Quest Magazine

By Ray Grasse

Originally printed in the January-February 2005 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Grasse, Ray. "The  Voice of Divination: Omens, Oracles, and the Symbolist Worldview." Quest  93.1 (JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2005):14-19.

"Things here are signs," the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus once declared. With these words, he gave expression to a worldview that has, in one form or another, influenced human thought since the earliest stirrings of civilization. Sometimes referred to as symbolist, this perspective regards the world as a kind of sacred text, written in the language of symbols, and holds that all phenomena harbor a deeper meaning beyond their obvious appearances. If one applies the proper key, these meanings can be decoded, and everyday life unveiled for its deeper truths.

While the symbolist worldview encompassed a wide range of symbolic patterns, one of these in particular —the omen—came to hold special importance for traditional societies. "Coming events cast their shadow before them," an ancient proverb proclaims. Through the study of omens, men and women sought to glimpse future possibilities and shifts of fortune and thus prepare themselves for the challenges and opportunities awaiting them.

As with all aspects of symbolist thought, the concept of the omen has expressed itself at widely varying levels of sophistication. At their subtlest, omens exist in a world where the boundaries between past, present, and future are permeable. Influences of past conditions or events still echo within the present, while from the other direction, what is to come sends ripples into the now, like the bow waves preceding an advancing boat. Hence the phenomenal play of each moment represents the complex blending of symbolic influences from all three dimensions of time, with those from the future designated as omens.

When classifying omens, it can be useful to distinguish between literal and symbolic forms. Literal omens require little translation. For instance, the South American novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez once recalled the time he answered his doorbell to find a stranger saying, "You must change the electric iron's cord—it is faulty!" Then, realizing he had come to the wrong house, the stranger promptly apologized and left. A half-hour later, Marquez's iron burst into flames—the result of a faulty cord. Here, the apparent omen foreshadowed the later event in a straightforward way.

Far more common, however, are those instances when an omen takes on a metaphoric dimension, appearing in ways that, like dreams, require greater skill and intuition to interpret. In the British television production of Robert Graves's I Claudius, the death of a central character (Herod) is foreshadowed by an owl landing on his chair during a public ceremony. The owl hoots several times, with the number of hoots corresponding to the number of days before his death. The relationship between the omen and what is signified by it was entirely symbolic and involved several levels of meaning. To make sense of such an image, we must perceive it with a discerning eye. As creatures of flight, birds are metaphorically associated with the soul's flight at death. Moreover, the owl is specifically a night bird, emphasizing even more dramatically the idea of otherness, the negative (or passive) half of the day/night polarity, and, by analogy, the opposing side of the life/death polarity. The number of hoots emitted by the bird represents a proportional reference to the number of days until the individual's death. In this way, a single and seemingly simple event encodes several dimensions of information and meaning at once.

In ancient times, birds represented one of many different types of omens. Other notable areas of study included the behavior of snakes, randomly situated pieces of wood along the road, patterns on bodies of water, omens derived from celestial phenomena of any sort, and even moles on the human body.

Identifying Omens

Is there any way to determine whether an event is an omen? Although such events don't lend themselves to easy classification, there are some useful guidelines we can hold in mind.

The first of these is the quality of unusualness characterizing an event. For ancient cultures, events that were out of the ordinary were seen as holding special import concerning future trends. Great attention was paid to the appearance of bizarre weather conditions, unusual dreams, the birth of malformed children or animals, or major accidents, all in the belief that the extraordinary quality of such events portended changes for the individual or the collective. This preoccupation with anomalies, in part, led ancient cultures like the Babylonian and the Mayan to chart the movements of heavenly bodies as precisely as possible in order to determine which movements or phenomena were out of the ordinary and thus of consequence to society. The more irregular an astronomical occurrence, the greater its significance as a portent of social change. For the Chinese astrologers of antiquity, such unusual sights as the daytime appearance of Venus would be regarded as highly significant omens, pointing to an imbalance of forces within the kingdom at large.

A more systematic method for identifying omens employed by traditional cultures to foretell the future was to carefully observe the symbols occurring around the beginning of any major development, whether a personal relationship, a public works project, or even an idea. This belief might be referred to as the "law of conception." Understood esoterically, the context surrounding a phenomenon's birth holds the seeds of its unfoldment and eventual outcome, provided one knows how to interpret their symbolic language.

In many cultures, great attention was paid to events on the first day of the new year (or, in some cultures, the day of the winter solstice or spring equinox). A similar notion is echoed in our observance of the twelve days of Christmas, each of which was traditionally seen as foreshadowing the weather to be expected in the corresponding month of the new year. The events seen on a person's birthday likewise assume significance as possible omens of the person's upcoming year. Regarding this general principle, the Renaissance mystic Cornelius Agrippa remarked: "All the auspicia [omens] which first happen in the beginning of any enterprise are to be taken notice of . . . if going forth thou shalt stumble at the threshold, or in the way thou shalt dash thy foot against anything, forbear thy journey." With this in mind, it is worth recalling what happened to Darwin's great contemporary Alfred Wallace as he was about to begin a sea voyage home to England after an exploratory trip through South America and the Pacific. Just as the ship was about to set sail, his pet toucan plunged into the ocean and drowned, a fact Wallace dejectedly noted in his journal. Within weeks, the ship was destroyed by fire at sea, resulting in the loss of almost all his research. Again, the timing of this event at the start of the trip was the key element conferring on it omenological importance.

Applied to the arena of personal relationships, this principle can sometimes yield intriguing if comical results. A friend once related to me the problems she was encountering in a current relationship. "He used to seem like such a nice guy," she sighed. "But this last year he's been a real monster." I asked her if she recalled their first meeting or their first time out together. Yes, she said, they went to a movie. Could she recall the name of the movie? "Let me think," she strained to remember, "Oh, yes, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde!"

It was with this belief that traditional cultures carefully noted the symbols arising around any person's birth. We are perhaps most familiar with this practice in the context of astrology, which looks at the positions and relationships of the celestial bodies at the moment of birth. Yet anything in the environment during these critical moments may serve as a symbolic clue to unlock an individual's destiny. In many Native American tribes, for instance, it was common to look for unusual events or symbols in the immediate environment at the moment a child was born, to seek indications of his or her future character and to suggest the child's name. A deer seen running by might suggest the name Running Deer, indicating that the child might be particularly swift or graceful. Native American lore likewise tells us of the dramatic omens accompanying the births of powerful leaders, such as the great shooting star seen at the birth of Tecumseh or the winds, lightning, and hail said to coincide with the birth of Pontiac.

A third source of potential omens is dreams. Reflecting the widespread esoteric notion that dreams precipitate from a higher realm of reality, the study of dreams has sometimes been felt to yield glimpses into the underlying symbolic patterns of daily life before they crystallize into manifestation. Dream symbols are generally regarded as occurring prior to physical, waking reality. The question of how much time must pass between a dream experience and its manifestation in waking reality is often debated. For some esotericists, dream symbols find expression in waking reality almost immediately, with dreams foreshadowing events to occur on the following day. For others, however, the period varies considerably; in the Kriya Yoga tradition, for example, this process is commonly said to take around seventy-two hours.

However long it takes, dreams tend to foreshadow physical events in largely symbolic rather than strictly literal terms. For instance, a dream of falling down the stairs may herald not an actual accident but rather an emotional fall from grace, as might accompany a romantic rejection; similarly, a dream of death might symbolize the closing off or transformation of some outworn habit pattern, such as quitting smoking, rather than actual death.

Divination

The problem with omens, however, is that one can never be entirely sure when they will occur. One can't very well wait for a comet to blaze through the sky or an animal to appear at one's window before one makes an important decision. As a result, humans developed a wide assortment of methods to induce omenological messages on demand.. Given the order and harmony underlying all events, it was believed, the inherent meaningfulness of the universe could be tapped at will to obtain answers to specific questions.

Thus arose in classical times the distinction between natural omens (in Latin, omina oblativa) and artificial omens (omina impetrativa), or those that naturally present themselves and those humanly provoked. This latter category is conventionally known as divination. Technically speaking, divination may be used to uncover information concerning any situation, past, present, or future; conventionally, however, we associate it almost entirely with foretelling future trends.

As in the case of natural omens, the ancients developed an astonishing array of methods to ascertain the future, including watching the shape of smoke rising from specially tended fires, examining animal or human entrails, opening scriptures or other books at random, gazing into crystals, and studying the pattern of tea leaves.

In the category of divination, we may also place seeking prophetic advice from an oracle, a man or woman thought to have the ability to speak of past, present, or future events while in a trance state. Such human "mediums" are still around today, though we call them "channelers." From the ambiguous pronouncements uttered in poetic meter by the famed oracle of Delphi in ancient Greece to the inspired prophecies of indigenous shamans in trance, societies across the world have drawn on the psychic capacities of the human mind for insights into the future as an alternative to (or in conjunction with) the purely external sources we've been considering thus far.

Subjective or Objective?

When discussing the underlying mechanism of omens and divinatory techniques generally, it is sometimes asked whether the prophetic aspects of such processes are the result of the events themselves or simply a reflection of the intuitive capacities brought to bear on those events. According to the latter view, the event or technique is nothing more than a neutral screen onto which the unconscious projects its own insights about coming events, which the conscious mind then interprets as deriving from an outside source.

While no doubt true in many cases, the projection theory doesn't fully explain the range of examples that characterize the classical understanding of omens. For instance, a meteorite plunging into one's neighborhood would, to the traditional mentality, be viewed as deeply meaningful omen, yet one could hardly classify this as just another event onto which one has projected omenological significance. It is, by any standard, a genuinely unusual occurrence.

For this reason, it is more helpful to speak of a spectrum of omenological systems, ranging from those involving little intuition to those requiring a great deal. At the far end of the spectrum are "low data/high subjectivity" systems such as crystal gazing or tea-leaf reading, where the mind has minimal information to work from; at the other end are "high data/low subjectivity" systems like astrology or even the tarot, which provide relatively high levels of information that the individual can draw upon. Even with such data-rich systems as astrology, however, it must be stressed that personal intuition always remains important, since the essentially symbolic nature of the information lends itself to interpretation on many levels.

The Symbology of Endings

Traditional cultures in general placed great emphasis on all important endings and conclusions. As with births and marriages, for instance, deaths have long been viewed as accompanied by symbols that reflect this greatest of threshold crossings—what might be called the "law of completion." As one example, it is said that at the moment of Carl Jung's death, a bolt of lightning hit the tree he frequently sat beneath. In Grace and Grit, transpersonal psychologist Ken Wilber described the unusually intense windstorm that blew through Boulder, Colorado, where they lived, at the precise moment his wife, Treya died. Checking the newspapers the next day, Wilber was intrigued to learn that this meteorological quirk did not seem to extend beyond that specific locale. Among the more common phenomena associated with death is the stopping of clocks at the moment of their owner's demise—an explicit metaphor, one may presume, for "time running out." History informs us such a timely malfunction occurred at the passing of Frederick the Great.

Because of their high visibility, the lives of celebrities provide an unending source of symbolically provocative anecdotes involving death-related synchronicities. For instance, in 1928 humorist Will Rogers died in an airplane crash along with aviator Wiley Post; amid the wreckage was Rogers's typewriter, showing that the last word he had typed was death. Film director John Huston's last completed directorial effort was prophetically titled The Dead. When actress Natalie Wood died during the early 1980s, she had been working on a film titled Brainstorm in which death was a prominent theme. Before her death in 1985, actress Anne Baxter played her final role in an episode of the TV series Hotel, in which her last on-screen line was "Shall we have one last waltz?" At the time of his death, Star Trek producer Gene Roddenberry was at work on his last film, subtitled The Undiscovered Country, a Shakespearean allusion to death. When Francis Ford Coppola's son died in a tragic boating accident, the famed director was directing the film Gardens of Stone, which concerned a cemetery. And when martial artist Bruce Lee's son Brandon died during the filming of the fantasy drama The Crow, many viewers were later startled to see how explicitly the film centered around death; indeed, Lee's resurrection from the grave in the opening shots was viewed by more than one critic as uncannily analogous to the renewed popularity the actor experienced during the posthumous release of this film.

A similar pattern is visible in the uncanny significance of song titles or lyrics surrounding the deaths of many famous singers. When he died, Hank Williams's most popular recording was "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive." At the time of his death in 1960, rock and roll singer Eddie Cochrane was beginning to enjoy the popularity of "Three Steps to Heaven" Pop music legend Buddy Holly died in a plane crash in 1959; at the time, his song "It Doesn't Matter Anymore" was experiencing wide popularity. When ex-Beatle John Lennon was murdered in 1980, he was witnessing his first top-ten single in many years, with the appropriate title "Starting Over." At the time of his death, rhythm and blues singer Chuck Willis had two songs on the charts, titled "Hang Up My Rock and Roll Shoes" and "What Am I Living For?" Otis Redding's hit single "Dock of the Bay" was ascending the charts at the time of his death, including among its lyrics the plaintive lines "I have nothing to live for; looks like nothing's gonna come my way." Singer Marvin Gaye's music experienced a posthumous resurgence of popularity with the rerelease of his song "I Heard It through the Grapevine" as part of the soundtrack to the movie The Big Chill, which went into nationwide release a day after his death; his song played over the film's opening funeral sequence.

This awareness of the symbols surrounding death is important in the mythologies of virtually all religions. In the New Testament account of the Crucifixion, we learn of the natural wonders, including earthquakes and the darkening of the sky, that took place at the moment of Christ's death. At the death of Krishna, we are told, a black circle surrounded the moon, the sky rained fire and ashes, and spirits were seen everywhere. At the moment the Buddha determined that he too would die, a major earthquake shook the land; three months later he was dead. In a similar vein, many Buddhists contend that the deaths or cremations of all great spiritual figures are accompanied by natural phenomena like unusual cloud formations or rainbows.

A more controversial contention held by some is that the actual mode of death contains clues to the life or karma of an individual. Just as the opening moments of a life in some way preview what is to follow, so the specific circumstances of a person's death summarize key lessons or aspects of his or her life story. At first glance, this theory seems questionable in cases where peaceful individuals died exceptionally violent deaths (such as Mahatma Gandhi's assassination by a political extremist) or criminals died under serene circumstances (such as Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele dying of natural causes). It may be, however, that it isn't the actual cause of death that contains the relevant clues so much as the subtler levels of symbolism.

For example, only hours before he died by electrocution while sitting in the bathtub, famed Trappist monk Thomas Merton proclaimed to an important meeting of world religious leaders that the times ahead were "electrifying." Clearly, it would seem we should look not to the manifestly violent nature of his death so much as the deeper symbolism (a subtle reference, perhaps, to the radical or electrifying nature of his efforts to harmonize Eastern and Western spirituality). Similarly, for many esotericists, drowning in the ocean has been viewed as one of the most auspicious deaths possible, due to the mystical connotations traditionally associated with the ocean, a symbol for the divine immensity.

Looked at deeply, every death has some significance symbolically. Say a man on his way to church is broadsided by a truck and dies. Here again, the significance of the death may reside less in its violence than in the fact that the accident occurred on the way to church. When we examine the patterns in the man's life, we may find he had continually been "broadsided" by circumstances seemingly beyond his control in pursuit of his spiritual goals. Perhaps he wanted to be a priest but had to drop out of the seminary to get a job when his father died; perhaps a long-anticipated pilgrimage to Rome many years later was canceled because of a fire in his home. As a person becomes more sensitive to the fine shadings of symbol and archetype rather than being limited by simplistic judgments of good and bad, even seemingly negative events can reveal deeper (and potentially spiritual) significance.

Conclusion

What, then, of divination? In the end, it is perhaps best understood as but one element within a far more extensive web of ideas concerning the symbolic dimensions of life. Through the divinatory act, we are able to "divine" the hidden messages encoded in the seemingly mundane phenomena of ordinary experience; yet as the examples here suggest (and as I explore more extensively in my book The Waking Dream), those selfsame messages permeate our experience in a wide range of ways—if only we could recognize them. "The whole world is an omen and a sign," the American poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote. "Why look so wistfully in a corner? The voice of divination resounds everywhere and runs to waste unheard, unregarded, as the mountains echo with the bleatings of cattle."

Ray Grasse worked on the staffs of Quest Books and The Quest magazine for ten years. His most recent book is Signs of the Times (Hampton Roads, 2002), an in-depth study of the unfolding Aquarian age. This article has been adapted from his book The Waking Dream: Unlocking the Symbolic Language of Our Lives (Quest Books, 1996). He maintains an active astrological practice in the Chicagoland area and can be reached at jupiter.enteract@rcn.com.

By Alice O. Howell

Originally printed in the January-February 2005 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Howell, Alice O. "Divination." Quest  93.1 (JULY-AUGUST 2005):8-12

In August 1938 I was fifteen and visiting San Diego, California, with my mother. We were invited to dinner by Dr. Anita Muehl, a psychiatrist who specialized in investigating the paranormal. She wanted us to meet a psychic friend of hers. After the meal, the woman closed her eyes and asked my mother if she had a brother living in New England. Yes, my mother answered, "Is he in the lumber business?" Good heavens, no! came the reply. "Well, I see this large country house surrounded by stacks and stacks of lumber." We left baffled, and I returned to boarding school in Providence, Rhode Island. On September 18, one of the worst hurricanes ever to strike the United States devastated New England, reaching as far inland as New Hampshire. The woods around my uncle's house were leveled, and indeed stacks of lumber surrounded it.

This was my first but not my last experience of the future being present in the past. Such things can and do happen, and this raises a serious question concerning our notions of time. The explanation would seem to be that there are two levels possible to our perception of time/space. One is that perceived by the conscious ego, which functions through duality, separating past and future and incapable of grasping infinity, and the other the potential rare peak experience from the center of our psyche—the atman, Christ Within, Jung's Self—which I call our Divine Guest.

As we identify with our ego or who we think we are, the temptation to know the future arises for various reasons: curiosity, fear, or the need for power and control. If we place the ego at the circumference of the circle, we experience "going around in circles" and the passage of time through space,

but our inner sun at the centerpoint transcends time/space and offers us at least a logical glimpse into the unus mundus, that other world hidden in this one. Another analogy is that time is like a phonograph record and we are limited in our consciousness to the point of the needle in the present.

Nicholas of Cusa's "God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere" could also be expressed as "God is a now whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is always!"

There certainly has been a fascination with forecasting* the future throughout human history. The earliest evidence for this is the throwing of bones in ancient China, which eventually led to throwing yarrow sticks to consult the I Ching and the emergence of astrology in Sumeria and Egypt, more than four thousand years ago.

Divination* (notice the reference to the gods in the word) falls mainly into four categories: those types based on psychic interpretation of synchronistic events; those relying on the gifts of clairvoyance of a specific person; human attempts by magical means to force change in the future; and those based on objective criteria. All four, of course, are subject to human fallibility and errors in interpretation.

Synchronicity

Carl Jung gave us the term synchronicity to describe an outer event coinciding spontaneously with a significant inner meaning. I call these fortuitous flukes Sophia's winks! They offer a glimpse into the unus mundus. Oddly, these events seem to increase the more we progress on the path. By far the greatest variety of divinations fall into this category, and many are still concealed in the words we use today.

The most familiar example is the reading of tea leaves or cocoa left in a cup. But in the old days the flight of birds this way or that gave rise to auguries and auspicious prognostications (from the Latin aves, birds). Reading oil film on water is the origin of speculate, (Latin specula, mirror). Omen yields ominous. Bibliomancy refers to the random selection of a verse in a sacred text such as the Bible. The weirdest is haruspicy, which was the study of livers and entrails in search of patterns. Scrying, crystal ball gazing, is often lampooned today. Interpretation in all of these methods involves a passive intuitive response.

A more proactive approach is that of the sortilege, the caster of lots. Runes, an ancient Norse system, involved throwing down twig-like figures, said to be the gift of the god Odin. Others include the dropping of those yarrow sticks or coins (heads up/down) of the highly sophisticated Chinese I Ching, the shuffling of tarot, or the playing cards of gypsies. All these are forms of forecasting, because they depend on the ways things fall. It is easy to see that the projections of the persons involved play an immense and risky role. Yet the results are often uncanny. What we see is who we are at that moment. My own personal favorite is the I Ching, not only because of its accuracy but because even if the hexagram denoted gives a warning, it always offers the wise way to proceed.

Twenty-five years ago, I longed for some real Chinese coins. A professor from Penn State College happened to visit me on Long Island, bringing as a house gift a bookmark embroidered by his wife with two hexagrams. The very next day, my daughter came in from a walk in a field with my five year-old grandson. "Look what I found for you," he said. Opening his hand, he offered me seven genuine Chinese coins! They were lying deep in the grass. I keep three of them in the bookmark pouch to this day.

Prophecy

There are collective prophecies and individual prophets who prophesy. Among the collective ones are those of the Great Pyramid of Gizeh, those of the Mayan and Hopi people, the biblical prophecies, and the long-range Hindu concept of yugas. It is quite extraordinary how accurate some of these prophecies can be, and how dangerous it is collectively to misinterpret them. As I write this, a great number of Christian fundamentalists are using biblical prophecies to foretell the end of the world and the imminence of a final Armageddon, a miraculous reappearance of Jesus Christ, and a rapture of all devout Christians into heaven. If only they realized that it is not the end of the world these prophecies portend but the end of the age of Pisces! This is an astronomical factor due to the point of the vernal equinox lining up with the first visible star in the constellation of Aquarius in January 2012. Anyone interested has only to look up the term "precession of the equinoxes" in an encyclopedia. This precession was discovered by Hipparchus circa 200 BCE and gives rise to the Platonic Year of more than 26,000 years. The so-called ages vary in length according to the width of each constellation, but they average around 2,000 years with an interface between them. The name of the constellation hosting the point of the vernal equinox gives its name to the age. This point establishes an imaginary line, using the position of the Sun and the Earth as two points, drawn out to the sidereal zodiac at the moment of spring. It moves 1 degree every 72 years. So if you hear anyone exclaim that they are sick and tired of all this "new age" stuff, you can tell them they had better get used to it because we have 2,000 years of it to come! This is a scientific fact.

Astrology enters into it when it points out that the religious and mythological symbolism of any age coincides with the nature of the sign governing it. For example, the bull was worshiped during the age of Taurus the Bull (Circa 4000–2000 BCE), and as the age of Aries the Ram (Circa 2000–5 BCE) succeeded it, bulls were out and rams were in. Heroes became bull slayers. And Jason went off to find the Golden Fleece. When one adds Jung's concept of the evolution of the collective unconscious, one can only see that there seems to be a menu of purpose to the unfolding of history. The great dichotomy of the age of Pisces has been between faith (Pisces) and reason (Virgo). As the age of Pisces passes, it will give way to a new dichotomy of the collective (Aquarius) versus the individual (Leo). And one could add the cosmos further on. Mother Teresa said it in a nutshell: "I believe in person to person [Leo] and that God is in everyone [Aquarius]." The trap will be that we may become too transpersonal and forget human love and connection. I once knew an Aquarian who was writing about the music of the spheres and his horse died because he forgot to water it! This describes the problem.

Prophets are gifted individuals. The great religious ones presumably were in touch with their Divine Guest. We can count every avatar among them. A lower rank would include the Druidic vates, the soothsayers, and people like Nostradamus and the Scottish Brahan Seer who, in the eighteenth century, looking through a hole in a white stone, foresaw sails going up and down the solid Great Glen (the Caledonia Canal) and iron horses (locomotives) crossing the land. On the distaff side, who can forget Cassandra or the Sybil of the Delphic Oracle. In the index of Jobe's Dictionary of Mythology and Folklore, 120 cross-cultural names of prophets are listed. These individuals are not relying on chance or outer instruments. Current psychics are often quite accurate except for the dating, which lends credence to that other level of time. One I know predicted a Mediterranean cruise ship being hijacked in 1980. This caused several people to cancel their trip. I was consulted for the astrological viewpoint and saw nothing amiss. The group director did not cancel and all went splendidly. A few years later the Achille Lauro was indeed seized by terrorists, resulting in the death of a man thrown overboard in his wheelchair. Edgar Cayce is probably one of the most exceptional psychics of our recent times, and certainly Madame Blavatsky falls into this category as well.

Sorcery

The sorcerer tries to affect the future by casting spells and curses. Circe and the Witch of Endor are archetypal examples. But witchcraft, black magic, voodoo, and the like have always lurked about. They represent the shadow side of divination. The Harry Potter books and Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series are examples of the current retelling of the eternal struggle between good and evil.

On the positive side are the healers, shamans, medicine men, and all those trying to save the earth, animals, and fellow humanity using invisible sources of energy. The skills are akin but the goals very different. The general public seems just on the brink of understanding that invisible psychic energies are a reality, and hopefully that the gods and goddesses of old can now be understood to be archetypal processes that were personified as pine since they were universal.

Objective Criteria

Astrology, palmistry, and numerology depend on outer observable factors: The planets do exist, and their movements are measured astronomically and tabulated in ephemerides; the lines in our palms are visible; and numbers are certainly valid, dependable concepts. All three come built into the system, as it were.

An astrologer for sixty years and a lifelong student of Jungian psychology, I have great reservations about making predictions. I view the chart as a description of the way a person is likely to process experience. I cannot foretell if a person is going to wear blue or yellow socks on Tuesday, but I can tell if the color of socks is important to the person. It is only when an individual chooses to resist becoming conscious that things are destined to be acted out as fate. The chart offers us that option if interpreted psychologically. So in looking at transits (the current position of the planets), it is wiser to offer a "weather report," pointing out the focus or emphasis of the time in question. Striking aspects will work out but instead of an alarming accident, the person may drop a saucer. For example, a client of mine was recently undergoing a Saturn return in Pisces, highlighting a number of alarming squares in his natal chart. But during the week in question, the man went out and bought a huge, heavy (Saturn) fish tank (Pisces) and, oblivious of anything else, spent his time setting up a habitat for the exotic fish he purchased. The aspects will always play out, but at what level is not always predictable. The word consider refers to the Latin sider meaning star. So it is a huge consideration of any counselor not to instill a negative prophecy in a client , which could become self-fulfilling.

Astrology for me is a sacred science, not to be used for personal profit in gambling or ever in manipulating people. During the Age of Reason in the eighteenth century, both religion and science rejected it, and when this happened religion lost its proof and science its sense of the sacred. It suffered ridicule (and still does), but in the last century astrology began regaining serious respect. It truly is the golden key to symbolic insight, not only psychologically but also to decode scripture and, mythology, and to see the solar system as an immense hologram and the human body as a psychosomatic miracle. The greatest gift of all is that it bridges the visible and invisible aspects of reality, functioning simultaneously in both our inner and outer worlds. I define astrology as a symbolic language of archetypal processes.

Palmistry, or chiromancy, is another discipline, and just as no two charts are alike, each person's hands are unique. The lines on them are subject to quite sophisticated interpretation. When I had my palms read for a lark in Lausanne at age seventeen, I was told that I would almost die at twenty-seven. This indeed happened to me: I had a miscarriage, severe hemorrhage, blood pressure down to nil, resulting in an out-of-body experience that changed my life.

Numerology seems to specialize more in general trends and is based on gematria, or the assigning of numbers to letters of the alphabet. Many do not realize that in ancient times the two were interchangeable. Biblical names and terms adding up to the same number are believed to resonate in meaning. The ancient Greeks did not use numerals in the beginning. These were the subsequent gift of the Arabs. A quick look in any good dictionary will yield the numerical value of the various ancient alphabets. The trap for me is how much time can be consumed in calculations. But I know it is a valid and meaningful discipline.

In conclusion, we need to ask ourselves what the fear and fascination of knowing the future really means. Are we fated or do we have free will? Where does karma fit in? I can only quote Arnold Toynbee's remark about history: "It's not what happens to a nation but how it reacts to it that determines its destiny." This applies to each of us as individuals as well. There are certain unalterable givens in every life; what we do with them determines our future. As we humbly become more conscious of our shortcomings inwardly, we may be spared acting them out as fate. Therein lies the power of Charles Dickens's message in A Christmas Carol. No individual effort is wasted in the collective, which is the theme of Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance, and perhaps that is the best hope for our future. Because so much depends on the fallibility of personal interpretation, I honestly believe that the best divination offers us pine options.

Alice O. Howell is a Jungian and has been an astrologer for sixty years. Her books include The Dove in the Stone: Finding the Sacred in the Commonplace; Jungian Symbolism in Astrology; Jungian Synchronicity in Astrological Signs and Ages; The Web in the Sea: Jung, Sophia, and the Geometry of the Soul (all Quest Books); and her latest book, The Beejum Book, a delightful wisdom book, reviewed in the November-December 2002 issue of Quest.

VOLUME 93, NUMBER 1

CONTENT

Ever New
By Betty Bland

Divination
By Alice O. Howell

What Is the What Is the I Ching?
By Richard W. Brooks

Clarification and Integration of Values
Vincent Hao Chin, Jr

The Voice of Divination: Omens, Oracles, and the Symbolist Worldview
By Ray Grasse

The Golden Age, Aquarius, and the Ringed Planet
By Carlos Cardoso Aveline

The History of Adyar Day
By Ananya S. Rajan

By Ananya S. Rajan

Originally printed in the January-February 2005 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Rajan, Ananya S. "The History of Adyar Day" Quest  93.1 (JANUARY-FEBRUAY 2005): 32

Adyar, the international headquarters of the Theosophical Society, continues to be a special place for many of our members. With the serene beauty of its gardens, it has become a sacred refuge for stray animals, weary travelers, and members desiring to understand more about Theosophy and the Society. Walking through the gates of Adyar, people often feel as if they are walking into a different world. The atmosphere changes. Stillness is felt within and without. Things begin to slow down and the simplicity of life, foreign to many of us, begins to take over. It is obvious why the founders chose these particular grounds for their headquarters. Even though the estate is surrounded by the noise and chaos of the city of Madras, within Adyar's gates there remains a quality of beauty that is rare to find. It is no wonder that there is a day, February 17, set aside each year called Adyar Day.

Originally, February 17 was known as Olcott Day, the day of the founder's passing in 1907. Members gathered at the place where Henry Steel Olcott was cremated, saying a few words and offering flowers to the memorial built in his honor.

By 1916 the tradition changed and became centered around the statue of HPB and Colonel Olcott that now stands in headquarters hall at Adyar. In her Watchtower notes of March 1916, Annie Besant writes:

Olcott Day, February 17, as it is called in India and Ceylon, was kept as usual at Headquarters.We gathered as usual at 7:10 A.M. in the large Hall and stood in a large semi-circle in front of the alcove in which are the statues of our founders.

According to Besant's notes, at 7:17 A.M., the time of Olcott's last breath, President Besant spoke and then had representatives from the various religions speak. Finally, everyone, from Olcott's servant to the sweepers of the great hall, silently lined up to offer flowers and give thanks. This tradition continues today.

Then how did Olcott Day become Adyar Day? According to an article in the Theosophical Messenger of 1928, the process began with Fritz Kunz, husband of past president Dora Kunz. Fritz returned to the United States after an extended stay in India and realized that "there were very few appeals before us in this country. . . . Adyar is the Mother of us all, and her claims come first." So he conceived of the Adyar Fund in 1922 and formed the Adyar committee to raise funds for Adyar and to help with the construction of the buildings. The first unofficial Adyar Day was celebrated February 17, 1923, in the United States, with members here raising money to send overseas. That date was chosen because it was not only the day Olcott passed away, but also the day Giordano Bruno, a student of Pythagoras was burned at the stake and the day Charles W. Leadbeater was born. Annie Besant, however, declared February 17 Adyar Day after a suggestion in 1925 from a Frenchwoman named Madame de Manziarly. In February 1926, to commemorate the first official Adyar Day, a pamphlet about Adyar was published with beautiful black and white photos of the estate.

Today, the Adyar Fund continues to thrive thanks to generous donations from many members. Adyar Day, however, is not only for fund-raising. It is a day to remember and give thanks to those who walked before us, who dedicated their lives to Theosophy, and who gave us the very special gift of Adyar.

If you would like to contribute to the Adyar Day Fund, you may write a check to TSA and mark "Adyar Day Fund" in the memo line. Mail it to TSA, P. O. Box 270, Wheaton, IL 60187. The devas of Adyar thank you!