Article of the Month: Dennis Elwell Interview (part one)

Dennis Elwell – Interview by Garry Phillipson (Originally recorded 21st March 1999; reviewed and slightly revised 2nd February 2006)
 
The Philosophy of Self-fulfilment

Q: A chapter title in Cosmic Loom exhorts, ‘Become what you are!’ which can, it seems to me, be taken in two different ways. The first interpretation is that one should develop latent talents, find a role in life to which one is suited, and live in a bold, unfearful way. The second interpretation is that we are already enlightened (or God-conscious, or whatever) – and should strive to realize that fact. Did you have both these meanings in mind when you chose that title? 
 
A: Yes, my chapter in Cosmic Loom, ‘Become what you are!’ expresses our human task. We are not automatically what we are created to be, and there are a lot of failed Aquarians, or amateur Sagittarians, about. At our birth the cosmos will have been working in a certain direction, towards the specific ends which were symbolised in the current state of the solar system, and all creatures and things born at that time were intended to contribute towards the further realization of those ends, according to their capacity as a vehicle. You might say that our human mission is to tune the microcosm to the macrocosm, both as individuals and collectively. 
 
Both your interpretations of this watchword are correct. We are already part of God-consciousness, a cell in the great body of Being, as is everything else, and of course it helps to live in that realisation. But as in our own body, a cell has work to do. We may have been created a nerve cell, or a blood cell, or a bone cell, and it is not enough to sit meditating but to do the work assigned to us. By the contribution cells make to the well-being of the whole, they simultaneously ensure their own welfare. For all I know, God-consciousness is not static but is continually evolving through the experiences that beings with a highly developed consciousness feed in the system. 
 
Q: Do you believe that astrology can help us to become what we are in this second sense, namely becoming enlightened (in the Buddhist sense)?
 
A: Probably the affinity of people who are actually living their astrology will be closest to Zen. We are already in the only reality now — THIS is it! It would be fruitful to explore the sense of is-ness that astrology encourages in us. Lately I have been interested in looking again at ‘event’ charts, many of which are puzzling and do not seem to reflect what actually happened. But that is because we are viewing them through the screen of our preconceptions, which usually amount to little more than the somewhat infantile dichotomies of good/bad, fortunate/unfortunate, happy/unhappy. The reality is contained in what is actually happening, which we should try to understand with astrology’s help, not in the considerations of outcomes which we try to impose on events, out of our limited insight. The cosmic connection reveals the meaning of what is happening, its significance, which allows us to add a new dimension to our experience. It is a qualitative dimension. Most of the time people register events according to simple opposites like nice-nasty, success-failure, good-bad, a net which is not finely meshed enough to capture the nuances of meaning. 
 
The outcomes on which we place so much importance are largely illusory anyway, because everything is carried along on the never-ending stream of universal becoming, which justifies reality in its own terms at the very moment of its manifestation. The situation ‘as is’ is complete in itself, and as such has something to say to us. A film may have a happy ending (or the reverse), but only because the story has been arbitrarily stopped at that point in the action. The ending is not the point of the film — that is almost academic — and the sole point of the film is the film. I am trying to say that we should respect events for what they are in essence, not according to how far we may find them personally convenient or inconvenient, pleasant or unpleasant, and this essence is the true business of astrology. 
 
Anyone embarked on the spiritual journey, which I suppose is the discovery of who they are and their place in the great scheme, will find that an enlightened astrology serves as a reliable compass, partly because the planets reveal the truth of what is happening. The realization that we can explore meaning through astrology has hardly dawned yet, but the heavens are well able to indicate the ‘why’ as well as the ‘what’. For instance they enable us to connect events — perhaps widely separated in time and space — which at first sight would not appear to be connected, but which are in fact in secret association. A radically different picture of cause and effect can be developed in this way, and I have tried to indicate the method in the chapter I have added to the revised Cosmic Loom.
 
Q: You advocate the discovery and development of ‘the cosmic Sun-related self’ as opposed to the ‘crude two-valued responses’ of the ‘Moon-self’. Does this literally entail emphasising the quality of the Sun in a chart and curbing the expression of the Moon? 
 
A: Anyone interested in self-realization (and a perusal of the advertising pages shows this is by no means a universal preoccupation!) must work to tune the various instruments of the cosmic orchestra, so that each is making it proper contribution to the whole. You might say the unfolding planetary patterns are a sort of curriculum or agenda: thus at this time you may have an opportunity to develop your relationship with Mars, next month or next year it may be Jupiter, and so on. Each cosmic principle has to be developed to its proper height, so to speak, and ideally none exaggerated at the expense of another.
 
One of our tasks is to establish ourselves as a creative centre. We are not automatically at the centre of our life activity, and it is something to be worked at, to be achieved by stages. This function relates to the embodied Sun. But not everybody is living creatively. I don’t mean we should all be painting watercolours, or doing embroidery, and such like. It is a matter of being creative in the life-situations that come our way, through the conscious exercise of spiritual intelligence. We can leave the stamp of our own personality on the opportunities and trials we encounter, or we can react robot-like according to our immediate feelings of pleasure or hurt. Such feelings are lunar; they arise as a sort of conditioned reflex, and come laden with the experiences of the past. The Sun on the other hand declares: Behold, I make all things new! 
 
I believe that at this stage of human evolution the creativity of the Sun has to struggle for expression, while the Moon function is too active for our own good. That is to say, our lives tend to be little more than a bundle of reactions. As somebody put it, we are ‘other’ directed, not inner directed. Rudolf Steiner, speaking of our enslavement to habitual responses, once observed that if some morning we untied our shoelace, and tied it again, this might be the only genuinely free act in the whole day. In our relationship with our surroundings, it is possible to go out to experience with warmth from our own centre, which involves a sense of gratitude for ‘what is’, or on the other hand — as a sort of lunar default — we can just absorb experience passively. It’s the difference between active looking and blank staring. 
 
It is so important to get this Sun-Moon polarity right, and a large book could be written on the subject. If we want to see a sign of the zodiac at its creative best, we should study people born with the Sun there. On the other hand the Moon tends to highlight the ‘faults’ of the sign, simply because she is so robotic, so swayed by feeling. The Moon placement can almost be regarded as the Achilles heel. 
 
I am reminded of the contrast between the Sun and Moon every morning when I fetch the papers. There are the tabloids, urging us to emote over the latest ephemeral sensation, and there are the broadsheets, trying to address central issues, geared more to intellect and responsible intention. Every day the tabloids win the circulation war, which tells us something about human nature as it currently stands.
 
My views on the Moon have drawn criticism from feminists and earth mothers. They may have misinterpreted what I am saying. Both the Sun and Moon have their own legitimate sphere. The Moon is habit, and where should we be without the efficient and energy-conserving power of that! Because the concert pianist has practised endlessly, so that the routine of playing is automatically taken care of, it means that the right conditions exist for creative expression. Again, the Moon is reactive feeling, and we should be poor creatures if we were forever insulated from the joy and suffering around us. In general the Moon represents sensory input, and we should remember that experiments in sensory deprivation have proved that without it our mind would lose its hold on reality. Incidentally, Gurdjieff spoke of sense impressions as a sort of food and, just as the quality of the food we eat is physically important, it may be that the quality of our sensory input is important for our inner life. These days our senses are exposed to junk food aplenty!
 
There is no competition between the Sun and Moon, nevertheless the Sun must be allowed to shine! 
 
Q: Charles Carter singled out 27 degrees of Aquarius/Leo as being one of two zodiacal positions particularly associated with astrology. Since your Sun is on that degree, I would be interested to know whether you agree and if you have anything to add. 
 
A: Yes, the axis 27 Leo-Aquarius is linked with astrology, but I think its particular connotation is wider than that. It seems to impart a sense of the cosmic, and appears in that role in the charts of non-astrologers. Maybe it is connected with the holistic viewpoint, of which the cosmic is the ultimate expression.
 
Q: Speaking of your chart: I have come across your chart in magazines, but I wonder if I could check the data?
 
A: My own time of birth has been rectified by myself from my parents’ recollection that I was born late at night. As I came into the world the clock downstairs kept striking, and the irritated doctor asked for it to be stopped. Synchronistically, it announced the arrival of a noisy nuisance! I have settled for 11:44 pm (16 February 1930, Stourbridge, UK). But the question of the true time of birth is an open one, and even with a stopwatch timed ‘first cry’ I should want to work with the chart for a while before I relied on the angles with confidence. Birth is a longish process. As well as the first breath, there is the moment of the ‘breaking of the waters’ when the child — hitherto in a relatively weightless state like an astronaut, displacing its own weight according to the principle of Archimedes — now becomes subject to gravity. The cutting of the umbilical cord signifies a separate entity. However there is the further possibility that our true chart is for an ideal moment which may not correspond with any of the physical stages. 
 
Generally the true time may be earlier than the one recorded. This would explain why the Gauquelin sensitive points occur some degrees distant from the main angles. Again, Charles Carter, a very experienced chart reader, used to say that he always allowed a backlog with the time of birth, so that if just the first few degrees of a sign were rising, he would be open to the possibility that birth had taken place under the previous sign.
 
Q: If I understand one of the points you make in Cosmic Loom, you believe that psychologists express the leanings of their natal charts in the theories they propound, and that this is inevitable, but that astrologers can (in the best cases) avoid doing this because they are working with universal truths?
 
A: Yes, since the birth chart represents those values and ideas to which our life is intended to bear witness, every thinker — including the great psychologists — will inevitably spin their theories from out of their own inner nature, and it is right that they should. We lesser mortals do the same of course, emphasising some opinions at the expense of others. But because the cosmos contains all the possible viewpoints, astrologers have the advantage of being able to see how all the varied psychologies and philosophies fit together into one big picture. They are all facets of the same jewel, as it were, and problems only arise when people assert that their personal and limited truth constitutes the entire truth. It encourages a proper humility to realize that the zodiac circle represents twelve equally valid vantage points or philosophies!
 
Q: This bears directly on a question which particularly interests me: Could there exist such a thing as an ‘absolute’ astrology, free from individual bias; or is it inevitable that, whenever one looks at a chart, one does so in a partial way – biased by one’s partial knowledge and views, by the set of techniques one chooses to use, and (in personal consultations) the way in which astrologer and client affect one another?
 
A: It may be because I am an Aquarian, but I do believe in the existence of an objective truth which can be known, or at least inched towards. When some high profile event occurs, the newspapers are full of comment and analysis, but there is a seldom a consensus. Every columnist views the event through the screen of their own subjectivity or, to put it another way, in terms of their personal horoscopes. This cacophony of voices is a measure of the extent to which the world is enmeshed in illusion. However, astrology does offer us the means of taking a more direct path towards an objective and impersonal truth. 
 
One difficulty encountered here is that instead of open-mindedly embracing what one might grandly call the cosmic viewpoint, there is a temptation to graft astrology onto our existing opinions, or our pet philosophy. In this way cosmic truth can become skewed in the direction of our current fads. Nobody can claim to be free from this, of course, but it is at least possible to make an honest attempt to set preconceptions aside, and attempt to interpret what the heavens are saying in their own terms — terms which may not always be immediately understood. 
 
What matters is the conscientious intent to hold up a mirror to the world in which we can see ourselves, individually and collectively, in a new light. In personal consultations there is little point in trying to second guess how the client is relating to the horoscope so far, nor should we talk about the chart in the gossipy terms of the Sun sign columns. The astrological viewpoint involves a specialised language, just as specialised as that of (say) medicine. Your doctor will have different terms for what you call a tummy ache, and it is precisely thanks to that different language that you can be helped. A person’s natal chart shows us the cosmic self, and the right approach is to illuminate the client’s current understanding from this other, and inevitably strange, perspective.
 
The mirror we hold up should perhaps be a magnifying mirror. We are after all relating the individual to a larger scheme of things. I like the ringing dictum: ‘Magnify to each his own soul!’ Equally important, we should be revealing the significance of the biographical dimension. By that I mean we can help to reconcile people with their individual destiny by explaining it in terms of what nowadays might be called a ‘mission statement’. Left to themselves, people tend not to magnify but to minify their worth, and their contribution to the whole. From astrology’s unique vantage point we can restore their self-esteem, give them back the dignity that may have been undermined by the false values of today’s society.