THE GREAT SCIENTIFIC BLINDSPOT

This Blog is about Censored Issues. The following article was offered to THE AUSTRALIAN newspaper in response to a report (28.4.06) on a rubbishing of astrology by scientists. It was sent to the Chief of Staff, the Science and Features editors. The last two sent automatic responses in their absence with alternative addresses from which I have not received even automatic rejection notices. (Granted most journalists and publishers don't use them but in courtesy they might). As a published author however I might receive a basic acknowledgement. (In France Le Monde invites published authors to express their views prominently). And some statements below might anyway have invoked response out of caring concern about the serious suppression involved. But alas Australia doesn't much respect its writers or artists,we're all so very very equal they can take their place in line with Joe Citizen and his opinions. As to astrology and religion they exist to be dismissed on almost any and every count anyway.

THE GREAT SCIENTIFIC BLINDSPOT

Maybe it’s because astrology is now gaining academic respectability, taught as a subject in such as Southampton, Bath, and Seattle universities, that scientists, beginning to panic, are determined to launch an attack. It had been reasonably established some years ago from the tests of such as the psychiatrist Hans Eysenck and the statistics of Michel Gauquelin (the former on extraversion and introversion around the sun signs, the latter on planetary influence on vocational dispositions), that there was something to astrology. Now in a recent study (reported The Australian 28th April) German and Danish scientists are attacking what is popularly considered the central issue of the sun sign to indicate there is nothing at all to astrology. They can find nothing to support different intelligence levels (I wasn't aware sun signism even dealt in that!) or character by the sun sign. Nothing?

Scientists are more than hard to please. Over a couple of decades ago now the Academy of Sciences in Belgium had told Gauquelin that if his (thousands of) cases could prove astrology by statistics we should no longer believe statistics. That’s not science it’s scientism, a new form of blinkered radical fundamentalism one which refuses dialogue. Astronomer Percy Seymour of the Plymouth Observatory in England found he was sent to Coventry by the scientific community in England for daring to suggest there might be something in Gauquelin’s statistics. Basically scientists don’t reckon to speak with those involved in astrology unless to tell them they are wrong.

Take noted astronomer, David Hughes. In the late seventies he wrote extensively on ancient astrology and its presumed connections to the birth of Christ. Developing his theories I claim to have found Christ’s birth data with innumerable proofs for it. But not with the Society of Authors appealing, his publisher asking, or an editor of one of my books who knows Hughes more recently mentioning me to him, has he ever deigned in years to contact me to answer questions or discuss matters. His indifference must be accounted one of the reasons I have been unable to advance my rather devastating discoveries for public debate. Breaking the PR barrier in this area is a formidable task even for a published author.

How can and will anyone one “scientifically” perceive and test in detail what sun signs claim? If you don’t wish to prove the case you never will because a lot of what's involved is at once special and elusive and linked not just to psychology but to such as medical associations like body parts in a way no one would care to test for. For example, Cancer the mother sign is the sign of the breasts. On this year’s Australian Big Brother, one of its housemates is a Cancerian so insecure about her breasts she has had a boobs job - at twenty. Another Cancerian housemate arrived on the show in a state of display suggesting she had no such hang-ups. Last year, Scorpio, sign of sex and the genitals, engaged Big Brother in issues that got political after a Scorpio flashed his penis and stuck it in the hair of a housemate he was styling. Most Scorpios won’t behave like that but maybe something along those lines will be more of an issue for them than others in the course of their lives. Such happened for myself and film maker, Tony Pitman, both Scorpios who, incredibly given current western trends, were charged by police with wilful obscene exposure for taking part in a nude demo so that one had to sit in court and hear arguments over whether we had in fact exposed our “members”. This year’s BB star could well be the Gemini Michael who has been displaying facets of the Geminian trickster archetype in the sheer playful relish with which he has agreed to double cross and chat up housemates, fib and steal from them. Will statistics catch the Gemini/Mercury thief, seducer associations, which of course not all Geminis for ethical reasons will display however well qualified – they may like Dorothy Sayers just prefer to write or read or talk about crime instead?

In some respects the problem is that astrology is not too little but too terribly accurate. I read best selling philosopher Alain de Botton’s horoscope and clearly didn’t make him too comfortable. I was able to demonstrate not just how planets worked but even how name asteroids show his favourite philosophers and which he deals with in his The Consolations of Philosophy. These are marked out in advance in his chart which was well triggered for publication of his breakthrough bestseller on Proust, asteroid Proust being strong natally and just waiting its moment.

This kind of thing isn’t good news for atheist philosophers and sceptical scientists. It’s obviously too much like fate or biblical statements about the night skies uttering knowledge and God naming the stars. Ironically, in the data I have for Christ, asteroid David Hughes exactly opposes the magian associated asteroid Chaldaea, betraying this scientist’s alienation from the astrology he researched; and, falling as Hughes’ asteroid does in the prideful sign of Leo it arguably betrays the status issues affecting his dislike…as some astrologers would say, the stars give you the Last Judgement in advance.
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If you want to test sun signs this side of social respectability the best way to go might be via literature, philosophy and art. One needs to take creative individuals minimally subject to average cultural conditioning. This way native style and archetypes emerge. It soon becomes evident that the ego of Aries is a real thing from the Cogito of Descartes to the transcendental ego of Husserl. One will then see how this contrasts with its opposite sign Libra, the relationship sign which adopts the almost Buddhistic, no self position of Oscar Wilde and Heidegger for whom the starting point is not the self but the Dasein, the being with others, and what’s already in this world. If you want to do philosophy with water sign Cancer go to Iris Murdoch (whose prize winning fiction work was suitably The Sea, The Sea) who talks about human consciousness being “soaked in value” and writes philosophy in a stream of thought like the Cancerian Proust, a writer who like Murdoch scarcely has room or time for a paragraph division in the onrush. Cancer Kafka allows you a few paragraphs but is also soaked in streams of thought and drowning in seas of confusion. If you want to try music instead of literature take Wagner, Richard Strauss and Stravinsky. If you can't appreciate how they are distinctly Geminian magicians then you may be a little lacking by way of synthetic intelligence and need a few intuitional abilities transcending the style of scientific fact collecting.

I have written of these things in a book called Astrology and Belief Today . It has never been published. Publishers prefer books on the astrology of cats, dogs and lovers and that situation suits the scientists well because they can continue to take pop shots at what looks more like party games than the Wisdom of the Magi. One day when the asteroids, Wisdom and Sophia hit somewhere meaningful, Truth may actually out. Meanwhile, alas censorship, suppression and even abuse rule.