Gifts Of The Spirit

Dane Rudhyar (March 23, 1895 - September 13, 1985), born Daniel Chenneviere, was an American author, modernist composer and humanistic astrologer. He was a pioneer of modern transpersonal astrology.'Throughout the past centuries, philosophers and wise men pondering over the many and varied ways in which human beings react to their experiences, have sought to define a few basic types of men according to the characteristic nature of their most familiar responses. Today, psychologists and biologists, anthropologists and endocrinologists propound in great detail their own classifications of human types. But what these new categories have gained in precision and analytical subtlety does not suffice to make obsolete the ancient classification of twelve zodiacal types of human beings, with its deep root in a metaphysical and cosmological understanding of the universal patterning of the tides of life and of the creative answer of spirit to human needs.We do not know where the concept of a twelvefold cosmos appeared for the first time. We find it abstractly and geometrically defined by Pythagoras and Plato, who probably had inherited it from Egypt or Chaldea, perhaps from still more ancient civilizations...On these two cycles, agricultural man established his calendars; which in turn gave him a sense of mastery over time and seasonal activity-a sense that he had become able to fathom the rhythmic pattern of all creative processes in nature. Having acquired the power to harness the life-force in crop-raising and cattle-breeding, the next step was for him to extend his understanding of nature's rhythm to human nature, for he believed that the universe was one organic whole controlled by divine Powers, and that humanity was an inseparable part of the harmony of this whole.'-Print ed.