The Asteroid - A Panpsychist Account

They had started falling towards the Sun when they were young. The tug of that luminous solar entity, the enticement toward the bright bottom of his gravity well, had been the closest thing they had known of love until regal Jupiter, exerting influence across a dissipating accretion disc, nudged them gently into a stable orbit presided over by the lording planet. 

There, the asteroid remained, rounding mighty Sun with deference and equanimity, whilst pledging fealty to the Jovian sovereign whose gravitational dominion seemed supreme. Indeed, they seemed to be only a vassal of Jupiter’s imperial might in those long, silent eternities. Yet it was the Sun that would master them in the end, and it was the Sun that would bring them home.

Home? What was home to them? They had never been home, nor been part of anything larger than themselves. If not for Jupiter’s constant reassurance, they would’ve drifted off into the black, or even more likely, would’ve begun their plunge towards the Sun much sooner, at a time when the shape of the solar system was still indeterminate.   

Jupiter’s gravity was powerful, however, and it influenced their path through space and time for eons. Only a consequential disruption could ever interrupt the elemental relationship between such a massive planet, the relatively minute asteroid, and the star they both had in common.

That disruption - and consequential it was - occurred on an occasion when another asteroid of similar size and composition intersected their orbital path. It seemed pre-ordained; The paths of the two asteroids had crossed many times, and the way between the bodies always cleared before a potential impact. Yet despite this delicate choreography, entropy was destined to prevail, and prevail it did - spectacularly.   

The outcome left them smaller than they were before; the impact shattered both asteroids into many pieces. But the better parts of them were free of Jupiter’s gravity and travelling through a vast darkness, in thrall to the solar winds that strengthened as they journeyed toward the planets of the inner system.

They remained undifferentiated from their environment during that time. Having been exiled from the sustaining Jovian influence, they slept, if a consciousness such as theirs - a  consciousness the size of a mountain - could be said to sleep. And in that sleep, they dreamed. They dreamed of starry oblivion without end, and of time outside time where they would drift, absolutely, forever. They were sleeping, though, and they didn’t notice that they were now sliding towards the Sun. 

They dreamt of traversing the spans between asteroids, and of Mars, a ruddy star whose orbital path they crossed - skipping like a pebble on a river in slow motion - while the planet traversed the Sun’s far side. 

And they dreamed, at last, of a blue-green and distant orb, Terra, regularly obscured by the shadow of her Moon, but coming closer until the pull of her gravity well stirred something on the asteroid, and woke them from their hundred-million-year slumber.

Their adoration of the blue-green orb - that love - was the bottom of Terra’s gravity well calling. Its allure was the promise of an end to their journey, of a perfect sorrow embedded in the nature of things. What does the end of the journey have to do with the beginning of another? Only they knew the answer - with a knowing beyond language - that they were the light that appeared in primordial skies in the deep dark before dawn, growing larger with each passing morn, until they were visible in the daylight, too. 

They had differentiated, at last, and found a place to satisfy their desire for inertia. Was that home? They had always been in motion, since the beginning. Here, at last, they would find rest, even though rest meant devastating Terra, and the rough start of a new era on that blue-green orb.    

After 65 million years on the planet of their homecoming, some animals found the place where the asteroid came to rest. These animals - beings who were conscious in their own way - owed their very existence to the catastrophe the asteroid had wrought eons earlier; beings who conceived, in fact, that there is a way it was like to be a big rock falling from the sky.

Astrological Monograph: Towards an Extraterrestrial Astrology

A perennial question to which astrologers are drawn in moments of idle contemplation concerns the possibility of a form of our practice as it might exist on a planet other than Earth. This short essay offers a sketch of a theoretical framework which might allow for the development of such a practice on an alien world, and explores what it can tell us - in a general sense - about how 21st astrology evolved over the course of human civilization’s 10,000 year lifetime.

1/ Metaphysics

The metaphysics of the astrological perspective describe a universe which, for all intents and purposes, is sentient and intelligible; a cosmos that engages humanity in a participation mystique. Admittedly, it's an a priori assumption, but it underlies all forms of astrology, whether basic or enlightened. The conceit is simple: There is a correspondence between events as they occur in the world of human experience, and the wider field of planetary motion. This correspondence is a synchronistic phenomenon - and so, by definition, is acausal in origin - with expressions that propagate synchronically (at the same time, across time) and diachronically (evolving in time). Whatever sort of astrology comes to exist on another world, it will share some version of these metaphysics. Astrology is incompatible with a materialist or nihilistic worldview that denies the reality of a living cosmos.

(Before proceeding any further and to clarify definitively, the project described here - that is, the theoretical possibility of an astrology on a planet other than Earth - would be created by the descendants of human astronauts and colonists to that world. Creation of a sort of astrology as it might be realized by an extraterrestrial species - little green men, so to speak - is not the purview of this essay, although we might conjecture an astrological system created by aliens would share the necessity of a common metaphysical conceit, i.e. that the universe is intelligent.)

2/ The Meaning of Planetary Bodies

A new astrology divined by these off-world practitioners will emerge because of the spontaneously created and self-consciously directed goals of the people involved as well as the process they follow. Simply to say, systemic descriptors (delineations) of the various planets, aspects, houses, signs that constitute terrestrial astrology evolved over millennia, producing a rich and complex archetypal symbology. Development of astrology by humans on a planet other than Earth would occur relatively quickly in comparison, and conceivably might bring to bear knowledge that can only be intimated currently, in areas of study as seemingly disparate as astronomy, anthropology, depth psychology, and theoretical physics, as well as statistical science and chronobiology. 

Viability of a human colony on another world would be directly influenced by resources available to the settlers, and their relationship with the planetary environment. This relationship would assume symbolic values in a new astrology. An artificial environment might mimic and modify circadian rhythms so that humans would become adapted to the extraterrestrial setting. These adaptations, in time, would come to describe activities, events and patterns that might be thought of as astrological.

3/ Temporal Linguistics

As more and more is discovered about gravity in the ongoing scientific work of physicists, consider what consequence this might have for an extraterrestrial astrology; not because of a causal relationship that a naïve astrology might assume, but as a result of gravity and its relationship to time, since time is encoded with the archetypal patterns and forms that astrology describes.

Another useful consideration involves exploring the intense social and cultural rate of change since the advent of the modern age, in contrast to previous eras. The modern age - always a murky term, but one we will define here as the period occurring between the discovery of Uranus by William Herschel in 1781 and our current century - coincided with the revival and refinement of the astrological perspective, spurred on by breakthroughs in many fields of human endeavour, including (but not limited to) politics, medicine, economics, psychology, historical studies, physics, technology and the arts. Observed in this way, we can see how the delineation of more recently discovered asteroids, planetoids, comets etc., imply an evolving and nuanced astrological perspective of humanity’s place in the cosmos. One can imagine a similar process taking place as an extraterrestrial astrology develops.

4/ Thought Experiment 

How will the Earth be described by astrologers on Mars when they look to delineate the planet’s horoscopic meaning? What symbolic values, what metaphors and similes, what deities and archetypes, will describe the ancestral home of humanity? What was the method used by astrologers of the past to attribute meaning to the outer planets - Uranus, Neptune, Pluto - and to delineate the many smaller celestial bodies discovered in the last century?

It isn’t difficult to imagine that, in a Martian sky, the Earth might take on at least some of the symbolic associations connected with Luna, since terrestrial astrology delineates archetypal meaning of the Moon as premised on the mother and child, tradition, the past, and the idea of home, in its varied and sundry expressions. Since Earth would be regarded as the ancestral site of humanity’s origin by colonists on other planets, it makes sense that Earth’s coordinates in a Martian - or any extraterrestrial - sky would suggest traits and events rooted in originating cultures, tribal and familial loyalty, etc., much in the way Luna and the Zodiacal sign of Cancer arrogate such meaning in their symbology.

The Sun, too, presumably visible from the site of this new extraterrestrial astrology would more than likely retain the same symbolic associations that the terrestrial delineation assigns: illumination, consciousness, the ‘light’ of reason, renewal, creativity, play. Of course, these meanings will require further development and contextualization by the pioneers of this new divinatio scientia who will live their lives on other planets.

5/ Conclusion 

As human civilization persisted on Earth, astrological observations and their corresponding Zodiacal placements came to constitute the earliest known form of an ecliptic coordinate system. The extent to which a similar coordinate system could be utilized on an alien world is unclear; however, it is altogether likely that if there is to be an extraterrestrial astrology, the influence of fixed stars will figure more prominently in the horoscopes it creates. This inheritance from astrology’s sidereal tradition bestows an intellectual pedigree stretching back to antiquity, to Egypt, Atlantis, and to our prehistoric ancestors who told the first stories about what was happening in the night sky.

(Extraterrestrial astrologers may indeed eschew Zodiacal-type referents in favour of planetary aspects, in addition to fixed star placements. For the purposes of this writing - which is to advance a model of how astrology might develop on another planet - the principles associated with non-Zodiacal-type delineations [ie, planetary aspects, fixed stars] are robust enough to transition into alternate horoscopic systems.) 

So, in consideration of an extraterrestrial astrology, these ideas would be paramount: metaphysics, gravity and time, the historical increase in observed astronomical bodies and their synchronic correlates in human culture, delineation of the Earth in an extraterrestrial horoscope, the enhanced relevance of fixed stars and planetary aspects over Zodiacal symbology. Used as conceptual demarcations, ideas like these offer a glimpse into astrology’s future on other planets that can only be imagined - for now.

Letter to an Anonymous Protester in Ottawa, February 2022

We don’t agree about the kind of Canada we want to live in, that’s plain to see. But we have to shelve that discussion for now. Clear and present is the situation in Ottawa, Windsor, and at border locations across the country, where you’ve made your displeasure known to the world: Vaccine mandates have got to go. 

Also, a bunch of other messages have gotten lumped in with your legitimate fears about job security. Racist messages. Seditious messages. You must know this by now.

I hope you haven’t forgotten that Canada - whatever the country is to become in our lifetime - was founded on principles of peace, order and good government. Look it up. The good government bit will be defined differently depending on what you expect of Canadian legislators, but the beauty of the democratic process is that we have a chance to determine what good government means whenever we go to the polls. 

The other principles, peace and order, we both know what that looks like, and it isn’t what these protests have become. Civil disobedience has a place in a just society. But there is a balance to be struck between the need for change and transformation in government, and the need for institutional stability and rule of law. 

You say government has overreached itself, that our freedoms are being stolen. I say, the role of government is to create laws that allow us to live in relative safety and autonomy, the same laws that keep people from driving on the wrong side of the road. Canadian laws also constrain the right to free expression that exists in other jurisdictions, most notably to our south, where citizens espouse life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness above all.  

But in Canada, societal freedoms have limits, and it’s the job of government to legislate those limits. And since our vote determines the membership of said government, by extension it’s our job.

There's not much else to say, except to remind you that the last few years have been challenging for everyone, no matter your identity, or politics, no matter your station in life, or whether you took the vaccine or not. The human capacity to suffer is common, and throughout history, not one person, or group of people, has had the franchise on it, nor can claim the exclusive experience of it. Why would things be any different now? 

So please, stand down. Go home. You don’t speak for me, but your message - both the intended and the unintended parts - has been communicated. As for freedom, emancipate yourself from mental slavery. That’s the real revolution, and in the end, the only one that matters.