Episode 111

The second episode in a series featuring religious studies scholar Angela Voss, exploring the history and nature of astrology. We continue discussing Iain McGilchrist's writings on the brain hemispheres, Angela reminding me that he concludes his The Master and His Emissary (2009) with the assertion that humanity's only hope is to rediscover the power of metaphor, a necessary bridge between the two hemispheric worldviews (one of which has become dangerously dominant). Citing various scientific experiments which have supposedly shown astrology's lack of predictive power, I probe further as to what it means to say that it "works" in any sense. Angela argues that such experiments are missing the point, confusing two levels of reality, and sets out her own neo-platonic understanding of the situation. Plotinus' treatise "Are the stars causes?" gets a mention, leading on to a discussion of something like a "universal mind field" and the anima mundi (world soul).

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• Iain McGilchrist
• I. McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (2009)
• brain hemispheres
• "furious skeptics"
• metaphor
• the Enlightenment
• New Age
• hermeneutics
• CCCU MA in Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred
• astrology
• Gauquelin experiments (the "Mars Effect")
• Carl Jung
• Jung's "marriage experiment"
• Rorschach inkblot test
• Platonism
• neoplatonism
• Plotinus
• Plotinus' treatise "Are the stars causes?" (scroll to "Third Tractate")
• panpsychism
• Universal mind field
• synchronicity
• anima mundi
• Taiwan blue magpie (Urocissa caerulea)