Mystical Astology, by Titus Burckhardt-Extracts
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>From Mystical Astology, by Titus Burckhardt
The written work of the 'greatest Master' (ash-sheikh al-akbar) Sufi,
Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi, contains certain considerations on astrology
which permit one to perceive how this science, which arrived in the
modern occident only in a fragmentary form and reduced only to some of
its most contingent applications, could be related to metaphysical
principles, thereby relating to knowledge self-sufficient in itself.
Astrology, as it was spread through the Middle Ages within Christian
and Islamic civilizations and which still subsists in certain Arab
countries, owes its form to the Alexandrine hermeticism; it is
therefore neither Islamic nor Christian in its essence; it could not in
any case find a place in the religious perspective of monotheistic
traditions, given that this perspective insists on the responsibility
of the individual before its Creator and avoids, by this fact, all that
could veil this relationship by considerations of intermediary causes.
If, all the same, it were possible to integrate astrology into the
Christian and Muslim esotericism, it is because it perpetuated,
vehicled by hermeticism, certain aspects of a very primordial
symbolism: the contemplative penetration of cosmic atmosphere, and the
identification of spontaneous appearances - cosmic and rhythmic - of
the sensible world with the eternal prototypes corresponding in fact to
a mentality as yet primitive, in the proper and positive sense of this
term. This implicit primordiality of the astrological symbolism flares
up in contact with spirituality, direct and universal, of a living
esotericism, just like the scintillation of a precious stone flares up
when it is exposed to the rays of light.
Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi encloses the facts of the hermetic astrology in
the edifice of his cosmology, which he summarizes by means of a
schemata of concentric spheres by taking, as the starting point and as
terms of comparison, the geocentric system of the planetary world as
the Medieval world conceived it. The 'subjective' polarisation of this
system - we mean by that the terrestrial position of the human being
serving as the fixed point to which will be related all the movements
of the stars - here symbolises the central role of man in the cosmic
whole, of which man is like the goal and the centre of gravity. This
symbolic perspective naturally does not depend upon the purely physical
or spatial reality, the only one envisaged by modern astronomy, of the
world of the stars; the geocentric system, being in conformity with the
reality as it presents itself immediately to the human eyes, contains
in itself all the logical coherence requisite to a body of knowledge
for constituting an exact science. The discovery of the heliocentric
system, which corresponds to a development both possible and
homogeneous but very particular to the empirical knowledge of the
sensible world, obviously could not prove anything against the central
cognition of the human being in the cosmos; only, the possibility of
conceiving the planetary world as if one were contemplating it from the
non-human position, and even as if one could make abstraction of the
existence of the human being - even though its consciousness still
remains the 'container' of all conceptions - had produced an
intellectual dis-equilibrium which shows clearly that the 'artificial'
extension of the empirical knowledge has in it something of the
abnormal, and that it is, intellectually, not only indifferent but even
detrimental.
The discovery of heliocentricism has had effects resembling certain
vulgarisations of esotericism; we are here thinking above all of those
inversions of point of view which are proper to esoteric speculation;
the confrontation of respective symbolisms of geocentric and
heliocentric systems shows very well what such an inversion is: in
fact, the fact that the sun, source of the light of the planets is
equally the pole which rules their movements, contains, like all
existent things, an evident symbolism and represents in reality, always
from a symbolic and spiritual point of view, a complementary point of
view to that of the geocentric astronomy.
Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi englobes in a certain fashion the essential
reality of heliocenticism in his cosmological edifice: like Ptolemy and
like those all through the Middle Ages he assigns to the sun, which he
compares to the 'Pole' (qutb) and to the 'heart of the world' (qalb
al-'alam), a central position in the hierarchy of the celestial
spheres, and this by assigning equal numbers of superior skies and
inferior skies to the sky of the sun; he amplifies nevertheless the
system of Ptolemy by yet again underlining the symmetry of the spheres
with respect to the sun: according to his cosmological system, which he
probably holds from the Andalusian Sufi Ibn Massarah, the sun is not
only in the centre of the six known planets - Mars (al-mirikh), Jupiter
(al-mushtari) and Saturn (az-zuhal) being further away from the Earth
(al-ardh) than the Sun (ash-shams), and Venus (az-zuhrah), Mercury
(al-utarid) and the Moon (al-qamar) being closer - but beyond the sky
of Saturn is situated the vault of the sky of the fixed stars (falak
al-kawakib), that of the sky without stars (al-falak al-atlas), and the
two supreme spheres of the 'Divine Pedestal' (al-kursi) and the 'Divine
Throne' (al-'arsh), concentric spheres to which symetrically correspond
the four sub-lunar spheres of ether (al-athir), of air (al-hawa), of
water (al-ma) and of earth (al-ardh). Thus is apportioned seven degrees
to either side of the sphere of the sun, the 'Divine Throne'
symbolising the sythesis of all the cosmos, and the centre of the earth
being thereof both the inferior conclusion and the centre of fixation.
It goes without saying, that among all the spheres of this hierarchy,
only the planetary spheres and those of the fixed stars correspond as
such to the sensible experience, even though they should not be
envisaged only within this relationship; as to the sub-lunary spheres
of ether - which do not signify here the quintessence, but the cosmic
centre in which the fire is re-absorbed - of air and water, one should
rather see a theoretical hierarchy according to the degrees of density,
rather than spatial spheres. As for the supreme spheres of the 'Divine
Pedestal' and the 'Throne' - the former containing the skies and the
earth, and the latter englobing all things - their spherical form is
purely symbolic, and they mark the passage from astronomy to
metaphysical and integral cosmology: the sky without Stars (al-falak
al-atlas), which is a 'void', and which because of this fact is no more
spatial, but rather marks the 'end' of space, also marks by that
discontinuity between the formal and informal; in fact this appears
like a 'nothingness' from the formal point of view, whereas the
principial appears like a 'nothingness' from the point of view of the
manifested. One would have understood that this passing from the
astronomic point of view to the cosmological and metaphysical point of
view has in it nothing of the arbitrary: the distinction between the
visible sky and the sky avoiding our view is real, even if its
application is nothing but symbolic, and the 'invisible' here
spontaneously becomes the 'transcendent', in conformity with the
Oriental symbolism; the spheres of informal manifestation - the
'Throne' and the 'Pedestal' - are expressly called the 'invisible
world' ('alam al-ghaib), the word ghaib meaning all that is beyond the
reach of our vision, which shows this symbolic correspondence between
the 'invisible' and the 'transcendent'.
Link:http://www.besharapublications.org.uk/pages/mysticalastrology.html