The Fallen Language

Tonight’s Question: Is Life a Play or a Game?

Playing chess just now I got clear on why I like games, and the difference, symbolically speaking, of Mercury in Capricorn and Mercury in Aquarius, and of Capricorn and Aquarius more generally.

It may be long past time, biographically speaking, or perhaps just in time, for me to come out of the closet and say that I think in astrological terms, which is something other than ‘believing in astrology’.

Perhaps it goes without saying, but I think a great deal of astrology in its application is complete bullshit, and a sort of plague on humanity. Most fascinatingly, this critique of astrology goes back to the core of what we call Western Society, through Christianity, then back through Judaism, all the way to the paleo-semitic culture (my own term) of the Near East. Yes, people have been thinking that astrology ruins everything for a really long time.

As Lao Tzu put it, knowledge of the future is but the flowery trapping of following the Way, and the beginning of folly. In the paleo-semitic canon expressed in the books of Moses, it amounted to a second fall. First came the fall brought by the knowledge of Good and Evil, then, the fall brought by knowledge of the esoteric language of good and bad fortune. Because once we humans know a language, we learn to code.

But, there’s no stopping it now, the milk has been spilled, the horse is out of the barn. Elivs has left the building. We have this language, and regardless of whether it really is some sort of Divine Language of Fate, it is nonetheless a fascinating language, which I keep coming back to.

Secretly. In that closet I’m now coming out of.

I think in astrology, not because I find astrologers convincing, or because I like talking astrology with people. The very opposite is true. Still, I think in astrology because I find it not just conceptually deep, but applicable to life in a way that transcends any specific area of knowledge but applies to life in general.

I think the zodiacal system that came out of the Near East, and was adopted and transmitted by first the Greeks and then the Arabs, provides a plausible candidate for that “economy of images” that complex systems theorists are in search of. I can’t say that definitively, but I believe it is plausible.

Take, for example, the symbolic idea that I started off meaning to explain, about the difference between Capricorn and Aquarius, as demonstrated by the nature of games. Capricorn is the restricted rule set of a game. What does not accord with the rules does not occur. Such is the dream sought by the physical scientists, which seemed to come into view with Newton..

Except, instead of science culminating in definitive knowledge of a clockwork universe, it ended in equations that function to predict the future while offering no tangible notion of what is going on; and then more strangely still, a universe where observer cannot be separated from observed.

Capricorn – Aquarius – Pisces.

Why does a symbolic language with roots in pre-history describe the unforeseen development of modern science?

I’m open to being wrong about this mapping, but not to the easy, over-confident, skepticism of self-styled scientists and believers in ‘science’. Honestly, it’s just immature. There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. There’s a difference between rigor and a small mind.

If I had to answer the question I pose to begin, I’d say life is more of a play than a game. Or rather: it’s a play within a game. Or maybe: a play within a game within a play.