A few month ago, we talked about the book written by Dane Rudhyar’s 1974 book The Astrology of America’s Destiny, since then few discussion had been cover it. The recent wars and conflicts in different part of the world again challenge an old American belief: These words — “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”, which “reclaimed the beliefs of a relatively small group — of educated men who had been stirred by the ideals formulated by the Humanists and the intellectuals of the Renaissance and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries”. I would like to read together with you the Chapter Two: The Roots of American nation.
Part of The Roots of the American Nation – Page 2
Every birth has antecedents which conditions its character and define its essential purpose. It has a purpose because it satisfies a need inherent in the time and place of its occurrence. We may think of this need in terms of the desire of the parents for a child who will fill their emotional wants, prolong their existence, perpetuate their sociopolitical and religious beliefs, and contribute to the preservation of the human race. We may also refer this need to an overall planetary process of spiritual-mental development (a religiously inclined person would speak here of “God’s plan”) which requires that a particular type of person should be born in a particular environment to fill a definite place in that vast evolutionary scheme, somewhat as a particular cell fulfills a definite function in the body of a human being.
Relatively speaking, a great personage or genius uniquely fills some need of his time and society; but, any human being can be said to be born in answer to some collective human need. Whether he is actually able to fulfill this need is another matter. He may fail or only partially succeed, but the potentiality inherent in the fact of his birth was there, whether it is actualized or not. It is this “Potentiality” that a birth chart formulates in the astrological code represented by the positions and interactions of the celestial bodies in the cosmic environment of the birth. The birth chart defines the potentiality, but not the degree or the quality of the actuality — that is, of what the person will turn out to be and to achieve.
This applies equally to the birth of a collective person — a national organism. A nation is born at a certain time, in a particular place and under definite telluric, climatic and magnetic conditions in order to contribute in a more or less definite way to the evolution of mankind as a whole. What it is to contribute is essentially a certain quality of humanhood — a special way of meeting the problems involved in existence within the Earth’s biosphere and of responding to the challenges which life in an international and geophysical world constantly brings to a nation and to its leaders in all fields of human activity. We can speak of such a “quality” as the character or temperament of the people participating in the collective activities of the national whole; it is possible, for instance, to characterize the English, American, French, German, Russian, Arab or Indian temperaments.
Such a national character both produces and results from a particular culture. A typical way of life and characteristic institutions are built in order to actualize, consciously in rare cases, but mostly unconsciously and according to “the force of circumstances,” the birth-potential of the nation and to externalize the motives that brought about the formation of the national entity and its emergence from whatever surrounded it and led to its birth. A nation is often formed in a violent or somehow cathartic manner by “colonists” from an older nation who wilfully seek independence from the mother country that through them had sought to extend its field of operation and to export its economy and its culture. In other cases a nation is born when after overcoming a disintegrating society, a number of migrating tribes coalesce into their own sociopolitical organism. This is what happened in Europe during the early Middle Ages as Germanic and Slavic tribes developed into small feudal units which eventually were absorbed by a powerful governmental nucleus giving its characteristic organization to the nascent national entity.
The ideas stated above imply a purposive view of history and of human (and even planetary) evolution. They are not likely to be acceptable to most academic historians of our day. Neither is the concept of cycles of civilization popular in academia, in spite of the extensively documented work of historians like Oswald Spengler (whose major work, The Decline of the West, was written sixty years ago) and Arnold Toynbee (whose A Study of History was written after World War 1). The cyclic concept of the development of civilizations, however, is implied in the astrological approach to history, and the study of great planetary cycles and precessional Ages provides an objective and rational foundation for the belief that civilization — or “societies,” in Toynbee’s use of the term are — much like organisms which are born, develop and disintegrate — according to some kind of structural rhythm.
In this study of the destiny of the American nation we therefore have to deal with two basic factors: on the one hand we should survey the development of the karmic relationship between the new American nation and the nations and cultures of Europe, and particularly England as the official mother country; on the other hand, we should consider the basic reasons and the more external and temporary motives which enabled the people of the Colonies, or at least their leaders, to become I willful and effective protagonists in a vast historical process of transformation of human society which had begun many centuries before the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble of the Constitution set the pace for a spreading sociopolitical revolution. Such a revolution may be only the first phase of a more far-reaching, more deeply rooted, upheaval — a revolution in consciousness.
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The “vast historical process of transformation of human society” to which I am referring can be identified with the development of Western civilization, a development which really began around the sixth century B.C. in Greece. It had been heralded by the great and unsuccessful reform of Egypt’s religion by Akh-en-Aton, and by the also relatively unsuccessful revelation which Moses brought to his people: the revelation of a God Who declared Himself to be the very principle of I-am-ness — thus, of individuality in its most absolute sense. The foundation of our Western civilization indeed is the concept of the individual person, along with the assertion that this individual person has an essential “worth and dignity” regardless of its condition and circumstances of birth, and of what it can produce in and for the society into which it is born.
The story of Western civilization is one of attempts to a concept of society allowing, nay encouraging, its members to regard themselves as individuals — individuals who are essentially “free and equal” and as such endowed with inalienable rights in any social conditions. These attempts have been constantly frustrated; they represented a definite challenge to the foundations upon which all societies had previously been built, foundations we can characterize as the expression of the “tribal order.” This tribal order was a manifestation of biological and psychic realities. It was rooted in the deep feeling that the unity of the social grouping — the tribe — was derived from a reality, a more or less mythical Great Ancestor or a god, that was in the past. Everything “sacred” was meant to reproduce a past event, a creative event by gods or a man-woman pair of a quasi-divine origin.
It is this concept of the tribal order — and later on, of a social order based on the different abilities of human beings to produce wares, ideas or acts of service to the expanded community, kingdom or empire — that our Western civilization has tried to supplant, or at least to polarize, The tribal and post-tribal order emphasized production and made human beings almost totally subservient to the requirements of this production. In contrast, the essential character of the democratic order is that it stresses the absolute spiritual character of the individual person. In more recent times our Western society has also stressed the nearly absolute individual rights of its collective persons — thus the concept of “national sovereignty”.
It is evident that these two rights — the right of a community to enforce patterns of productivity for the welfare of all its members, and the right of the individual to become and remain an independent person centered in his truth-of-being and essential spiritual identity — have a polar character. From the point of view of Western civilization, both have to be recognized and kept operative. The basic problem concerns the relative strength and value accorded to each by any particular society, nation or community. Because these two concepts of rights easily become the foundations of two opposite philosophies of life and of social organization — individualism versus collectivism — they constantly generate internal as well as external. conflicts: conflicts within nations, and conflicts between nations which at least theoretically, have opted for a way of life and institutions emphasizing one or the other of these principles. The basic conflict even manifests in two opposite concepts of knowledge and scientific inquiry, atomism versus holism.
Western civilization at all levels has been and is based on this polarization. We see its manifestation in the contrast between the ideals of free enterprise (or laissiee-faire capitalism) and socialism. The two-party system in the United States is a watered-down aspect of this polarization. The essential point is that our civilization is based on conflicts, and that because of this it has proven to be exceedingly dynamic; but this dynamism nevertheless tends to express itself in the form of violence, violence which has become a way of life.
Such a dialectical way of life has been accepted and even justified by our American nation, which inherited it from the European past. America inherited the religious form of violence strongly implied in Puritanism — violence against oneself and one’s biopsychic urges, and violence against dissenters and scapegoats (the burning of witches). It inherited also the conquistadors’ kind of violence, which led to the destruction of Indian tribes and the crude, even if at times heroic, conquest of a vast continent subjected to all kinds of depredation and exploitation for personal gain. America also went one step further than European serfdom by importing thousands of African slaves and allowing as many to die in transit from their native land.
The destruction of Indians, Negro slavery, and finally the wholesale pollution of the land, water and air — plus the psychological pollution accompanying the cult of violence featured by motion pictures, television and a myriad of popular books — have been a heavy price to pay for an amazing, yet chaotic, productivity and for a life of abundance which, welcome as it is, has often turned out-to be morally and biologically self-defeating because of its implications and its uneven repartition. Feverish and ruthless forms of competition, always an inch away from the boundaries between legality and crime — and often ignoring these boundaries — constitute only the shadow of the individualism and the freedom which Western civilization has been meant to uphold. By making an ever more intense productivity possible, science and technology exacerbated and intellectualized man’s instinctual drive for power; power over other human beings as much as over physical nature, power whose great symbol became the dollar.
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We can lump the various movements against which the builders of Christian orthodoxy fought under the general term of Gnosticism; but there were many kinds of Gnostics, some linked with the Hermetic movement in Egypt, others with what, at a later period, was set down as the Hebrew Kabballah and no doubt was influenced by the old Chaldeans’ wisdom of Babylon. Still other Gnostic groups sought to prolong the Orphic, Eleusian, neo-Pythagorean and neo-Platonic traditions, and even the teachings of the Buddhist missionaries who, in the time of the great Indian King Asoka, had settled on the shores of the Dead Sea.
The Catholic Church was successful in condensing, appropriating and transforming much of the complex esoteric material that had been poured out by the Gnostic “sects,” center in what it was able to keep of all these highly intellectual ideas and of the great symbols of the ancient Mysteries around the personage of Jesus Christ, considered the one and only Son of God. After a series of councils in which dissident groups were anathematized, the Church triumphed and became the official religion of the disintegrating Roman Empire, then of the slowly settling down Germanic and Slavic tribes. It also absorbed the old Celtic traditions. But this success was never total. Gnostic movements sprang up here and there during the Middle Ages. The Crusades, by bringing French, English and German noblemen in contact with the still flourishing centers of Near Eastern culture and tradition — especially with the Sufi Movement, which had become the esoteric aspect of Islam(4) — spurred the spread of mystical and occult movements. This was especially the case in southern France, where the influence of the Mozarabic culture of Islamic Spain, and of kabbalistic doctrines, had been strongly felt. There the Albigenses flourished along Gnostic lines; and in northern France the Order of the Templars also gained in importance and (unfortunately for its members) in wealth.(5) This led the French monarch to savagely destroy the two movements, with the help of the Pope.
At the same time, and under the influence of similar ancient traditions, the masons who were building the magnificent Gothic cathedrals, under the leadership of architects whose names are mostly lost, incorporated in these cathedrals and their rose windows an immense amount of traditional occult and astrological symbolism. These lodges of “operative” masons were precursors of the lodges of “speculative” Masons which were formed in the early eighteenth century or a little earlier. On June, 24, 1717, a Grand Master, Anthony Sayer, was elected and for the first time given jurisdiction over several Masonic lodges, marking the effective beginning of modern speculative Freemasonry. (It is called “speculative” because it used basic philosophic concepts and symbolic rituals to bring to the intellectual classes of the Western world a free, nondogmatic, nonecclesiastic approach to man, God and the universe.)
A fast-growing network of Masonic lodges became the means whereby the rationalistic and humanistic ideals that for three centuries had been developing in Europe could effectively be propagated. Masonry had reached the American colonies during the seventeenth century, and according to the Encyclopedia of American Facts and Dates (a fascinating mine of information published by T. Y. Crowell Company), in — 1682 one John Skene became the “first Freemason to settle in Burlington, New Jersey. He belonged to the Lodge in Aberdeen, Scotland, and came to the colonies through arrangement with the Earl of Perth, chief ‘proprietor’ of New Jersey and an outstanding Freemason.” Later, in 1730, “Daniel Coxe became the first appointed Grand Master of Masons of the Provinces of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.”
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In 1789, less than three months after Washington had been inaugurated, the French Revolution began with the storming of the Bastille. In the ensuing years Paine urged President Washington to declare America’s support for the country which had been of such great assistance during our revolutionary crisis; but Washington was both afraid to involve the United States in a conflict which might have been detrimental to our early national growth, and repelled by the radicalism of the French revolutionists — a radicalism very foreign to his nature. The President may have been right from a national point of view, but not only did his actions not avoid the War of 1812 with England, but he established an isolationist policy that lasted for a century
The sharp disagreement between Paine and Washington symbolized the basic conflict between political-economic realities and the humanistic idealism which has ever been strong in American history. It is also the conflict between two concepts of social organization: one seeking to perpetuate whatever can be saved of Europe’s aristocratic past, and the other founded upon the new vision of society which had emerged from the minds of a few Greek thinkers as well as from Jesus’ teachings — a vision which never has had much chance to be fully implemented. This conflict also took form in the contest between Jefferson and Hamilton.
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The practical realities and expediencies of life, especially in a newborn nation, had evidently to be considered, and the stand taken by Hamilton and Washington had value; but developments that occur in infancy do persist in later years, and once a definite quality of social and national living becomes habitual, it becomes extremely difficult to alter it, except perhaps through violent crises which often solve nothing fundamental.
The question that should be asked by anyone accepting a purposive approach to history and human evolution is: To what extent has this collective person, the United States of America, fulfilled its destiny as a new and powerful agent within the cycle of Western civilization?
The answer to this question, I believe, rests upon a grasp of what the Industrial Revolution and our more recent Electronic Revolution have meant. Undoubtedly the development by Western man of new intellectual, faculties made available a tremendous amount of power. But when power is made available, another question immediately arises: To what use will it be put?
In a very real sense the answer was already foreshadowed in the first cargo of Negro slaves that reached Virginia. It was further implied in the refusal by delegates of Southern states to accept the provision against slavery that Jefferson had included in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence. It was reasserted when Benjamin Franklin’s example of friendship to the Indians was negated by nineteenth-century men intent upon the development of a big powerful nation dominated by an individualistic yearning for power and wealth and utterly conditioned by dogmatic ideas concerning the absolute value of their religion and culture. It is true that in the past the building and growth of a nation or empire have never proceeded humanely, but America was to be “the New World” and not merely a new nation. Two basic conceptions of America have always been in conflict: the great new ideal of world Americanism which Walt Whitman extolled, saying: “O America, because you work for the world, I work for you” — and that of a nationalistic United States.
Many people will say that the United States had to be and now more than ever must be a strong united nation to offset the drive for power of other nations embodying social systems opposite to what I have described as the great and so often frustrated ideal of our Western civilization. But how can we effectively fight for principles and values which we uphold in beautiful phrases while in so many ways betraying them in actions and in a general quality of living and behaving?
What we are facing today in America is not merely a political crisis, but a crisis in collective consciousness. We have to reassess the fundamental meaning of what our Western civilization has brought to mankind and what the meaning and destiny of America essentially are now. We have to try, first of all, to clearly understand, the present world, which we have been largely responsible for transforming through our industrial and managerial skills, and the example of which we eagerly export.
Talleyrand once said that politics is the art of the possible; but so is civilization. What is possible today? Economic or political theories are not inclusive enough to provide a truly satisfying answer. An individual of course has his intuition, or whatever is back of his consciousness as a guiding power, to show him the way. But when we deal with vast collective and global issues, the real answer lies in the universe itself and in its majestic rhythms that, no man or nation can deviate or alter. We can ask of the universe that surrounds us: What time is it for mankind according to the clock of planetary destiny? What time is it for America?
A brief study of some of the larger cycles which define this global “time” should give us a background for a more detailed analysis and interpretation