Stars, Numbers, and True Astrology

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Planetary Rounds and Globes Series · 20 pages

Twenty pages opened by an abstract and train of thoughts, and closed by a section on the Great Pyramid as an observatory of occult astrognosy and a page of suggested reading. The epigraph on the title page states the whole position in a line — stars do not cause good or bad luck but simply indicate it.

The opening claim is that astrology is a science far more difficult to master than the highest mathematics, and that every great astrologer admits man's free will — not absolute, but real enough to let him react against the occult influence of the heavenly bodies upon his destiny. Two prerequisites are named for proficiency in it, and only one of them is intellectual: the apperception by intuition of the ramifications of universal sympathy, and a pure life, physically, morally and spiritually. As with alchemy, modern astrology is said to be no longer the pure science of the schools of Thoth-Hermes and the first Egyptian dynasties. The middle of the study concerns number, and it is precise about what kind. The Kabbalistic Gematria is described as arithmetical rather than geometrical — one of the methods for extracting the hidden meaning of letters, words and sentences, by applying to the letters of a word the sense they bear as numbers, in outward shape as well as in individual meaning — while mathematics is called the only exact and infallible science because it proceeds from universals to particulars. The distinction the file exists to make is then put twice. Astrology is a mathematical science which reveals what particular causes will produce what combination of effects and gives the means of knowing how to guide our future births; but as the clock merely indicates and does not influence the time, the astrologer cannot shape destiny. Where the science determines the nature of effects by a knowledge of magnetic affinities and attractions between planetary bodies, it is the man's own karma that places him in a particular magnetic relation to begin with. The closing pages argue that the Great Pyramid must have been built when Draconis, the then pole star, was at its lower culmination with the Pleiades, and Alcyone especially, on the same meridian above.

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