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by A. T. Mann
A. T. Mann is is an astrologer, architect, author, artist, designer and teacher → @atmann4
When I was teaching myself astrology in the 1970s, I had an important realization: Instead of learning it, I was remembering its principles, and this feeling has attended me ever since. So, when I returned from my hitchhiking journey overland from Munich to India in 1971, and began studying the many astrology books in the house of a dear woman friend in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, I wondered, particularly as my daughter had just been conceived and was gestating, why no traditional astrology books seemed to even mention gestation. Of course, I had heard of something called the ‘pre-natal eclipse,’ which shows prior cosmic patterns into which we are born, as well as aspect patterns that indicate major issues that we are likely to confront during the coming lifetime. While these are significant when the eclipse aspects make direct contact with any of our natal planets, I found this quite an indirect dynamic, on the whole. This was particularly the case as my daughter’s gestation was highly dramatic from the very beginning, as her mother was married to someone else, and she already had three children. I imagined that these influences would be an integral aspect of my coming child’s astrology, yet saw no indications of this before the fact.
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Upon my discovery, at that time, of the teachings of George Gurdjieff’s ‘Fourth Way,’ his student, the mathematician Petr Ouspensky, and in turn his student Rodney Collin, an astute English journalist had written a book about their ‘fourth way system’ of knowledge called, “The Theory of Celestial Influence,” These amazing men looked at humanity in a very different way than I had ever imagined, primarily through the idea that a lifetime was seen a ‘process in time,’ which had certain biological and psychological characteristics that I realized immediately were extremely relevant. This was particularly relevant since I had been an architect and had studied quantum mechanics and relativity physics at Cornell University in the 1960s under the guidance of Niels Bohr, the famous Danish physicist, whose studies were profound about the dynamics and implications of time on human life. Collin’s book therefore started with a shocking realization: that our human ‘time-sense’ was not additive, but rather that our perception of the passage of time was ‘logarithmic’ due to the succession of biological-cyclic vehicles, called ‘Octaves,’ through which we experience during our life in time: a molecular scale of time during the life of the ovum in gestation within our mother, the cellular time scale of childhood within our family, and the calendrical time of years and decades during maturity, from the end of childhood until the moment of death. As we grow through each of these octaves, we perceive time differently. During gestation, time passes extremely slowly, as we essentially repeat the entire evolutionary process in the mother’s womb in nine calendar months (or ten lunar months), although mother feels that it takes forever.
Collin divided the lifetime up into three distinct octaves, of Gestation (containing 10 lunar months or nine calendar months) and the creation of our physical body; Childhood (of 100 lunar months or seven years) during which time we create our emotional body or personality; and Maturity (1000 lunar months or 78 years) during which we create a mental body and live our life in the world. Collin called this model the “Clock of Human Life.” (Illustration 1) Much of what he described came from an earlier book by the biologist Pierre Lecomte du Noüy called, “Biological Time,” published in the last years of the First World War.
The phenomenon he described meant that during life, our time sense changes dramatically from conception to death, making apparent time pass ever more quickly, year after year, through our lifetime, as we accelerate through our lifetime. The older we are, the faster time passes.
The mechanism of this process was also unique, which Collin described as the “Long Body of the Solar System” in time, as our sun travels around the galactic center at a phenomenal rate of millions of miles per hour, carrying the planets’ orbits with it as nested spirals. (Illustration 2.) The resultant diagram, as shown by Collin, (and created by this author in 1977.) has a similar form to the double helix of the DNA molecule within every living being on earth. Via the process of resonance, the DNA molecule within each cell exchanges information instantly with the spiraling body of the solar system in time. This realization blew me away, as I subsequently created a precise diagram of just that dynamic system that essentially governs our life in time.
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Instead of the then prevailing concept that we enter the world at birth as an ‘empty canvas,’ ready to be imprinted by life experiences, we already carry the extended baggage of the entire evolutionary process and the combined experiences of our mother’s and father’s lineages. In a book I read at that time, “The Secret Life of the Unborn Child,” Dr. Thomas Verny described how, during gestation, we experience the earliest stages of our intelligent life in the womb, which we carry as a ‘background’ of our later life experience.
As a fledgling astrologer, I naturally wondered; Where would I find such information in my child’s birth chart? The answer was already in Collin’s book, on page 118 as “The Clock of Human Life,” which showed three clockwise pie-shaped stages of life: Gestation, Childhood and Maturity. (Illustration 3) I suddenly realized that I had been perplexed by the traditional form of the houses/zodiac signs, that the eighth sign and house, associated with the sign Scorpio and the end of life at death were only two-thirds of the way around the whole chart, and this was the key.
When I transposed Collins’ clock in a counter-clockwise form and overlaid it on the zodiac, it matched perfectly and showed clearly that the ninth house cusp was both death and conception, and that the ninth house through the Ascendant Birth moment segment was Gestation, the ‘missing third’ of the life process.
I started thinking about the definitions of the last four houses (9th—ASC) in traditional astrology and was amazed by my conclusions. (Figure 4: Stages of Gestation) The four zodiac symbols associated with the last four signs of the year are Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces. All four are traditionally associated with animistic symbols, which coincidentally are metaphorical for the four stages of gestation when translated to modern biology.
Sagittarius is a centaur, with a human torso upon a horse’s body, and is associated with ‘self-realization, higher mind, psychology, philosophy, foreign places, etc.’ During the first six weeks of gestation we undergo a biological transformation, initially looking like a fish, then invertebrate, and then the human in us gradually emerges, until about six weeks later, at the Midheaven of the astrology chart, our mother realizes that she is pregnant and we become ‘officially human,’ and take on our karma from previous lives, now associated with the Ego in this incarnation.
Capricorn is the goat-fish, and in gestation we develop within the amniotic fluid with fish-like gills, emerging as a being with a spine and skeletal system, associated with ‘our position in the world, occupation, fame and worldly acknowledgement.’ Often the father now knows the mother is pregnant, and spreads the word.
Aquarius in its most ancient symbolic form is two water snakes swimming in opposite directions but in parallel, up and down. In gestation, this signifies when mother first feels the presence of the baby, called the ‘quickening,’ and perceives movement within. Biologically this is the time when our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems come into being, which parallel each other within us.
Pisces is the last half of gestation when we are swimming in the amniotic fluid, connected to our mother via our umbilical cord, and we often establish a powerful psychic connection with mother. We feel a mother's movement, respond to music, react to her moods and generally reflect her temperament within the amniotic fluid of the womb. Later, the twelfth house brings water weight, and symbolizes psychic connections, symbiotic relationships, and deeper emotional connections.
When I do a Life*Time Reading, I start by going back to cusp 9 and talking about what led to one’s gestation (from your mother’s perspective), by looking at the sign on cusp 9, any planets that reside there, or planets making aspects to cusp 9, and which planet rules the sign on cusp 9. And I try to see it from the mother’s perspective, approximately nine months before conception.
I first go backwards before conception, from cusp 9, down the right side of the chart and down to the bottom and up the left side to find whether the Sun or Moon is the first luminary we come to, which equals the parent responsible for the ‘impulse’ to conceive a child. If that luminary is below the horizon, it is an unconscious impulse, and if above in the upper half, it is a conscious choice. And they locate the aspect from the impulsive planet to the other luminary, to describe the ‘receiver’ of the conception impulse. The type of aspect is essential as it shows their relationship. The luminaries' gender (male=fire/air or female=earth/water) shows their choice of desired gender of the child. I try to see the entire gestation from the mother’s viewpoint, even when the Sun is in gestation houses, as it is how mother ‘sees’ the father is essential.
The ninth house is how mother realizes that she is pregnant, equivalent to how we realize our deeper life direction via psychology, philosophy or religion later in life.
The tenth house cusp (MC) is one’s Ego, related to mother’s reaction to being pregnant. Water sign, she feels it; fire sign, she intuits it; earth sign, she senses it; water sign, she feels it, etc. Aspects to the MC show who the mother tells or doesn’t tell and how she reacts to the reality of conception. Aspects to planets below the horizon are unconscious, above are conscious.
Eleventh house is when the ‘quickening’ happens and mother feels movement inside, it is also her ‘allies,’ whom she finds to work with and allies herself to for support. Later this is those to whom we go for support of creativity.
Twelfth house is half of the gestation, and she is psychically connected to the child (or not), via the umbilical cord and whether the mother withdraws from the world or embraces it.
During gestation, each planet shows a person present who affects gestation and qualities evoked by the coming child as to personality types we carry creativity. And, as in my books on reincarnation, each gestation planet shows a prior incarnation we carry into this lifetime, stored in our collective unconscious, waiting to emerge during life.
Finally, the birth happens at the Ascendant and the sign shows the nature of the process, equals the child’s personality/mask. Aspects to the ASC/birth moment show qualities of the birth process and aspects of one’s personality as sub-personalities.
When we look at a lifetime as a whole in time, (Diagram 5: The Cylinder of Life) resonating with the spiraling solar system, we see that it is a cylinder with four layers (octaves), and that the first and deepest layer is Gestation, the foundation upon which all rests, showing us that it is essential to our being. And in addition, it is a prototype of the fourth/highest layer/octave of Transcendence, showing that our Gestation material, as we discover and unearth it, is an early echo of the highest level, so when searching our being for life’s important clues, this is where we would start. Jung described an important mechanism to understanding this he called “The Axiom of Maria,” in which ‘out of the three, comes the fourth, which is an echo of the first,’ and this is exactly what we see here in this model. Jung calls the mystery of the three into four as the most profound understanding of the search for paradise. In order to advance to the fourth level we must experience a symbolic death of our animistic being and hence a spiritual rebirth.
In short, we must delve into our deepest unconscious being in order to discover our true and highest Transcendent reality. The astrology Life Time reading gives one a sense of the flow of one’s life in time.
A. T. Mann (Tad) is aninventive astrologer, author of 15 books on astrology, tarot, the sacred arts,as well as a mandala painter, architect, and designer. He served on theNCGR Board, and was designer andco-editor of the NCGR Research Journal. His books include: The Round Art; The DivineLife: Astrology and Reincarnation; A New Visionof Astrology; The MandalaAstrological Tarot; SacredArchitecture; The Sacred Language of Trees, and others. Tad lectures and teaches internationallyand is available for Life Time Astrology consultations. He lives in Ithaca, NY.For more information, see http://www.atmann.net and contact him atmann4@gmail.com.
Image: Portal by Andreas Brooks
by A. T. Mann
A. T. Mann is is an astrologer, architect, author, artist, designer and teacher → @atmann4
When I was teaching myself astrology in the 1970s, I had an important realization: Instead of learning it, I was remembering its principles, and this feeling has attended me ever since. So, when I returned from my hitchhiking journey overland from Munich to India in 1971, and began studying the many astrology books in the house of a dear woman friend in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, I wondered, particularly as my daughter had just been conceived and was gestating, why no traditional astrology books seemed to even mention gestation. Of course, I had heard of something called the ‘pre-natal eclipse,’ which shows prior cosmic patterns into which we are born, as well as aspect patterns that indicate major issues that we are likely to confront during the coming lifetime. While these are significant when the eclipse aspects make direct contact with any of our natal planets, I found this quite an indirect dynamic, on the whole. This was particularly the case as my daughter’s gestation was highly dramatic from the very beginning, as her mother was married to someone else, and she already had three children. I imagined that these influences would be an integral aspect of my coming child’s astrology, yet saw no indications of this before the fact.
Upon my discovery, at that time, of the teachings of George Gurdjieff’s ‘Fourth Way,’ his student, the mathematician Petr Ouspensky, and in turn his student Rodney Collin, an astute English journalist had written a book about their ‘fourth way system’ of knowledge called, “The Theory of Celestial Influence,” These amazing men looked at humanity in a very different way than I had ever imagined, primarily through the idea that a lifetime was seen a ‘process in time,’ which had certain biological and psychological characteristics that I realized immediately were extremely relevant. This was particularly relevant since I had been an architect and had studied quantum mechanics and relativity physics at Cornell University in the 1960s under the guidance of Niels Bohr, the famous Danish physicist, whose studies were profound about the dynamics and implications of time on human life. Collin’s book therefore started with a shocking realization: that our human ‘time-sense’ was not additive, but rather that our perception of the passage of time was ‘logarithmic’ due to the succession of biological-cyclic vehicles, called ‘Octaves,’ through which we experience during our life in time: a molecular scale of time during the life of the ovum in gestation within our mother, the cellular time scale of childhood within our family, and the calendrical time of years and decades during maturity, from the end of childhood until the moment of death. As we grow through each of these octaves, we perceive time differently. During gestation, time passes extremely slowly, as we essentially repeat the entire evolutionary process in the mother’s womb in nine calendar months (or ten lunar months), although mother feels that it takes forever.
Collin divided the lifetime up into three distinct octaves, of Gestation (containing 10 lunar months or nine calendar months) and the creation of our physical body; Childhood (of 100 lunar months or seven years) during which time we create our emotional body or personality; and Maturity (1000 lunar months or 78 years) during which we create a mental body and live our life in the world. Collin called this model the “Clock of Human Life.” (Illustration 1) Much of what he described came from an earlier book by the biologist Pierre Lecomte du Noüy called, “Biological Time,” published in the last years of the First World War.
The phenomenon he described meant that during life, our time sense changes dramatically from conception to death, making apparent time pass ever more quickly, year after year, through our lifetime, as we accelerate through our lifetime. The older we are, the faster time passes.
The mechanism of this process was also unique, which Collin described as the “Long Body of the Solar System” in time, as our sun travels around the galactic center at a phenomenal rate of millions of miles per hour, carrying the planets’ orbits with it as nested spirals. (Illustration 2.) The resultant diagram, as shown by Collin, (and created by this author in 1977.) has a similar form to the double helix of the DNA molecule within every living being on earth. Via the process of resonance, the DNA molecule within each cell exchanges information instantly with the spiraling body of the solar system in time. This realization blew me away, as I subsequently created a precise diagram of just that dynamic system that essentially governs our life in time.
Instead of the then prevailing concept that we enter the world at birth as an ‘empty canvas,’ ready to be imprinted by life experiences, we already carry the extended baggage of the entire evolutionary process and the combined experiences of our mother’s and father’s lineages. In a book I read at that time, “The Secret Life of the Unborn Child,” Dr. Thomas Verny described how, during gestation, we experience the earliest stages of our intelligent life in the womb, which we carry as a ‘background’ of our later life experience.
As a fledgling astrologer, I naturally wondered; Where would I find such information in my child’s birth chart? The answer was already in Collin’s book, on page 118 as “The Clock of Human Life,” which showed three clockwise pie-shaped stages of life: Gestation, Childhood and Maturity. (Illustration 3) I suddenly realized that I had been perplexed by the traditional form of the houses/zodiac signs, that the eighth sign and house, associated with the sign Scorpio and the end of life at death were only two-thirds of the way around the whole chart, and this was the key.
When I transposed Collins’ clock in a counter-clockwise form and overlaid it on the zodiac, it matched perfectly and showed clearly that the ninth house cusp was both death and conception, and that the ninth house through the Ascendant Birth moment segment was Gestation, the ‘missing third’ of the life process.
I started thinking about the definitions of the last four houses (9th—ASC) in traditional astrology and was amazed by my conclusions. (Figure 4: Stages of Gestation) The four zodiac symbols associated with the last four signs of the year are Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces. All four are traditionally associated with animistic symbols, which coincidentally are metaphorical for the four stages of gestation when translated to modern biology.
Sagittarius is a centaur, with a human torso upon a horse’s body, and is associated with ‘self-realization, higher mind, psychology, philosophy, foreign places, etc.’ During the first six weeks of gestation we undergo a biological transformation, initially looking like a fish, then invertebrate, and then the human in us gradually emerges, until about six weeks later, at the Midheaven of the astrology chart, our mother realizes that she is pregnant and we become ‘officially human,’ and take on our karma from previous lives, now associated with the Ego in this incarnation.
Capricorn is the goat-fish, and in gestation we develop within the amniotic fluid with fish-like gills, emerging as a being with a spine and skeletal system, associated with ‘our position in the world, occupation, fame and worldly acknowledgement.’ Often the father now knows the mother is pregnant, and spreads the word.
Aquarius in its most ancient symbolic form is two water snakes swimming in opposite directions but in parallel, up and down. In gestation, this signifies when mother first feels the presence of the baby, called the ‘quickening,’ and perceives movement within. Biologically this is the time when our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems come into being, which parallel each other within us.
Pisces is the last half of gestation when we are swimming in the amniotic fluid, connected to our mother via our umbilical cord, and we often establish a powerful psychic connection with mother. We feel a mother's movement, respond to music, react to her moods and generally reflect her temperament within the amniotic fluid of the womb. Later, the twelfth house brings water weight, and symbolizes psychic connections, symbiotic relationships, and deeper emotional connections.
When I do a Life*Time Reading, I start by going back to cusp 9 and talking about what led to one’s gestation (from your mother’s perspective), by looking at the sign on cusp 9, any planets that reside there, or planets making aspects to cusp 9, and which planet rules the sign on cusp 9. And I try to see it from the mother’s perspective, approximately nine months before conception.
I first go backwards before conception, from cusp 9, down the right side of the chart and down to the bottom and up the left side to find whether the Sun or Moon is the first luminary we come to, which equals the parent responsible for the ‘impulse’ to conceive a child. If that luminary is below the horizon, it is an unconscious impulse, and if above in the upper half, it is a conscious choice. And they locate the aspect from the impulsive planet to the other luminary, to describe the ‘receiver’ of the conception impulse. The type of aspect is essential as it shows their relationship. The luminaries' gender (male=fire/air or female=earth/water) shows their choice of desired gender of the child. I try to see the entire gestation from the mother’s viewpoint, even when the Sun is in gestation houses, as it is how mother ‘sees’ the father is essential.
The ninth house is how mother realizes that she is pregnant, equivalent to how we realize our deeper life direction via psychology, philosophy or religion later in life.
The tenth house cusp (MC) is one’s Ego, related to mother’s reaction to being pregnant. Water sign, she feels it; fire sign, she intuits it; earth sign, she senses it; water sign, she feels it, etc. Aspects to the MC show who the mother tells or doesn’t tell and how she reacts to the reality of conception. Aspects to planets below the horizon are unconscious, above are conscious.
Eleventh house is when the ‘quickening’ happens and mother feels movement inside, it is also her ‘allies,’ whom she finds to work with and allies herself to for support. Later this is those to whom we go for support of creativity.
Twelfth house is half of the gestation, and she is psychically connected to the child (or not), via the umbilical cord and whether the mother withdraws from the world or embraces it.
During gestation, each planet shows a person present who affects gestation and qualities evoked by the coming child as to personality types we carry creativity. And, as in my books on reincarnation, each gestation planet shows a prior incarnation we carry into this lifetime, stored in our collective unconscious, waiting to emerge during life.
Finally, the birth happens at the Ascendant and the sign shows the nature of the process, equals the child’s personality/mask. Aspects to the ASC/birth moment show qualities of the birth process and aspects of one’s personality as sub-personalities.
When we look at a lifetime as a whole in time, (Diagram 5: The Cylinder of Life) resonating with the spiraling solar system, we see that it is a cylinder with four layers (octaves), and that the first and deepest layer is Gestation, the foundation upon which all rests, showing us that it is essential to our being. And in addition, it is a prototype of the fourth/highest layer/octave of Transcendence, showing that our Gestation material, as we discover and unearth it, is an early echo of the highest level, so when searching our being for life’s important clues, this is where we would start. Jung described an important mechanism to understanding this he called “The Axiom of Maria,” in which ‘out of the three, comes the fourth, which is an echo of the first,’ and this is exactly what we see here in this model. Jung calls the mystery of the three into four as the most profound understanding of the search for paradise. In order to advance to the fourth level we must experience a symbolic death of our animistic being and hence a spiritual rebirth.
In short, we must delve into our deepest unconscious being in order to discover our true and highest Transcendent reality. The astrology Life Time reading gives one a sense of the flow of one’s life in time.
A. T. Mann (Tad) is aninventive astrologer, author of 15 books on astrology, tarot, the sacred arts,as well as a mandala painter, architect, and designer. He served on theNCGR Board, and was designer andco-editor of the NCGR Research Journal. His books include: The Round Art; The DivineLife: Astrology and Reincarnation; A New Visionof Astrology; The MandalaAstrological Tarot; SacredArchitecture; The Sacred Language of Trees, and others. Tad lectures and teaches internationallyand is available for Life Time Astrology consultations. He lives in Ithaca, NY.For more information, see http://www.atmann.net and contact him atmann4@gmail.com.
Image: Portal by Andreas Brooks