Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (17 page)

The rising sign in a chart is sensitive to the time of birth more than anything else in the chart. It is the part of the sky that is coming up over the eastern horizon at the time and place that you are born. It changes every minute.

The computer assumed that someone would not really know what
actual
time he was born if he was born during World War
II in America. We had an extra hour of daylight savings time. In 1944, when I was born, if your birth certificate said that you were born at 1:53
PM
in December, you were really born at 12:53
PM
. I knew that when I filled out the form. I put in the right time and called it EST rather than EWT. The computer figured I didn’t know what I was writing and corrected EWT to EST. The result was that I got a horoscope that was an hour off. My moon was misplaced just a half degree to the west. Against the backdrop of the stars, the moon moves slowly toward the east, not to be confused with its apparent movement to the west caused by the earth’s rotation. But my rising sign was way off. It was Taurus instead of Aries.

Being educated in these things, I was more entertained than damaged. God forbid I had been dependent exclusively on that computer to tell me about myself.

To be an Aries rising and to mistakenly think that you are a Taurus rising could cause you to conclude that you were fucking up. A Taurus rising feels himself to have physical substance, he takes care of things like a farmer, he doesn’t depend on others a lot because he knows they can’t be trusted. His humor is ironic if at all, and he is thoroughly fixed. He is a mountain. He does not pray for he knows that nothing changes. But he believes.

An Aries rising feels his oats, but not his substance. He does new things. He is alone and so he originates. He has a conscience because everything that happens is his fault, but he can behave excessively since no one else is there. He dares. He prays. But he does not believe.

I knew that a mistake had been made when I read the paragraphs that were based on my rising sign.

The rest of the printout was correct. I wondered whether
someone familiar with me, but not with the fault in this rendering of my horoscope, could determine which of the various pronouncements was wrong.

I gave the printout to a really good friend who didn’t know anything about astrology. I asked him to go over the two hundred or so items about me and put an
x
beside any that he thought did not apply to me. He did. Almost exclusively he marked those items that were derived from the bogus rising sign.

I had copied the printout so nobody could see his x’s because I am a scientist. I tried to find more people who were willing to look at my horoscope seriously. I found two. They also put
x
’s most often by the paragraphs that had to do with my misplaced rising sign.

I explained the error to the people with the computer and they redid my horoscope with the correct time. The new one fit. Once more I asked friends to mark passages that didn’t apply to me. There were fewer
x
’s and they weren’t concentrated on items from the rising sign.

From all this I can conclude a number of things. A horoscope that accurately reflects your personality can be cast by a computer if you give it the correct birth data, and at least three of my friends know me at least as well as a computer program. It was entertaining and a pretty cheap experiment. Little girls, people at parties, and voices out of the darkness by the Navarro River can tell you what month you were born in.

We consider ourselves to be sophisticated, intelligent, modern people. Our psychologists and sociologists consider astrology to be nonsense. Academic departments concerned with human behavior consider astrology to be a confusing distraction,
with no serious value to their pursuits. And it’s not that they’ve never heard of it. They’ve noticed that every daily paper in the world has a column devoted to it and that lots of humans pay attention to it. The reason they don’t pay attention to it is that it would embarrass them in front of their colleagues. There’s no proven body of facts in the social sciences that says human behavior does not contain elements that are related to planetary positions at the time of birth. Instead, there’s a broad and arrogant understanding among social science professionals that folklore, like astrology, is for simpletons. Without doing any simple experiments to test some of the tenets of astrology, it has been completely ignored by psychologists in the last two centuries.

Most of them are under the false impression that it is non-scientific and not a fit subject for their serious study. They are dead wrong. Whether or not the present-day practitioners of astrology are using scientific methods has no direct bearing on whether the body of knowledge they employ is true and valid. To have dismissed it without any experimental evaluation as insubstantial drivel from the masses says a lot about the fact that the present-day mental health practitioners have their heads firmly inserted in their asses and generally need more help than they provide.

We know little about ancient astrology besides the fact that as long as five thousand years ago civilizations ranging from Babylonia to China independently looked to the heavens for help in understanding life on Earth. In the seventeenth century, when men like Galileo, Kepler, and Newton were laying the foundations of astronomy, they were also concerned with the astrological significance of the observations they were
recording and learning how to predict. Somewhere along the line, though, the precision that they could bring to the act of measurement and mathematical prediction must have outweighed the usefulness of the thoughts they could bring to bear on the rather more vague concepts that astrology required. Men who stay up all night looking through long black tubes, recording numbers with four or five digits, and inventing calculus don’t necessarily know a whole lot about human beings, and they aren’t likely to take an interest in the complex interactions between people and the stars. They’ve got enough to worry about just trying to figure out why the orbit of Mars is elliptic instead of circular.

So astronomy separated itself from astrology. But not because one worked and the other didn’t. No one did extensive empirical testing of astrological facts and concluded that nothing useful could be predicted from any of it. Astronomers just preferred to stick to the cyclical movements of planets rather than the cyclical movements of people.

They specialized in the numbers. And astronomy is a rich and interesting field because of it. Behold the nice pictures of things very far away that the Hubble telescope sends back.

But astrology is still here and it could be a valuable tool for understanding human beings if serious students of behavior would lower themselves to examine it. Are there any serious students of behavior? Medical researchers have for a long time recognized that folk remedies often work. Ethnobotanists examine the healing use of herbs by primitive people, who don’t know what molecules are, but when the herb works, it works, and therefore it gets incorporated into scientific medicine. If nobody knows how it works, somebody finds out. Folklore
is a rich source of new information. But you don’t hear about modern psychologists out mining the world of folklore for new concepts. You don’t hear about it because it’s not done.

They’re stuck with a loose set of theories of learning and behavior that completely ignore a vast area of human understanding that begins with the premise that all men are definitely not created equal. They are divided into a complex array of different types that can be at least sorted out, if not partially understood, by looking at the positions of the planets in the sky at the site and time of their birth. Preposterous, but it is true, and it is scientifically accessible. Furthermore, these various types of people are affected differentially by the continued movement and rearrangements of those same planets for the rest of their lives. They come in and out of cyclical bursts of creativity, periods of deep depression, warm fulfilling experiences, horrible losses, and on and on.

How can somebody call himself a student of human behavior and hang out a shingle offering to help humans solve their problems without at least studying astrology? How could an institution of higher learning grant someone a Ph.D. in psychology without requiring at least a few courses in astrology? If psychologists were doing okay, that is, if they had a good track record for freeing their patients from the pain that they pay good money to sort out and be relieved of, then I could see why the good head doctors could thumb their noses at the folklore of astrology, but
nobody
would be so demented as to imagine for a moment that when you go to a shrink you get anything resembling good mental health. If you are lucky in your choice of psychologist, maybe you won’t do yourself in this year, but no one expects a human in chronic emotional pain to get
a miracle cure. In other words, psychology is practiced by a bunch of well-paid incompetents. They can’t fix a broken heart.

They ought to be looking around for some new theories. Freud, Jung, Maslow—they were cool, fun to read maybe—but we’re still neurotic, and some of us still jump off bridges. Astrology by itself is not the answer to all our problems any more than herbs from the Amazon witch doctor, but it’s a shame to waste such a vast and ancient resource because of the simple fact that our modern witch doctors are too frozen in their attitudes to take a look around.

I don’t go to shrinks. Would you take your car to a mechanic who refused to acknowledge the existence of separate makes and models?

Astrology also contains a deep mystery or two that should whet the appetite of any curious student of “what’s going on in the universe.” How the hell does my brain have any way of knowing about the relative position of the planets before I learned how to use the
Nautical Almanac?
It must somehow be in touch with these things either directly or indirectly since it seems to be affected by them. And the “how” of that should be as interesting to a physiologist as to a sociologist, or a psychiatrist, even a physicist. The fact that it is correlated with these things can be easily established by observing the non-random distribution of birthdays among various professions.

A recent scientific study of the distribution of medical students in birth months discovered that a lot of medical students were born in late June. They postulated that it was because the sun was up earlier and so there was more light for them right away and they could be outside and therefore would get interested
in biology. Well, that was bullshit. It’s the same in Australia, and the sun is not up early in June down in the antipodes. Successful applicants to medical school do not come equally from each month. They cluster around Gemini–Cancer in both hemispheres. More biochemists are born in Sagittarius. Lawyers have their own distribution, and some people claim reasonably that lawyers hatch from eggs and eat their own young—not enough obviously—so they have their own separate problems. Sociology has so far turned a blind eye to these things. It could be that’s one of the reasons sociology is so boring and such a worthless science. It’s pedantic and uninformed.

I was born at 17:58 Greenwich Mean Time on December 28, 1944 in Lenoir, North Carolina. You can find out more about me from that than you can from reading this book.

N
ANCY POINTED OUT
to me this evening, in a book she bought by a certified nutritionist, that margarine should be avoided. The author goes so far as to suggest that it is a villain.

I don’t like margarine either. I never eat it, and Nancy never serves it. I like butter, but I spent fifteen minutes on the Internet because I wanted to know why the author would say something like that. The Internet is like a library in your home. Even late at night, I can find out whether claims are supported by established facts or whether they were just made up for effect.

It doesn’t take a lot of education to check things out. All it takes is access to resources and a minor distrust of everyone else on the planet and a feeling that they may be trying to put something over on you. At the end of her book, the author had a long list of references supposedly supporting her conclusions. While she listed the references, she failed to specify exactly what books supported which arguments. She didn’t make it clear where she had learned what she had claimed she had learned, making it difficult to check up on her. Scientific method takes issue with this kind of callous disregard for the impersonal nature of knowledge.

I searched the Internet for “trans fats.” I found twenty-eight references. One was relevant. It referred to a study which concluded that, compared to saturated fats alone, margarine might cause a minor change in the ratio between so-called good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. This information should not be reason to call margarine “villainous.”

Cholesterol has been shown to be an important indicator of cardiovascular disease, or not, depending on which reports you believe. But there are a lot of clinics that do cholesterol profiles and make a lot of money at it. People believe in the numbers they generate, and they try all kinds of things to raise their level of good cholesterol and lower the level of bad cholesterol. Now, if doing this makes people happy, they should keep doing it. But it doesn’t make any sense. No one has any hard evidence that all this stuff about good cholesterol and bad cholesterol makes any difference.

This is what we know about cholesterol. It makes up a considerable percentage of the membranes surrounding every single one of our cells. We make cholesterol ourselves, and we control the amount of it that we make. Cholesterol synthesis in humans is connected to the synthesis of hormones like androgens and estrogens, which are connected to all of our sexual functions. Chemists think of them as cholesterol derivatives. Cholesterol is not some horrible thing that chickens put into their eggs, it’s something our bodies need, otherwise we wouldn’t be making it. If there was something wrong with it, our bodies would have learned how to make something else to replace it.