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I’m somewhat fascinated by The English Reformation.
Many of the Protestant Movements in the 16th century were the motions of peasants. Uprisings of the lower classes against the established order. Indeed, while the usual story is that the Reformation was fueled by genuine religious disagreement over the interpretation of all those newly printed Bibles, some have argued that in reality, the whole thing was nothing more than the resentment of the people against a priestly caste grown too powerful. For our purposes it doesn’t much matter. It is enough to know that Continental Protestantism was a thing for the masses, but English Protestantism? Well. In England The Reformation was a decidedly top-down affair.
I’m sure you know the story.
King Henry VIII wanted a divorce and the Pope said no. A butterfly flaps its wings and castles fall over. So it goes.
So it always goes.
Such a small thing in hindsight. The fate of millions, the deaths of thousands at the hands of the state, the rise of an empire that subjugated India, and the collapse of the religion which had governed Europe for a thousand years…
All hanging by a thread.
All pushed over the ledge by the whims of one man.
Worse!
All of it depending on a single sentence from a single woman.
No matter how high we build our walls, Time will knock them down.
Today people don’t put much stock into their words. Oaths, honor, even pledges of allegiance… mostly these are seen as formalities. Niceties we perform as a ritual of courtesy, but not anything anyone expects us to actually take seriously. Everyday people get up in court and lie through their teeth after swearing not to. Everyday contracts are signed that no one will think twice about breaking. Everyday people look deeply into the eyes of someone they claim to love and promise “till death do us part”, with no real sense that such a statement is actually binding. The words of the Modern Westerner are written on water. They mean nothing. We lie as easy as we breathe.
In King Henry’s time it was different. Words mattered. Or, at least, they were supposed to.
Contrary to the Vibe I might give off sometimes, I’m actually not one of those people who idolizes the past. Medieval Europe, Ancient Egypt, The Roman Empire, 1950s America… they all had their problems and on the whole, Now, Today, is probably a pretty good time to be alive. As Solomon said in Ecclesiastes, “Do not say, ‘Why were the former times better than these?’ for it is not wise to ask such questions.” Or as Billy Joel put it, “Say goodbye to the oldies but goodies. For the good old days weren’t always good, and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems.”
True. Every time and place has its problems.
But... every time and place has different problems.
And the problem of people not honoring their word was not something that the 16th century overly suffered from.
You see they were living at the very tail-end of the Medieval Period. The time of Knights in shining armor and of Beautiful Princesses waiting in castles to be saved. It was a religious time. Perhaps, even, a magical one. For them the concept of A Covenant was very powerful, and the concept of The Word, or The Logos, more powerful still. God after all seemed to have started the whole idea of a covenant (or a contract), The Old and The New Covenants being the two major divisions of the Bible. Also maybe the fact that literacy was not as widespread as it is today contributed something to the solemnity of a vow. Without a written record, the expectation to honor one’s word, and the connection between doing so and being a “good” person was perhaps all the more strong. Back then if a man swore an oath to the King he was expected to keep it. If he shook hands on a deal, it was taken as a given that he would not try to later back out. Most importantly of all though, if you entered into a Marriage… into the Covenant of Marriage…
That was supposed to be binding.
It was supposed to be for life.
Funny. I think I’ve heard Marriage referred to as a covenant maybe twice in my life. Shows how little we Moderns think of our promises, our Word. We dare not even call a thing what it is.
So you see, in such an environment as that no one could respect a King who just up and divorced his wife. It simply wasn’t the done thing. You had to instead convince everyone that you’d never actually made a covenant with her in the first place, or, at least, if you did, that you did so under false or misleading pretenses. You had to claim somehow that your marriage covenant was null and void from the get-go, as just saying, “Hey, changed my mind. I want out,” was just simply not on the table. Now, it’s a labored analogy, yes, but one that is so labored because it is so fitting, but back then The Church had become more or less the equivalent of today’s European Union. The Vatican was a supranational body that mediated between all the various tribes and kingdoms of Europe and which did its best to keep all of them in check. Europeans, you may have noticed, are a particularly war-like people. Every so often they just tend to go off on a rampage. So The Vatican served as a kind of Law Behind The Law, brokering deals and treaties between the various peoples under its command and trying (and often failing) to keep the peace. As a result a peculiar sort of duel-court system had grown up, wherein most kingdoms had both secular and ecclesial (meaning church) courts operating within them, each tasked with the prosecution of different sorts of crimes. Murder for example? Strictly the domain of the secular. The job of the crown to address and punish, like it was for things like theft, or assault or failing to pay one’s taxes. Other crimes however, broadly thought of as more “morality-based” issues, were considered to be under the domain of the Church. Things like adultery, gambling, heresy, or witchcraft. You know, things which threatened the moral order. And marriage, particularly marital dissolution, was an issue firmly within the jurisdiction of the Church.
Now of course, such a political situation is always a bit tenuous. Like the European Union today, which has no military of its own to actually enforce things, The Vatican too had a kind of “Soft Power”, different from the power of the Monarchs which actually had the Men with Spears. The Pope had authority… but, if challenged, it was never really sure how far that authority would actually go. For this reason, you must believe me, The Church really tried to play ball with Henry when he asked for a divorce.
Well. Actually for an annulment.
As I’ve already alluded to Divorce wasn’t really a thing. I mean, it was, but it was a lot more rare and a lot more extreme than you can probably imagine. Some Germanic kingdoms, for instance, practiced “Divorce by Combat”, where the embattled husband and wife would duel to the death to solve their problems. On average, of course, men are larger than women, and that makes a big difference, as anyone who’s ever done boxing can tell you. Even ten pounds, well, when you’re trading blows it’s huge. So, to make things fair and equitable the Husband was given a few handicaps for his divorce proceedings. One is that he was placed in a hole up to his waist and not allowed to exit it for the duration of the divorce. Depending on the perceived size differences between the man and the woman, he might also have one hand tied behind his back. That was optional. He was given some clubs to hit his wife with but, of course, being in a hole he could only hit her legs and that seldom produces a killing blow. This was designed to give the woman more chances to retaliate. For her part, the wife was given several large sacks full of rocks and her job was to try and swing these down into the hole onto her husband’s head.
That was how you got divorced.
When they said, “Till death do us part…”
They were serious
Unfortunately for Henry and The World (and probably his wife Catherine who would’ve probably enjoyed the chance to crush her husband’s skull), at this time in England Divorce by Combat wasn’t allowed, and so the King had to get The Pope to agree that his marriage to Catherine had never actually been Valid. That God himself had never actually seen the thing as legitimate. If you do that then you’re not technically getting divorced, you’re just… recognizing that the marriage never existed. Even though, you thought it did. You know. Because of the whole ceremony and years together and everything.
Now, cynical as I make it sound there, there were legitimate reasons for annulment. If someone was already secretly married to someone else at the time of the wedding for example, or if you found out the bride was actually your long lost sister whom barbarians had stolen from your village when you were both children. Sounds extreme yes but such things happened occasionally and when they did the Church would declare the marriage null and void and free both parties to go and pursue other relationships. That was the line of tack Henry was hoping to use.
Interestingly enough, Henry did have something of a case here. Not much of one… no. But one that was strong enough that everybody could agree to squint and see what wasn’t there if they wanted to. Henry had enough of a case for everybody to do his wishes and also save face. As mentioned, Kings and Queens could be capricious creatures and nobody, not even the Pope, was overly interested in refusing them. I mean in theory yes, The Supreme Pontiff believed he had the blessings and protections of God on his side but… in practice, he was nonetheless a little skeptical about how much that would mean against a wall of angry knights in armor. As such Henry’s lawyers set about working with the Vatican’s to see if they could finagle Henry’s claims into something approaching a legitimate concern. It would be hard to do, but not impossible, for although Catherine was Henry’s first wife, he was her second husband.
The first had been Henry’s brother.
And wasn’t that incest?
“HEY!! HEY LOOK EVERYBODY!!! This is incest right? It’s kinda like incest… right? Can we all agree this is incest so that the King doesn’t go mad and kill everyone please???”
You see Catherine was very important. It would be years before England came to rule the waves and at the moment it was the Spanish Armada which was the undisputed ruler of the sea. Catherine was the princess of Spain, daughter of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, and a marriage between her and an English King was seen as vital to forming an alliance with the great Spanish power. As such, Henry’s older brother, Arthur Prince of Wales, had been given her hand first. Unfortunately, poor Arthur had died of illness a mere six months into their marriage and the crown was quite anxious to keep Catherine in the family. Now, to Henry’s point, it was actually illegal for him to have married his brother’s widow. That was against the standard practices of the Church at the time. However, again, because nobody likes upsetting Kings and Queens, The Vatican at the time had granted Henry a special dispensation for the marriage to proceed, a decision which was now all these years later coming back to bite them. For now Henry was arguing that that dispensation ought to never have been granted. That it was a mistake. That The Vatican and erred in its decision to grant his earlier request and had declared valid a marriage which was for certain not approved of by God Almighty. That being the case, Henry demanded that The Church recognize its error and annul his marriage to Catherine so that he could marry her hand-maiden, Anne Boleyn.
Again. Everyone wanted to do this. It was a weak case but Henry was a strong and scary king and everyone was anxious to appease him.
Everyone but Catherine.
Now please understand. I am not about to say that she was wrong to oppose Henry in this matter. No. I’m only pointing out the fickle nature of Fate which lays the best laid plans of mice and men to waste. A thousand years of Christendom, an entire philosophical outlook on life and society, a whole social structure, an entire language, a culture, even for heaven’s sakes a calendar… were all about to be destroyed by one woman’s refusal to play ball. If she’d just gone along with it, if she’d just quietly acquiesced… The Church of England never happens. If she’d played ball, The British Empire never forms. Possibly the Americans who were revolting in part against the religious tyranny imposed by the British crown would have never separated. Maybe NASA never happens. Maybe there’s never a World War Two. So much hangs on so little and there’s no way she or anyone else could ever possibly have known. We are subject to things greater than ourselves. Forces outside our control govern the course of history and the fate of all our lives.
Ah.
But she was the Queen of England damn it. And she wasn’t going to be tossed aside for some young hussy just because her husband’s sperm didn’t carry enough Y-chromosomes to make a male heir.
Can you blame her?
I can’t.
Perhaps surprisingly, the ecclesial courts were often much more fair and egalitarian than the secular ones. In a secular court, maybe, a wife’s testimony wouldn’t bare up against that of her husbands, but in the church court Catherine was given the chance to have her say. Before she took the stand it was all going along rather swimmingly and the annulment process looked to be more or less in the bag. But when it was Catherine’s turn to speak she dropped a bombshell on the proceedings.
Her previous marriage to Arthur had never been consummated.
She and Arthur had never had sex.
Again, maybe a bit strange to our ears but The Past really is a foreign country. At the time sex and marriage were sort of seen as synonymous and when they weren’t it was a big problem. To have sex outside of marriage either through fornication or adultery were grave sins, and to have never had it within marriage left the marriage bond unsealed. It wasn’t required that a husband and wife have sex like rabbits or anything, but, if they’d never done it while married, not even once…
Then the marriage wasn’t finalized.
Ergo the initial dispensation Henry was now disputing was never needed. Therefore the marriage to Henry was not incestuous. Ipso facto, her marriage was valid and could never be annulled. Henry’s claim had no standing.
Now, if Catherine had been up there claiming that a husband of thirty years had never touched her or something… that would’ve been a hard sell. But, as it happened, she and Arthur had been only fifteen when they were wed. Children. Kids. Moreover it was an arranged marriage and the two were practically strangers. They barely knew each other. It was completely plausible that two inexperienced teenagers might have taken a while to warm up to each other and also completely plausible that they simply hadn’t had that time. As I said, Arthur got sick and died six months later. The Queen’s statement was both imminently plausible and also impossible to contest. There were, after all, no other living witnesses to the event or lack thereof.
It was a nuclear bomb.
Henry’s ambitions to trade his wife in for a younger (and in his mind a more fertile) model, were instantly torpedoed. Catherine swore what she was saying was true and, as I said, back then swearing meant something. Much as he would’ve liked to, The Pople couldn’t come up with any legitimate cover for granting the annulment and Henry was now left married to a woman who hated him and stuck in a union which had failed to produce an heir to his throne.
Well.
Fate is funny.
The Turnings of the Universe more than we can understand.
After the initial fits of rage passed, Henry moved from a place of anger to one of, at least in his own eyes, enlightenment. How could The Church, which was supposed to be God’s representative on Earth, have handled things so poorly. Firstly, it was obvious to him that Catherine was surely lying about the no-sex thing and The True Church should’ve been able to see through that. But, secondly, if she was telling the truth that was almost an even bigger problem, for that meant that the church had granted a dispensation when such was never needed. This Church… This Institution… they were not infallible were they? They made mistakes. And if they made mistakes on such little things…
Well…
The Reformers were even at that moment setting fire to Europe. The words of Martin Luther had set the continent ablaze. Thus far though England had been largely unaffected, and Henry only even dimly aware of the Reformers arguments. Honestly, until that point he probably never even cared to hear them. For centuries England had been a bastion of Catholic Orthodoxy, The Pope’s good servants, first to leap to his defense and jump at his command.
But now…
Now as he sat in bitterness upon his royal bed it was all so obvious. Henry was having an epiphany. The Reformers were right. The Pope was not, after all, head of the True Church.
He was.
(This last bit was the King’s own addendum to Luther’s 95 theses.)
He, The King, was the Divinely Appointed shepherd of his people. Not some dumb Italian a continent away. Why… now that he sat and considered it, wasn’t the very idea of the pope ridiculous? Of course. How had he not seen before? He, Henry, had Divine Right over The Church. He had the responsibility, nay, the duty, to oversee the morality of his people, and things like heresy and blasphemy and marriage were obviously under his jurisdiction. Yes. Of course. Naturally. He was The Head of The Church of England. A new entity. A different thing from the Ecclesia Anglica which had existed before.
Rapidly The King began a purge. With Stalinesque efficiency any bishops or courtiers or priests or nobility who did not see the Truth of his new epiphany were routed out.
And my.
Wasn’t it a messy affair.
Touch and go really.
The King who took the heads of his wives was at this time very much in danger of losing his own. He was after all asking his subjects to commit apostasy. To reject the faith they’d been raised to believe, the faith he himself had told them to follow on pain of damnation for so many years before. People felt as though their immortal souls hung in the balance. As though they were on a knife’s edge, perched precariously between losing their lives or losing their souls. Well. As happens almost every time such a choice is presented… most people chose their lives.
You will find time and again that a man’s deeply held beliefs vanish in a moment if you put a gun against his head.
It took some doing, but in the end most of those in the King’s service accepted his ideas. They probably didn’t believe it in their hearts, no. But what does that matter so long as they were saying it with their lips. Those who wouldn’t go along with the new program were imprisoned or exiled or even put to death. Sir Thomas More, one of the King’s previously most trusted statesmen and now revered as a saint amongst Catholics, allegedly went to the executioner’s ax with kindness on his lips, his last words being, “I am the King’s good servant. But, God’s first.”
And then his head came off.
Well as you can imagine most people weren’t willing to part with their heads. There were revolts. Grumblings. Protests. Here and there rumors of a coup were murmured in the halls but never actually manifested. At least once a large group of English Catholics took up arms in the countryside to try and force the King to repent. Had they pressed their luck they might even have been strong enough to have succeeded. The King however was clever, and talked them down, giving them many empty promises about a return to normalcy that he never intended to fulfill and then, when they had dispersed, had them privately hunted down with a kind of medieval secret police.
So it was that eventually most of England became Protestant.
Totally against their will.
The State cracked down on the old religion and tore down the shrines of the saints and pillaged the monasteries and threw all the icons into the fire. A new liturgy was promulgated, a liturgy in English, and not in Latin, one that was printed out and handed to every priest in every parish. Priests who wouldn’t say the new mass were ousted. Some defrocked. Some killed. And so it was that Merry Old England, Catholic England… it wasn’t so much Reformed as it was murdered.
And then in a generation or two that murder was forgotten. As all murders must be.
A few decades later and the New Englishmen who’d grown up with the new faith took it for granted as the Truth. Taught to hate the papacy from a young age, they did. Taught to think The State and the Church were the same, they assumed such was the only way. So it always is. So it always goes.
We have seen similar in our time. Communism or Fascism or even Democracy foisted upon an unwilling population, only to have that population embrace them shortly thereafter because there was simply nothing else to do. Contra our deeply engrained beliefs about The Will of the People and The Rights of Man, the reality is that in most cases what the People want doesn’t really matter very much. Honestly, I’m not sure what the rulers want really matters much either. The English Reformation after all is the story of absolutely nobody getting what they wanted, not even Henry, who despite all his machinations had his throne slip back into the hands of he and Catherine’s daughter Mary, who tried in vain to reverse her father’s Protestantism. A project which earned her the nickname “Bloody” in the process of the failing.
All the plans, all the scheming, all the jockeying for power and position, all the tradition, all the custom, all the history.
You can’t count on any of it.
Nothing in this world is static. Nothing is sure. Everything is subject to change and every attempt we make to create stability will be washed away.
We live Beneath the Moon.
Castles Made of Sand
This is not an anti-Reformation post.
Nor is it a pro-Catholic one.
It’s rather more of a lament, or maybe just an observation, about how powerless we are in the face of History’s changes. You have to understand, everyone in England prior to Henry thought things were settled. Truth existed, and they knew what it was, and society, even with whatever faults it may have had, seemed ordered and complete. A man could wake up in the morning and look out over his farm with the knowledge that it was the same farm that his grandfather had worked, and his grandfather before him. For generations out of mind everyone had had the same faith, believed more or less the same things, had more or less the same occupations, and lived more or less the same way. I don’t say of course that everyone was happy. That’s never the case. But most people were probably content. Possessed of that satisfaction that only comes with settled assurance and dependability. The satisfaction of Knowing Where You Stand.
And then it all went away.
Gone. Like tears in rain.
We all want, desperately, to find solid ground. Terra Firma. An unmovable surface on which to set our feet. Indeed I think probably you could say that that desire is synonymous with civilization. The drive to concretize things. To be able to count on tomorrow. We spend our lives building institutions and edifices and legacies and empires that we hope will stand the test of time, putting up every guardrail against them slipping that we can imagine.
But they never do.
No matter how empowered we might feel we are to affect change… at the end of the day we’re all just along for the ride. The solid structures we think we’ve made, for whatever reason or for no reason whatever, one day just aren’t solid anymore. One day they crumble. Castles made of sand, fall in the sea, eventually.
I mean, after all, it’s not as though in the centuries prior to Henry there hadn’t also been lustful kings. It’s not as though in the centuries prior to Luther priests had never gone rouge. At every other time before this one though, The System that existed had been able to absorb and handle such men without incident, so completely that we don’t even remember who they were. But this time something was different… only who the hell knows what it was?
A word here, a letter there. The right man in the wrong place. A single gunshot rings out over the streets of Sarajevo and the world has to sacrifice their sons in muddy trenches. An examiner has a poor breakfast and rejects an art student he might have otherwise accepted, and the Jews end up in camps. A queen decides she’s not going to play ball with her husband and we end up with the British Raj. A few typists make clerical errors, and bombs are dropped on Japan. The course of history is governed by the tiniest of things. Flaps of a butterfly’s wing that knock down empires.
And we’re expected to live in such uncertainty…
Difficult.
I’m an astrologer, non-practicing. By this I mean that I believe in astrology but never consult my horoscope. I don’t believe in it in quite that way. To be sure, I have known astrologers who can make rather astonishing predictions about the future based on the movements of the stars, for example, I know a man who predicted a major geopolitical event, to the day, months in advance based on his reading of “The Sky Clock”. That said, I remain nonetheless skeptical about it’s overall predictive power. For me it’s more of the concept behind astrology which matters. I don’t personally get into the fine details.
Of course, the issue for modern people in believing in astrology is the lack of a Mechanism. You know, lack of a How. It’s never articulated How or by what Mechanism the movements of the stars could ever possibly affect our lives. It’s a quaint idea, sure, but… how’s it supposed to work? Jupiter in retrograde? Okay. And? How could that possibly matter in our day-to-day life? What? Are we proposing that maybe the infinitesimal differences in gravity this might cause somehow have cascading macro effects? Is it the light photons that are doing it? Are the astrologers proposing that maybe we are quantum-entangled with Venus? There’s nothing there! How could the position of Saturn or Gemini possibly influence what happens to us here on Earth!?
Well, they can’t.
You’re asking the wrong question.
There’s no mechanism. There’s just a beat.
You see in Medieval Astrology had this idea of The Music of the Spheres. This belief that the celestial bodies were all actually involved in a great dance. A Divine Musical. The planets and stars were whirling and spinning about up there not in deference to laws, but out of Joy. Out of the fun and thrill of movement to a Music beyond our hearing.
That’s sounds dumb to us maybe. Planets and stars don’t dance after all. They don’t have fun.
Okay.
But do they follow Laws?
What, is there some celestial police force out their handing out tickets to planets who don’t orbit properly? Will The Big Dipper be called before the magistrate for failing to be in its proper place this Fall?
During the Scientific Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, people tried their absolute damnedest to get rid of every kind of anthropomorphism in their thinking. You know, that Old Man in the Sky seemed omnipresent, and gods and goddesses hid everywhere inside our language. They were men of Reason after all. They believed they’d evolved beyond the need for all such magical thinking, and they wanted to evolve the language to reflect that. To be objective. To remove any hint of a specter of some disembodied rational actor controlling Nature behind the scenes. Where the Greeks had said that rocks fall because they were in love with their home (the Earth) and trying to get back to it, the New Scientist said instead that the rock was simply obeying a law. Where the theologians had said birds sought to mate to fulfill their God-given telos, the new biologists said they were rather driven by instinctual drives. Where the shamans had described the environment in terms of a loving Mother Earth, the new rationalists instead described it as simply and Eco-system. A system, basically, of interlocking machines.
Drives, laws, systems…
We didn’t do a very good job at getting away from anthropomorphizing. We just anthropomorphized in a different way.
I mean, aren’t Laws a human construct? Isn’t being driven an idea from Engineering? When did the rainforest ever sit down with a schematic and come up with a System for its ecology? Does not the entire way we speak of Evolution make it sound as though Life itself is following some kind of plan?
We’re human.
We can only see things through that lens.
It’s actually impossible for us not to anthropomorphize things. For us to not remake them in our own image.
That accepted… which is more appealing? A legalistic cosmos where the planets are forced to follow their paths on pain of punishment for breaking “The Law”, or a personal cosmos where they are dancing out of Joy?
After all, what is most immediate to us? What is most important? Mechanics? Laws? Engineering?
Not to me. Not personally.
For me relationships are more important. Emotions. Friendship, love, and passion. The things known to us in the womb and our first and most immediate experiences of the world. Only later, when we are dumber and have been brainwashed by enculturation, do we learn to speak of things like systems and laws and rules. And so if The Ancients said things fall because they’re made of earth or that balloons float because they’re made of air, because they were seeking to get back Home… Is that really so stupid? Perhaps. But no more stupid than claiming they fall because they’re obeying traffic laws. Both are anthropomorphisms, but only one involves Love.
And yes, I hear you, sure. We can indeed mathematically describe the way a thing falls. Sure.
But WHY it falls is a different question. Whys are always answered by stories. By narratives. Not by maths. And currently the story our culture tells about such things is that inanimate objects are following laws or the dictates of drives or systems. Saying things fall at 9.8 meters-per-second squared “because of the law of gravity” is no less ridiculous than saying they fall at 9.8 meters-per-second squared “because they want to get back home.” Both ascribe to Nature something which is a purely human construct. One a legal system, the other a desire.
…
But no.
No I speak wrongly here because a desire is more than human and unlike a law certainly not a construct. Do animals not desire? Do they not love? They do. And do plants not likewise feel emotion? I think so. So then is it ridiculous to posit that perhaps so too do rocks and minerals, air and water and light and stone?
It might be. I don’t know. But I do know that Jesus spoke to the wind and the waves and that they listened. I know likewise that he got mad at a tree for its bad behavior. I know that he told us that the rocks themselves would praise God if Man refused.
I personally think it’s likely that the universe is alive. It think it is joyful. I think, indeed, there is a great dance going on above our heads. A great movement to a pattern beyond our understanding. And there lies the crucial bit. For the idea for the original astrologers was simply that.
The idea was that The Music, that great pattern beyond all patterns which moved the Heavens…
Also moved you.
It was only that you, unlike the stars, were simply too dim to notice.
There’s an old dystopian novel, the name of which escapes me at the moment, with the premise that society’s tyrants kept the populace enslaved by means of a beat. A beat like in music. Loudspeakers all around the city producing just a constant steady rhythm of background noise. A kind of thwak, rat-a thwak, rat-a thwak, rat-a thwak, rat-a thwak over and over again with no variation. Sounds benign enough I suppose until you stop and think about it. As the novel pointed out, biology is rhythmic, and you and I are no exception. Just as you will find your foot tapping to music without your consent, or your head bobbing to a beat you don’t even really like, everyone and everything in the novel found that their actions began to sync up with the percussions. This omnipresent beat.
Yes. Temporarily one could resist it through conscious effort but inevitably when they got tired and lost their focus they would discover to their horror that once again their steps were falling in time with the music, their breath somehow hitting each of the pauses… even lovers found that their caresses now possessed a curious time.
That’s more of what I’m suggesting.
There’s no Mechanism in astrology.
Just Music.
Like in the novel, but intended for good instead of evil, God is playing a cosmic song that we can’t quite hear with our ears. The idea is that the universe has beats to it. Rhythms. That it is, in fact, a song. That is why the stars, the heavenly host… in other words the angels… were said to sing. That’s why they have harps. Like the omnipresent rhythm in the novel, the ancient view of Astrology was that everything, from penguins to Pluto, were driven to conform to this Heavenly Sound. When the Music of the Spheres rose and became more light and joyful, it was more likely that blessing would occur. When it slowed and became more sober, be watchful, for tragedy was more likely to strike. And at any given time the melody might be different things for each of us, as a symphony likewise has many instruments playing many parts, but all nonetheless the same song. That’s why you, personally, have a horoscope, just as you, personally, would have your own bit of sheet music in a band. Yes, there is a Cosmic Song we’re all playing, but you, personally, have your own part. The stars therefore were useful therefore, not because they were special and controlling our lives, but because they were the most macro manifestation of the music. The place where we could get the biggest picture of what God was up to.
Oh, and they were also useful because they were perfect.
The stars were dancing perfectly to a song we here on Earth were all screwing up.
Doesn’t that make sense? I mean, you can, today, if you know what you are doing, predict with perfect accuracy the exact location of Jupiter in the night sky three thousand years hence. You can likewise do the same in reverse and tell use precisely where the constellation Gemini was at the birth of Christ. The sun rises and the sun falls with perfect predictability each day and the winter and summer solstices never catch us by surprise. The Will of God, if there is such a thing, is done perfectly in Heaven. The celestial bodies dance to his Music without a single misstep. Here, on Earth, we are driven likewise to conform to the Music but are always cursed with a tin-ear and two left feet. We are always mucking it up.
We are, in fact, always sinning. That’s what sin actually is.
This is why Christ instructed us to pray the way he did. To ask that God’s will be done on Earth, as it is in Heaven.
Because we live beneath the Moon. On Earth. In The Realm of Imperfection. The Realm of Change.
Life Beneath The Moon
You see the Moon was viewed as the half-way point. The barrier. The buffer zone between The Realm of Change and The Realm of Eternity. It is the celestial body possessed of both qualities, both going round and round its course with perfect predictability but also subject to a constant cycle of dying and being reborn. Every month (every moon-th, that’s where the word comes from) the Moon vanishes as though dead, only to reappear once again and grow and wax strong. It is, as it were, the only heavenly body also caught in the Wheel of Samsara, the great turning of birth and death.
You see, on our side of the Moon we have forgotten how to dance properly to God’s Music and so we are subject to change and corruption and accident and death. Out there, on the other side in Deep Heaven though… The Heavenly Host dances perfectly and lives forever.
That’s why those stars that sinned, those shooting stars, those angels, had to fall to Earth.
Because by their actions they had ceased to be harmonious. Striking discordant notes and missing dance steps through their pride.
This you see, being The Realm of Change, means it’s also the place where it’s possible that you can Repent.
Our existence here therefore, and our struggle, was seen as a constant effort to try and sync ourselves up to the Heavenly Song. To train ourselves to dance to the Music of Love with such precision that when we die our souls might catch that Rhythm and rise to dance among the stars instead of falling deeper into the earth… farther and farther away from the sky.
Being here was seen as a gift you see.
A chance to make things right.
So, yes. I believe in Astrology.
That’s why stories like the English Reformation make me sad.
Inescapable Changes
The promise of Christ was that God’s Kingdom would come one day, and we have ever been about the business of trying to set it up. Egypt. Rome. Christendom under the Pope or King Henry. The British Empire. The Yuan Dynasty. America. NATO and the Neo-liberal World Order.
Man is driven to try and create Eternity. To create structures and systems which will conform perfectly to the Heavenly music as last forever. We want to make the final philosophy which explains all, develop the unified field theory of physics, discover universal ethics, produce a perfectly just and total system of government. We build towers and pyramids and obelisks. We create monuments. We dress our rulers in fine clothes and set them in fancy buildings and hang on their every word as though they were gods. We imbue our documents with quasi-religious import, treating the Declaration of Independence or The Magna Carta as though they were written by angelic hands.
And every single time it all falls down.
Because it never is perfect.
Not really.
Sometimes it might be pretty good, for that particular verse or stanza of the Music... but inevitably the Cosmos moves on to the next bar. Inevitably we find ourselves once again wildly out of tune.
Personally I think that’s why all our Empires rise and fall.
I think that’s why really.
Sure, yes, for any of them we could point to economic insecurity or famine or war or moral laxitude but those to my estimation are just symptoms of falling out of tune. Examples of a dance move that worked in a previous movement of the symphony no longer working in the new one. Failures to keep up with the conductor.
Failures to keep the Time.
That’s why it never mattered how we approached the Reformation, or the American Revolution, or World War 1, or The Collapse of Paganism, or The End of The Bronze Age. It didn’t. They were in some sense inevitable. As much as we hate to hear it, the Universe and the course of History is always mostly out of our hands. Perhaps that’s Fatalistic. Maybe. I don’t think so though. I just think it’s reality, or at least the only vision of reality which accounts for such small minutia like a King not being able to get his wife pregnant leading to Gandhi’s Salt March to the Sea. I just think The Music is out of our hands. I think that we cannot hope to control it and the absolute best we can do is try and play along. To play along and know at the same time that we’re never set. On this side of the Moon, we’re never done. Change will come, and you’d better be ready to learn the new steps.
Maybe now you see why Religion has always been concerned about Heaven. About The Sky. Because what we want, what we really, really want… is to attain perfection and to stay there. As it is in Heaven. In The Sky. Perfect. Radiant. Beautiful and at Peace.
Like all the unchanging stars.
And maybe also now you see why The Final Victory, the ultimate triumph of Good over Evil, involves the making of a New Heaven and a New Earth. In the last book of the Bible we’re given a vision of The City of God coming down from The Sky. Of Heaven invading Earth. Of a time when we shall really have The Empire that Doesn’t End. When all the swords are beaten into plowshares and the lion lays down at peace with the lamb.
The time when finally, at long last, we shall have learned the dance.
Amor Vincit Omnia.
Oh Yoshi!
I'm dancing after reading your post.
Gorgeous honey!
Thank you for your insightful, delightful, and loving words.
May you continue to be blessed with words sung together that remind me of what truly matters, and that make me want to keep dancing in the mists of the missteps.
💞❣️💕
There is astrology hidden in the Bible. Psalm 19:1 says "the heavens declare the glory of God". This isn't just a metaphor, it's literal. Paul quotes Psalm 19:4 in Romans 10:18:
"But I ask, have they not heard? Indeed they have, for 'Their voice has gone out to all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world'".
Paul is literally saying here that the stars are proclaiming the gospel to all the world. And that's literally what happens in the beginning of Matthew's gospel, where the stars announce the birth of Christ.