Paul Vitols's Blog, page 16

birth of the (serious) writer

I’ve finally got my mailing-list signup form up and running (see sidebar to the left), and as an immediate bonus for signing up, my new subscriber (such as, for instance, your own good self) receives an e-book version of my first serious short story, “The Hermit.”

I say serious short story to distinguish it from my efforts up until that point, which had all been written while I was in public school (even though most of my writing had been extracurricular). “The Hermit” was a self-conscious effort to write the best story I could; it was intended to reach highest literary peak I was capable of, and it was written in an emotional state that flowed between the poles of exaltation and anxiety.

I wrote it between September 1979 and January 1980, at age 20, through my first and only term of university at UBC in Vancouver. I had entered the faculty of arts there after a two-year hiatus from school in which I had worked and traveled, tussling within myself over whether I wanted to pursue a career in art or in science, for both pulled at me.

While growing up I never doubted that I would become a scientist—a space scientist of some kind. I was excited by cosmology and by the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. But I had always loved writing. And by the end of high school I had entered a crisis in which I was no longer sure about what direction my life should take. I was especially affected by reading James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which a perceptive English teacher had put in front of me. I was electified by this story of a young man finding his artistic vocation as a writer, and I realized that it was—or could be—my own story. Everything I thought I’d known about myself was thrown into doubt.

Two years later, when I started at UBC, I still had not arrived at a decision. I entered the arts faculty, but chose courses that could be ported over to science if I wanted to switch: mathematics, computer science. I was lonely and alienated from my fellow students—all 25,000 or so of them—on the paradise campus of UBC. I felt driven to give expression to my feelings—but how? With what?

Shortly after beginning the year I started writing a short story, one that I intended to be a serious, adult effort; one that would announce my vocation as an artist. Among the things I had been studying in my search for vocation and meaning were astrology and the Tarot, and I became drawn to the Tarot card called The Hermit—the ninth card in the so-called major arcana of the Tarot pack. An idea came to me about a solitary character walking the seawall in Stanley Park, and I was so excited by this idea that I caught a bus downtown to the park and started walking it myself. It was a sunny day in September, but even though I wanted to set my story later, in November I still absorbed the sensations of being there. Seen through the eyes of the artist, the whole scene was charged with meaning, with depth. I wanted to bring this to my story.

I returned home to the town house where I lived with my mother, aunt, and sister, and, sitting on a stool at the slanted drawing table below my long bedroom window that looked south up the slope of Fairview, I started writing “The Hermit” on sheets of ruled foolscap. I was a good typist, but I wanted to compose this in longhand, which by then I believed was how the best writing was done.

The composition was tortuous. I fretted, I worried, I scribbled out and wrote in margins—all things that were not really natural for me, for I had always been a fluent writer. But I wanted it to be artistic; I wanted it to be my best. James Joyce was still my guiding light. And as he, with his collection of Dubliners, had wanted to “give Dublin to the world,” I wanted in my own small way to give Vancouver to the world—to write a story about Vancouver, or anyway definitely set there. It was my city; I had been born only two or three stones’ throws from the Stanley Park seawall where my hero, Alex, takes his solitary walk.

By the time I finished drafting the story I was no longer a student (although my English prof at UBC, Lee Whitehead, had generously allowed me to submit it as one of the major assignments for his course, and was equally generous in his appreciation of the story). But the story was never published until I brought it out myself in 2012 as an e-book (and who did the cover art, you ask? Moi). Now I see it as the manifesto of my vocation as an artist—for that is the path I chose. Indeed I remember the moment I chose it: it was in the Sedgewick Library at UBC, just before my math final in December 1979 (but that’s another story). I can’t say it’s been an easy one, although I have no regrets.

As for the merits of the story itself, it is not for me to say what they might be. The author was a passionate young fellow of 20, and I can say that he put his heart and brain into it. He did his best.

But I invite you to be the judge. Sign up to my mailing list and download your own copy, bypassing the 99-cent purchase price. If you ever want to stop receiving my infrequent emails, you can unsubscribe at any time. Who knows—you might even enjoy them!

In the meantime, a lonely young man stands ready for a visit.

it’s not polite to talk about yourself, but . . .

I’ve spent 9 posts trying to explain why I believe that astrology is a valid field of knowledge and study and not a pseudoscience or superstition. The topic is important in itself, but in the context of this blog and my project, The Age of Pisces, it is especially significant. Why this title in particular for what may well prove to be my life’s work?

In general, I don’t think it’s an especially good idea for artists to talk about their work, certainly not in the sense of trying to explain it. For one thing, the artist may not be particularly articulate about that aspect of his work, and wind up doing more harm than good to his artistic mission by talking about it. But for another, there is a strong case to be made that the artist is not necessarily in any privileged position to understand his own work. I remember reading Northrop Frye on this point, or anyway on one that I think is closely related. He was talking about the idea of seeing a production of Hamlet directed by William Shakespeare: would that not be the definitive interpretation of the play? According to Frye, no, it would not. He says that a Shakespeare production of Hamlet would be of special interest, but not of special authority.

And just by the by: this relates to my own belief that it is generally a bad idea for a writer to direct his own play or movie. For not only do the tasks of writing and directing require quite different talents and skills, which never exist in equal prominence in any one person, but the writer, when it comes to seeing meanings in what he has created, is only one pair of eyes among many. He may be an authority on his own intentions, but as for what finally wound up residing in the dark thicket of his created work, very likely other, more detached and objective observers are in a better position to say.

However, in the Wild West that the world of writing and publishing has become since the advent of the e-book, the writer is now often his own publisher as well as his own publicity agent, and it falls to him, and him alone, to try to promote his work to a public deluged by other promotions of other works. Thomas Pynchon launched his career in a time when a writer could still afford to have a mystique, when there were enough other people publishing and promoting his work that he could hide himself. He did no book tours, book signings, or interviews. Heck, there was no photo of Thomas Pynchon (I was shocked to find that Wikipedia does have a photo of him after all; someone must have dug one up somewhere). His reclusiveness gave him mystique, but it did not provide much in the way of promotional copy for his work.

The modern author, for better or for worse, has to beat his own drum. Willy nilly he has to talk about it and about himself in such a way as to draw interest. There are problems with this, because self-promotion tends to be inherently cheesy. It’s one thing for a third party to extol one’s work with praise such as, “This is way better than the Bible!” But if an author says these same things about his own work, his words will be accepted only at a steep discount. Nay, he will make himself like unto a laughing stock.

So there’s the predicament. An author, who nowadays needs a blog, needs to have a way of talking about his work without really talking about it. For there is the danger not only of plot spoilers, but much more of what might be called thematic spoilers: talking about meanings that are seeded into a work, but that are best unearthed by the reader as personal discoveries. Such discoveries are among the greatest pleasures of reading, in my opinion, and I want no part of spoiling them for anyone.

On the other hand, there is a great deal to say about The Age of Pisces that I will never be able to say in the books themselves. The topic is vast, and, I think, both fascinating and important. So why not just enjoy the luxury of having my own channel of discussion? Maybe many thematic spoilers will indeed fall on the ground along the way. But, just as in the fiction itself, it may not be so obvious what they are.

I would never state what I think the “meaning” of The Age of Pisces (my literary work, that is) is, even if were clear myself on what that were. But there are a great many things associated with it that are worth talking about, so that is what I will do. And as for the connections between these musings and the fictional work, I will leave those to the reader.

how astrology works, part 9: the Rosetta Stone of meaning

In my last post I introduced Arthur M. Young’s book The Geometry of Meaning, in which he shows how the deep, metaphysical aspect of every situation can be symbolized by numbers and angles—specifically the number 4 and the right angles formed when a circle is bisected by perpendicular diameters, like the crosshairs of a telescopic sight. But I mentioned that this geometrical analysis applies, so far, only to static situations; it does not yet include the phenomenon of change.

Change, it turns out, is symbolized not by the number 4, but by the number 3, what Young calls “the threefold cycle of stimulus, response, and result”. You might think also of the Hegelian triad of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. In each case there is the suggestion of a dynamic: a push, a push back, and a new resulting state which, in coming to be, constitutes its own new push, moving the cycle forward again. It is a way of cognizing or analyzing processes, and its threefold nature is symbolized geometrically by the equilateral triangle. (By contrast, the actual figure associated with the fourfold division is the square, formed when you connect the points at which the two lines intersect the circumference of the circle.) When this triangle is inscribed in a circle, it cuts the circle into 3 arcs of 120 degrees.

Using these two inscribed figures in the circle, Young works out their relationships to form what he calls “the Rosetta Stone of meaning,” which turns out to be a circle cut into 12 equal arcs of 30 degrees each, which expresses all the ways in which the square and the equilateral triangle can be related to each other in the circle, and also forms what we recognize as the template of a horoscope.

Of course, this image is not simply a drawing; each of its features has meaning. But Young puts it more strongly than this. He says that his diagram

is not just a translation of meaning, but is a generation of meaning. It is the relationships between the words we must use, not their definitions, that give them their meaning.

As I understand it, this is why meaning has to be represented pictorially, diagrammatically: for only thus can relationships between things be represented. A diagram is a set of relationships made visible. Its meanings are encoded as angles.

Young, finding words to be too imprecise and too circular (every entry in the dictionary is defined in terms of the other entries) for his Rosetta Stone, makes use instead of the “measurement formulae” of physics: our ways of measuring our sensations of the world using the elementary physical ideas of length, mass, and time. Young demonstrates how there are exactly 12 of these, and how and why, in their relationships with each other, they correspond to the 12 divisions of the circle of his Rosetta Stone.

But, in order to continue talking about them, he also does give them names beyond the physical quantities they represent, and, going counterclockwise around the circle, starting at the leftmost point, these are what they are:

spontaneous act
establishment
knowledge
change
being
fact
observation
transformation
impulse
control
significance
faith

And, as Young himself goes on to observe, this fully worked-out way of cognizing our world of experience corresponds closely with the zodiac of signs:

Aries
Taurus
Gemini
Cancer
Leo
Virgo
Libra
Scorpio
Sagittarius
Capricorn
Aquarius
Pisces

Young’s argument is deep and I don’t claim to understand it fully. But what he is saying is that astrological symbolism, if you look at it deeply enough, is a way of cognizing reality that is exactly analogous to our “scientific” (physical) way of cognizing it. The physical, scientific way of looking at the world measures it in terms of length, mass, and time, while the astrological way of looking at the world is qualitative: it sees the world as a place of qualities rather than quantities. It sees it as a place not of measurements but of interconnected meanings.

Young goes on to discuss astrology at more length in his book, “deriving” the meanings of the signs from his diagram, the “Rosetta Stone of meaning.” Each sign has its appointed place in a complete, geometrically ordered symbol of reality.

If you’ve come along this whole journey with me, this investigation of how astrology works, you’ll recall my posts about storytelling, and what Dante called the “polysemous” nature of spiritual writings. Now polysemous means “having multiple meanings,” and Dante was pointing to the rich meaningfulness of literary works. My own thought is that this meaningfulness of literary works is based upon, and ultimately identical with, the meaningfulness of life itself. Arthur M. Young, in his book The Geometry of Meaning, approaches this same issue, the issue of meaning, from the perspective of geometry and metaphysics. His “Rosetta Stone of meaning,” the wheel of the horoscope, is a kind of symbolic map of what could be called the “allegorical level” of meaning in life.

Thus there is no conflict between “science”—that is the physical science taught in schools and universities—and astrology. While physical scientists use the measurement of physical quantities to study the world at its literal level, astrologers, and others who concern themselves with things beyond the literal, use the relationships between certain literal, physical objects—the stars and planets—to study the world at its allegorical level. The people we conventionally call scientists are “literal scientists,” while astrologers are what could be called “allegorical scientists.” Both of those layers of meaning are baked into the cake of reality, and it’s a fundamental mistake for either of these schools of practitioners to regard the other’s province as invalid.

I have given an overview of how and why I think astrology works. If you’re a hardboiled skeptic, I don’t think this abbreviated argument will necessarily have converted you (although I congratulate you on sitting still through it all!), but I hope that it will have given you food for thought. For my own part, as a poet (using the term in its widest sense), whether astrology is valid or not I am free to make use of its symbols and imagery, including that of the Age of Pisces, in my created work. But if it is valid, as I say it is, then in some paradoxical or self-referential way, my poetic work will have something to say about the literal level of the world. My story will be something more like history.

But that’s another deep subject, which I will investigate separately.

how astrology works, part 8: “all meaning is an angle”

I intend to conclude my brief exploration of the “mechanism” behind the effectiveness of astrology with what I hope will be my deepest thoughts on the workings of number. For, as I said in my last post in this series, astrology is founded ultimately on number; it is in some way a system of recognizing the meaning of number in our experience.

Back when I used to shop for books in the bricks-and-mortar world, one of my favorite stores was Banyen Books, a store in Vancouver’s Kitsilano district specializing in spiritual and New Age books. I think my first purchase there was at its original location on 4th Avenue near Macdonald Street in 1977 or 1978: I got myself an ephemeris so that I could cast horoscopes for myself. In March 2000 I was browsing the store at its newer location at Broadway and Macdonald, and my eye was caught by an intriguing-looking brick-red paperback called The Geometry of Meaning by one Arthur M. Young. The cover illustration was simply of a circle partitioned by four inscribed equilateral triangles, making the circle look much like the frame of a horoscope. I picked up the book and discovered that while it contained geometrical diagrams and even physics equations, it was actually a work of metaphysics. With excitement I realized that it appeared to be a modern (published in 1976) addition to the Pythagorean approach to number theory. I shelled out the relatively exorbitant $22.50 price and took the book home.

I had never heard of Arthur M. Young. By profession he was an aeronautical engineer, inventor of the Bell helicopter, but his education was in mathematics In 1952 he apparently left aeronautics, for he established the Foundation for the Study of Consciousness, which published a journal with the same name. His aim was “the development of a science of mind/body interaction.” This book, The Geometry of Meaning, appeared to be a distillation of his mature thought on the relationship between number and experience.

All right: and what is that relationship? Young launches his book with this quote:

“All meaning is an angle.”

In his next sentence he admits:

I don’t know where I first encountered this enigmatic statement. I do recall that its origin was said to be in ancient Egypt, and I draw great comfort from this confirmation that there was at one time, perhaps so long ago that it was not even registered by Greek thought, a tradition that reflected the same conclusions I have reached after a lifelong effort to formulate manings without reverting to the circularity found, for example, in dictionary definitions.

For my part, while I can’t affirm that Pythagoras and his followers arrived at the “same conclusions,” it does seem to me that Young’s ideas are in that tradition of Greek thought. And for his own part, Young says:

I would like to call this book an essay in philosophy . . . . but in the older sense of “the science which investigates the facts and principles of reality.”

We hear an echo of John Anthony West’s definition of number as not merely a quantity but as a symbol of “the functions and principles upon which the universe is created and maintained.” And for Young, philosophy “also deals with the relationship between the knower and the known.”

After this introduction, Young begins by discussing what he calls the fourfold division of the “categories of knowing.” For while we might first think that there are just two aspects to any moment of cognition—a known object and its conscious knower—Young finds that four aspects are required for a more complete description of that moment. There is, in the first place, the known or perceived object; then there are the sense-data by which the object is perceived; then there is the knower or perceiver of the object; and finally there are the qualities or opinions projected by the perceiver on the object. This last category includes such judgments as whether the object is good or bad, beautiful or ugly, useful or useless.

These four different categories suggest four different kinds of relationship within the situation as a whole. If the object in question is, say, an equilateral triangle, and it is labeled A, while its perceiver is labeled B, then AA stands for the relationships contained within the triangle itself: the fact that it has three equal angles and sides. AB stands for the data that the observer receives from that object: shape, color, texture, and so on. BA stands for the qualities projected by the observer on the object, such as whether it is beautiful or ugly. And finally, BB stands for the function of the object for the observer, such as whether it’s a watch fob or an illustration in an argument. This category represents relations within the observer himself, which he makes for the object, treating it as an object.

A similar and related fourfold way of breaking down an experienced situation is Aristotle’s system of four kinds of cause: formal, material, efficient, final. Using the example of a table, the table can be regarded as having four different kinds of cause:

formal: the structure of the table, as recorded in the drawing a carpenter might make before building the table
material: the stuff that the table is made of, as, for example, oak wood
efficient: the action or work that physically produces the table, such as the skilled actions of the carpenter
final: the purpose for which the table is being made, such as, for example, to furnish a breakfast nook and eat meals from

These are all causes of the table in the sense that they all, generally speaking, answer the question, “Why does that table exist?” It exists because this carpenter, wanting a table for his breakfast nook, designed it, got the wood, and built it. It provides a complete account of how the table came to be. The point of interest for Arthur M. Young is that this account has exactly four aspects—not three, not five.

So a complete description of the arising of any object or any cognition has exactly four aspects. Young finds that these four aspects can be sorted according to whether, on the one hand, they belong to the object (in which case he calls them objective) or to the subject (in which case he calls them projective), or, on the other hand, they are specific or general. These are two pairs of opposites. The relationship of opposition is expressed spatially, geometrically, as the relationship of diameter: in the boxing ring, the opponents stand face to face. When the second opposition is added to the depiction, it takes its own place at the maximum distance from the first opposition, namely, as another diameter at 90 degrees from the first, thus quartering the circle like the crosshairs in a telescopic sight. The tensions within the fourfold way in which reality is cognized or experienced has been given a geometrical expression in the form of a quadrated circle.

And we begin to sense the significance of the ancient dictum that “all meaning is an angle.” For the expression of an opposition or polarity as the diameter of a circle is entirely valid: the meaning of the opposition is preserved in the geometrical representation. It’s another way of saying the same thing.

(As an aside, my own intuition tells me that this fourfold way of cognizing is also the pattern underlying the four levels of meaning in a literary work, as I have discussed before.)

By way of foreshadowing, I’ll note for now that this quadrated circle, with its inner polarities of objective and subjective, self and other, is already an elementary horoscope, in which a circle representing the whole world at a given moment is cut by two diameters: the horizon line running running from east to west, and the axis line running from zenith to nadir. These two lines, and the four points of the sky that they specify, form the frame of a horoscope, on which all the other elements will be hung.

We’ve come a long way, but we’re still not quite done, for the fourfold division is way of understanding only relatively static situations: single objects or cognitions. When change enters the picture—and all of our experience is continuous change—then more is required. I’ll get into that in my next installment.

Creating a Transparent Democracy by Shamar Rinpoche: power to the people

Creating A Transparent Democracy: A New Model by Shamar Rinpoché

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My path to this book began at Christmas 2014, when I received a copy of Buddhism Today magazine in my stocking. I didn’t get to it until about April, when I discovered that the fall/winter 2014 issue was devoted to Shamar Rinpoche, a Tibetan lama who died in Germany in June 2014.

I remembered that Shamar Rinpoche was one of the four “dharma regents” who had been tasked with continuing the work of the 16th Karmapa, a senior Tibetan lama, after his death in 1981. As a student of this same lineage of Buddhism, I was sad to read about Shamar’s death, and read the whole magazine with interest. One of the things mentioned in passing was that Shamar had written a book of political philosophy, Creating a Transparent Democracy: A New Model. As a late-blooming student of political science, I found this fact most intriguing, and immediately ordered a copy online from a bookseller in India.

I quickly saw why the book was mostly to be found in India: not only was it published there (by New Age Books of New Delhi), but the book is primarily addressed to India and to what Shamar perceived to be the political problems of his adopted home in exile from Tibet. The book begins with the author’s “Letter to the Indian People,” in which he offers these critical observations:

Unfortunately, in this land of great thinkers, small political minds primarily at the state level have wrecked [sic] havoc on the average citizen. The once-powerful ideals of democracy and self-rule have given way in many instances to inequity and corruption. The legitimate development needs of villagers and urban slum dwellers go unmet. The levers of power are far from the people most in need.

Shamar’s little book is an effort to solve these problems, and it amounts to a fresh constitution for India. But the text itself never names India, and the ideas presented could be applied to any large federal state, such as, for instance, my own country of Canada. Many of the author’s ideas for improvement are technical and administrative, but he also offers a number of proposals that are bold and innovative.

The author begins with a preface, then an introduction, followed by a chapter entitled “Overview,” all to make sure that the overarching vision of his document is clear. In his preface he says that at age 18 he was inspired by reading, in translation, some lectures by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, which convinced him that “all forms of cruelty and torture are wrong in principle, and totally unacceptable as a means of securing a leader’s power in a truly democratic and civilized society. . . . [T]he only legitimate power to govern people in modern society is power that is granted by the people themselves, that is, power that is gained through democratic means.”

So there you have it: this Asian Buddhist teacher espoused a political philosophy that could have been voiced by John Locke or the authors of the Federalist Papers. I found it striking that it was specifically the issue of torture that set Shamar on his path of political thought. Years ago I might have thought that this reflected the fact that he was writing in the great East, a place where collectivism and authoritarian government were the rule and the rights of individuals routinely trampled. Now, with Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib and other instances of government-perpetrated torture in the West, it’s clear that the issue is indeed, sadly, global. We too need Shamar’s vision of a torture-free state.

In his introduction, the author asserts that there are three things “necessary to enable humans to gain the maximum benefit from a democratic system of government.” The first of these is the most revolutionary in the strict sense: political power must flow up from the grass roots to the top, and not the other way around. Shamar’s whole system is an effort to achieve this. The second requisite is that citizens “must become politically literate before they can fully participate in self-rule.” This means that the state must provide a universal political education to its citizens—but this must not constitute propaganda, for the third requisite is precisely that “all forms of political propaganda should be banned from public life.”

This third point, interestingly, seems to be the one that the author regards as most important for his aim of realizing a transparent democracy—that is, one free from corruption. Here in Canada we tend to regard the blandishments of politicians as part of the routine if unfortunate flow of political life, but in Shamar’s eyes the fallacious rhetoric of politicians and the credulity of good-hearted but uneducated villagers form a toxic combination that is inimical to democracy. In his proposed system he is at pains to break this pernicious cycle.

In brief, Shamar proposes to create a bottom-up democracy instead of a top-down one by having the members of each successively higher level of political representation and legislation—from village to town to county to district to state to the federal level—selected from the level below it. Thus, each village sends one representative to the town council, the town council sends four representatives to the county council, and so on. At the federal level, the prime minister is popularly elected. The power of the prime minister is kept within bounds in part by “the head of the country,” who might be either a king, a queen, or a president, and in part by the third pillar of the three-part state, the judiciary.

Perhaps the most interesting part of Shamar’s whole proposal is the greatly expanded role he sees for the judiciary in his fully “transparent” democracy. Whether or not Shamar ever read Montesquieu, who I believe is the main architect of the concept of the separation of powers in government, he takes this concept very seriously indeed and his proposed state is shot through with it. Not only must a special constitutional court rule on the constitutionality of every law before it can take effect, but there is also a court of government oversight tasked with monitoring the actions of government generally, and even a full-on “judicial army”—an armed service under the command of the “chief of courts.” This army is equal is size and power to the “people’ army” under the command of the prime minister.

You can see from this selection of ideas that Shamar Rinpoche has put much thought into his proposed state, and has not shied from making bold innovations to the democratic system as it is now practiced. One thing I especially appreciate is that the author proposes making government officials, especially the head of state, swear oaths to uphold the laws of Earth, and to pass no legislation that is damaging to Earth.

I have questions about whether his system may intrude too much on individual freedoms here and there, and whether his bottom-up approach really would empower the bottom and keep undue power away from the top. But I find his proposal to be an exciting and creative addition to political thought of whatever hemisphere of the Earth. If nothing else, the fact that a serious, Western-style work of political theory, one that is intended for practical use, has been authored by a man who was, let’s not be afraid to say it, in Buddhist terms, an enlightened being, makes it of special interest and, perhaps, of special potency to effect good, should any society become inspired to implement it.

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how astrology works, part 7: the mysteries of number

In part 6 I looked briefly at one aspect of where astrological “meanings” come from, namely the empirical approach of making observations of the world in the light of the symbolism connected with the named planets and signs. Taking the name as a given, the astrologer looks for a correspondence between the meaning of that name, as for instance the name Uranus as the Greek sky-god who was the father of Saturn (to use their respective Latin names), and events on Earth. When the position of Uranus came to be tracked and recorded, astrologers could plug the planet into horoscopes and see what it did.

I have seen this process unfold in my own lifetime with the planetoid Chiron, which was discovered in 1977. (Looking in Wikipedia, I see that now the object is officially named 2060 Chiron.) I remember in the 1980s, when I was studying astrology, reading astrologers’ thoughts on how to interpret this new celestial object. It was discovered by Charles Kowal, an American astronomer at the Hale Observatories in Pasadena, California, and it was he who named the new object Chiron, after the king of the centaurs of Greek mythology. Within an hour or two of the announcement of the discovery, Kowal received a phone call from New York astrologer Joelle Mahoney asking him the exact time of day when he first realized that his photographic plates were showing him a new planet. He recalled that it was 10 o’clock in the morning of 1 November. Mahoney cast a horoscope for the discovery, and determined that the sign Sagittarius—the centaur—was rising at that moment. This was before the planetoid was named, but the first symbolic connection had been made.

Astrologers around the world got busy working on the question of how to interpret the new planetoid. It seemed obvious to connect Chiron with the sign Sagittarius; indeed, some complained that the sign already was Chiron, and that giving a planet that name was astrologically redundant. But at the same time some saw a connection with the sign Virgo, because Chiron’s name derived from the Greek for “hand” (his name means, in effect, “the handy one”), and Virgo has some rulership over the hands, and more direct rulership over human skills in general—and it was this quality of skillfulness that really gave Chiron his name. For he was renowned for his knowledge (he was tutor to Achilles, Jason, and Perseus, among many others), especially his knowledge of healing—and medicine is ruled by Virgo. There was irony in this, for Chiron was accidentally shot with an arrow poisoned with Hydra’s blood, which was invariably fatal; but because Chiron was immortal, he could not die, so he suffered with an incurable wound until he finally voluntarily gave up his immortality in a bargain that freed Prometheus from his endless torment on a rock in the Caucasus Mountains.

So there is a rich nexus of themes here: wisdom, study, healing, tutelage, foster care, and self-sacrifice. Astrology makes use of all of these meanings, but the one that stands out, as far as I know, is the meaning of “wounds that don’t heal,” or perhaps “the wounds that make us wise”: this is what a contemporary astrologer might be looking for when noting the placement of Chiron in a horoscope and relating it to a person’s life. As it happens, Chiron is prominent in my own birth chart—something that could not have been known when I was born in 1959—and I think that its influence is visible in my life, especially in that I have devoted much of my life, and continue to devote it, to study. As for wounds that don’t heal—well, maybe another time.

But I wanted to get to the deeper question of where astrological meanings come from, beyond the empirical observation of the connections between the world and the mythological symbols in which astrology is expressed. That deeper, more metaphysical source of meaning comes ultimately from numbers. At its bottom, astrology is a form of applied numerology.

And what is numerology? The foundation of it goes back, in Western society anyway, at least to the teachings of the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, who lived in the 6th century BC. Instead of focusing on the mathematical behavior of numbers, he focused on their significance, their meanings. He looked at their qualitative aspect rather than their quantitative aspect. And while no writings of Pythagoras have survived, his thinking was a key source in the later philosophy of Plato.

What does it mean to talk about the qualities of a number? There’s an excellent and accessible discussion of this in John Anthony West’s book Serpent in the Sky: The High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt. West, a maverick American scholar, is a student of the esoteric knowledge of ancient Egypt, especially as this was explicated by the French Egyptologist and occultist R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, who spent his career making detailed measurements and studies of Egyptian temples. He was able to show that they were built according to a complex and profound geometrical scheme, which resonated with the metaphysical depths of Egyptian mythology. And much of this metaphysics was based on a philosophy of number. In the words of John Anthony West:

Numbers are neither abstractions nor entities in themselves. Numbers are names applied to the functions and principles upon which the universe is created and maintained.

In his book West walks us through some of the meanings of the natural numbers 1 through 9. The number 1, for example, represents the absolute, or unity. It cannot be cognized directly, because to do so requires that the duality of knower and known already exists. Unity, then, is a kind of implicit origin of all things, the wellspring, the source. Somehow, out of unit, multiplicity arose, perhaps like a cell dividing in mitosis. This metaphysical division Lubicz gave the name Primordial Scission: 1, in effect, became 2.

And 2 is the number of polarity, which is fundamental to all phenomena. Anything that is, is identifiable only in distinction to what it is not. The world is filled with polarities—light and dark, positive and negative electric charge, male and female—but these are specific instances of the principle of polarity, which is what the number 2 represents. To quote West again:

Two, regarded in itself, represents a state of primordial or principial tension. It is a hypothetical condition of eternally unreconciled opposites. (In nature, such a state does not exist.) Two is static. In the world of Two, nothing can happen.

In order for things to happen, the poles represented by 2 have to come into relationship with each other. There has to be a mediating principle between them; this principle is represented by the number 3. It is expressed somewhat in the Hegelian dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, where it is the third term. But even this is more a specific instance of the deeper principle which 3 represents.

With the number 4 we arrive at the principle of substantiality—giving form to the developing reality. West uses the example of lovers: if the lover is 1 the beloved is 2, and the desire between them is 3, then we still have not arrived at an actual relationship; it still remains only possible. When the lovers begin their affair, then that possibility has become an actuality—it has taken on substance. Again, 4 does not represent actual physical materiality—that comes later—but only the principle of substantiality.

As I’ve mentioned, West goes on to sketch the meanings of the first 9 numbers, leading up to the number 10, which was held to be especially sacred by Pythagoras (who, incidentally, was reputed to have studied extensively in Egypt). Each number adds more to an understanding of the principles underlying our experience, of how the world works. By the time you get to 9 or 10, the system has become subtle, complex, and dynamic. But there’s a good metaphysical argument that you haven’t completely done an analysis of the principles of the world until you get to 12. Only at 12 have you completely symbolized all of our ways of cognizing reality.

But 12 is the number of signs in the zodiac; and it turns out that this is no coincidence. For 12 contains a much greater richness of arithmetical and geometrical relationships between its component numbers. And when you arrange these numbers in a circle as a expression of that completeness, you have the zodiac. Each number, each zodiacal sign, again represents some fundamental principle of reality, of the universe as we experience it. And it will turn out that the qualities of each sign derive from its unique placement in that circle and its unique set of relationships with the other signs and with the whole.

But more on that later.

how astrology works, part 6: of planets, metals, and revolutions

In part 5 I got as far as suggesting that the connection between the placement of planets and stars in the sky and events here on Earth is not a physical one, but rather one of meaning, a meaning that rides along with the physical facts in the same way that the “allegorical” meaning of a story rides along with its literal meaning. The next question might be, how are such meanings established or discovered in the first place? Who says that when, say, the Sun is in the sign Leo, a person born at that time is likely to have self-confidence, charisma, and expressive power, and is likely to outshine his peers in the early stages of life?

The first answer here is empirical. Just as with any science, astrology has proceeded, at least partly, by the making of observations. For if there is any regularity in phenomena, then that regularity can be observed if one sets out to do so. Perhaps the greatest single contribution of this kind to the body of knowledge we call astrology was made by the ancient astronomers of Mesopotamia, who recorded the positions of stars and planets for hundreds of years and also made note of significant events on Earth that coincided with the different configurations. As far as is known, these were the first astrological “cookbooks,” and much of this data came into the hands of Aristotle, who traveled for a time with his pupil Alexander the Great when he was making his bid for world conquest. Via Aristotle, it is thought, the data made its way into other hands in the West, to augment the observational data that was beginning to be gathered there.

Since then, astrologers have made similar observations when new astronomical discoveries have been made. The planet Uranus was discovered in 1781 by William Herschel. Gradually, astrologers made note of events and qualities that seemed to correspond to the placements of this hitherto unknown planet. And incidentally, in keeping with the meaningful viewpoint of astrology, the name of a planet is no coincidence, but is a key to its meaning—and this regardless of how that name was arrived at.

In the case of Uranus, for example, the name was arrived at only slowly. Herschel, when given the opportunity to name the planet he had found, chose the name Georgium Sidus, Latin for “George’s Star,” to commemorate the king (George III, Herschel’s patron) in whose reign the planet was discovered. But this name did not stick. Different people floated various suggestions, and the name that caught was one suggested by the German astronomer Johann Elert Bode, who proposed it on the basis that as the planet Saturn, which had been thought to be the farthest from the Sun, was named after the father of Jupiter, the planet next in, so the next planet out should be named in turn after Saturn’s mythical father. And thus the name Uranus. One of the people who supported this alternative name was Martin Klaproth, the German chemist who in 1789 named his newly discovered element uranium in honor of the new planet. As Wikipedia notes:

Ultimately, Bode’s suggestion became the most widely used, and became universal in 1850 when HM Nautical Almanac Office, the final holdout, switched from using Georgium Sidus to Uranus.

As the planet gathered its name to itself, astrologers would look to the symbolism of that name: who was Uranus? what were his qualities? what did he do? Uranus is the Latinized spelling of the Greek Ouranos, who was a sky-god, or in fact was simply the sky personified, since he had few human attributes. For example, he had no father, according to the poet Hesiod, but was engendered solely by Gaia, Mother Earth. So Uranus, the astrological planet, magnetized the symbolic attributes of the sky: clarity, spirituality, and also storm and lightning.

In 1781, the year of Uranus’s discovery, the American Revolutionary War was in progress, erupting from a growing international ferment of feelings of egalitarianism and a yearning for liberty. These qualities would come to be closely connected with Uranus in astrological symbolism. And, along the same lines, in 1789, the year of the discovery and naming of the element uranium—Uranus’s metal—George Washington was acclaimed the first president of the United States, and the French Revolution was launched under those same Uranian impulses of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

In time, as every planet in astrology is associated with a sign, Uranus came to associated with the sign Aquarius, and is now designated its “ruler.” Previously Saturn was said to rule Aquarius, a chore it divided with its rulership of the sign Capricorn. Some astrologers still regard Saturn as a secondary ruler of Aquarius, but all now see Uranus as the primary ruler of that sign. (This question of rulerships in astrology is crucial, for it determines which planets and which signs affect which things on Earth.)

So much for empirical observation as a key to discovering astrological meanings. But there is a further, deeper key to these meanings, which I thought I would be able to cover in this post. However, I’ve said enough for today, so I’ll have to leave that for next time. We’ll be moving into the realm of metaphysics, so I don’t know whether my powers will be equal to the task. But I welcome you to stop by and find out.

how astrology works, part 5: holding the mirror up to nature

In my last post I discussed the 4 levels of meaning in a story, as established (so I believe) by the grammarians of the ancient library of Alexandria. If you’re curious about how all this relates to astrology, stick with me—for this was more or less the path that I followed in arriving at my own theory about that.

The next topic I want to look at is how we respond to stories. I discovered, with great pleasure and interest, a couple of years ago that scientific research is being done on how people react to stories. (There has been at least one Scientific American article on the subject.) One of the researchers is Paul J. Zak, who has measured the activity in people’s brains while they were reading stories or watching movies. One of his discoveries was that stories cause the secretion of certain chemicals in the body, notably that of oxytocin, a hormone associated with feelings of interpersonal closeness and empathy. And the more involving the story, the more of this hormone is produced. Another discovery was that when we read certain words, that is, nouns and verbs, our brains become active in exactly the same places and in the same patterns as when we experience the real thing. That is, if we read, say, the word tree, the same parts of our brain become active as when we actually see a tree. This is another indicator of why we become so involved in stories: we experience them as being like life.

Not all stories are equally involving. One interesting aspect of Zak’s work is that he was able, on the basis of his empirical research, to come up with ingredients or rules that a storyteller should use if he wants to make his story as involving as possible. I haven’t looked at these in detail as yet, but I expect that they will be in harmony with a similar set of rules derived 2,300 years ago by Aristotle in his book Poetics. For Aristotle found the most powerful form of poetry to be tragedy—that is, dramatic poetry. And he found that the aspect of dramatic poetry that contributes most to its powerful effect is its plotting—that is, its storytelling.

In my own thinking and my own researches into storytelling, I have come up with a number of different definitions for the word storytelling. One of my favorites is: “the art of creating lifelike surprises.” For I had been persuaded by Aristotle, by which I mean that his arguments in the Poetics accorded with my own experience, that the compelling—that is, the involving—aspect of a story is exactly that it proceeds in a chain of events connected by either necessity or probability. For us to be fully involved in a story, the flow of action in it must happen with the same quality of inexorable necessity that guides events in our real-life experience. This is true even in the case of fantasy writing, but in this case the “rules” of the fictional world are stipulated by the author, who then is bound to respect them unswervingly. Because we experience our world, even though it is full of endless surprises, as a lawful place. We can always count on snow to be cold and on water to flow downhill.

What I’m saying is that stories have an effect on us to the extent that they resemble life. The dominant form of human communication, as far as I can tell, is storytelling. Think about it: we spend some time, certainly, stating facts and issuing commands, but the bulk of our communication, in terms of sheer word-count, is usually storytelling of one kind or another. Sitting in the lunchroom or in the bar, people swap stories; at the end of the day, we tell our housemates what happened to us at work. The balance of probabilities, to me, suggests that language itself was invented for the purpose of storytelling. But I’ll leave that thought with you.

But if stories resemble life, then life resembles stories—for the two propositions are what Aristotle would call “convertible”: they are logically equivalent. This in turn implies that elements that are present in stories are present in life. We respond to a good story because it is lifelike; that means that its form, its ingredients, are also present in life. Indeed it is because they are present in life that the story contains them, for we have created the art of story to imitate life.

Now let’s go back to the Alexandrian 4-level model of story analysis. If the best stories really can be read on those 4 levels—the literal, the moral, the allegorical, and the anagogic—then so can life itself be read on those same 4 levels. In exactly the same way that they are objectively present in the story, they are objectively present in life, in the world, in our experience. For the story mirrors life. Somehow, and we don’t need to know how in order for this to be true, life, the cosmos, is built this way. Events flow, driven by the law of cause and effect; but even as they flow, unfolding literally in our seemingly physical world, they at the same time have significance for a witnessing consciousness, if that consciousness takes the trouble to look for it.

This view holds that life, in the most basic, literal sense, is meaningful. Meanings are there to be read by the alert and educated mind.

We’re starting to close in on our quarry, but I’ll use another post to tie everything up. In the meantime, I invite you to join me in a thoroughly meaningful world—this very world we’ve been living in all along.

how astrology works, part 4: of women and wasps

As I mentioned in my last post, my reflections on why astrology appears to work eventually came to be illuminated by my researches into the art of storytelling. I got as far as describing briefly the ancient approach to the “allegorical” reading of poetry—that is, seeing more meanings in a text than the surface, literal meaning. By the time of Augustine, only the Bible was thought to be able to support such a deep type of reading, but Dante opened the door to reading other works—his own in particular—in this way. Gradually it came to be acknowledged that any literary work could be read or interpreted in a number of ways.

A few years ago I became excited by the idea that this way of reading, the allegorical, can be applied to any story, sacred or profane, complex or simple, written or verbal. As I recall, it was the very day that I had this thought that I tried to apply it to a simple story that I found online. I know that I’ve written about it before, but now I can’t find it in my old blog or anywhere else, so I’ll recap the analysis from memory.

I read a blog post by a woman in the U.K. who described as simple recent event in her life. She went into her bathroom and saw a wasp in the toilet, struggling to get out of the water. She felt a pang of compassion for the wasp and wanted to help it, but at the same time she was afraid that if she freed the wasp that it might sting her newborn baby. So she wound up flushing the wasp down the toilet, but felt a pang of remorse for doing so, and indeed it was this pang that led her to write the blog post.

I looked at this simple, real-life story through the lens of the ancient four-level allegorical approach. What are the meanings of this story? I will try to recall my analysis. The first level is the literal level. At the literal level, everything is just as it appears to be. This would be the level described by science: a woman enters her bathroom, finds a wasp, considers what to do, and flushes it down the toilet. The meaning of each of these words corresponds to its dictionary definition, pure and simple. The woman is an adult female Homo sapiens; the bathroom is a room in the house containing fixtures for bathing and excreting; and so on. The woman will be of a certain age, a certain height, a certain weight, and so on; the toilet will be made of certain materials and be of a certain color; and so on for all the other things mentioned in the story.

So much for the literal level. How about the moral level, the second of what I’ll call the four  Alexandrian levels (for I believe that this system of reading must have come from the grammarians of the ancient library of Alexandria)? Here I saw the story as being charged with certain values. The problem the woman faces is actually a moral one: whether to help a wasp that is struggling for its life, or whether, out of fear of what that wasp might do, to end that life. In this story, fear trumps compassion, and she chooses to kill the wasp, even as she feels guilt for doing so. A summary of the moral level of the story might be something like, “A woman, finding a potentially dangerous animal in distress, feels compassion and wants to help the animal, but feels fear as well for her own baby, and decides to kill the animal in order to stay safe.” Here I’m not trying to draw a “moral” from the story; I’m just trying to summarize it in moral language. The moral level has to do with the emotions and values that drive the action. While the woman’s behavior here could be looked at psychologically, it falls outside the realm of the hard sciences—physics and chemistry—that are the realm of the literal level. As a moral tale, it’s about a woman grappling with an ethical question, coming to an answer, and then having feelings and reflections about it.

Next: the allegorical level, properly so called (for all readings other than the literal, as Dante noted, can be called “allegorical” in the sense that they refer to meanings brought in from outside the literal text). Here my thought was to look at the story as a system of symbols. For while science can note that the protagonist of this story is a woman, an adult female Homo sapiens, in our experience the word woman has meanings that go far beyond those categorical labels. Every one of us took form in the womb of a woman and took birth from a woman’s body. In mythology woman has appeared as goddesses and heroines of vastly many types, including personifications of the Earth and the cosmos. From ancient times woman has had a special connection with compassion: in the ancient world the goddess Isis was the goddess who wept, first for her dead husband Osiris, and then out of compassion for her devotees, whose pain she understood and felt.

Here we’re going beyond what the dictionary tells us about woman. We’re exploring the associations and connotations connected with the term; we’re looking at it not as an isolated thing, but at how it is interconnected with other things in the world; we’re looking at its subtleties, at its significance, in the usually understood sense of that word. This is not like the literal level; physics and chemistry can’t tell us anything about this level. In this story, if we look at the wasp in more detail, we find some interesting things. A wasp that can sting us is a female wasp; her stinger is the wasp’s ovipositor, the organ through which she lays her eggs. In my research into figs—an image in my own writing—I discovered that wasps have an intimate relationship with fig-trees, and act as fertilizing agents for figs, even as the fig from ancient times was itself seen as a symbol of fertility, because of the great number of seeds in its fruit. And according to Wikipedia, wasps reproduce mainly parasitically, by depositing their eggs in the bodies of other insects and spiders. When the young hatch, they devour their host from within—a horrible death.

Putting even these preliminary thoughts together, we start to find meanings in our story. For the protagonist of our story is a mother, and her antagonist, the wasp, is likely a mother too, or anyway a certain kind of symbol of motherhood. The encounter has aroused the protective maternal instinct in our human mother; she sees in this nonhuman insect-mother a threat to her own child. Now the woman has found the wasp drowning: the wasp, no doubt trying to take a drink, has fallen into the water, which is not its element. The wasp, a winged insect, is a creature of the air, and in trying to preserve its own life by taking on water is now in danger of dying from it. Water is itself a powerful and widespread symbol: it is associated with the unconscious and the emotions, and, rising and falling in the monthly cycle of tides, with womanhood as well.

The wasp is a type of mother that kills in order to foster its own young. In a certain symbolic sense, when the woman sees the wasp in the toilet, she is seeing a dark aspect of her own motherhood, as in a mirror (reflectiveness being another famous property of water—as witness the story of Narcissus). Should she help that aspect to survive, or not? She decides not, and herself kills in order that her own young may be safe.

She does this by flushing the toilet, for that is where this little drama has taken place. But what is a toilet? It’s the appliance by which we get rid of our excrement—the waste products of our bodies, matter that has been purged of everything useful and helpful to us, and which has in the process become loathsome to us. In being flushed down the toilet, the wasp is equated with excrement. She is being sent to the place of oblivion and nonbeing to which we send our bodily waste: out of sight, out of mind, to unconsciousness.

I think this story is one in which a woman is presented with the dark aspect of motherhood, its deadly side, and with a shudder she flushes it from awareness. But it lives on as a disturbing feeling, a feeling of guilt.

Or anyway, that is one way of reading this story symbolically, or, as I’m calling it here, allegorically.

The fourth and final level is known as the anagogic level. We could call it the spiritual or mystical level. I think of this level as the one that addresses the issue of our journey to salvation.  At each level of the story we arrive at a more difficult task of interpretation. Interpretation at the anagogic or mystical level will depend on one’s spiritual maturity and orientation. If you believe in a particular religion, then you will be obliged to interpret in its terms, as Dante did in his letter to Can Grande. If you do not, then you must fall back on whatever spiritual training or intuition you may have—whatever mythology speaks to and from your heart.

In my opinion, a clue to the mystical reading of this story lies in the woman’s troubled conscience after she has flushed away the wasp. For in getting rid of the wasp she has acted on instinct—in exactly the way that the wasp, that dark unwanted thing, acts. She has not got rid of the wasp at all; she is the wasp. She has tried to destroy or deny a part of herself, and she has not succeeded. Whatever our idea of the spiritual journey is, it will involve an emancipation from blind instinct. The maternal “love” that kills is not a spiritual love. And as spiritual beings, our progress surely depends on spiritual love. Or, in the words of 1 John 4:8:

He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.

So there is a quick look at the four levels of meaning in a story according to the Alexandrian method of interpretation. As for how this ties in to the effectiveness of astrology—bear with me. For the journey itself is interesting, is it not?

how astrology works, part 3: don’t do your own thing

In my last post I said that it was my study of the art of storytelling that eventually brought me to an understanding of why astrology works. Science might be able to show that astrology works—this is what Carl Jung attempted in his “Astrological Experiment,” and it was the mission of the French astrologer Michel Gauquelin—by applying statistical methods to certain objectively verifiable data, but it cannot account for why it might work. If astrology does indeed work, it would appear for reasons that are beyond the power of science to explain.

My interest in storytelling, and more generally in creative writing, led me gradually to study how to do these things. It might sound obvious that one might study something that one wishes to do, but in the 20th century the teaching of fine art, including the art of creative writing, had fallen under the spell of the 1960s catchphrase, “do your own thing,” with the result that it was thought that the teaching of technique or craft or principles in art would limit the student’s creativity. Even today, the typical creative-writing course will consist mainly of students’ critiquing each other’s work. This is the main reason that I have never formally studied creative writing. If I’m paying for instruction, I want to be instructed.

Therefore the instruction that I have received, such as it is, has come from books. This informal program of self-study got a big push forward in 2010 when I decided that I wanted to acquire a liberal education. I acquired a set of the Britannica Great Books of the Western World and started reading them. I also read books by Mortimer J. Adler, an editor of that set, and by other exponents of the tradition of liberal education. It was in one of Adler’s books that I found this sentence: “It is a knowledge of principles that elevates a knack into an art.” I found it inspiring, and I have kept it in mind ever since, turning it over and over, reflecting on its implications.

We’re all born with various knacks. I was born with a knack, or talent, for writing. I also have a talent for drawing, and, to a lesser degree, for music and acting, among other things. Growing up in the 1960s and 70s, I was indoctrinated with the “do your own thing” precept, which suited my naturally self-willed and arrogant personality.  When you have a knack for something, you can achieve results effortlessly that others must toil to achieve—if they can achieve them at all. It’s tempting to coast; and if your creed is “do your own thing,” then coasting becomes almost a duty.

But if you have a real passion for something, then coasting becomes unsatisfactory. You can’t express your love for something through coasting; you want to give effort to it; you want to improve. And here, I think, is the actual birth of the artist. At first the writer laboring under the “do your own thing” delusion will try to improve simply by writing more and reading more, maybe reading differently, more attentively. But eventually it becomes clear that this is not enough; it is still the student trying to teach himself.

So I became grateful when good instructional books came my way. But it was the notion that art, by definition, consists of a knowledge of principles that really spurred me. Among other things, I took on a new and avid interest in literary criticism, something that had not much interested me before. Now I saw it through a new lens: literary criticism is exactly a search for the principles that govern the art of writing. For the literary critic is concerned with the question, “what is it, exactly, that makes a piece of writing good?” To the extent that he can answer that question, he has elucidated a principle of the art of writing, and it will behoove the literary artist to learn that principle.

Among the literary-critical ideas that I found myself learning or relearning was the ancient idea of “polysemous” writing—writing that has more than one meaning. I first encountered the idea in Joseph Campbell’s Creative Mythology, the climactic volume of his magnificent Masks of God tetralogy:

Dante, in the Convito, was to make the point that spiritual writings “may be taken and should be expounded chiefly in four senses”: the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical.

Dante means that in a spiritual work, such as his own Divine Comedy, any given passage can be read in four different ways, each yielding a separate and valid meaning for a separate sphere of experience. Dante makes an example of reading the first 2 verses of Psalm 114:

Consider these lines: “When Israel came out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from people of strange language, Judah was his sanctuary and Israel his dominion.” If we look only at the letter, this signifies that the children of Israel went out of Egypt in the time of Moses; if we look at the allegory, it signifies our redemption through Christ; if we look at the moral sense, it signifies the turning of the souls from the sorrow and misery of sin to a state of grace; if we look at the anagogical sense, it signifies the passage of the blessed souls from the slavery of this corruption to the freedom of eternal glory. And although these mystical meanings are called by various names, in general they can all be called allegorical, inasmuch as they are different from the literal or historical. For “allegoria” comes from “alleon” in Greek, which in Latin is alienum [strange] or diversum [different].

I found this fascinating. When I looked into it further, I learned that the idea was not original with Dante; he had inherited it from earlier writers extending back to Augustine and beyond. As far as I can tell, this idea of a 4-level “polysemous” reading of a poetic text came out of the researches of the grammarians at the ancient library of Alexandria. According to Augustine, only the Bible could support such a dense load of meaning. Dante was expanding this notion to include his own work. But if one could accept this, then in principle it would be possible to read any work this way—why not? The only question is whether meaning is there to be found. And at least in one sense, meaning is in the eye of the beholder, is it not? So let us seek; perchance we shall find.

Armed with this new idea, I started reading stories with a view to discovering these different levels of meaning. And while it’s true that not all of them support all 4 of these levels of meaning, some of them do—at least in my opinion. And when I thought further about the implications of this, I discovered some intriguing new ideas.

But those will be for future posts.