Dane Rhudyar, the grand old man of humanistic astrology said in his book `The Planetarization of Consciousness' that `Astrology raises the solution of problems from the social to the cosmic level'. The planet often associated with Astrology & astrologers, Uranus moved into the spiritual or cosmic sign of Pisces in March 2003. After the first floundering we are waking up to new meaning & understanding within our profession. It also finds us looking deeper into the spiritual waters of our working model of astrology to find some meaning & overview that will help us become more able to fulfill our purpose as human beings.
Then Lyn Birkbeck released the book `Divine Astrology', which provides meditations & rituals to fully access the power of who we are through the planetary symbols. I have always admired Lyn's writing & found the beautiful artwork of the planetary cards included with the book & the poetry, particularly inspiring to my combined values of beauty & meaning.
To quote him from the book: `Divine Astrology however, presents astrology in a way that sees personality as being an expression of Spirit, and sees life as being a journey of Spirit driven by cosmic forces and in turn governed by definite laws that are inherent in them.'
I was also fascinated by his investigation into different religions & spiritual disciplines as regards astrology in the early part of the book. I have always held high regard for ritual, seeing it as a bridge between the hidden, unseen inner life & the outer manifest life. Lyn accesses this tool in a beautifully sensitive way with various rituals to access the power within us & around us. To quote him again from the book: `When you are contacting or addressing any Planet in any Ritual you are actually contacting or addressing - on a causal or unconscious plane - that part of yourself that corresponds to the energies & qualities of that Planet and the divine energy it accesses. In other words, and in physiological terms, you are tapping into the part of your brain and nervous system that affects how you operate autonomically at cellular and hormonal levels. This is analogous to the part of a computer called the BIOS which is where and how the computer is set to function without one even knowing that it is doing so and which normally only a technician should, or knows how to, access and use. But in this case Divine Astrology enables you to be your own technician, a `Technician of the Sacred'.
Profound inner & therefore outer healing can happen when we are paying so much attention to who we authentically are, not what we are supposed to be. As he so succinctly puts it at the end of the book: `The majority of the world's and one's individual ills are down to us being programmed to want and need things we do not actually want or need......'
I would recommend this book for new students of the astrological model as well as older more experienced ones, such as myself. He breathes new life into the metaphors that are associated with the planets, differentiating the negative & positive attributes of them. This is a book that will be taken from your bookshelf often, particularly when you are looking for astrology to become alive spiritually! Good work, Lyn!