ASTROLOGY and
DIVINATION WHY MAGIC, AND WHY NOW? The Revival of Astrological Magic by
Michael Ofek
“ We have lost the cosmos. The Sun strengthens us no more, neither does the Moon[…]. Now we have to get back to the cosmos, and it can’t be done by a trick. The great range of responses that have fallen dead in us have to come to life again. It has taken two thousand years to kill them. Who knows how long it will take to bring them to life?” ~ D.H. Lawrance, Apocalypse
I
n recent years there has been a great resurgence of interest in astrological magic. Magic practitioners, astrologers, and academic scholars have been gradually rekindling the ancient art, and are just beginning to grasp its importance in the history and development of philosophy, religion, and science. In the astrological community, this was a direct follow-up to the fairly recent, and still ongoing, renaissance of ancient traditional astrology. Since the late 20th Century we have witnessed its resurfacing through the cracks of time, through translations of surviving texts, uncovering ancient theory and practice and astrology’s various phases of development stretching over two millennia. We have learned to appreciate not only the depth and richness of the original system, but also the underlying cosmological and philosophical underpinnings, connecting it to
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The
Career Astrologer
the prevailing schools of its time, as well as the heritage of this archaic wisdom.
The Revival of Ancient Wisdom
To grasp the significance of this revival, and to answer the questions raised in this article, it is important to see this resurgence as a part of a larger cycle. This cycle appears to recur through history every time man is confronted by an anticipated existential crisis, whenever his actions seem to lead him into a blind alley. In recent decades, many ancient forms of knowledge and practice have been slowly revived and reintegrated. These, together with new ways of seeing and understanding, such as through the modern lenses of psychological and scientific inquiry, have ushered novel perceptions and findings of age-old truths. It is this pollination from the wisdom of the past into the present, which gives us a renewed perspective about our inherent nature, the potential for our growth, and a deeper understanding of reality. We are now at a very accelerated phase of this cyclic wave, as it crushes on the shores of our unfulfilling cultural structures. The contrast of the pathological nature of our current world climate, whether social, political, economic or environmental, and the intensely growing need to connect back to our origins has never been so great.
OPA’s Quarterly Magazine
This is the soul’s nostalgia for the primal experience, for the vitality and meaning gained from our deep-rooted connection with spirit, nature, and natural powers. This is the unavoidable “archaic revival”1 that seeks to reunite us with our innate potentials and the wisdom of our ancient ancestry. This recurring trend is reflective of a deep longing for something we once knew but is now forgotten, this is the collective amnesia and the strive for anamnesis, or “remembrance”. This recollection of the forgotten is our collective soul retrieval, it is the way we heal ourselves from the long and arduous sojourn away from our real home, and our deeply severed connection with the cosmos. Searching for wisdom and answers in our past, is not only a moving backwards in time, but an analogical movement inwards, or upwards, to our ontological source. It is the search for our authentic identity, our spiritual origins, as well as our ideal embodied primordial state and connection to the natural kingdom. It is my belief that the revival of astrology and astrological magic has a big part to play in this current wave of re-membering. As man seeks to reclaim his connection with the earth, imperative to his survival, he will also have to regain recognition of
To grasp the significance of this revival, and to answer the questions raised in this article, it is important to see this resurgence as a part of a larger cycle.
