Astronomy and Astrology: Finding a Relationship to the Cosmos

by Rudolf Steiner, Margaret Jonas (Compiler)

In the Middle Ages, astronomia ―one of the seven liberal arts―was as much about astrology as it was astronomy. Indeed, the two disciplines did not part company until the seventeenth century, when the materialistic worldview began to gain greater prominence. Where human destiny was once connected with the stars and planets, and spiritual, or soul, qualities were associated with the natural world, the cosmos began to be seen as merely a matter of gases, fire, and dead rocks. Steiner brings a spiritual perspective to our study of the heavens. While criticizing the superficial nature of popular astrology, Steiner shows that, as individuals with the guidance of spiritual beings, we choose the appropriate time of birth to match the destiny we are to live. This enlightening anthology, expertly collated by Margaret Jonas, features excerpts of Steiner’s work on the spiritual individuals of the planets; the determination of human characteristics by the constellation at birth; the cultural epochs and the passage of the equinox; cosmic influences on the individual and humanity; life in the planetary spheres between death and rebirth; solar and lunar eclipses; comets; and much more.

Genres: Astrology

256 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2009

About the author

Author also wrote under the name Rudolph Steiner.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...


Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. His teachings are influenced by Christian Gnosticism or neognosticism. Many of his ideas are pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory.
In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality. His philosophical work of these years, which he termed "spiritual science", sought to apply what he saw as the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions,  differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, dance and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts. In the third phase of his work, beginning after World War I, Steiner worked on various ostensibly applied projects, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and anthroposophical medicine.
Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's world view in which "thinking…is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." A consistent thread that runs through his work is the goal of demonstrating that there are no limits to human knowledge.

Reviews

[Nathan]

Here are a few of the excerpts I thought were fun:

“Ego and sun are the inner and the outer aspects of the same being.”

“Only someone who, by developing certain qualities connected with the human heart, succeeds in relating himself to the sun’s light in such a way that he does not see the reflection from the moon—only for such a person does the moon become inwardly transparent.”

“A language is deepened, imbued with the quality of soul, when, for example, Venus is square to Mars. On the other hand a language tends to be superficial, poor in qualities of soul, when Venus and Mars are in conjunction.”

“Much less selfish and much more beautiful would be a horoscope, a planetary horoscope made for the moment of death.”

“We take 18 breaths per minute, which over a whole day comes to 25,920 respirations. And we arrive at the same number when we calculate how many days are contained in a normal life term of 71 years. And again, when we consider how the sun moves, advancing a little each year in what we call the precession of the equinoxes, when we consider the number of years it takes the sun to make this journey round the whole zodiac, once more we get 25,920 years.”