There’s no doubt in my mind that Bruce Scofield’s ‘The Nature of Astrology: History, Philosophy and the Science of Self-Organizing Systems’ is the best book on scientific astrology written in recent years. If you’re interested in the academic approach to astrology it’s easily the number one read of the 21st century so far. I recently reread it, and in this blogpost i want to offer a few personal opinions and some general remarks.
I have to start by saying that my personal opinions are very much shaped by my own metaphysical commitment, which is different from Scofield’s ‘non-supernatural’ position, if i may describe it like that. Personally, i actually dislike the word ‘supernatural’, whether negated or not. I have no use for it, because i like to define Nature as everything that is, has been or can be. In other words, to me there is nothing outside of Nature. It’s the whole enchilada. Such a definition leaves no room for anything supernatural in the sense of mysterious things that transcend Nature. Also, i don’t think of Nature exclusively in terms of physical stuff or as somehow limited to physical chains of cause and effect. As you may have guessed by now, i ‘identify as’ an idealist or even an analytical idealist, borrowing quite heavily from Bernardo Kastrup’s school of thought.
Bruce Scofield uses the word ‘supernatural’ about ten times in his book. Mostly to qualify ‘beings’, gods or beliefs. His position is roughly that he doesn’t want to invoke any of these, or at least that he will keep his distance. He prefers to defend the honour of the astrological traditions on the basis of solid quantitative astrological science, while offering the beginnings of a theoretical framework, based on the notion of self-organizing systems (somewhat reminiscent of Bernadette Brady’s chaosmos). I hope this characterization is fair to Bruce, and if so, i think it’s a sound basis for discussion and for valuable astrological research. But having said that, i’m not sure his position allows us to tackle a sufficiently large part of the phenomena that astrologers deal with, scientifically.
While rereading The Nature of Astrology, it occurred to me that the word ‘astrology’ is not specific enough when it comes to scientific research of astrological claims. In the last few centuries, the scientific method has been very succesfull when it comes to physical matters, and there’s also a long tradition of astrological scientific research focusing on physical phenomena; weather, earthquakes and so on. Think Johannes Kepler, John Goad, Theodor Landscheidt and Percy Seymour. But at the end of the day, the non-physical aspect of astrology is at least just as important – and certainly much more popular.
These two flavors are different in many ways. It’s confusing to refer to both of them using one and the same word. Historically, we might distinguish between ‘natural’ astrology and maybe ‘psychological’ astrology or something like that, but that’s not enough. The idea that these two flavors might also – at least to some extent – have a different kind of causal provenance and therefore might require different (in my opinion non-exclusive, complementary) theoretical frameworks, methodologies and so on, is seldom discussed – at least as far as i know. In other words, i’m suggesting that scientific astrology should explicitly take the dualistic nature of it’s subject into account. There’s one leg in the physical world, and one in the metaphysical, and they’re joined at the hip so to speak. Let’s deal with that explicitly.
Scofield is of course aware of this duality. The title of chapter 12 of his book is: ‘Mechanism or Magic’. While his own astrometeorological research leans to the mechanical in this scheme, he is at the same time fair and openminded when it comes to non-physical astrology. He gives full credit to archetypal (Jungian, synchronicity-based) astrology, with Richard Tarnas as its main exponent. But then – almost out of the blue – he claims that the archetypal perspective on astrology can’t be tested: “From the scientific perspective, it is an unproven, and untestable, hypothesis. But it is, more or less, what a substantial part of the astrology subculture, and others in related fields, including some psychologists, are most comfortable with in the way of explanations for the observed effects of astrology.” He ends the discussion on a slightly more charitable note: “This is not to say that archetypal cosmology is wrong or false. Certainly much of it defies scientific testing in the conventional sense, but it does offer an interpretation of modern scientific findings and an update on Platonism, Renaissance naturalism, and also the archaic cosmologies of certain religions.”
Personally, i’m not so sure that archetypal astrology is untestable. I’d say that we can at least test hypotheses that are closely aligned with the archetypal, synchronistic, meaning-based perspective. For example by expanding the repertoire of quantifiable astrological variables, and by introducing (by now decennia old) techniques like AI and Big Data. This will allow us to paint a more detailed picture of – to quote Robert Anton Wilson – what’s really going on.
If you’re a bit of a physicalist by temperament, you’ll prefer to do physicalist astrology: subjects like astrometeorology or earthquakes. You will think mostly in terms of gravity, electromagnetism and so on when it comes to the mechanics of that type of astrology. On the other hand, if you’re an idealist, you should have no problem with the approach of your physicalist colleagues, but to complete the picture, you will also entertain certain non-physicalist theories, for example on the basis of a sophisticated concept of synchronicity. I think Bruce Scofield’s position might be in the middle, with his “tolerance for ambiguity”.
One obstacle that will have to be overcome is the limited – i would almost say misguided – concept of synchronicity that currently dominates discussions about archetypal astrology. Let’s be clear: synchronicity is not about scarab beetles. Anybody who has read the correspondence between C. G. Jung and Wolfgang Pauli understands this. But unfortunately, most archetypal astrologers aren’t inclined to go ad fontes when it comes to this core concept. And so the scarab beetle anecdote gets repeated ad infinitum. To his great and everlasting credit, Bruce Scofield describes synchronicity in a more sophisticated way.
For a really robust 21st century perspective on synchronicity, i would recommend Bernardo Kastrup’s book ‘Decoding Jung’s Metaphysics: The archetypal semantics of an experiential universe’. Here’s how Kastrup describes the ultimate perspective of that ‘other’ kind of synchronicity, the one that transcends remarkable coincidences involving shiny insects: “Synchronicity – insofar as it defines the structures or tendencies underlying all quantum events – is the only metaphysically real ordering principle in nature. The laws of nature we are familiar with in our daily lives become mere epiphenomena of archetypal synchronicities.”
Yep, we’re talking about the whole enchilada, not just intrusive bugs. Bon appetit.