14
5
6
4
ZION
64
28
28
-
-
6+4
2+8
2+8
4
ZION
10
10
10
   
1+0
1+0
1+0
4
ZION
1
1
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
6
ISRAEL
-
-
-
-
I
9
9
9
-
S
19
10
1
-
R
18
9
9
-
AEL
18
9
9
6
ISRAEL
64
28
28
-
-
6+4
3+7
2+8
6
ISRAEL
10
10
10
   
1+0
1+0
1+0
6
ISRAEL
1
1
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
4
YHWH
64
28
1
4
ZION
64
28
1
6
ISRAEL
64
28
1

 

 

10
LOVE + EVOLVE
-
-
-
-
LOVE
-
-
-
-
L+O
27
9
9
-
V+E
27
9
9
-
EVOLVE
-
-
-
-
E+V
27
9
9
-
O+L
27
9
9
-
V+E
27
9
9
-
LOVE EVOLVE
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
10
LOVE + EVOLVE
135
45
9

 

99 NAMES OF GOD GOD OF NAMES 99

THEN SINGS MY SOUL MY SAVIOUR GOD TO THEE

HOW GREAT THOU ART HOW GREAT THOU ART

 

 

SATURN IN TRANSIT

BOUNDARIES OF MIND BODY AND SOUL

Erin Sullivan

1991

THE HEROIC ROUND'

Page 144

THE CROSS OF MATTER IN THE CIRCLE OF SPIRIT

"The horoscope is an ancient, archetypal image - its circle of spirit and cross of matter is an image common to all civilizations. The quartered circle is a symbol that emerges spontaneously from the collective psyche in all cultures and continues to be reflected in modern times in dreams, art and architecture, religious motifs and psychology. The representation of the circle and the square appears to be a source of conflict, but the union of opposites and the integration of the parts into the whole has always been central to philosophical and spiritual quests. When we view the horoscope as an integral unity of opposites, whether that be through ele­ments, qualities, points, houses, quadrants, planets or geomet.ric shapes, we begin to see its potential as a sacred image' for psychological development.
In the alchemical opus the quadratura circuli was one of the / Page 145 / central symbols and this aspect, of the work produced the'lapis. 'Out of man and woman make a round circle and extract the quadrangle from "this and from the quadrangle~the triangle. Make a round circle and you will have the philosophers' stone.'l2 The circle itself is a symbol for psychic wholeness' and the work of individuation, that of becoming whole,rhe opus circulatorium, requires assimilation of all zodiacal stages in their proper order; But this all-important ,quartering of the circle was the secret to manifestation of mind, body and soul.
One way of viewing the birthchart is through the timeless zone of myth and archetype, in which case we see ourselves reflected in all things and all things reflected jn us. In Platonic terms there exist perfect forms in a sacred dimension, and,from these perfect forms tangible forms are created in our dimension of existence. As a map the horoscope employs both specific and real points of'
reference as well as esoteric symbols. Being both circular and quartered, the horoscope represents not only wholeness, perfection and the eternal return but also compartments, imperfections and finiteness. Each point along the arc of the circle represents a
simultaneous point of departure and a point of arrival. The world itself is a sphere and the depiction of the circle represents the,
world soul, the anima mundi, while the horoscopic circle, the zodiac, symbolizes the psyche and the, greater Self of the individual

 

5
ANIMA
-
-
-
5
MUNDI
-
-
-
-
A+N
15
6
6
-
I
9
9
9
-
M+A+M
27
9
9
-
U+N+D
39
12
3
-
I
9
9
9
10
ANIMA MUNDI
99
45
36
1+0
-
9+9
4+5
3+6
1
ANIMA MUNDI
18
9
9
=
=
1+8
-
-
1
ANIMA MUNDI
9
9
9

 


"The angles of the horoscope intersect the eternal round of the zodiac, pointing the way and dividing the path into four cardinal points. The hero stands at the middle of this quartered circle of perfection. At the very centre of this magical circle with its tangible points is the soul of the worldly traveller, the journeyer through life. Fromcwhere does he derive direction? From within and from.
without.
The quaternity;'or the four cardinal points, is directional, and finite, associated with the world of form. It marks off a sacred space within which the individual develops. The horoscope" is a mandala, the Sanskrit.it word for circle and, the .centre of the horo­scopic mandala is the person, the radiating house cusps being the extension of the individual from his innermost to his outermost.

Page 146

"Specifically;rhe angles of the horoscope are the primary extensions of the person in his or her outreach and orientation to the environ­ment. Therefore the angles, the cross, within the circle are the conscious realization and the outer manifestation of the inner Se:lf and represent incarnation.
To be incarnate is to be in the flesh, and incarnation requires differentiation and - individuation, which is where the ego becomes an all-important factor. A healthy ego is necessary to cope with the process of individuation; it works to contain the Self while undergoing any personal transformation. By its very existence the cross of matter demands a relationship with the circle of spirit. A spontaneous inundation of archetypal contents from the unconscious into the conscious mind can destroy the integrity of an individual in his attempt to reconcile the im­mediate and incarnate with the timeless and archetypal. The angles of the horoscope are the constant reminder of the participation of the ego in the work of evolving into a whole person.

THE SUN, THE CROSS OF MATTER,
THE HERO AND THE EGO

.
Hero myths emerged from the collective unconscious after the fall of the mairiarchal earth-goddess religions. The hero was born from the womb of the great mother and is identified as symbolic of the birth of a collective ego.
The transition from a matrilineal membership to a patriarchal -society was long and mysterious but effectively transferred,spiri­tual and religious power from a chthonic (earth-based) and lunar­ goddess consciousness to a celestial (sky-dominated) solar-god consciousness. The movement out, up and away from the earth continues to this day. Mircea Eliade says:
The moon confers a religious valorization on cosmic becoming and reconciles man to death. The sun, on the contrary, reveals a different mode of existence. The sun does / Page 147 / not share in becoming; although always in motion, the sun remains unchangeable; its form is always the same. Solar hierophanies give expression to the religious values of - autonomy and power, of sovereignty, of intelligence.13
The solarization of consciousness, the birth of the collective ego and the awareness of singularity, have gradually moved us. from concentration on isolated semi-divine hero figures of a mythical source to our current obsession with the development of per­sonality and personal ego. Individuation, a concept that hopes to unite the ego with the greater Self - connecting both solar and lunar functions - demands that the individual be aware of his 'I am-ness', but that the I-ego be a vehicle for the expression of the greater Self.
The ego is born when a conscious separation of the observer from the observed occurs. An infant only begins to develop an ego when it recognizes its body as a separate entity from its environment, its mother in particular. A culture separated from the earth mother develops an ego when it further differentiates itself as an entity separate from other cultures. An individual continues to develop an ego as he increases his differentiation of self from others. The distinction of self from others is solar consciousness asserting itself over lunar consciousness, bound by Saturn.
That the Moon has become connected to the unconscious and the Sun to the conscious is no mystery. The Sun is the archety­pal hero, rising in the east to dominate the day (consciousness) and setting in the west to battle dragons or monsters by night. The Sun brings to consciousness the light of reason and sharply distinguished clarity, differentiation and logic. This is in direct contrast to the lunar qualities of reflection, integration and cyclic evolution: seeding, gestating, giving birth and dying, only to begin again. Our lunar connections are no less powerful, but they remain subterranean. Today it is our solar development that is emphasized, particularly in modern astrology. Time, the solar measurement upon which the horoscope is based, in con­nection with Place, singles out and identifies the modern hero / Page 148 / with a map of directions.As mentioned, the angles are determined by solar movement and are thus the cardinal points of heroic orientation."

 

4
MIND
40
22
4
4
BODY
46
19
1
4
SOUL
67
13
4
12
-
153
54
9
1+2
1+5+3
5+4
-
3
-
9
9
9

 

 

 
MIND BODY SOUL
-
-
-
-
M
13
4
4
-
I
9
9
9
-
N+D
18
9
9
-
B
2
2
2
-
O+D+Y+S
63
18
9
-
O+U
36
9
9
-
L
12
3
3
12
MIND BODY SOUL
153
54
45
1+2
=
1+5+3
5+4
4+5
3
MIND BODY SOUL
9
9
9

 

 

12
M
I
N
D
-
B
O
D
Y
-
S
O
U
L
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
5
-
-
-
6
-
-
-
1
6
-
-
+
=
27
2+7
=
9
NINE
9
-
-
9
14
-
-
-
15
-
-
-
19
15
-
-
+
=
72
7+2
=
9
NINE
9
-
M
I
N
D
-
B
O
D
Y
-
S
O
U
L
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
13
9
14
4
-
2
15
4
25
-
19
15
21
12
+
=
153
1+5+3
=
9
NINE
9
-
4
9
5
4
-
2
6
4
7
-
1
6
3
3
+
=
54
5+4
=
9
NINE
9
12
M
I
N
D
-
B
O
D
Y
-
S
O
U
L
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
-
-
-
+
=
1
-
=
1
ONE
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
2
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
+
=
2
-
=
2
TWO
2
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
3
3
+
=
6
-
=
6
SIX
6
-
4
    
4
-
-
-
4
-
-
-
-
-
-
+
=
12
1+2
=
3
THREE
3
-
-
-
5
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
+
=
5
  
-
5
FIVE
5
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
6
-
-
-
-
6
-
-
+
=
12
1+2
=
3
THREE
3
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
7
-
-
-
-
-
+
=
7
-
-
7
SEVEN
7
-
-
9
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
-
-
9
NINE
9
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
54
-
-
36
-
36
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
5+4
-
-
3+6
-
3+6
12
M
I
N
D
-
B
O
D
Y
-
S
O
U
L
-
-
9
-
9
NINE
9

 

SATURN IN TRANSIT

BOUNDARIES OF MIND BODY AND SOUL

Erin Sullivan

1991

THE HEROIC ROUND'

Page 148
"The transit of. the Sun once around the birthchart each year emphasizes the angles and marks a personal seasonal transition. The solar revolution restates the original premise in which the psyche agreed to participate at the time of birth. Because the angles are the cross upon which hangs our ego development, the planet Saturn, when it transits those points challenges the old established form of the ego to find new avenues of expression. Saturn symbolism is synonymous with the images of the cross of the angles in that they both represent the intersection of the imaginal realm with the temporal realm.
The images of Saturn correspond to the images of the cross in that they both represent limits, boundaries, meeting-places, defini­tion, points of incarnation and manifestation. Saturn is the meeting-place of the personal and transpersonal planets, the symbol of embodiment and therefore a point. of reckoning. The angles, too, are points of reckoning, and Saturn's transit in relationship to the angles brings to consciousness the knowledge that we must continually reorient ourselves according to the demands of the world.
In modern times both men and women identify themselves with their egos, resulting. in each individual's need to connect to the world through ego development. The heroism required on the heroic journey involves the development and evolution of the ego in relation to environmental and internal conditions. It seems necessary in our world to have.this fact of the Self made manifest in.the psyche, and evidence suggests that the personal ego develops in accord with changing times and cultural evolution.
As long as the need exists for ego development and heroic differentiation.from the ouroboric one-ness, Saturn will continue to act as the symbolic castrator and the individual will continue to participate in his own ego development as Saturn transits the angles. Saturn gives shape and form to the ego and establishes the manner in which it participates in the whole. As a planet that embodies, separates and differentiates, it is the vehicle by which / Page 149 / we express our ambitions and ego needs; how we effect these ends is completely individual.
The work of the ego in its attempt to battle the shadow or primitive force in the psyche is parallel to hero myths in which the hero embarks on an adventure into the unknown, descends into a mysterious place, overcomes primitive or dangerous forces, then returns with a boon or civilizing agent. In this way the transit of Saturn over the angles (ego embodiment) forces the ego to confront the different stages of personal development in order to effect the civilization process of the consciousness. Saturn is the catalyst for ego development, and it is for the sake of the civilization of both, culture and the individual that the ego fights.
The heroic journey begins at the MC in Saturn's natural house, the tenth, which represents the apex of the solar journey. Like the alchemical opus which begins with the prima materia (lead/ Saturn), the work of the life journey begins with Saturn. The zodiac wheel is called the opus circulatorium, with its natural progression from the Ram (Aries) to the Fishes (Pisces), represent­ing the snake devouring itself and renewing itself eternally.
There is a conflict of direction between that which is happening in actual motion and that which appears to be happening as we view it from earth. The appearance of the Sun ascending in the east, and all the heavens rising is due to the actual motion of the earth turning ('down') to meet the heavens ('rising'). Once the horoscope is fixed, apprehending the heavens in time and space, the transits begin to appear to move in zodiacal order from the west to the east, down and across the ascendant. This is an apparent motion and not one which occurs naturally. Therefore, the transits appear to be an opus contra naturam, about which Johannes Fabricius says:
Since it is repeatedly emphasized that the alchemical work is an opus contra naturam, that is, a way not of small but rather supreme resistance, the work of the alchemical rockbreakers emerges as a powerful symbol for the removal of repression by an ego working its way back into the depths of the unconscious.14 .

What better description of Saturn can be found as it moves from its sovereign place in its natural home at the M C to cross the ascendant, rendering the ego virtually useless in the following stage? Again, the meeting of opposites brings the tension of development.

THE ASCENDANT - DESCENDANT AXIS: THE HORIZON OF AWARENESS

It is at this meeting-place of heaven and earth that the individual is born. The ascendant is descriptive of the quality of the time of birth based on the exact location and time of day. Egyptian myth­ology shows an interesting reversal of our Western concept: the birth of all original beings was the result of the sky goddess, Nut, and the earth god, Geb.15 Hathor was produced on the horizon and all subsequent life was formed by their union. In Greek myth we have the sky god, Ouranos, mating with the earth goddess, Gaia, to produce a series of creatures including the anthro­pomorphic-Titans, last born of which was Kronos/Saturn.
Our own experience of the horizon is both practical and metaphysical. We speak of 'broadening our horizons' and other such metaphors for expansion. The horizon in the horoscope is symbolic of our experience of orientation towards the east, always associated with birth, and towards the ,west, associated with termination. Early man, uncertain as to what happened to the Sun when it set, established rituals around sunrise and sunset. By beating drums, chanting or propitiating the Sun god, he assured himself of participation in the natural world, something that seems primitive to us today. When the Sun finally rose, the ancients assured themselves that had they not urged it on, it may well not have risen. With the Sun having risen, all was well and the daily activities could carry on. Imagine the concern that would arise in the mind of an archaic participator in nature when the Sun approached the western horizon. Yet again another journey would occur through the dark, the unknown, the mysterious, possibly to battles with dragons or other forces. In the horoscope the I C is / Page 151 / this point of ultimate darkness and it is there that the struggle for rebirth takes place. The I C is the turning-point in the heroic journey where one burns off one's mortality.
It is possible to draw analogies between day and night and conscious and unconscious. The upper (diurnal) hemisphere of the horoscope is designated as the conscious, and the lower (nocturnal) hemisphere the unconscious. However, what actually happens at the demarcation? There is no abrupt, noticeable change from consciousness to unconsciousness, though there is one in actuality. This boundary is fuzzy. The process of going to sleep or waking is a good illustration for the horizontal experience. Rather than just lying down and snapping at once into unconsciousness one reviews the events of the day, of one's life possibly, and prepares for a
descent into the unconscious. Some people find they need little-rituals to assist them to sleep, in particular those with overactive or controlling minds. Regardless of the degree of tiredness there is always resistance to sleep, for sleep is death's brother. However, when a certain indefinable point is reached, one welcomes sleep and folds into it. The conscious mind has had ascendancy for a period of time, and wishes to retain it. The process of waking is precisely the opposite: the unconscious mind has had 'control' and is equally unwilling to relinquish it. This threshold struggle is not unlike the normal, everyday process of flow and resistance to anything new in our experience.
When a planet transits the ascendant, metaphorically speaking it brings its daylight, or conscious experience, down into the unconscious for further processing. When that planet is Saturn the transit lasts for about a year, longer if it retrogresses back and forth over the degree rising. The twelfth house is the house ,of the 'collective unconscious'; it is the house where the psyche is most deeply connected to symbolic images and archetypes. The descent of Saturn over the ascendant is preceded by its transit through the twelfth house which results in a slow disintegration of the ego's power over the persona and a battle with the shadow. A death is implied and a struggle ensues. Frequently, the person experiencing this dissolution is quite unaware of the process until Saturn actually transits the ascendant. As a result, Saturn over the / Page 152 / ascendant can be experienced as an extremely dramatic shift from 'who you used to be' to 'who you will be', but with a rather traumatic period of uncertainty while the no longer useful persona is sloughed off.
The liminality, the 'thresholding', that is experienced during this time can be a shock to someone who has strongly identified with, or has been identified with, a particular and definite image. We are frequently carried along by our persona, unaware that it might be in the process of becoming outmoded by developments in the unconscious. Understanding this necessary loss of personal identification greatly reduces stress and allows a more conscious, if ,not a more rapid, transition into the new self-image. The threshold struggle is all about coming to terms with unconscious material in the conscious mind and vice versa. This situation is not without its difficulties, as Von Franz suggests:

This threshold difficulty has also to do with the fact that our consciousness ~is structured so as to represent~. things in a spatial and temporal order that does not exist ,for contents when they appear in the unconscious, wherec,they seem to'be present simultaneously.16

Saturn brings'to the ascendant all the manifest experiences and cohtrol issues that have dominated the last fourteen-year ex­traverted cycle during which the individual learned how to be present and accountable in the conscious world of accomplish­ments, deeds and collective goals. The meeting-place at the horizon symbolizes the threshold of the conscious and the unconscious, but it also encompasses the realms of self and others. The movement to the lower hemisphere after this fourteen-year cycle is symbolic of a descent into oneself, whereas the movement to the upper hemisphere is symbolicof a rise to meet the challenge of others. Saturn moving to the upper hemisphere brings with it the experiences of the introverted stage of the journey, which primarily involved feelings, self-development, inner motivation and personal goals. The fourteen-year cycle of Saturn transiting the lower half of the horoscope focused oh internal development and self­ / Page153 / discovery with all its attendant challenges. As it transits. the
descendant into the seventh house the requirement. is to examine oneself in relation to others in the context either of a specific
relationship or all relationships in general.
The sixth house poses its own disciplines and, hence, .its own addictions. .Its opposite, the twelfth, has been defined as the house .of the psyche, and conversely the sixth is the house of soma, or body. That which exists in the psyche constellates in the soma and the. experiences of the soma are, in turn, registered in the psyche. The entire psychosomatic experience is a sixth-house-twelfth­house affair. When Saturn moves into the seventh house it brings with it.old patterns, body memories and automatic responses that were finally consolidated in the earthy sixth house. Frequently these responses are unconscious and reflexive, having become autonomous, and as a result have become outmoded, often to the surprise of the person experiencing. them. It is not uncommon for the Saturn descendant transit to produce terrific pressure on a relationship because for a long period of time preceding this transit very little attention (in an actively conscious manner) has been paid to it. Suddenly one is expected to 'wake up' and face reality, often alerted by an experience within a close relationship.

THE MC-IC AXIS:
T'HE MERIDIAN OF EXPERIENCE

The axis joining the medium coeli (MC) and imum coeli (IC) divides the. horoscope-cinto eastern and western hemispheres, often called, ,respectively, the oriental and occidental hemispheres. It is on-this axis that we meet the zenith and the nadir of our experi­ences. Since the MC is the point of navigation, or the point of longitudinal reckoning, and its apparent motion is one degree for every four.minutes of time, it is, in fact, the measurement of the predictable travel of the Sun's path along the ecliptic. The founda­tion of the chart is the opposite pole, .the fourth-house cusp. The poles that are the MC and the IC represent respectively that which.is most public and conscious and that which is most secret / Page154 / and unconscious. Goals based on the security of the foundations of the fourth house can be interpreted through the tenth house.
The MC-IC is the parent axis, and the fourth house (IC) refers specifically to the privacy and mystery that surrounds family origins, while the tenth house (MC) is the public, externalized self. The fourth house (IC) is the family lineage, the conditions around the early home environment and one's innermost private concerns, most of which are deeply embedded in the lunar un­conscious. In the horoscope the IC is the point of ultimate dark­ness and it is there that the struggle for rebirth takes place. The I C is the turning-point in the heroic journey where one burns off one's mortality; slays the dragon, wrests the treasure from the goblin, rescues the distressed anima and so on. These actions all symbolize the differentiation between the family and oneself, the acquisition of the personal traits lost in the collective.' The tenth house (MC) is where the inner Self is made manifest and is the most exposed point in the horoscope. Rob Hand suggests that the MC-IC axis has to do with how one travels forwards and back­wards in time, whereas the horizon axis describes how one inter­acts with others.17 I agree, in that the M C is what we aspire to, based on where we have come from (IC). The IC holds the personal treasure and the M C delivers it to the world.
The eastern hemisphere symbolizes the process of self­identification and personal development, whereas the western relates to how one interacts with others and the degree to which dependency on others is an important factor in personal develop­ment.
Joseph Campbell says in his Hero With a Thousand Faces that the initial call to adventure is the call of vocation, and the hero,
. .. ventures forth, from the world of common day ihto a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.18
The vocation is intensely personal and not necessarily what the / Page 155 / family has designed for the individual. Therefore, the call can be a source of anxiety given such an unknown destination. The return from such adventure, occurs only after all the phases of the experi-ence of the round have been completed. For life is discovery not design. In order to heed the call, one must listen to the most intelligent (not the most intellectual) part of one's psyche., This requires courage - the courage of a hero - but the hero's journey is not an, unfamiliar one, nor one., without precedent. The fact that the call is vocational is another of the key indicators that the heroic: journey begins with the tenth house. That it means a departure from the known and the visible to the unknown :lnd,the unseen is also typical of the magisterial placement of the M C in the horoscope and the nocturnal position of the I C. Whethter society approves, the family approves,"or whether there is support during this time of drastic transition is unknown, but individual cases will show some fascinating variations on this.rheme.
That the parents are implicated in this call forth to adventure can also be appreciated if we consider that it might be the World Parents that are luring the hero 'forth from the world of com­monday'. Today, heroism is a personal. experience, dragon-battles and Minotaurs are metaphorical and, of course, the atonement with the parents is unique to the individual doing the atoning. The myths of heroic 'journeys always detail external events, but the stories of modern human journeys do not always conform to the environment as some of those journeys are internal, towards pyschic unity, and thus apparently heroic only to.the hero. Still, it is possible to 'bring the boon to mankind' in the form of personal transformation. Perhaps some do it by breaking a family complex and, as a result, not passing, on unresolved conflicts to their own children; others by taking the .journey to find out better how to heal others through the exploration of the wound one can discover how to heal it. For example, though it is not stated astrologically, the fourth house as a source for a vocational call is discussed in The Drama of the Gifted Child. Alice Miller says that the pattern of the psychology of the healer starts at birth with a remarkable facility to know what is expected of them and then, immediately, to begin fulfilling those expectations. She then says, / Page 156 / 'Who else, without this previous history [of dealing with neurotic family origins] would muster sufficient interest to spend the whole day trying to discover what is happening in the other person's un­conscious?'19
As there is a struggle at the threshold of consciousness on the horizon, there is also a threshold struggle at the poles of the meridian. However, this struggle is between the inner voice and the voice of society, family or education. This struggle, too, can result in a fusion of the conscious and the. unconscious mind, although it has to do with the chains of cultural bias versus the inner urging of the individual's desire for personal fulfilment. The desire to go forth into the unknown is, after all, related to what is known in the first place. As Saturn moves over the M C one is called upon to test one's theoretical view of life; if it is not in accord with what one meets in the reality of life experience, a crisis can occur. If the world-view conforms with the" lifestyle, crisis may not be necessary, but a trial by experience will be. Either way, a new adventure looms.

QUADRANT DIVISIONS

For the purpose of identifying the quadrants to accord with the stages of the heroic journey, I have avoided the conventional numerical order which starts at the ascendant with the first quadrant. For convenience I have called them the MC quadrant (tenth, eleventh and twelfth houses), the ascendant quadrant (the first, second and third houses), the IC quadrant (fourth, fifth and sixth houses) and the descendant quadrant (seventh, eighth and ninth houses). (See fig. 3, p. 164. Figure omitted) This paradigm will apply in both northern and southern hemispheres, thus avoiding the problem of orientation towards the ecliptic.
MC quadrant. The point of origin for the heroic journey, the call to adventure, combines the eastern hemisphere with the upper hemisphere and is the Conscious Self. This quadrant is where one's combined skills are contributed to society and refined to a / Page 157 / point of completion. The combination of self-consciousness and active involvement with the world and society is the initial stage of the call to adventure. That which was fully developed during the Saturn transit through the M C quadrant is left behind at the ascendant.


Ascendant quadrant. The second stage of the heroic journey, the descent into the unknown, is initiated at the ascendant, and the quadrant combines both the unconscious hemisphere and the eastern hemisphere. This is the Unconscious Self. The basic requirements for survival are acquired in this quadrant and actions are primal and instinctive. That which is acquired in the ascendant quadrant is carried over into the IC quadrant for further development.


IC quadrant. This quadrant combines the unconscious hemisphere and the western hemisphere. It is the unconscious preparation for relating to the outer world and involves the development of acquired skills which will enable the returning hero to relate more fully to others. This quadrant is initiated by the atonement phase, where one retrieves the lost or hidden treasure and nurtures it to maturity. The social and personal skills which one develops in this quadrant will be carried forth into the descendant quadrant as 'boons'.

Descendant quadrant. This quadrant is both conscious and other­oriented. It is in this area of the horoscope that one consciously encounters others in a meaningful way and tests acquired skills for their usefulness in society. The alchemical process of transformation that occurs with a meaningful encounter with one's opposite is the foundation for a personal philosophy. The development of a belief system which includes oneself within a social context results in the culmination at the MC of all that one aspires to.

Size of quadrant. The ascendant, unlike the M C, is reckoned according to the latitude of the birth. It 'moves' according to the / Page 158 / latitude of birth north or south of the equator, the only place where the angles are exactly ninety degrees apart. Therefore, the angle between the ascendant and the M C can fluctuate. widely in horoscopes set for mid-to,northern/southern latitudes. Astro* Carto.-Graphy2O maps show this pheoomenon graphically: the ascendant-descendant lines are curved and the MC-IC lines are straight and vertical. This fluctuation of distance between the angles of the M C axis and the ascendant axis is responsible for the differing lengths of time that Saturn (or any transiting planet for, that matter) will spend in a particular quadrant. However, opposite quadrants are always balanced. For example, ihhe call­to-adventure quadrant (the MC quadrant) is unusually large, i.e. comprises more than ninety degrees, then the opposite quadrant, the atonement-and-treasure-quest quadrant (the IC quadrant) will be equal in size. In this particular situation 'size' is really 'duration of time'.
Though the call to adventure begins with Saturn's transit to the M C, its particular phase might last anything from three to ten years, and the atonement-and-treasure-quest phase, beginning at .the I C, would last the same length of time. The other phases, the two 'threshold struggles' at the ascendant and descendant, would divide the remaining space time equally between them. These time-frames have very particular implications for what needs to be focused on in one's heroic journey in life.

4 The Personal Heroic Journey

Thus the hero is the archetypal forerunner of mankind in general.
His fate is the pattern in accordance with which the masses-.of humanity must live, and always have lived, however haltinglyand distantly; and however short of the ideal man they have fallen, the stages of the hero myth have become constituent, elements in the personal development of every individual.
Erich Neumann


Experiencing Boundaries, Definition and Containment


In The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Camp bell syn-thesized heroic myths from many cultures into what is now known as the 'monomyth'1 From all cultures emerge tales of a hero and his journey. There is a common thread throughout these myths that links, all mankind to an archetypal experience of life as a cycle of birth; death, resurrection and redemption. Liz Greene says about the heroic quest that: ­
The hero's journey is a map of the development of culture and of the individual's psychic voyage through life. It applies to both men and women, to the primitive tribesman and the sophisticated Western city dweller, to the adult and to the child. It weaves its way through our dreams, our fantasies, our .hopes, our fears, our aspirations, our loves and our ends."

 

SATURN IN TRANSIT

BOUNDARIES OF MIND BODY AND SOUL

Erin Sullivan 1991

Page 160

"The stages of the hero's journey are found in every culture and at every epoch. The surface details may vary, but the skeletal structure remains the same.2
Our modem culture has desacralized these myths, placing them in the realm of fairy tales (which have their own. special place as well) and commonly uses the word myth as a synonym for untruth. The myths as we know them today are a legacy from an oral tradition that emerged from the mythopoeic mind. Regardless of the innumerable transformations and translations that myths have undergone, for reasons ranging from literacy to political ex­pediency, there was a point in time when they were true, when the separation between man and nature was not conscious, and his active participation in rite and ritual was not' a contrived gesture of supplication to a transcendent god. Man and animal were god and god was man and animal.
That is not our time, nor has it been for several thousand years. Astrologyy can reconnect us with that time insofar as we can be in accord with our natural cycles, with our own clock in our own time. Though Campbell himself warns us to . . . 'seek, not interest­ing applications to modern affairs, but illuminating hints from the inspired, past,'3 it is inevitable that we should do this in our attempts to reconnect with that time of participation conscious­ness. Jung says:

If you can put yourself in the mind of the primitive you will at once understand why this is so. He lives in such 'participation mystique' with his world, as Levy-Bruhl calls it, that there is nothing like that absolute distinction between subject and object which exists in our minds. What happens outside also happens in him, and what happens in him also happens outside.4

The concept that 'within is without' is very much a part also of the alchemical opus. For instance, Saturn is not only in the sky as a planet but also in the earth as lead. Saturn not only symbolizes a psychological state but also a structure within the / Page161 / body itself, such as the bones, lower spine and knee-joints and teeth. Furthermore, it is the skin as a 'container' of the body.
Therefore, everything is not only contained but also a container. Everything is both imbued with and surrounded by Saturn. Saturn's participation in transformation is an integral part of a whole process, which would be incomplete without that co­operation.
So, it is easily done, this business of relating modern psy­chology and behaviour to the action of our ancient ancestors and their muthos, particularly through the medium of astro­logical metaphor and symbol. Others before us have done so, having recognized the immutability of the psyche and its racial memory with its archetypal forms.
Contained within the mono myth is a formula that is inherent in all rites of passage - separation, initiation, return. This heroic paradigm may seem a little aggrandized to someone who thinks in terms of food, rent, sex and sleep as the only motivation or meaning in life! Indeed, it is very important for these needs to be met, but to what end? What lies beneath these obvious human needs, what greater mystique are we participating in? In fact, it-is these very fundamental activities of everyday, human life that resonate with the greatest archetypes of all, the greatest of origin myths, of actions that are in imitation of the gods. Mircea Eliade says in The Sacred and the Profane:

Acting as a fully responsible human being, man imitates the paradigmatic gestures of the gods, repeats their actions, whether in the case of a simple physiological function such as eating or of a social, economic, cultural, military, or other activity.5
That we are so connected to the archetypal journey may not come as a surprise. That we can consciously and actively par­ticipate in this journey is the gift of the astrological model. The characteristic phases that I have seen clients experience are:
1. Separation from the known path, either through a per / Page 162 / ceptual shift or an event that thrusts them out of their regular routines.
2. A period of ego loss or identity crisis during which a chaos of polarities and opposites occurs, which in the alchemical process is called massa confusa; then, they seem suspended in liminality, living in the threshold, not having exited from one room completely, and at the same time not yet having entered the next.
3. From that no man's land come many images of what could be possible;
4. Finally, a sorting period during which, from those possible options, the actual alternatives emerge that they may then choose to incorporate into their lives; the once turbulent polarities. re­align.
This particular series of episodes is especially attuned to the effects of major transits and specifically to transits over the angles of .the horoscope, which are the points of orientation. Because Saturn is the planet that gives us definition, from within and from without, its transit is particularly involved with the organizing of inner characteristics and their effectiveness in our world;
The macrocosmic cycle of eternal return - the Greeks called it anakyklosis - which calls up a repetition of quality or feeling­tone, is reflected in microcosmic planetary cycles. However, each planet has a different cycle so it does not return to the same configurations with the others. This leaves much room for cycles within cycles with the result that although things may be similar they are never the same. Within our own lifetime there are returns and cycles, each of which recall a time past and act as a guide for future action.
The cycle that shapes our sense of worth and power is the Saturn cycle. In the twenty-nine-and-a-half-year period that it takes for Saturn to transit the zodiac, it makes every possible aspect to our natal horoscope. Its movement over the angles of the chart trigger off distinct movements away from an established path and towards something new and unknown.
These times of transit are usually fraught with a highly charged / Page 163 / energy and can be troublesome, especially if in some way our past has caught up with us. The intense sense of conservatism and self-preservation that Saturn embodies seems utterly con­tradictory to the urgent change that a contact from Saturn will inevitably demand. When one is pressured by a Saturn transit it is important to recognize that the inner world has already shifted drastically away from the outer: world and that an external realignment is necessary. This is often expressed by a with­drawal from the outer world in order to reassess the inner situ­ation.
Saturn lowers the threshold 'between our conscious hold over the environment and our unconscious mind, and brings about the necessity for unconscious material to surface - to be disgorged, as it were. This lowering of the threshold can appear as symptomatic depression. Naturally depression can be a creative impetus, as we shall see, but it can also herald a deeper conflict. As a result, Saturn contacts have been interpreted as times of introversion and solitude. This solitude is necessary, but it should not be allowed to become chronic. Recognizing the role that the Saturn transit is playing in the larger drama of the life cycle will place this reassess­ment time in perspective which, in turn, will produce a less nega­tive self examination.
The lessons learned from Saturn all seem to be very serious and dry. All heroes enter a wasteland, and endure times of challenge and testing. There are distinct time periods that are critical for action which are followed by experimentation and then main­tenance. If the maintenance period extends beyond its usefulness then another critical period of change-on-demand occurs, and- so on. The archetypal hero's journey with all of its phases and turning-points parallels the Saturn transit as it moves over the angles and travels through the quadrants of the horoscope."

 

SATURN IN TRANSIT

BOUNDARIES OF MIND BODY AND SOUL

Erin Sullivan 1991

Page186
"...Campbell says, 'The hero whose attachment to ego is already annihilated passes back and forth across the horizons of the world, in and out of the dragon, as readily as,a king through all the rooms of his house. And therein lies his power to save6 The latter stages of this transit propose a new way of 'seeing' life, and.how one can participate in it. They can also be fraught with terror and anxiety, for one's boundaries are dissolv'ing and the identity, as it has been for along time now, is slowly but,.certainly becoming eroded. Saturn, in its dark and most primitiye form, is bound up with the ego and its control mechanisms. A real sense of peripheral invasion occurs ­ something on the horizon beckons, but it cannot be seen. The boundless deep of the unconscious is filled with primordial images that arise spontaneously, both while awake and while asleep. Irnages and sensations creep in, occupying what used to be superfunctional space in the consciousness. Because of this preoccupation with the unconscious mind one can retreat into solitude which, though important on one level, should not be carried into extreme isolation from the people and things that one values. This, of course, means re-evaluating precisely what it is that one does value.
The hero must now join, collectively, with all heroes from all time and, divesting himself of the now useless protective devices, make himself availabbfor more magical tools. In more pragmatic terms, one must allow the contents of the unconscious to rise and to be the guiding factor in the continuing joumey. Dream analysis is Very fruitful during this time, as is any analytic exploration of the symbols that will surface from deep within the psyche. The twelfth-house Saturn transit dissolves all the old boundaries and leaves one vulnerable. That vulnerability, however, is the gift though, like the serpent who sloughs off its old skin, a tender time precedes the renewal
This process entails making a conscious agreement with the ego to participate in the dissolution, letting go of attachments and single-minded focus, It is possible to retain some of the protective coating behind which the change can take place, rather like changing clothes behind a Chinese screen. I call it maturing in private.

Page 187

It is difficult at best to interpret symbolic thought, and for a normally pragmatic individual to experience inexplicable outpour­ings of feelings, images and moods is like being plunged into an abyss. And an abyss it is. All heroes go through this identity loss, or change, in order to accomplish the next task, that of slaying the dragon, confronting the monster, passing through whatever danger may be put in their way.
Our hero, Theseus, and heroines, Demeter and Persephone, undergo metamorphoses, each in their own way and each with separate intent, but both enter a period of darkness and unknown transition. The transformation for Demeter involved a gradual awareness,that things had changed irrevocably. Her loss of identity relative to her previous stature was profound, and when Helios and Hecate apprised her fully of her circumstances she plunged into even deeper mourning. The threshold struggle, the confronta­tion with the unconscious, produced an understandable resistance. She withdrew from the other Olympians and roamed incognito among the mortals, without identity, without power, completely diminished and in a state of highly charged grief and anger.
Theseus' sea journey is the part of a rite of passage that occurs when one is somewhere between the pla:ce of departure and the place of arrival. Having proved himself mid-journey, the rest of the trip was spent mysteriously, presumably in suspension, preparing himself for the ordeal ahead. We often know in our innermost self what lies ahead, but our preparations seem futile, for it is not until the reality of the present actually arrives that we can act on its demands. This final phase of the first stage of the heroic journey is critical because of the temptation to create a fantasy event. Much of the creative aspect of major transformation can be devoured by this desire to imagine what is going to happen when Saturn transits ourascendant. By projecting imaginary possibilities on to the new horizon we can miss the actual opportunities that will be there and, worse, create situations that inhibit the natural evolution of a new persona.
The distillation of personality impurities is one level on which Saturn will function while in the twelfth house. If the psyche has become overburdened and polluted through the ego's attachment / Page188 / to old forms, the soma will register the complaint. Traditionally, the twelfth house rules institutions, be they hospitals, jails, asylums or ideologies. If the psyche ,has been issuing orders which, for some reason have been ignored, the potential for con­finemen this high. One's bodily constitution is at its lowest ebb with this transit, the body being far more susceptible to psychic disturbances. Especially if there are chronic disorders or con­genital conditions, it is time to consider a serious health pro­gramme. Voluntary confinement, retreats, holidays and other spi­ritually' recharging. activities are necessary. Out of. a twenty­nine-year cycle, two and a half years (on, average) spent in spir­itual rehabilitation is not a tall order; though letting go is never easy. Saying 'no' and letting go will bring energy and.. power back into one's system.

THE THRESHOLD STRUGGLE (ASC.)

There he encounters a shadow presence that guards the passage. The hero may defeat or conciliate his power and go alive into the kingdom of the dark (brother-battle; dragon-battle; offering, charm), or be slain by the opponent and descend in death (dis­memberment, crucifixion). Beyond the threshold, then, the hero journeys through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which give magical aid (helpers).
Joseph Campbell 7

The descent of Saturn over the ascendant and into the first house can be one of the most devastating times in a person's,life. One often feels that all pretence has been stripped away and one is left with the bare rudiments of an ego and a rough outline of what was once a valid and presentable persona. Of course, the 'opponent' mentioned which can slay the Self' is the shadow. That shadow, however, can just as easily be projected out' into the environment and appear as an actual person seemingly in direct opposition to oneself. The world that the hero enters at this time / Page 189 / is 'strangely intimate' because it is known to the unconscious though only registered in the conscious mind as a vague and shadowy realm.
The individual undergoing this important phase will be in a vulnerable state; the ego is shaky and identity is questionable. The process of dissolution that occuned in the twelfth house becomes apparent as Saturn enters the first. This difficult time is not without its redeeming features, however, as equal time is given to the positive aspects of the transit, the 'helpers:' A helper can take many forms - a therapist, a friend or even an event that indicates new symbols to identify with. The abrupt ripping away of false appearances can also rip away valuable protective devices that one has carefully created and it is im­portant, therefore, not to go 'dragon-slaying' without a helper. Sometimes there are several helpers, occasionally brought over from the upper hemisphere transit and at other times acquired during the descent into the lower hemisphere. One might' have to elicit a helper during the ascendant transit if one is not forth­commg.
The transit of Saturn over the ascendant establishes the phase which ends with entry into the figurative labyrinth at the I C. The more dissonance there has been between the persona and the Self the more drastic are the measures that the unconscious employs to battle the old self-image which will not survive the journey in its old form.
Because the threshold struggle that takes place at this stage of the transit is a descent into the personal, unconscious hemisphere of the horoscope, resistance is often intense at first. The last fourteen years with Saturn above the horizon have been spent developing worldly skills, but now the need is to develop a greater strength based on inner values rather than external measurements. The transition is tiring and people often complain of exhaustion during this initial stage of renewal. The unconscious demands almost equal time, and sleep seems more necessary during the Saturn descent than normal. Behind this need for sleep are dreams. Dreams of death are not uncommon, nor are dreams dark, shadowy figures; dream people often beckon or call one to an un­ / Page 190 / known destination, or help one to cross a river or chasm or to ,walk down a pathway.
The modern hero will lose touch with the old identity and try to force the changes within his or her environment in order to cope with the losses. The fear of obscurity that the old texts deem to be inevitable does, indeed, seem possible. Often the journeyer
seeks out helpers in the form of teachers; an analyst or friend who will provide support during this time of restructuring. Just as frequently the helpers can appear spontaneously and they can arrive in many forms; one has but to recognize these people. As mentioned, the dragon-battle is between the shadow and the Self, but it is not uncommon for helpers to be called upon to aid in
some confrontation with society.
The confusion as to who we really are can leave us available to projections from others during this transit. We are also vulner­able to experiencing rejection from others, or even attack, as a result. Simply stated, the point of these types of event, should they happen, is to indicate to the individual that there is a dissociation between who they really are and who they appear to be.
There is an interesting - pun in the Odyssey on this lack of identity: Odysseus was a hero with a strong ego, whose epithets were, among others, wily, cunning, shining and brilliant. This was not a man who let go easily. On his return from Troy to Ithaca, one of his tests was to encounter and slay the Cyclops Polyphemus, Poseidon's son. While Odysseus is getting the Cyclops drunk, Polyphem us- asks Odysseus his name, for he wants to know who to thank for the wine, and give him a gift. No fool, Odysseus says to the Cyclops, 'My name is Nobody: mother, father, and friends, everyone calls me Nobody.'
Once Odysseus had accomplished the blinding of the Cyclops, and sailed out into the bay, Polyphemus screamed for his neighbouring Cyclopes to help him. They called out to ask who had hurt him, to which the answer came, "Nobody.' Naturally they all assumed that no person had harmed him and that help would therefore have to come from a divine source. .
Odysseus' ego overcame him when his self-pride insisted that he / Page191 / take credit for the blinding of the Cyclops. The hubris of Odysseus in this situation is to claim he actually has an identity, for when one is in the mystical realm, one is meant to be without identity. When he leaves the Cyclops he states his identity as the hero, Odysseus, which enrages Polyphemus' father, Poseidon, who then has it in for him for the rest of his journey.
The hero in transition, in liminality, is an individual without identity, without attachment to ego and former glory - he, is a 'nobody', a non-person. So, Odysseus' lie is actually the truth, and the truth is .,a lie, in that when he says he is Nobody, he and we think he is lying, but when he says '[I am]-Odysseus . . . Laertes' son, who lives in Ithaca!', really he is lying because according to the rules of journeying, and as long as he is on Jhat journey, he is not .really that person at all. His journey is that of a nobody. So there is some danger involved if we adhere to an old identity image while undergoing a major transition.

 

SATURN IN TRANSIT

BOUNDARIES OF MIND BODY AND SOUL

Erin Sullivan 1991

THE PERSONAL HEROIC JOURNEY

THE ATONEMENT (IC)

Page 210

"When he arrives at. the nadir of the mythological round, he un­dergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward. The triumph may be represented as the hero's sexual union with the goddess-mother of the world (sacred marriage), his recognition by the father-creator (father atonement), his own divinization (apotheosis), or again - if the powers have remained unfriendly to him - his theft of the boon he came to gain (bridge-theft, fire-theft); intrinsically it is an ex­pansion of consciousness and therewith of being (illumination, transfiguration, freedom). Joseph Campbell 9


Just as apotheosis is a transformation from the human to a divine state, so this transit can initiate a person into his own sense of immortality, whether that be through the awareness of ancestral links or through progeny of his own. The old texts called the fourth house the 'house of confinement', referring to a woman's confinement at childbirth, and certainly Saturn here will bring to the fore all the hidden components that lie in the blueprint of the psychic lineage, the fate, of, the family. It is entirely possible for prenatal conditions to surface during this stage of the round. One of my clients who had suffered from acute anxiety attacks since childhood found it effective to enter into a form of therapy called 'rebirthing' where she relived her birth experience and all of its potent dangers: she had almost died at birth.
The fourth-house experience indicates a time for new founda­tions, but in horary astrology the fourth house is 'the end of the matter' and one cannot build a new structure on an old foundation. Because the fourth house is both beginnings and endings one might find that the past has to be rediscovered before the future can unfold.
Frequently this transit precipitates a fascination with 'roots', with family genealogy. Chronic or inherent physiological or psychological patterns emerge through the fourth house. When Saturn transits the lC it becomes apparent that one must come to terms with the family fate, become reconciled to that legacy / Page 211 / and begin to rework the dynamics that have been rumbling underground during the preceding phase. Often, the 'fate' of an individual is really the unresolved conflicts of the family dyna­mic as embedded in the psyche, which then manifest in events or symptoms. .
Here we are at the midnight phase of the journey, faced with the darkest aspects of the psyche and its potentials - the time when the unconscious is at its most active. The events that occur during the fourth-house transit will bring to the threshold of awareness long-forgotten memories, often from childhood, in order to gauge the strength of one's security bases. The kind of resolution that results from this confrontation between the individual and his or her family origins creates a greater sense of inner security. Since the family plays such a major role in our ability to establish. a. secure base of operation for accomplishment, it is essential that an 'atonement' or reconciliation with the parents takes place.
Life is mysterious enough, but the fourth house and all of its intricate involvement with the secrets of the family and its hidden dynamics is the source of the biological and unconscious psychological contract with our life path. 'Full circle, from the tomb of the womb to the womb of the tomb, we come: an ambiguous, enigmatical incursion into a world of solid matter that is soon to melt from us, like the substance of a 'dream.'10 The tomb and the womb are inseparable, the archetypal womb is the grave, the womb of Gaia. The fourth house is the as­trologicallocus for the symbols of the tomb, the womb and the Moon, the Moon ruling Cancer, the fourth-house sign. When Saturn is transiting .the fourth house it is in the house of the Moon and will bring forth memories that are from the prenatal and pre-verbal lunar time of life: infancy and the first three years of life.
The most obvious celestial reminder is Luna, the triple god­dess of Artemis, Selene and Hecate. The triple goddess repre­sents the three phases of the Moon: New, Full and Balsamic; the three phases of a woman's menstrual cycle; the three phases of life, 'she is huge and calls us from her womb; she is beautiful / Page 212 /and calls us to her bed; she is old and ugly and calls us to the tomb.'l1 These are the three realms of lunar manifestation: Selene in heaven, Artemis on earth and Hecate in the realm of Hades.
When masculine Saturn is in the feminine house of the Moon, we have a meeting of opposites, an experience that recalls the union of Ouranos and Gaia. For remember that Kronos' parents had a violent opposition, and that he was called in by his mother to act as an intermediary. Having castrated his father to please his mother he was eventually betrayed by her in favour of his wife, Rhea. The type of atonement that Saturn transiting the fourth house induces is not always comfortable, but it will bring the modern hero to an understanding and reconciliation of his role in the family destiny and, ultimately, his own per­sonal destiny.
What we bring from the 'tomb of the womb' into our lives is an intensely complex formation of family patterns which surround
and often obscure the treasure of self-destiny. When Saturn is transiting the fourth house, especially duringrheinitial phase of contact with the I C, the doors to the past swing open and we are faced with sorting out these complex patterns. The process takes many forms but always relates to complex conditions in the family and how these conditions colour one's world-view. It can initiate a time when one begins to differentiate oneself from one's parents, in other words begins to withdraw one's projection of the parent archetype from the biological parent. Ideally, this is a period that begins a process of liberation, but the opposite can occur too, where one calcifies one's identity with the family fate and carries it on. Even in the most sublime family situation, there is still the need for the child to separate himself from the complex and become fully identified as himself. The horoscope is the lens through which one views the world, and a child 'sees' his parents through that lens. In The Astrology of Fate, Liz Green says (em­
phasis mine):

The meridian of the birth chart is a representation of family fate, but it does not really describe what one's parents did to / Page 213 / one in childhood. Rather, it is a portrait of two inner parents, archetypal or mythic in nature, which dominate the psyche of the child and remain as representations of the relationship between man and woman throughout life. These are the inherited complexes, the 'ancestral sins'.12
Although the parents' astrological signatures conform with remarkable regularity with the child's parent-axis theme, it is still through an unconscious collusion on the part of parent and child that the fate of the family is visited upon the child. Each child in a family unit will, of course, manifest different components of the parental theme. It is at this base point of the horoscope, this dark place, that the treasure is guarded by the dragon. The treasure is that spark of individual destiny, the inner glow that provides one's unique essence, and the heroic experience is the retrieval of that essence.
This stage of the heroic journey demands atonement, retrieval of the gold, or treasure, the secret of the elixir. The deeper one goes into the cave, the forest, the wasteland or the labyrinth of one's unconscious, the more perilous is the journey but the more precious is the treasure. The monster must be faced and slain. Having slain the Minotaur, Theseus was recalled to meet his helper, Ariadne,and escape with her. One problem that arose for him was the realization that if Ariadne could betray her father to help him, then it might be possible for her, in turn, to betray him. That factor played a role in one variant of the myth, in which he leaves Ariadne behind on Naxos when he sails for home. This is a family in conflict. He leaves behind the taint that might have destroyed his 'boon'. He does not realize, - however, what lies ahead in his return phase, of which more later.
These experiences of going into the pit, the depth, the dark and the nadir all relate to finding the treasure of individuality, the gold within. Everyone, no matter whether his family con­ditioning was dramatic or conservative, has this challenge thrust upon him - find your gold, your treasure, your own personal destiny. Even those individuals who have had relatively benign / Page 214 / family histories and well-supported childhoods have dragons to slay, and because their childhood training did not include dodging mines or detonating bombs, theirs is a particular challenge..."

Page 214

"...The challenge that arises in a situation like this is subtle. Because such individuals lack specific traumas to pin their pschic struggles on, they will often experience a vague form of guilt or feelings of ingratitude towards their parents, recognizinig at the same time that their parents are not responsible for their feelings of longing or dissatisfaction.
'Where, then, does one begin to look whether or not the inherent, archhetypal, divine discontent has been exacerbated by child­hood trauma, the Self always seeks to find its greatest potential and fullest expression. whether or not. this search is conscious or unconscious, the Self as an organic whole 'knows' that it must never, by its very limitations and dimensions, be completely fulfilled. The heroic journey is a path unique to the hero, and part of the challenge is to find the treasure. That treasure is necessarily buried deep within the psyche and as an archetypal experience, needs to be hunted and retrieved,"

 

 

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann

1875 1955

Page 465 / 466

"They talked of "humanity," of nobility - but it was / the spirit alone that distinguished man, as a creature largely divorced from nature, largely opposed to her in feeling, from all other forms of organic life. In man's spirit, then, resided his true nobility and his merit - in his state of disease, as it were; in a word, the more ailing he was, by so much was he the more man. The genius of disease was more human than the genius of health. How, then, could one who posed as the. friend of man shut his eyes to these fundamental truths concerning man's humanIty? Herr Settembrini had progress ever on his lips: was he aware that all progress, in so far as there was such a thing, was due to illness, and to illness alone? In other words, to genius, which was the same thing? Had not the normal, since time was, lived on the achievements of the abnormal? Men consciously and voluntarily descended into disease and madness, in search of knowledge which, acquired by fanaticism, would lead back to health; after the possession and use of it had ceased to be conditioned by that heroic and abnormal act of sacrifice. That was the true death on the cross, the true Atone-ment."

 

AT

ONE

MENT


4
MIND
40
22
4
4
BODY
46
19
1
4
SOUL
67
13
4
12
-
153
54
9
1+2
1+5+3
5+4
-
3
-
9
9
9

 

 

 
MIND BODY SOUL
-
-
-
-
M
13
4
4
-
I
9
9
9
-
N+D
18
9
9
-
B
2
2
2
-
O+D+Y+S
63
18
9
-
O+U
36
9
9
-
L
12
3
3
12
MIND BODY SOUL
153
54
45
1+2
=
1+5+3
5+4
4+5
3
MIND BODY SOUL
9
9
9

 

 

SATURN IN TRANSIT

BOUNDARIES OF MIND BODY AND SOUL

Erin Sullivan 1991

THE PERSONAL HEROIC JOURNEY

THE ATONEMENT (IC)

Page 210

"When he arrives at. the nadir of the mythological round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward. The triumph may be represented as the hero's sexual union with the goddess-mother of the world (sacred marriage), his recognition by the father-creator (father atonement), his own divinization (apotheosis), or again - if the powers have remained unfriendly to him - his theft of the boon he came to gain (bridge-theft, fire-theft); intrinsically it is an ex­pansion of consciousness and therewith of being (illumination, transfiguration, freedom)." Joseph Campbell 9

 

14
 PHARAOH+PYRAMID
153
81
9
11
 SOKAR+OSIRIS
153
54
9
11
 ZARATHUSTRA
153
45
9
12
 QUETZALCOATL
153
45
9
15
 EHYEH+ASHER+EHYEH
153
90
9
15
 AUM+MANI+PADME+HUM
153
63
9
10
 IPSISSIMUS
153
45
9
10
 SIXTYTHREE
153
54
9
14
 ALBERT+EINSTEIN
153
63
9
13
 ATOMIC+NUMBERS
153
54
9
10
 PUREST+LOVE
153
45
9

 

153 x 12 = 1836

EIGHTEENTHIRTYSIX = 99 9+9 = 181+8 = 9

 

8
EIGHTEEN
73
46
1
9
THIRTYSIX
152
53
8
17
-
225
99
9

 

-
E
I
G
H
T
E
E
N
T
H
I
R
T
Y
S
I
X
 - - - - - -
-
-
9
-
8
-
-
-
5
-
8
9
-
-
-
1
9
6
+
=
55
5+5
=
1
-
-
9
-
8
-
-
-
14
-
8
9
-
-
-
19
9
24
+
=
100
 1+0+0
=
1
17
E
I
G
H
T
E
E
N
T
H
I
R
T
Y
S
I
X
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
5
9
7
8
20
5
5
14
20
8
9
18
20
25
19
9
24
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
5
9
7
8
2
5
5
5
2
8
9
9
2
7
1
9
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
-
-
+
=
1
-
-
1
-
-
-
-
-
2
-
-
-
2
-
-
-
2
-
-
-
-
+
=
6
-
-
6
-
5
-
-
-
-
5
5
5
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
+
=
20
2+0
=
2
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
6
+
=
6
-
-
6
-
-
-
7
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
7
-
-
-
+
=
14
1+4
=
5
-
-
-
-
8
-
-
-
-
-
8
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
+
=
16
1+6
=
7
-
-
9
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
9
-
-
-
9
-
+
=
36
3+6
=
9
-
E
I
G
H
T
E
E
N
T
H
I
R
T
Y
S
I
X
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
9
-
-
-
9
-
+
=
36
3+6
=
9
-
E
I
G
H
T
E
E
N
T
H
I
R
T
Y
S
I
X
-
-
-
-
-
-

 

 

JUST SIX NUMBERS
Martin Rees
1
OUR COSMIC HABITAT I PLANETS STARS AND LIFE

Page 24


"A proton is 1,836 times heavier than an electron, and the number 1,836 would have the same connotations to any 'intelligence' "

Page 24 /25 '
" A manifestly artificial signal-even if it were as boring as lists of prime numbers, or the digits of 'pi' - would imply that ntelli-gence' wasn't unique to the Earth and had evolved elsewhere. The nearest potential sites are so far away that signals would take many years in transit. For this reason alone, transmission would be primarily one-way.
There would be time to send a measured response, but no scope for quick repartee! any remote beings who could communicate with us would have some concepts of mathematics and logic that paralleled our own. And they would also share a knowledge of the basic particles and forces that govern our universe. Their habitat may be very different (and the biosphere even more different) from ours here on Earth; but they, and their planet, would be made of atoms just like those on Earth. For them, as for us, the most important particles would be protons and electrons: one electron orbiting a proton makes a hydrogen atom, and electric currents and radio transmitters involve streams of electrons. A proton is 1,836 times heavier than an electron, and the number 1,836 would have the same connotations to any 'intelligence' able and motivated to transmit radio signals. All the basic forces and natural laws would be the same. Indeed, this uniformity - without which our universe would be a far more baffling place - seems to extend to the remotest galaxies that astronomers can study.
 Later chapters in this book will, however, speculate about other 'universes', forever beyond range of our telescopes, where different laws may prevail.)
Clearly, alien beings wouldn't use metres, kilograms or seconds. But we could exchange information about the ratios of two masses (such as thc ratio of proton and electron masses) or of two lengths, which are 'pure numbers' that don't depend on what units are used: the statement that one rod is ten times as long as another is true (or false) whether we measure lengths/ 1feet or metres or some alien units"

"A proton is 1,836 times heavier than an electron, and the number 1,836 would have the same connotations to any 'intelligence' "

 

 

HARMONIC 288
Bruce Cathie
1977
EIGHT

 THE MEASURE OF LIGHT : I

Page 95
"The search for this particular value was a lengthy one and the clue that led me finally to a possible solution was a study of the construction of the Grand Gallery. The height of the Gallery was the first indication that it was not just an elaborate access passage. Previous measurements made by scientific investigators pointed to some interesting possibilities. "
Page 95
"The value that I calculated for length was extremely close to that of the one published in Davidson and Aldersmith's book, their value being 1836 inches,"

Page 95/97                                                                                                                                                        
"A search of my physics books revealed that 1836 was the closest approximation the scientists have calculated to the mass / ratio of the positive hydrogen ion, i.e. the proton, to the electron."



THE GREAT PYRAMID
ITS
DIVINE MESSAGE
D.Davidson and H. Alderson
Page 279

"The resulting length for the Grand Gallery roof is 1836 p', an important Pyramid dimension dealt with later"

 


 THE TUTANKHAMUN PROPHECIES
 Maurice Cotterell

Page194

Anderson's Constitutions of the Freemasons (In3) comments:
", . . the Tillest structures of Tyre and Sidon could not be compared with the Etemal God's T emple at Jerusalem. , ,
  there were employed 3,600 Princes, or Master Masons', to conduct the work according to Solomon's directions,
 with 80000 hewers of stone in the mountains ('Fellow Craftsmen')and 70000 labourers in all 153600 besides       
the levy under Adoniram to work In the mountains of Lebanon by turns with the Sidonians, viz 30,000 being in all
183,600.

Page 190

"The holy number of sun-worshippers is 9, the highest number that can be reached before becoming one (10) with the creator. This is why Tutankhamun was entombed in nine layers of coffin. This is why the pyramid skirts of the two statues, guarding the entrance to the Burial Chamber, were triangular (base 3), when the all-seeing eye-skirt of Mereruka contained a pyramid skirt with a base of four sides. The message concealed here is that the 3 should be squared, which equals 9. Freemasons" for reasons we shall see, are said to be 'on the square'."

 

 

THE BIOLOGY OF DEATH
Lyall Watson 1974
Page 49
"AS long ago as 1836, in a Manual of Medical Jurisprudence, this was said: Individuals who are apparently destroyed in a sudden manner, by certain wounds, diseases , or even decapitation are not really dead, but are only in conditions incompatible with the persistence life."


THE JUPITER EFFECT
John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann

l977
Page 122

: "Seventeen 'major historical earthquakes' are referred to in the report all of which occurred since
1836

 

 

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A YOGI

Paramahansa Yogananda

1946

Book cover comments

"I am grateful to you for granting me some insight into this fascinating world." - Thomas Mann"

"As an eye witness recountal of the extraordinary lives and powers of modern Hindu saints, the book has importance both timely and timeless." - W. Y. Evans-Wentz, Orientalist

Page 275

"In the gigantic concepts of Einstein, the velocity of light - 1863 miles per second - dominates the whole theory of relativity"

1863 - 1836

 

 

GODS OF THE DAWN

THE MESSAGE OF THE PYRAMIDS

AND

THE TRUE STARGATE MYSTERY

Peter Lemesurier 1997

Page 118

"With the entry into the Grand Gallery, all kinds of extraordinary things now start to happen"
                                         while the 1836P" long roof (-code equivalent: 153 x 12)

 

THE NEW VIEW OVER ATLANTIS

John Michell 1983

Page160

"MERCURY, known to the Greeks as HERMES and to the Egyptians as THOTH,

was the deity of speech and communication, in which aspect he was the patron saint of travellers, of roads and paths and the pillars marking their course"

"MERCURY

was also god of revelation and of  the'hermetic mysteries which were held within a dark, buried chamber, similar to the kings / Page 161 / chamber buried deep within the masonry of the GREAT PYRAMID. The use of the Pyramid's inner chambers for rituals of initiation and rebirth is implied in Pyramid legend, in the impressions of modern mystics, and in the traditional dedication of the Pyramid to the principle of MERCURY.
On page 124 are displayed the magic squares relating to the various planets. These figures were highly regarded by the mathematicians of antiquity, who took them as paradigms of universal laws. Every ritual centre or temple was laid out according to one of the geometrical designs which are inherent in the structure of magic squares. Thus the ancient world was laid out to a cosmological pattern within which smaller patterns were formed, all radiating from certain points on the earth's surface, the natural centres of terrestrial current. Each of these centres, and each individual group and cluster of groups, was known by an astrological symbol and related to a magic square, expressing the influence to which it was found most susceptible...."

"...The association of the Pyramid with the magic square of Mercury links it also to the number 2080, which is the sum of all numbers from 1 to 64 and thus the sum of all the numbers within Mercury's magic square. 2080 is also the number of (Greek word omitted) the first-born, an epithet of Christ. {Revelation, i, 5), and the same number is prodqced by the Greek phrase which describes the 'fire' which Prometheus, a type of Mercury, stole from the gods - the 'artificers' fire' (Greek word omitted 2080). The combination of light (Greek word omitted) and fire (Greek word omitted) also gives 2080. This
 number and 1080 appear to have similar meanings, 1080 representing Mercury in the character of the earth spirit (Greek word omitted = 1080)..."
                      
                                                                                           

THE NEW VIEW OVER ATLANTIS

John Michell 1983

Page 161

"The association of the pyramid with the magic square of MERCURY links it also to the number 2080, which is the sum of all numbers from 1 to 64 and

thus the sum of all the numbers within

MERCURY'S MAGIC SQUARE"

 

THE

MAGIC SQUARE

MERCURY

8 58 59 5 4 62 63 1
49 15 14 52  53 11 10 56
41 23 22 44 45 19 18 48
32 34 35 29 28 38 39 25
40 26 27 37 36 30 31 33
17 47 46 20 21 43 42 24
9 55 54 12 13 51 50 16
64 2 3 61 60 6 7 5

 

8       8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8       8
260 260 260 260 260 260 260 260 260 260
= = = = = = = = = =
+ + + + + + + + + +
8 260 = + 8 58 59 5 4 62 63 1 + = 260 8
8 260 = + 49 15 14 52  53 11 10 56 + = 260 8
8 260 = + 41 23 22 44 45 19 18 48 + = 260 8
8 260 = + 32 34 35 29 28 38 39 25 + = 260 8
8 260 = + 40 26 27 37 36 30 31 33 + = 260 8
8 260 = + 17 47 46 20 21 43 42 24 + = 260 8
8 260 = + 9 55 54 12 13 51 50 16 + = 260 8
8 260 = + 64 2 3 61 60 6 7 57 + = 260 8
+ + + + + + + + + +
= = = = = = = = = =
260 260 260 260 260 260 260 260 260 260
8       8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8       8

 

Page 161

"Symbolism in the ancient world was always related to function, and the symbolic numbers associated with or expressed in the dimensions / Page 162 /  of the Great Pyramid give clear indications of its general purpose: to bring about the fertile union of the two elements in nature referred to as sulphur, 666, and mercury, 1080. Their offspring was that spirit which the alchemists in their technical language referred to as the animated Mercurius, fertility-bearer, revealer of knowledge and guide between life and death, representing in one aspect the spirit of the living earth, and in another the' Mercury of the Philosophers' enshrined within the initiatory chambers of the Pyramid.
 The Order of Art and Science Seen in a Flash
 Questions which inevitably follow upon our recognition of the great universal civilization in deep prehistory, and the highly developed code of magic and science on which it was based, are those which ask its origin, how it spread across the earth and why it declined and vanished. Such questions have been asked in vain since at1east the time of Plato, who attributed the origins of culture to the appearance of gods or god-like individuals, in other words, to the mysterious principle of revelation.
The existence of similar or identical features in the cosmologies, myths, names, ceremonies, artefacts and even units of measure of such widely separated countries as China, Egypt, Britain and America
implies that their cultures were derived from a common source, from some greater tradition of which they each preserved certain relics. An academic fad of the last century was to try to locate that source in India, Babylon or some other matrix, Egypt being a popular favourite.
It has, however, often been observed that the Great Pyramid is not apparently of native Egyptian construction. Like the earliest and most perfect temples of Mexico, it relates to world geography in a way which indicates that it belonged to some universal system in the forgotten past. Ever and again, studies of ancient civilizations trace them back from their declines to their high origins beyond which the trail ends, with no trace of any previous period of cultural development. The great riddle in the quest for the origin of human culture is that civilizations appear suddenly, at their peak, as if ready-made. The version of history that constantly suggests itself is Plato's, given in his account of that long-vanished world which he called Atlantis."

9 x 6 = 54

6 HERMES 68 32 5
7 MERCURY 103 40 4
131 - 171 72 9
- - - - -
- - - - -
6

DIVINE

 63 36 9
3

LAW

 36 9 9
9 - 99 45 18
- - 9+9 4+5 1+8
9 - 18 9 9
- - 1+8 - -
9 - 9 9 9

 

 

14 THE HOLY QABALAH 135 63 9
12 THE HOLY KORAN

152

62

8
12 THE HOLY BIBLE 123 60 6
6 TALMUD

71

17

8
5 KORAN 59 23

5
5 BIBLE 30 21 3
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
11 KING SOLOMON 144 54 9
9 KING DAVID 81 45 9
10 KING OF EDOM 99 54 9
9 KING HIRAM 90 54 9

 

 

3

THE

 33 15 6
4

HOLY

 60 24 6
7

QABALAH

 42 24 6
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
8

ESOTERIC

 94 40 4
8

EXOTERIC

 99 45 9

 

 

SATURN IN TRANSIT

BOUNDARIES OF MIND BODY AND SOUL

Erin Sullivan 1991

THE EVOLUTION OF AN ARCHETYPE

THE MASTER OF TIME

Page 26

"Before time was the unknown, and the unknown is a fearful thing. At some point it became essential in the evolution of human awareness to apprehend and to define the passage of time. All the mysteries of life involve this phenomenon as everything must have a beginning, a middle and an end.
In the beginning the fluidity of time was .expressed through the great oceanic god. Ouroboros, who is variously depicted as a circular river encompassing the earth, as a snake eating its own tail and as Oceanus the great source of all life which summnds all life. This definition of time is infinite, all-enveloping and eternal. The Greek Aion is a personified 'life fluid' that contains us and is contained within us.
The world soul, the all-embracing never-ending quality of time is made certain in the depiction of the zodiac, one of the earliest forms of demarcating time, and it, too, is Ouroboros and Oceanus and the Snake circling the known earth and eternally returning to renew itself. This reassuring infinity soothed the minds of the ancients, for it is in the womb of infinite time itself that we are assured of the immortality of the soul.
The obsession with marking time increased with the develop­ment of culture and marvellous measuring-devices were invented and employed. The deities of measured time are. the gods of the Sun, the goddesses of the Moon and Kronos himself. They symbo­lize respectively the solar division of diurnal and nocturnal time, the eternal return of lunar cyclic time and the terminus, the end of time. It is this terminus that is presided over by Saturn as the Grim Reaper, the god of corporeal death, and he becomes the personification of our worldly journey with all its cycles and phases. Saturn's depiction with the sickle, handed to him by his mother and first used to terminate the procreativity of Ouranos, is the personification of the cut-off point, when our 'time is up'.
The Greeks were aware of quality of time and had terms for such numinous experiences as were intrinsic within certain events.

Page 27
Far example, Nike (Victory) was a personified image af a numinous moment in time when a game ar battle is won, describing not the winning, not the mament itself, but the quality of the time. Or Kairos, a winged god sametimes depicted with wheels an his feet, representing that magical momen of perfection when time and circumstance conspire to make the quality af that time correct and momentous. Or the feminine Moira, the 'allotment' af time, the portion or degree that we carry as aur fate. We might also. think of the gaddess Nemesis, representative af that moment in time when retribution is achieved. Astrologically, we have Heimarmene, the quality af astrological time or our haroscopic fate. This is a thread woven throughout the horoscope, permeating and infusing the essence af aur own time within it - we cannot define it, we can only live it.
A Saturn transit evokes an acute awareness af the passage af time, and the Saturn cycle is descriptive af the natural progressian of time and personal develapment; and time itself is often the only cansolation we have in a moment of crisis, when we know that 'this two shall pass'. Saturn has been equated with chronological time, histary and the past. We can easily see our lives as a series.
of small aeons, little lifetimes within the great lifetime, and it is Saturn who. marks off these stages, clarifies and separates them from what we once were and who we cantinue to become. But what is the quality af Saturnian time?
Saturn represents time in sequence and duratian; as Kronos his realm was finite, whereas his parents' dominion extended infinitely back into. the past, and his san Zeus' extends infinitely farward. Saturnian time is bracketed by the infinite in either directian. His rulership af the Golden Age was called 'timeless', but the terminatian af it brought about the seasons and measurements af celestial motion.
This finiteness implies anather Saturnian experience which manifests as an enclosed period of time within which subjectively numinous experiences accur. Saturn transits are aften accompanied by a feeling of being apprehended in time, of being stuck or immobilized. This sensation frequently precedes a major breakthrough or transformation and is often accompanied by / Page 28 /
synchronicities. When time seems suspended, or enclosed episodes occur which have extraordinary meaning to an individual, it is
possible that the psychic 'stillness' engendered by Saturn allows inner experiences to build up a psychic charge which is then expelled into the environment. The subjective experience then becomes objective with a rapid sequence of events all coinciding with a profound inner awareness. These acausal events (those with no apparent connecting principle, yet redolent with meaning and implication) tend to cluster around an individual who is in a state of highly charged suspension and on the threshold of change. It is as if a connecting link is formed between subject and object, mind and matter, body and soul, whch confirms the intercon­nectedness between an individual's Self and the cosmos.
We have seen that Saturn acts as two things: first, as a barrier between the conscious and the unconscious, and secondly, as a bridge between those two states. The transit of Saturn provokes the tension between the two, one of which will eventually pre­dominate, but acceptance of the situation produces the luxury of choosing a new direction. All the determinism that Saturn brings, those moments that are absolute, lead ultimately to a choice of some kind - one might not choose one's circumstances but can choose what one does with them. That apparent paradox, fate and free will, is inherent in Saturn. When opposites unite, a still­ness prevails and a subsequent reordering occurs. Transformation, in Saturn's case, does not mean transcending, it means incorporating. So, Saturnian choice means working reality. The word choice, when held upside down and read in a mirror, holds a surprise. Try it.

CHOICE

The experience of Saturn as we perceive it today contains all the complexities of every thought-form humanity has projected upon it, and. we therefore personally encounter it in a myriad of ways. He might emerge as anyone of the images which have inspired and depressed some of the greatest minds, but he will emerge. Because the way in which we use the impressions that arise with Saturn's transit will be individual and unique, there is no adequate / Page 29 / interpretation of a Saturn transit, only a perception, a hint of what might be.
Saturn brings us all of his archetypal images - he has done so through all time, and continues to do so as we evolve within our own time. Saturn in transit brings to bear upon our consciousness the concept of our own worth, value and essence within the quality of that time. It offers perimeters within which to generate, develop and unfold. Saturn is the boundary of the mind, body and soul."

 

 

4
MIND
40
22
4
4
BODY
46
19
1
4
SOUL
67
13
4
12
-
153
54
9
1+2
1+5+3
5+4
-
3
-
9
9
9

 

 

 
MIND BODY SOUL
-
-
-
-
M
13
4
4
-
I
9
9
9
-
N+D
18
9
9
-
B
2
2
2
-
O+D+Y+S
63
18
9
-
O+U
36
9
9
-
L
12
3
3
12
MIND BODY SOUL
153
54
45
1+2
=
1+5+3
5+4
4+5
3
MIND BODY SOUL
9
9
9

 

 

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann

1875 1955

FOREWORD

"THE STORY of Hans Castorp, which we would here set forth, not on his own account, for in him the reader will make acquaintance with a simple-minded though pleasing young man, but for the sake of the story itself, which seems to us highly worth telling- though it must needs be borne in mind, in Hans Castorp's behalf, that it is his story, and not every story happens to everybody- this story, we say, belongs to the long ago; is already, so to speak, covered with historic mould, and unquestionably to be presented in the tense best suited to a narrative out of the depth of the past.
That should be no drawback to a story, but rather the reverse. Since histories must be in the past, then the more past the better, it would seem, for them in their character as histories, and for him, the teller of them, rounding wizard of times gone by. With this story, moreover, it stands as it does to-day with human beings, not least among them writers of tales: it is far older than its years; its age may not be measured by length of days, nor the weight of time on its head reckoned by the rising or setting of suns. In a word, the degree of its antiquity has noways to do with the pas-sage of time - in which statement the author intentionally touches upon the strange and questionable double nature of that riddling element.
 But we would not wilfully obscure a plain matter. The exag-gerated pastness of our narrative is due to its taking place before the epoch when a certain crisis shattered its way through life and consciousness and left a deep chasm behind. It takes place - or, rather, deliberately to avoid the present tense, it took place, and had taken place - in the long ago, in the old days, the days of the world before the Great War, in the beginning of which so much began that has scarcely yet left off beginning. Yes, it took place before that; yet not so long before. Is not the pastness of the past the profounder, the completer, the more legendary, the more im-mediately before the present it falls? More than that, our story has, of its own nature, something of the legend about it now and again.

We shall tell it at length, thoroughly, in detail-for when did a narrative seem too long or too short by reason of the actual time or space it took up? We do not fear being called meticulous, in-clining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.
Not all in a minute, then, will the narrator be finished with the story of our Hans. The seven days of a week will not suffice, no, nor seven months either. Best not too soon make too plain how much mortal time must pass over his head while he sits spun round in his spell. Heaven forbid it should be seven years!
And now we begin"

 

BY THE OCEAN OF TIME

CHAPTER SEVEN

Page 541

"CAN one tell - that is to say, narrate - time, time itself', as such, for its own sake? That would surely be an absurd undertaking. A story which read: "Time passed, It ran on, the time. flowed on-ward" and so forth - no one in his senses could consider that a narrative. It would be as though one .held a single note or chord fora whole hour, and called it music. For narration resembles music in this, that it fills up the time. It " fills it in " and " breaks it up." so that there's something to it," " something going on" - to quote, with due and mouriiful piety, those casual phrases of our departed Joachim, all echo of which so long ago died away. So long ago, indeed, that we wonder if the reader is clear how long ago it was. For time is the medium of narration, as it is the medium of life. Both are in extricably bound up with it, as inextricably as are bodies in space. Similarly, time is the medium of music; music divides, measures, articulates time, and can shorten it, yet enhance its value, both at once. Thus music and narration are alike, in that they can only present themselves as a flowing, as a succession in time, as one thing after another; and both differ from the plastic arts, which are complete in the present, and unrelated to time save as all bodies are, whereas narration - like music - even if it should try to be completely present at any given moment, would need time to do it in.
So much is clear. But it is just as clear that we have also a dif-ference to deal with. For the time element in music is single. Into a section of mortal time music pours itself, thereby inexpressibly' enhancing and ennobling what it fills. But a narrative must have two kinds of time: first, its own, like music, actual time, condi- tioning its presentation and course; and second, the time of its con-tent, which is relative, so extremely relative that the imaginary time of the narrative can either coincide nearly or completely with the actual, or musical, time, or can be a world away. A piece of music called a "Five-minute Waltz "lasts five minutes, and this is / Page 542 / its sole relation to the time element. But a narrative which con-cerned itself with the events of five minutes, might, by extraor-dinary conscientiousness in the telling, take up a thousand times five minutes, and even then seem very short, though long in relation to its imaginary time. On the other hand, the contentual time of a story can shrink its actual time out of all measure. We put it in this way on purpose, in order to suggest another element, an illusory, even, to speak plainly, a morbid element, which is quite definitely a factor in the situation. I am speaking of cases where the story practises a hermetical magic, a temporal distortion of perspective reminding one of certain abnormal and transcendental experiences in actual life. We have records of opium dreams in which the dreamer, during a brief narcotic sleep, had experiences stretching over a period or ten, thirty, sixty years, or even passing the extreme limit of man's temporal capacity for experience: dreams whose contentual time was enormously greater than their actual or mu-sical time, and in which there obtained an incredible foreshortening of events; the images pressing one upon another with such rapidity that it was as though "somethmg had been taken away, like the - spring from a broken watch" from the brain of the sleeper. Such is the descriftion of a hashish eater.
Thus, or in some such way as in these sinister dreams, can the narrative go to work with time; in some such way can time be dealt with in a tale. And if this be so, then it is clear that time, while- the medium of the narrative, can also become its subject. There-fore, if it is too much to say that one can tell a tale of time, it is none the less true that a desire to tell a tale about time is not such an absurd idea as it just now seemed. We freely admit that, in bring-ing up the question as to whether the time can be narrated or not, we have done so only to confess that we had something like that in view.in the present work. And if we touched upon the. further question, whether our readers were clear how .much time had passed since the upnght Joachim, deceased in the mterval, had in-troduced into the conversation the above-quoted phrases about music and time - remarks indicating a certain alchemlstical height-ning of his nature, which, in its goodness and simpliciry, was, of its own unaided power, incapable of any such ideas - we should not have been dismayed to hear that they were not clear. We might even have been gratified, on the plain ground that a thorough-go-ing sympathy with the experiences of our hero is precisely what :" we wish to arouse, and he, Hans Castorp, was himself not clear upon the point in question, no, nor had been for a very long time - a fact that has conditioned his romantic adventures up here, to an / Page 543 / extent which has made of them, in more than one sense, a "time-romance."
How long Joachim had lived here with his cousin, up to the time of his fateful departure, or taken all in all; what had been the date of his going, how long he "had been gone, when he had come back; how long Hans Castorp himself had been up here when his cousin returned and then bade time farewell; how long - dismissing Joachim from our calculations - Frau Chauchat had been absent; how long, since what date, she had been back again (for she did come back); how much mortal time Hans Castorp himself had spent in House Berghof by the time she returned; no one asked him all these questions, and he probably shrank from asking him- self. If they had been put him, he would have tapped his forehead with the tips of his fingers, and most certainly not have known - a phenomenon as disquieting as his incapacity to answer Herr Set-tembrini, that long-ago first evening, when the latter had asked him his age.
All which may sound preposterous; yet there are conditions under which nothing could keep us from losing account of the passage of time, losing account -even of our own age; lacking, as we do, any trace of an inner time-organ, and being absolutely in- capable of fixing it even with an approach to accuracy by our-selves, without any outward fixed pomts as guides. There is a case of a party of miners, buried and shut off from every possibility of knowing the passage of day or night, who told their rescuers that they estimated the time they had spent in darkness, flickering be-tween hope and fear, to be some three days, It had actually been ten. Their high state of suspense might, one would think, have made the time seem longer to them than it actually was, whereas it shrank to less than a third of its objective length. It would ap-pear, then, that under conditions of bewilderment man is likely to under-rather than over-estimate time.
No doubt Hans Castorp, were he wishful to do so, could with-out a great trouble have reckoned himself into certainty; just as the reader can, in case all this vagueness and involvedness are re-pugnant to his healthy sense. Perhaps our hero himself was not quite comfortable either; though he refused to give himself any trouble to wrestle clear of vagueness and involution and arrive at certainty of how much time had gone over his head since he came up here. His scruple was of the conscience - yet surely it is a want
of conscientiousness most flagrant of all not to pay heed to the time.
We do not know whether we may count it in his favour that /Page 544 / circumstances advantaged his lack of inclination, or perhaps we ought to say his disinclination. When Frau Chauchat came back - under circumstances very different from those Hans Castorp had imagined, but of that in its place - when she came back, it was the Advent season again, and the shortest day of the year; the begin-ning; of winter, astronomically speaking, was at hand. Apart. from arbitrary time-divisions, and with reference to the quantity of snow and cold, it had been winter for God knows how long, in-terrupted, as always all too briefly, by burning hot summer days, with a sky of an exaggerated depth of blueness, well-nigh shading into black; real summer days, such as one often had even in the winter, aside from the snow - and the snow one might also have in the summer! This confusion in the seasons, how often had Hans Castorp discussed it with the departed Joachim! It robbed the year of its articulation, made it tediously brief, or briefly tedious,as one chose to put it; and confirmed another of Joachim's disgusted utter-ances, to the effect that there was no time up here to speak of, either long or short. The great confusion played havoc, moreover, with emotional conceptions, or states of consciousness like "still " and "again "; and this was one of the very most gruesome, bewil-dering, uncanny features of the case. Hans Castorp, on his first day up here, had discovered in himself a hankering to dabble in that uncanny, during the five mighty meals in the gaily stenciled dining- room; when a first faint giddiness, as yet quite blameless, had made itself felt.
Since then, however, the deception upon his senses and his mind had assumed much larger proportions. Time, however weakened the subjective perception of it has become, has objective reality in that it brings things to pass. It is a question for professional think- ers - Hans Castorp, in his youthful arrogance, nad one time been led to consider it - whether the hermetically sealed conserve upon its shelf is outside of time. We know that time does its work, even upon Seven-Sleepers. A physician cites a case of a twelve-year- old-girl, who felf asleep and slept thirteen years; assuredly she did not remain thereby a twelve-year-old girl; but bloomed into ripe womanhood while she slept. How could it be otherwise? The dead man - is dead; he has closed his eyes on time. He has plenty of time, or personally speaking, he is timeless. Which does not prevent his hair and nails from growing, or, all in all- but no, we shall not repeat those free-and-easy expressions used once by Joachim, to which Hans Castorp, newly arrived from the flat-land, had taken exception. Hans Castorp's hair and nails grew too, grew rather fast. He sat very often in the barber's chair m the main street of the / Page 545 / Dorf, wrapped in a white sheet; and the barber, chatting obsequi-ously the while, deftly performed upon the fringes of his hair, growing too long behind his ears. First time; then the barber, per-formed their office upon our hero. When he sat there, or when he stood at the door of his loggia and pared his nails and groomed them, with the accessories from his aainty velvet case, he would suddenly be over-powered by a mixture of terror and eager joy that made him fairly giddy. And this giddiness was in both senses of the word: rendering our hero not only dazed and dizzy, but flighty and light-headed, incapable of distinguishing between "now" and "then, " and prone to mingle these together in a time-less eternity.
As we have repeatedly .said, we wish to make him out neither better nor worse than he was; accordingly we must report that he often tried to atone for his reprehensible indulgence in attacks of mysticism, by virtuously and painstakingly stnving to counteract them. He would sit with his watch open in his hand, his thin gold watch with the engraved. monogram on the lid, looking at the porcelain face with the double row of black and red Arabic fig-ures running round it, the two fine and delicately curved gold hands moving in and out over it, and the little second-hand taking its busy ticking course round its own small circle. Hans Castorp, watching the second-hand, essayed to hold time by the tail, to cling to and prolong the passing moments. The little hand tripped on its way, Unheeding the figures it reached, passed over, left behind, left far behind, approached, and came on to again. It had no feeling for time limits, divisions, or measurements of time. Should it not pause on the sixty, or give some small sign that this was the end of one thing and the beginning of the next? But the way it passed over the intervening unmarked strokes showed that the figures and divisons on its path were.simply beneath it, that it moved on, and on. - Hans Castorp shoved his product of the Glashutte works back in his waistcoat pocket, and left time to take care of itself.
How make plain to the sober intelligence of the flat-land the changes that took place in the inner economy of our young adven-turer? The dizzying problem of identities grew grander in its scale.
If to-day's now - even with decent goodwill-was not easy to distinguish from yesterday's, the day before's or the day before
that's, which were all as like each other as the same number of peas, was it not also capable of being confused. with the now which: had been in force a month or a year ago, was it not also likely to be mingled and rolled round in the course of that other, to blend with / Page 546 / it into the always? However one might still differentiate between the ordinary states of consciousness which we attached to the words .. still," .. again," .. next," there was always the temptation to extend the sigificance of such descriptive words as "to-morrow,"yesterday," by which "to-day" holds at bay" the past " and" the future." It would not be hard to imagine the exist-ence of creatures, perhaps upon smaller planets than ours, practis-ing a miniature time-economy, in whose brief span the brisk trip-ping gait of our second-hand would possess the tenacious spatial economy of our hand that marks the hours. And, contrariwise, one can conceive of a world so spacious that its time system too has a majestic stride, and the distinctions between .. still," ., in a little while," " yesterday," .. to-morrow,'? are, in its economy, possessed of hugely extended significance. That, we say, would be not only conceivable, but, viewed in the spirit of a tolerant relativity, and in the light of an already-quoted proverb, might be considered legiti- mate, sound, even estimable. Yet what shall one say of a son of earth, and of our time to boot, for whom a day, a week, a month, a semester, ought to play such an important role, and bring so many changes, so much progress in its !:rain, who one day falls into the vicious habit -,- or perhaps we should say, yields sometimes to the desire - to say" yesterday" when he means a year ago, and .. next year " when he means to-morrow? Certainly we must deem him lost and undone, and the object of our just concern.
There is a state, in our human life, there are certain scenic sur-roundings - if one may use that adjective to describe the surround-ings we have in mind - within which such a confusion and obliteration of distances in time and space is in a measure justified, and temporary submersion in them, say for the term of a holiday, not reprehensible. Hans Castorp, for his part, could never without the greatest longing think of a stroll along the ocean's edge. We know how he loved to have the snowy wastes remind him of his native landscape of broad ocean dunes; we hope the reader's recol-lections will bear us out when we speak of the joys of that straying. You walk, and walk - never will you come home at the right time, for you are of time, and time is vanished. O ocean, far from thee we sit and spin our tale; we turn toward thee our thoughts, our love, loud and expressly we call on thee, that thou mayst be present in the tale we spin, as in secret thou ever wast and shalt be! - A sing-ing solitude, spanned by a sky of palest grey; full of stinging damp that leaves a salty tang upon the lips. - We walk along the springy floor, strewn with seaweed and tiny mussel-shells. Our ears are wrapped about by the great mild, ample wind, that comes / Page 547 / sweeping untrammelled blandly through space, and gently blunts our senses. We wander - wander - watching the tongues of foam lick upward toward our feet and sink back again. The surf is seething; wave after wave, with high, hollow sound, rears up, re-bounds, and runs with a silken rustle out over the flat strand: here one, there one, and more beyond, out on the bar. The dull; perva-sive, sonorous roar loses our ears against all the sounds of the world. O deep content, O wilful bliss of sheer forgetfulness! Let us shut our eyes, safe in eternity! No - for there in the flaming grey- green waste that stretches Wlth uncanny foreshortenIng to lose it-self in the horizon,. look, there is a sail. There? Where is there? How far, how near? You cannot tell. Dizzyingly it escapes your measurement. In order to know how far that ship is from the shore, you would need to know how much room it occupies, as a body in space.1s it large and far off, or is it small and near? Your eye grows dim with uncertainty, for in yourself you have no sense-organ to help. you judge of time or space. - We Walk, walk. How long, how far? Who knows? Nothing is changed by our pacing, there is the same as here, once on a time the same as now, or then; time is drowning in the measureless monotony of space, motion from point-to point is no motion more, where uniformity rules; and where motion is no more motion, time is no longer time.
The schoolmen of the Middle Ages would have it that time is an illusion; that its flow in sequence and causality is only the result of
a sensory device, and the real existence of things in an abiding pres-ent. Was he walking by the sea, the philosopher to whom this thought first came, walking by the sea, with the faint bitterness of eternity upon his lips? We must repeat that, as for us, we have been speaking only of the lawful licence of a holiday, of fantasies born of leisure, of which the well-conducted mind wearies as quickly as a vigorous man does of lying in the warm sand. To call into question our human means and powers of perception, to ques-tion their validity, would be absurd; dishonourable, arbitrary, if it were done in any other spirit than to set bounds to reason, which
she may not overstep without incurring the reproach of neglecting her own task. We can only be grateful to a man like Herr Settem- brini, who with pedagogic dogmatism characterized metaphysics as the " evil principle," to the young man in whose fate we are in- terested, and whom he had once subtly called "life's delicate child." We shall best honour the memory of one departed, who was dear to us, if we say plainly that the meaning, the end and aim of the critical principle can and may be but one thing: the thought
of duty, the law of life. Yes, law-giving wisdom, in marking off the / Page548 / limits of reason, planted precisely at those limits the banner of life, and proclaimed it man's soldierly duty to serve under that banner. May we set it down on the credit side of Hans Castorp's account, that he had been strengthened in his vicious time-economy, his baleful traffic with eternity, by seeing that all his cousin's zeal, called doggedness by a certain melancholy blusterer, had but the more surely brought him to a fatal end?"

 

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann

1875 1955

MOUNTING MISGIVINGS

Page 147 Quoted in full

"other he mentally summoned up various people, the thought of whom might serve him as some sort of mental support.
 There was the good, the upright Joachim, firm as a rock-yet whose eyes in these past months had come to hold such a tragic Shadow, and who had never used to shrug his shoulders, as he did so often now. Joachim, with the "Blue Peter" in his pocket, as Frau Stohr called the receptacle. When Hans Castorp thought of her hard, crabbed face it made him shiver. Yes, there was Joa-chim - who kept constandy at Hofrat Behrens to let him get away and go down to the longed-for service in the " plain "- the " flat-land," as the healthy, normal world was called up here, with a faint yet perceptible nuance of contempt. Joachim served the cure single-mindedly, to the end that he might arrive sooner at his goal and save some of the time which "those up here " so wantonly flung away; served it unquestioningly for the sake of speedy re-covery - but also, Hans Castorp detected, for the sake of the cure'
itself, which, after all, was a service, like another; and was not duty duty, wherever performed? Joachim invatiably went upstairs after only a quarter-hour in the drawing-rooms; and this military precision of his was a crop to the civilian laxity of his cousin, who would otherwise be likely to loiter unprofitably below, with his eye on the company in the small salon. But Hans Castorp was con-vinced there was another and private reason why Joachim with-drew so early; he had known it since the time he saw his cousin's face take on the mottleled pallor, and his mouth assume the pathetic twist. He perfectly understood. For Marusja was almost always there in the evening -laughter-loving Marusja, with the little ruby on her charming hand, the handkerchief with the orange scent, and the swelling bosom, tainted within - Hans Castorp com-prehended that it. was her presence which drove Joachim away, precisely because it so strongly, so fearfully drew him toward her.
Was Joachim too "immured " - and even worse off than him-self, in that, he had five times a day to sit at the same table with Marusja and her orange-scented handkerchief? However that might be, it was clear that Joachim was preoccupied with his own troubles; the thought of him could afford his cousin no mental support. That he took refuge in daily flight was a credit to him; but that he had to flee was anything but reassuring to Hans Ca-storp, who even began to feel that Joachim's good example of faithful service of the cure and the initiation which he owed to his cousin's experience might have also their bad side.
Hans Castorp had not been up here three weeks. But it seemed longer; and the daily routine which Joachim so piously observed"

 

 

BEHRENS 7

occurs

x

 1 =

7
--

7
CASTORP 7

occurs

x

6

=

42

4+2

6
JOACHIM 7

occurs

x

11

 =

77

7+7

5
MARUSJA 7

occurs

x

3

 =

21

2+1

3
-
28
-
21
-
147
-
21
-
2+8
-
  
2+1
-
1+4+7
-
2+1
-
10
-
3
-
12
-
3
-
1+0
-
  
-
1+2
-
-
-
1
-
3
-
3
-
3

 

 

Page 147 containing seven lettered names of characters

Page 147 Penguin edition 1979 contains 43 lines

Joachim x 10

Joachim's x1

 

7
 BEHRENS
71
35
8
7
 CASTORP
92
29
2
7
 JOACHIM
59
32
5
7
 MARUSJA
83
20
2
28
 First Total
305
116
17
2+8
 Add to Deduce
3+0+5
1+1+6
1+7
10
 Second Total
8
8
8
1+0
 Reduce to Deduce
-
-
-
1
 Essence of Number
8
8
8

 

305 + 1 = 306

THE APOSTROPHE'S

JOACHIM'S

?

 

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann

1875 1955

Page 711

"These were the moments when the "Seven-Sleeper," not knowing what had happened, was slowly stirring himself in the grass, before he sat up, rubbed his eyes - yes, let us carry the figure to the end, in order to do justice to the movement of our hero's mind: he drew up his legs, stood up, looked about him. He saw himself released, freed from enchantment -not of his own motion; he was fain to confess, but by the operation of exterior powers' of whose activities his own liberation was a minor incident Indeed! Yet though his tiny destiny fainted to nothing in the face of the general, was there not some hint of a personal mercy and grace for him, a manifestation of divine goodness and justice? Would Life receive again her erring and " delicate " child-not by a cheap and easy slipping back to her arms, but sternly, solemnly, penentially - perhaps not even among the living, but only with three salvoes fired over the grave of him a sinner? Thus might he return. He sank on his knees, raising face and hands to a heaven that howsoever dark and sulphurous was no longer the gloomy grotto of his state of sin."

 

 

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann

1875 1955

FOREWORD

"THE STORY of Hans Castorp, which we would here set forth, ..."

We shall tell it at length, thoroughly, in detail-for when did a narrative seem too long or too short by reason of the actual time or space it took up? We do not fear being called meticulous, in-clining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.
Not all in a minute, then, will the narrator be finished with the story of our Hans. The seven days of a week will not suffice, no, nor seven months either. Best not too soon make too plain how much mortal time must pass over his head while he sits spun round in his spell. Heaven forbid it should be seven years!
And now we begin"

The Thunderbolt

Page 706
"SEVEN years Hans Castorp remained amongst those up here. Par-tisans of the decimal system might prefer a round number, though seven is a good handy figure in its way, picturesque, with a savour of the mythical; one might even say that it is more filling to the spirit than a dull academic half-dozen. Our hero had sat at all seven of the tables in the dining-room, at each about a year, the last being the "bad" Russian table, and his company there two Ar-menians, two Finns, a Bokharian, and a Kurd. He sat at the " bad " Russian table, wearing a recent little blond beard, vaguish in cut, which we are disposed to regard as a sign of philosophic indiffer-ence to his own outer man. Yes, we will even go further, and relate his carelessness of his person to the carelessness of the rest of the world regarding him. The authorities had ceased to devise him distractions. There was the morning inquiry, as to, whether he had slept well, itself purely rhetorical and summary; and that aside, the Hofrat did not address him with any particularity; while Adriatica von Mylendonk-she had, at the time of which we write, a stye in a perfect state of maturity - did so seldom, in fact scarcely ever. They let him be. He was like the scholar in the peculiarly happy state of never being "asked" any more; of never having a task, of being left to sit, since the fact of his being left behind is established, and no one troubles about him further - an orgiastic kind of freedom, but we ask ourselves whether, in-deed, freedom ever is or can be of any other kind. At all events, here was one on whom the authorities no longer needed to keep an eye, being assured that no wild or defiant resolves were ripen-ing in his breast. He was " settled," established. Long ago he had ceased to know where else he should go, long ago he had ceased to be capable of a resolve to return to the flat-land. Pid not the very fact that he was sitting at the " bad " Russian table witness a certain-abandon? No slightest adverse comment upon the said table being intended by the remark! Among all the seven, no single one could be said to possess definite tangible advantages or / Page 707 / disadvantages. We make bold to say that here was a democracy of tables, all honourable alike. T:he same tremendous meals were served here, as at the others; Rhadamanthus himself occasionally folded his huge hands before the doctor's place at the head; and the nations who ate there were respectable members of the human race, even though they boasted no Latin, and were not exag-geratedly dainty at their feeding.
Time - yet not the time told by the station clock, moving with- a jerk five minutes at once, but rather the time of a tiny timepiece, the hand of which one cannot see move, or the time the grass keeps when it grows, so unobservably one would say it does not grow at all, until some morning the fact is undeni- able - time, a line composed of a succession of dimensionless points (and now we are sure the unhappy deceased Naphta would interrupt us to ask how dimensionless points, no matter how many of them, can constitute a line), time, we say, had gone on, in its furtive, unobservable, competent way, bringing about changes. For example, the boy Teddy was discovered, one day- not one single day, of course, but only rather indefinitely from which day - to be a boy no longeer. No more might ladies take him on their laps, when, on occasion, he left his bed, changed his pyjamas for his knickerbockers, and came downstairs. Im-perceptibly that leaf had turned. Now, on such occasions, he took them. on- his instead, and both sides were as well, or even better pleased. He was become a youth; scarcely could we say he had bloomed into a youth; but he had shot up. Hans Castorp had not noticed it happening, and then, suddenlyy, he did. The shooting-up, however, did not suit the lad Teddy; the temporal became him not. In his twenty-first year he departed this life; dying of the disease for which he had proved receptive; and they cleansed and fumigated after him. The fact makes little claim upon our emotions, the change being so slight between his one state and his next.
But there were other deaths, and more important; deaths down in the flat-land, which touched, or would once have touched, our hero more nearly. We are thinking of the recent decease of old .Consul Tienappel, Hans's great-uncle and foster-father, of faded memory. He had carefully avoided unfavourable conditions of atmospheric pressure, and left it to Uncle James to stultify him-self; yet .an apoplexy carried him off after all; and a telegram, couched m brief but feelmg terms - feeling more for the departed than for the recipient of the wire - was one day brought to Hans Castorp where he lay.in his excellent chair. He acquired / Page 708 / some black-bordered note-paper, and wrote to his uncle-cousins: he, the doubly, now, so to say, triply orphaned, expressed him- self as being the more distressed over the sad news, for that cir- cumstances forbade him interrupting his present sojourn even to pay his great-uncle the last respects.
To speak of sorrow would be disingenuous. Yet in these days Hans Castorp's eyes did wear an expression more musing than common. This death, which could at no time have moved him greatly, and after the lapse of years could scarcely move him at all, meant the sundering of yet another bond with the life below; gave to what he rightly called his freedom the final seal. In the time of which we speak, all contact between him and the flatland had ceased. He sent no letters thither, and received none thence. He no longer ordered Maria Mancini, having found a brand up here to his liking, to which he was now as faithful as once to his old-time charmer: a brand that must have carried even a polar explorer through the sorest and severest trials; armed with which, and no other solace, Hans Castorp could lie and bear it out indefinitely, as one does at the sea-shore. It was an especially well cured brand, with the best leaf wrapper, named "Light of Asia "; rather more compact than Maria, mouse-grey in colour with a blue band, very tractable and mild, and evenly consuming to a snow-white ash, that held its shape and still showed traces of the veining on the wrapper; so evenly and regularly that it might have served the smoker for an hour-glass, and did so, at need, for he no longer carried a timepiece. His watch had fallen from his night-table; it did not go, and he had neglected to have it regulated, perhaps on the same grounds as had made him long since give up using a calendar, whether to keep track of the day, or to look out an approaching feast: the grounds, namely, of his freedom." Thus he did honour to his abiding-everlasting, his walk by the ocean of time, the hermetic enchantment to which he had proved so extraordinarily susceptible that it had become tlle fundamental adventure ofhis life, in which all the alchemisti-cal processes of his simple substance had found full play.
Thus he lay; and thus, in high summer, the year was once more rounding out, the seventh year, though he knew it not, of his sojourn up here.
Then, like a thunder-peal-
But God forbid and modesty withhold us from speaking over- much of what the thunder-peal bore us on its wave of sound! Here rodomontade is out of place. Rather let us lower our voice to say that then came the peal of thunder we all know so well; / Page 709 / that deafening explosion of long-gathering magazines of passion and spleen. That historic thunder-peal, of which we speak with bated breath, made the foundations of the earth to shake; but for us it was the shock that fired the mine beneath the magic mountain, and set our sleeper ungently outside the gates. Dazed he sits in the long grass and rubs his eyes - a man who, despite many warnings, had neglected to read the papers.
His Mediterranean friend and mentor had ever tried to prompt him; had felt it incumbent upon him to instruct his nurslmg, the object of his solicitude, in what was going on down below; but his pupil had lent no ear. The young man had indeed, in a stock- taking way, preoccupied himself. with this or that among the subjective shadows of things; but the things themselves he had heeded not at all, having a wilful tendency to take the shadow for the substance, and in the substance to see only shadow. For this, however, we must not judge him harshly, since the relation between'substance and shadow has never been defined once and for all.
Long ago it had been Herr Settembrini who brought sudden illumination into the room, sat down beside the horizontal Hans and sought to influence and instruct him upon matters of life and death. But now it was the pupil, who, seated with his hands between his knees, at the bedside of the humanist, or near his couch in the cosy and retired little mansard, study, with the car- bonaro chairs and the water-bottle, kept him company and listened courteously to his utterances upon the state of Europe - for in these days Herr Ludovico was seldom on his legs. Naphta's violent end, the terroristic deed of that desperat~ antagonist, had dealt his sensitive nature a blow from which it could scarcely rally; weakness and infirmity had since been his portion. He could
no longer work on the Sociological Pathology; the League waited in vain for that lexicon of all the masterpieces of letters having human suffering for their central theme. Herr Ludovico had per-force to limit to oral efforts his contribution to the organization of progress; and even so much he must have foregone had not Hans Castorp's visits given him opportunity to spread his gospel.
His voice was weak, but he spoke with conviction, at length and beautifully, upon the self-perfecting of the human spirit through social betterment. Softly, as though on the wings of doves, came the words of Herr Ludovico. Yet again, when he came to speak of the unification and universal well being of the liberated peoples, there mingled a sound - he neither knew nor willed it, of course - as of the rushing pinions of eagles. That / Page 710 / was the political key, the grandfatherly inheritance that united in him with the humanistic gift of the father, to make up the litterateur - precisely as humanism and politics united in the lofty ideal of civilization, an ideal wherein were blended the mildness of doves and the boldness of eagles. That ideal was only biding its time, until the day dawned, the Day of the People, when,. the principle of reaction should be laid low, and the Holy Alliance of civic democracIes take Its place. Yes, here seemed to sound two voices, with differing counsels. For Herr Settembrini was a hu-manitarian, yet at the same time, half explicitly, he was warlike too. In the duel with the outrageous little Naphta he had borne himself like a man. But in general it still remained rather vague what his position was to be, when humanity in an outburst of enthusiasm united itself with politics in support of a triumphant and dominating world-civilization, and the burgher's pike was dedicated upon the altar of humanity. There was some doubt whether he would then hold back his hand from the shedding of blood. Yes, it seemed the prevailing temper more and more held sway in the Italian's mind and view; the boldness of the eagle was gradually outbidding the mildness of the dove.
Not infrequently his attitude toward the existing great political systems was divided, embarrassed, disturbed by scruples. The. diplomatic rapprochement between his country and Austria, their co-operation in Albania, had reflected itself in his conversation: a co-operation that raised his spirits in that it was directed against Latinless half-Asia - knout, Schlusselburg, and all- yet tormented them in that it was a misbegotten alliance with the hereditary foe, with the principle of reaction and subjugated nationalities. The autumn previous, the great French loan to Russia, for the purpose of building a network of railways in Poland, had awakened in him similar misgivings. For Herr Settembrini belonged to the Fran-cophile party in his own country, which was not surprising when one recalled that his grandfather had compared the six days of the July Revolution to the six days of the creation, and seen that they were as good. But the understanding between the en-lightened republic and Byzantine Scythia was too much for him, it oppressed his breast, and at the same time made him breathe quicker for hope and joy at the thought of the strategic meaning of that network of railways. Then came the Serajevo murder, for everyone excepting German Seven-Sleepers a storm-signal; de-cisive for the informed ones, among whom we may reckon Herr Settembrini. Hans Castorp saw him shudder as a private citizen at the frightful deed, while in the same moment his breast heaved / Page 711 / with the knowledge that this was a deed of popular liberation, directed against the citadel of his loathing. On the other hand, was it not also the fruit of Muscovite activity, and as such giving rise to great heart.;searchings? Which did not hinder him, three weeks later, from characterizing the extreme demands of the monarchy upon Servia as a hideous crime and an insult to human dignity, the consequences of which he could forese well enough, and awaited in breathless excitement.
In short, Herr Settembrini's feelings were as complex as the fatality he saw fast rolling up, for which he sought by hints and half-words to prepare his pupil, a sort of national courtesy and compunction preventIng him from speaking out. In the first days of mobilization, the first declaration of war, he had a way of putting out both hands to his visitor; taking Hans Castorp's own and pressing them, that fairly went to our young noodle's heart, if not precisely to his head. " My friend," the Italian would say, " gunpowder, the printing-press, yes, you have certainly given us all that. but if you think we could march against the Revolution-Caro. . . .
During those days of stifling expectation, when the nerves of Europe were on the rack, Hans Castorp did not see Herr Settembrini. The newspapers with their wild, chaotic contents pressed up out of the depths to his very balcony, they disorganized the house, filled the dining-room with their sulphurous, stifling breath, even penetrated the chambers of the dying. These were the moments when the "Seven-Sleeper," not knowing what had hap-pened, was slowly stirring himself in the grass, before he sat up, rubbed his eyes - yes, let us carry the figure to the end, in order to do justice to the movement of our hero's mind: he drew up his legs, stood up, looked about him. He saw himself released, freed from enchantment -not of his own motion; he was fain to confess, but by the operation of exterior powers, of whose activities his own liberation was a minor incident Indeed! Yet though his tiny destiny fainted to nothing in the face of the general, was there not some hint of a personal mercy and grace for him, a manifestation of divine goodness and justice? Would Life receive again her erring and "delicate " child-not by a cheap and easy slipping back to her arms, but sternly, solemnly, peni-entially - perhaps not even among the living, but only with three salvoes fired over the grave of him a sinner? Thus might he return. He sank on his knees, raising face and hands to a heaven that howsoever dark and sulphurous was no longer the gloomy grotto of his state of sin.

Page 712

And in this attitude Herr Settembrini found him - figura-tively and most figuratively spoken, for full well we know our hero's traditional reserve would render such theatricality im-possible. Herr Settembrini, in fact, found him packing his trunk. For since the moment of his sudden awakening, Hans Castorp had been caught up in the hurry and scurry of a "wild" de-parture, brought about by the thunder-peal. "Home" - the Berghof - was the picture of an ant-hill in a panic: its little popu- lation was flinging itself, heels over head, five thousand feet downwards to the catastrophe-smitten flat-land. They stormed the little trains, they crowded them to the footboard -luggageless, if needs must, and the stacks of luggage piled high the station platform, the seething platform, to the height of which the scorching breath from the flat-land seemed to mount - and Hans Castorp stormed with them. In the heart of the tumult Ludovico embraced him, quite literally enfolded him in his arms and kissed him, like a southerner - but like a Russian too - on both his cheeks; and this, despite his own emotion, took our wild traveller no little aback. But he nearly lost his composure. when, at t.he very last, Herr Settembnm called him " Giovanni" and, laying aside the form, of address common to the cultured West, spoke to him with the thou!
"E cosi in giu," he said. "Cosi vai in giu finalmente - add-io, Giovanni mio! Quite otherwise had I thought to see thee go. But be it so, the gods have willed it thus and not otherwise. I hoped to discharge you to go down to your work, and now you go to fight among your kindred. My God, it was given to you and not to your cousin, our Tenente! What tricks life plays! Go, then, It is your blood 'that calls, go and fight bravely. More than that can no man. But forgive me if I devote the remnant of my powers to incite my country to fight where the Spirit and sacra egoismo point the way. Addio! " .
  Hans Castorp thrust out his head among ten others, filling the little open window-frame. He waved.. And Herr Settembrini waved back, with his right hand, while with the ring-finger of his left he delicately touched the comer of his eye.

What is it? Where are we? Whither has the dream snatched us? Twilight, rain, filth. Fiery glow of the overcast sky, ceaseless booming of heavy thunder; the moist air rent by a sharp singing whine, a raging, swelling howl as of some hound of hell, that ends its course in a splitting, a splintering and sprinkling, a crackling, a coruscation; by groans and shrieks, by trumpets blowing fit to / Page 713 /  burst, by the beat of a drum coming faster, faster- There is a wood, discharging drab hordes, that come on, fall, spring up again, come on - Beyond, a line of hill stands out against the fiery sky, whose glow turns now and again to blowing flames. About us is rolling plough-land, all upheaved and trodden into mud; athwart it a bemired high road, disguised with broken branches and from it again a deeply furrowed, boggy field-path leading off in curves toward the distant hills. Nude, branchless trunks of trees meet the eye, a cold rain falls. Ah, a signpost! Useless, though, to question it, even despite the half-dark, for it is shattered, illegible. East, west? It is the flat-land, it is the war. And we are shrinking shadows by the way-side, shamed by the security of our shadowdom, and noways minded to indulge in any rodomontade; merely led hither by the spirit of our nar-rative, merely to see again, among those running, stumbling, drum- mustered grey comrades that swarm out of yonder wood, one we know; merely to look once more in the simple face of our one-time fellow of so many years, the genial sinner whose voice we know so well, before we lose him from our sight.
They have been brought forward, these comrades, for a final thrust in a fight that has already lasted all day long, whose ob-jective is the retaking of the hill position and the burning villages beyond, lost two days since to the enemy. It is a volunteer regiment, fresh young blood and mostly students, not long in the field. They were roused in the night, brought up in trains to morning, then marched in the rain on wretched roads - on no roads at all, for the roads were blocked, and they went over moor and ploughed land with full kit for seven hours, their coats. sodden. It was no pleasure excursion. If one did not care to lose one's boots, one stooped at every second step, clutched with one's fingers into the straps and pulled them out of the quaking mire. It took an hour of such work to cover one meadow. But at last they have reached the appointed spot, exhausted, on edge, yet the reserve strength of their youthful bodies has kept them tense, they crave neither the sleep nor the food they have been denied. Their wet, mud-bespattered faces, framed between strap and grey-covered helmet, are flushed with exertion - perhaps too with the sight of the losses they suffered on their march through that boggy wood. For the enemy, aware of their advance, have concentrated a barrage of shrapnel and large-calibre grenades upon .the way they must come; it crashed among them in the wood, and howling, flaming, splashing, lashed the wide ploughed land.
They must get through, these three thousand ardent youths; / Page 714 / they must reinforce with their bayonets the attack on the burning villages, and the trenches in front of and behind the line of hills; they must help to advance their line to a point indicated in the dispatch their leader has in his pocket. They are three thousand, that they may be two thousand when the hills, the villages are reached; that is the meaning of their number. They are a body of troops calculated as sufficierit, even after great losses, to attack and carry a position and greet their triumph with a thousand-voiced huzza - not counting the stragglers that fall out by the way. Many a one has thus fallen out on the forced march, for which he proved too young and weak; paler he grew, staggered, set his teeth, drove himself on - and after all he could do fell out notwithstanding. Awhile he dragged himself in the rear of the marching column, overaken and passed by company after company; at length he remained on the ground, lying where it was not good to lie. Then came the shattering wood. But there are so many of them, swarming on - they can survive a blood-letting and still come on in hosts. They have already overflowed the level, rain-lashed land; the high road, the field road, the boggy ploughed land; we shadows stand amid and among them. At the edge of the wood they fix their bayonets, with the practised grips; the horns enforce them, the drums roll deepest bass, and forward they stumble, as best they can, with shrill cries; night- marishly, for clods of earth cling to their heavy boots and fetter them.
They fling themselves down before the projectiles that come howling on, then they leap up again and hurry forward; they exult, in their young, breaking voices as they run, to discover themselves still unhit. Or they are hit, they fall, fighting the air with their arms, shot through the forehead, the heart, the belly; They lie, their faces in the mire, and are motionless. They lie, their backs elevated by the knapsack, the crowns of their heads pressed into the mud, and clutch and claw in the air. But the wood emits new swarms, who fling themselves down, who spring up, who, shrieking or silent, blunder forward over the fallen.
Ah, this young blood, with its knapsacks and bayonets, its mud-befouled boots and clothing! We look at it, our humanistic- aesthetic eye pictures it among scenes far other than these: we see these youths watering horses on a sunny arm of the sea; roving with the beloved one along the strand, the lover's lips to the ear of the yielding bride; in happiest rivalry bending the bow. Alas, no, here they lie, their noses in fiery filth: They are glad to be here - albeit with boundless anguish, with unspeakable / Page 715 / sickness for home; and this, of itself, is a noble and a shaming thing - but no good reason for bringing them to such a pass.
There is our friend, there is Hans Castorp! We recognize him at a distance, by the little beard he assumed while sitting at the bad" Russian table. Like all the others, he is wet through and glowing.. He is running, his feet heavy with mould, the bayonet swinging in his hand. Look! He treads on the hand of a fallen comrade; with his hobnailed boot he treads the hand deep into the slimy, branch-strewn ground. But it is he. What, singing? As one sings, unaware, staring stark ahead, yes, thus he spends his hurrying breath, to sing half soundlessly:

"And loving words I've carven
 Upon its branches fair - "

He stumbles, No, he has flung himself down, a hell-hound is coming howling, a huge explosive shell, a disgusting sugar-loaf from the infernal regions. He lies wIth his face In the cool mire, legs sprawled out, feet twisted, heels turned down. The product of a perverted science, laden with death, slopes earth-ward thirty paces in front of him. and buries its nose in the ground;. explodes InsIde there, wIth hideous expense of power, and raises up a fountain high as a house, of mud, fire, iron, molten metal, scattered fragments of humanity. Where it fell, two youths had lain, friends who in their need flung themselves down together - now they are scattered, commingled and gone.
Shame of our shadow-safety! Away! No more! - But our friend? Was he hit? He thought so, for the moment. A great clod of earth struck him on the shin, it hurt, but he smiles at it. Up he gets, and staggers on, limping on his earth-bound feet, all un-consciously singing:

"Its waving branches whi-ispered
A mess-age in my ear-"

and thus, in the tumult, in the rain, in the dusk, vanishes out of our sight.
Farewell, honest Hans Castorp, farewell, Life's delicate child! Your tale is told. We have told it to the end, and it was neither short nor long, but hermetic. We have told it for its own sake, not for yours, for you were simple. But after all, it was your story, it befell you, you must have more in you than we thought; we will not disclaim the pedagogic weakness we conceived for / Page 716 / you in the telling; which could even lead us to press a finger deli-cately to our eyes at the thought that we shall see you no more, hear you no more for ever.
Farewell- and if thou livest or diest! Thy prospects are poor. The desperate dance, in which thy fortunes are caught up, will last yet many a sinful year; we should not care to set a high stake on thy life by the time it ends. We even confess that it is without great concern we leave the question open. Adventures of the flesh and in the spirit, while enhancing thy simplicity, granted thee to know in the spirit what in the flesh thou scarcely couldst have done. Moments there were, when out of death, and the rebellion of the flesh, there came to thee, as thou tookest stock of thyself, a dream of love. Out of this universal feast of death, out of this extremity of fever, kindling the rain-washed evening sky to a fiery glow, may it be that Love one day shall mount?"

FINIS OPERIS

 
 
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