Astrology and the Election

Things are about to get weird.

I know what you’re thinking: things are already weird, Michael. But it’s about to get even weirder with the election. The heavens are declaring it.

On November 8th, Election Day here in the “land of democracy” [sic], we will see some significant portents as regards the positions of the planets and their relationship to one another.

First of all, it’s the day of a full lunar eclipse which will be visible in North America and will be fully visible in Washington, DC (which is significant) from roughly 3:00 – 6:00 a.m. Lunar eclipses typically act as release valves that loose the tension brought by a solar eclipse that typically anticipates it by two weeks. In this case we will have a partial solar eclipse on October 25th that will be visible in most of Europe (including Ukraine and eastern Russia) and the Middle East. That’s fun. Things may get very tense in that area of the world next week (not that they aren’t already—but just wait).

So that’s one thing.

In addition to this, the Sun and Mercury will be in an exact conjunction (meaning: at the same spot in the sky). Among other things, Mercury rules communication and acts as a triggering mechanism in astrological movements. This by itself is not necessarily a big deal. Mercury is not all that far from the Sun (it is the closest planet after all) so such a conjunction is not all that uncommon, this being the fourth such conjunction this year. The kicker is Uranus, which will be in exact conjunction to the Moon during this eclipse. This means that Sun-Mercury will be in exact opposition to Moon-Uranus. Uranus, which rules electronics, technology, and innovation, is also a bit of a loose cannon: you never know what it’s going to do, but you know it will do something. This is a real “expect the unexpected” deal, and, so, prediction becomes a bit of a challenge. As an aside, last year when Uranus was conjunct my Moon while Saturn squared it, I expected my aged mother, who suffers from advanced vascular dementia, to die (the Moon, among other things, represents the archetypal mother). She didn’t die, though she did get very ill. What happened, however, was that my wife developed rapid-onset uterine cancer, which we suspect was due to shedding from a v@xxed relative. My wife is healthy and cancer-free now, praise God. But I digress.

But wait, there’s more!

Not only will also this action be taking place in the sky, but Saturn also wants to play. Saturn, known as the Greater Malefic to the medieval astrologers, is the cosmic badass, the archetypal father and ruler of authority, structure, stability, and stuff like that. It often represents the father in the horoscope. So, anyway, Saturn will be in square (a ninety-degree angle) to both Sun-Mercury and Moon-Uranus, a configuration known as a T-square. (Another aside: my birth chart is just crummy with these things. I don’t recommend trying this at home.)

Oh, but that’s not weird enough. In addition, the Sun-Mercury conjunction will also be in exact conjunction to the fixed star Zubenelgenubi, one of the scales of justice in the sign of Libra (though some astrologers think of as one malevolent motherscratcher).

The take-home: though Uranus acts as a bit of a wildcard here, I can imagine there will be weird stuff happening with voting machines or even power outages (Uranus triggered by the energy of the Moon and Mercury), though I think Saturn will act as a check to this getting too out of hand. Does this mean State power will intervene? Or does it mean that tradition will prevail? Those are important questions, because I think this is precisely what is at stake in this election. Whatever the case, I think it is very possible there will probably be some potentially violent (and without a doubt emotional) protests or other kinds of (almost) spontaneous eruptions (definitely the right word) on November 8th. You probably don’t need astrology to predict that. But, because of Saturn’s role, I would guess that a conservative victory is coming. I could be wrong, of course, but that seems to be what the stars are saying.

One more thing.

November 8th is an important day on the liturgical calendar of the Eastern churches: The Feast of St. Michael the Archangel and All the Bodiless Powers of Heaven. THIS. IS. BIG. Valentin Tomberg calls St. Michael “the Archistrategist,” and even identifies Tuesday as the day of the week under his rulership and, in keeping with Hermetic tradition, associates him as the representative of the Sun. This gives me tremendous hope. But don’t kid yourself: we really are in a battle between good and evil. And St. Michael, Commander of the Heavenly Hosts, is on the job.

But things are still gonna get weird, at least for a little while.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: Flesh & Spirit. Twitter: @Sophiologist_

In Memoriam: Christopher Bamford (1943-2022)

I don’t recall exactly when I first heard the name “Christopher Bamford,” who died Friday morning after a very long battle with cancer, but I do know it was when I was in my mid-twenties and starting to explore the world of ideas that eventually led me to a deeper search for Wisdom and to which I have devoted my life. I recall listening to cassette tapes someone loaned me from the Lindisfarne Association and hearing poet, literary critic, and Blake scholar Kathleen Raine’s admiration for Bamford as a philosopher. I also remember his introductions to other speakers at Lindisfarne (though I don’t recall what he said or who he was introducing). I had no idea how my path through life would be as a fellow traveler with Chris on the path to Wisdom.

I never met Chris in-person, though we did correspond over the last few years; but I did see him once. At the time, I was a Waldorf teacher at a teacher training course at Sunbridge College in New York and visiting the Steiner Books bookstore. For decades, Chris served as editor-in-chief at Steiner Books and his office was in the back of the bookstore. I saw him come out of his office, chat for a second with a clerk, and then disappear into his office. That was the extent of our physical contact. Not too impressive of a meeting. Still, he transformed that press into something impressive and, as my friend and Regeneration Podcast co-host Mike Sauter observes, Chris’s introductions were often the best parts of the books!

Prior to his work at Steiner Books, Chris founded the Lindisfarne Press and published or republished a number of exceptional books on what could be called implicit and explicit sophiological themes. We have a copy of Celtic Christianity: Ecology and Holiness, an anthology put together by Chris and William Parker Marsh that my wife bought before we were married—and I had a copy of Lindisfarne Letter 13, the original source of the book, though I have no idea what’s happened to it. Chris also shepherded the Esalen Institute/Lindisfarne Press’s Library of Russian Philosophy project, which saw new translations and retrofitted earlier translations of some of the great texts of Russian Sophiology, including works by Vladimir Solovyov, Nikolai Berdyaev, and Sergei Bulgakov. Seriously, I do not know how I would have become myself without the ready availability of these thinkers in English. They were absolutely formative.

When I was working on my own anthology, the casebook The Heavenly Country (2016), Chris was exceedingly generous in allowing me to use a number of passages from Steiner Books/Lindisfarne books, including long excerpts from Bulgakov’s Sophia, the Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology and Steiner’s Cosmic and Human Metamorphoses. And without charge!

Around that time, I was surprised when Chris expressed interest in attending the Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything conference at my farm in Summer of 2016, though he didn’t make it. It would have been nice. Alas.

Great interview made for the film The Challenge of Rudolf Steiner.

In addition to his gifts as an editor, Chris was also a gifted translator, and his translations of Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz (uncle of the Polish Noble Laureate) are exquisite. In one of the email exchanges I had with Chris (in November 2019—just before the world went completely mad), he told me about a new translation project:

“I am more than half way through translating the complete Angelus Silesius Cherubinic Wanderer and will one day be looking for someone to read through it with a red pencil. “Silesius, of course, takes one deep into Eckhart, Tauler, Suse and the Friends of God territory…. the depths of which almost defy contemplation…”

I hope he was able to finish it. I’d love to read it. Earlier that year, he sent me a translation of one of Novalis’s Spiritual Songs:

Few know

love’s secret,

feel insatiability

and everlasting thirst.

The holy supper’s

celestial meaning

remains a riddle

to earthly senses,

but whoever has drawn

life’s breath

from warm, loved lips,

whoever’s heart holy fervor

has melted in quivering waves,

whoever’s eyes have ever lifted

to measure

heaven’s unfathomable depths—

that person will eat his body

and drink his blood

forever.

For who has guessed the earthly body’s

higher meaning?

Who can say

he understands the blood?

Once all is body,

ONE body, then swims

the blessed couple

in celestial blood—

O! that the world sea

would grow red

and rocks rise up

in fragrant flesh!

Then the magic meal would never end

nor love ever find satisfaction.

You can never have the beloved

inwardly enough, enough your own.

Transformed by ever gentler lips

the companion becomes

more inward, ever closer.

Warmer pleasure

thrills through the soul.

Thirstier, hungrier

grows the heart:

love’s bliss endures

from eternity to eternity.

If ever those fasting

once tasted,

they would abandon all,

and sit down with us

at longing’s table

that never grows empty.

They would never know

love’s unending fullness

and praise the sustenance

of body and blood.

But I think Chris’s greatest contribution was as a writer of deeply insightful, philosophically open, and spiritually profound prose. His book An Endless Trace: The Passionate Pursuit of Wisdom in the West (2003) is as moving and enlightening a book as I have read. In fact, when I was teaching an undergraduate course entitled “Truth and Inquiry” at Siena Heights University in Michigan a few years ago, I used it as a textbook. Its table of contents, in fact, acts like a mirror in which I see my own interests and loves reflected—Sophia, the Eucharist, Hermeticism, Celtic Christianity, the Grail, Novalis, Romanticism, the Rose Cross, the Troubadours, and “Deserts and Gardens,” perhaps the best essay I’ve ever read on the Rosary. He writes with incredible felicity and grace—reading him is a pleasurable experience.

In June of 2020, Chris wrote me regarding a few publishing projects he had in the works, including a follow-up to An Endless Trace. In his words: “The Great Life: Learning to Live between Worlds. This a companion volume to An Endless Trace: The Passionate Pursuit of Wisdom in the West. My old friend and co-creator of Lindisfarne Press, Will Marsh, is presently doing a final copy edit etc. Manuscript should be available by Fall.”

I forwarded the email to my publisher, who was very interested, but I don’t think Chris ever followed-up on it. It may be that he became too ill. I certainly hope it finds a publisher...and soon!

While I never had the grace to call Chris my friend (though, as you can see, he was very kind to me), several friends and acquaintances of mine did, including one of my very best friends, Therese Schroeder-Sheker, who has known Chris for decades. Over the past few years, as we knew Chris’s condition was not improving, I would get occasional updates on his health.

When Therese called me a few days ago and told me Chris was nearing his transitus, I joined her and others in keeping vigil over the leave-taking of this extraordinary and kind soul. In my place, I worked on a guitar arrangement for “And did those feet in ancient time” (also known as “Jerusalem”)—I’m sure Chris, who loved Blake as much as I do, would appreciate it, or at least the effort. I also reread some parts of An Endless Trace. I fear that if I begin quoting the book, I may just copy the whole thing, so beautiful is the prose and filled with truth and goodness the content, but I will suffice with a selection from “Deserts and Gardens”:

“I discovered this viriditas and the healing field of the soul implicit in the Rosary at a very difficult period of my life. It was one in which, forced by circumstances I was powerless to change, I was metaphorically brought to my knees and taught that life is meaning—always, inevitably, and necessarily filled with meaning, whether I recognized it or not. I learned that life always knew best, and was wise, and would always lift me up and carry me, whether I wanted it to or not. I learned, too, that all I could do was respond, with gratitude, praise, and reverence for whatever life brought. I learned that this was healing. I learned it with a force of revelation through the Rosary at the feet and in the presence of Mary Sophia.”

I am certain that revelation is a space which Christopher Bamford now inhabits in as full a way as possible.

Thank you, friend. I owe you so much.

Godspeed.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine.

A Rosicrucian Easter Meditation

from Daniel Cramer's 'Emblemata sacra' (1624)

In my scholarship, I often write about the Rosicrucian phenomenon that appeared in the first decades of the seventeenth century. In Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England, I have a chapter entitled “The Rosicrucian Mysticism of Henry and Thomas Vaughan” and in The Submerged Reality, I have one on the Paracelsian physician and Rosicrucian apologist Robert Fludd, and recently I edited an edition of the seventeenth-century alchemical fantasy, The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz. So when I hear the word “Rosicrucian,” I don’t immediately think of quasi-Masonic fraternal orders devoted to esoteric ritual or occult trivia. In fact, I don’t think of such groups as Rosicrucian at all. In those cases, “Rosicrucian” is a glittering generality, a mirror that receives the projected reflection of the ego. This is not to say that such groups don’t have interesting doctrines; but they don’t obtain as Rosicrucian, at least in the seventeenth-century understanding of the word.

Actually, what I do think of when I hear the word “Rosicrucian” is medicine. The Vaughans were both physicians, and Henry issued translations of Heinrich Nollius’s Hermetick Physic and The Chymists Key in 1655 and 1657, respectively. Fludd and his German counterpart Michael Maier were also physicians, Fludd a respected member of the Royal College of Physicians and Maier, the private physician of Emperor Rudolf II. These were hardly fringe figures, though the medicine all of these men practiced was deeply indebted to the Swiss medical wonderworker, Theophrastus von Hohenheim, better know to posterity as Paracelsus. Were these medical professionals alive in our own cultural context, they would no doubt be practicing what we now call “alternative medicine.” Unfortunately, today’s reigning medical archons don’t consider alternative medicine as proper medicine at all, and many insurance providers won’t cover patients seeking these paths; and many alternative practitioners, to be honest, don’t want to fall into the snares of bureaucratic interference in the art of healing, whether it be from the realms of government or corporations.

In the Fama Fraternitatis, the Rosicrucian manifesto first published in 1614, we find a sketch of the mythic background of the order, a sketch, more importantly, that outlines the Rosicrucian ethos. The art of healing is listed first among their list of commitments: “That none of them should profess any other thing than to cure the sick, and that gratis.”

“To cure the sick, and that gratis”: these words strike me with hope, but that hope is compromised by living in a medical culture too ensconced with governmental control and capitalistic desires. The pharmaceutical companies pump billions of dollars into advertising ($30 billion in one year, according to The Los Angeles Times) a practice outlawed in most civilized countries. Money is a most addictive drug, and media conglomerates are addicted to BigPharma’s supply chain and are always looking for the next fix. BigPharma certainly seems to be interested in medicine, but I’m not all that convinced that it’s interested in health. Prove me wrong. While we’re waiting, don’t plan on any rigorous journalistic investigation of BigPharma as a matter of course, especially when it comes to using third world populations as human guinea pigs (a “best business practice”), a method darkly illustrated in John le Carré’s book The Constant Gardener, later turned into a film directed by Fernando Meirelles.

Another commitment mentioned in the Fama may appear unobtrusive at first: “After such a most laudable sort they did spend their lives; and although they were free from all diseases and pain, yet notwithstanding they could not live and pass their time appointed by God” (my emphasis). This line, probably more than any other, has haunted my imagination for much of the past thirty years or so. What is our time appointed by God? The medical establishment has invested much time and treasure into prolonging life, but it does not seem that it has invested similar resources into prolonging health. Indeed, the “4 out of 5 doctors” who recommended margarine instead of butter and saccharine instead of sugar did much to decrease the health of people—while standing on a platform of almost godlike authority. I suspect that their nefarious “research” promoted in the 1970s has much to do with the explosion in Alzheimer’s and dementia sufferers we see today, sufferers like my mother and a beloved aunt. Where’s a class-action lawsuit when you need one?

I often contemplate the approaching “appointed time.” Further on in the Fama, we read: “The what secret soever we have learned of the book M. (although before our eyes we behold the image and pattern of the world) yet there are not shewn unto us our misfortunes, nor the hour of death, the which is known only to God himself, who thereby would have us keep in a continual readiness.”

The readiness is all.

You can hear me talking more about Rosicrucianism on the Post-Structuralist Tent Revival podcast.

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutzand Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses.