The Teeter Totter
Part One
What holds you back? Are you waiting for conditions to improve before acting in a big and magnificent way? Do you have this scenario in mind that if only such and such were true, well then, you would have all the rizz you would need? Imagine that! Having the guile and gumption to seduce and cajole what you want out of life, to be and get anything you desire from this precious world. One of the biggest motivators for me to take my astrology seriously, aside from trying to understand and get a grip on personal tragedies, was the utter frustration and disappointment I experienced in various approaches to self-help. Is it just me, or does self-help tend to leave people with less than they desire? Psychology Today suggests that the self-help market has reached $11 billion worldwide and is growing,1.so, someone is buying what self-help is selling, but why?
“Just sign up here dear Henry! We have what you need to patch your life up,” Liza said. Her name tag indicated that she was an organizer and ‘leader’ of the seminar. “Wanna be and become the best version of yourself? We can help! And in this day and age it could not be any easier because we accept all forms of payment: Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and yes, even Bitcoin! Credit your practice in gratitude, and abundance because there is way more where that comes. Just sign here! ”
Henry hesitates, lifting his pale eyes while raising his arm, bucket in hand.
“Ahh! So, you have a hole in your bucket!” Eliza says, a tad dismissive and waving away Henry’s justifications with her hands in the air, not accepting his excuses, disbelieving why he has devalued himself. “No worries! We will just mend it! That is what this seminar is all about…”
The script is not too far-fetched or much of an exaggeration from the original nursery rhyme and goes a long way in describing the opportunities, but also a fundamental problem involved in signing up for a self-help workshop. “This is an opportunity to gain experience about all the secret ways to fix your life;” in other words, to patch the hole in your proverbial bucket. But the folk song reminds us that we first need straw to mend our bucket, and before that, we need a knife to cut the straw. Then, if the knife is dull, we need a whetstone to sharpen the knife, and of course to wet the stone, we need a bucket to carry the water. A bucket without a hole. But if we only have this one bucket, and it has a hole, well, then we are back to square one. And “so it goes.” A Vonnegut mantra taken from his book Slaughterhouse-Five, which persuasively takes a different view, and more sympathetic with the stoics who were steeped in predeterminism, as compared to the hubristic take that we can be and become anything we want to be.
Joining the Circus
I have always been a little suspicious of the Barnum and Bailey approach to self-help. The movement grows unabated with unlimited offerings, a smorgasbord of techniques for your own betterment, a panoply of approaches for self-improvement. “Step right up and see the legendary creatures of all-time whose commitment for self-discovery, breakthrough, and revelation can be yours in only 9 minutes.” The offer is a tease, a fantastic demonstration on how to gain your heart’s desires, but like a heart throb in a college bar, what is most desirable is not always accessible. Someone has to go home alone.
Cut to Cecile B. DeMille’s Greatest Show on Earth, which makes a statement. The allure for spectacle and our addiction for fascination, makes it seemingly impossible to resist c’mons. The carnival, like self-help and personal development programs, makes promises too big to ignore, not to be missed.
“We bring you the circus, pied piper whose magic tunes greet children of all ages, from six to 60, into a tinsel and spun-candy world of reckless beauty and mounting laughter and whirling thrills; of rhythm, excitement and grace; of blaring and daring and dance; of high-stepping horses and high-flying stars.” 2.
Carnival Barker
Although this is an astrology blog, the resurgence of astrology risks falling in step with the carnival barker and has become something of a circus act unto itself under the guise of knowledge (lower case “k”). Imagine a “ringmaster,” wearing his top hat and holding a cane in the place of a bucket, yelling ‘Praemonitus, praemunitas’, the Latin phrase that loosely translated means “forewarned is forearmed.” Today, as always, seekers try to help themselves by divining the future, using the past as prelude. By finding patterns of behavior on earth that correspond with planetary patterns in the sky, of transits, and progressions, and using this information to anticipate events in the future, and in so doing they can at least create a story that “rhymes with history.” The purpose is a noble one, to get a leg up about challenges and dangers ahead of time. Prediction then attempts to enable enquiring minds to be better prepared, awareness and preparation being two keys to managing future situations effectively. Astrologers have assisted clients for multiple millennia referencing patterns found in the stars, which correspond with patterns found in life. Astrology works! To one degree or another!! And in some respects we might even argue that the appetite to divine the future feeds the self-help movement, but through a different lens, or a different constellation of guiding principles, which enumerates personal development, erring on choice, determination, and willpower. Marveling at the miracle that holds the fascination for the process we call life, under The Big Tent of self-agency.
In the Beginning
Pinpointing the start of any movement is difficult, so identifying the individuals most responsible for ushering in the self-help and personal development movement is debatable. We might point to Pythagoras (570 B.C.E. – 490 B.C.E.), or to someone who lived more recently, like the polymath Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 – April 17, 1790).
Franklin was more of a humanistic thinker than he was religious but supremely practical. He once wrote that “lighthouses are more helpful than churches,” emphasizing that what is most useful and practical in life, is what is good. Both Pythagoras and Franklin emphasized the importance of self-discipline, knowledge, and moral improvement, which in addition to awareness and preparation add to the key elements we already identified in the self-help movement. Other notable personalities from the modern era that we might throw in the mix as having an influence on the self-help and personal development movement, include Samuel Smiles, Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, and even Bill Wilson and Dr. Robert Smith, founders of Alcoholics Anonymous. AA emerged sometime around 1935, and introduced the concept of mutual care, community, and peer support. We can make a compelling case for Pythagoras and even for Franklin being significant figures in starting the self-help movement, but Smiles, Hill, Carnegie, and Wilson are not particularly significant since their work seems more acculturated than representative of an essential pivot in the developmental psychological aspects of the movement.
Pythagoras was a pioneer in numerology and self-discovery. He adhered to an integrated approach. While he may have been the most sympathetic to astrology, of all those mentioned above, his worldview was more universal, which drew him to mathematics. We might say that he practiced a kind of sacred geometry. Franklin would have been reasonably well versed in astrology, but more inclined to persuade his readership to consider natural and scientific explanations over celestial phenomena. He promoted rational reasoning over magical or mysterious thinking. Both men in their own way seeded the idea of the importance of individuality, but with over 2,000 years between them we could easily insert a thousand names, of people who contributed to the modern mindset of self-help. But Pythagoras’ life work preceded Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; three giants of philosophy from Ancient Greece. Since Greek philosophy is essential in understanding the evolution of western thought we might more easily lean on the notion that Pythagoras in a way started it all; he laid the cornerstone.
Anna Katharina Schaffner, Ph.D. quotes the prominent Stoic philosopher from Ancient Rome, Seneca, in her article, What We Really Talk about When We Talk about Self-Help, On the politics of self-improvement:
“Our relations with one another are like a stone arch, which would collapse if the stones did not mutually support each other, and which is upheld in this very way.”
The quote could suggest better cooperation not just among individuals in the moment, but for generations across the large arc of time, and within various approaches that share the same discipline. Different methodologies that get at saying the same thing, are not really that different from one another; it is probably more ‘useful’ to embrace the notion of the “many and the one” and to see how each thing fits in its place to construct the whole. Through this lens there is simultaneously another perspective, a singular view, that Knows the Earth follows only One Path in its orbit around the Sun.
Franklin, on the other hand, embraced the scientific enlightenment at the expense of superstition, he was skeptical of anything that had a more natural explanation, and promoted self-improvement. Even with this extremely thin thread, from Pythagoras to Franklin, we can establish a throughline that reaches the present, and how modern views grew out of the past; today’s influencers stand on the shoulders of a protracted line of great thinkers and practitioners. The vast majority of western thinkers in the modern era give more power to people than they do to fate, destiny, or the planets. The root of the problem for the western mind, if the movement is correct, relates to the question of “who decides?”. Is the problem of fate also an opportunity? More than likely the answer to the question is that it is a combination of both; there is what fate has to say about a person’s future, but that there is also something the individual has to say about their own future.
100% Genuine Cotton
Seldom mentioned as a source or even as a contributor to the self-help movement is Cotton Mather. He is at least worthy of mention since he was an influence on Benjamin Franklin. Mather utilized pamphlet distribution as a medium to effectively spread his religious and philosophical views, which was the trend at the time, and he was one of the most prolific writers of his generation in his particular genre. Ever since the colonial mania that saw an explosion of pamphleteers, there has been a profusion of writers, preachers, and proselytizers all clamoring to win the hearts and minds of their flock, Benjamin Franklin, not the least among them. Pamphleteering was a crucial lynchpin to the movement, so, Mather as an evangelist, and a key nexus in the genesis of the self-help movement is deserving of more credit than he has been given in the past. He was a complex figure who combined various interests and beliefs, and in true Aquarian form an immense writer of books and pamphlets mostly aimed at affecting the way people need to think about life, morally, intellectually, and spiritually. But he was also fascinated by scientific explanations of things. For example, he was a proponent of inoculation, and had learned about variolation during the smallpox epidemic, concepts well ahead of his time. Unfortunately, he was also intrigued by witchcraft, believed in spirits and true to his Puritanical faith, believed in the Devil incarnate.
Cotton Mather was the son of the first Harvard President, Increase Mather. They both published books about witchcraft, respectively, 3 to 8 years before the Salem Witch Trials. One cannot help but wonder if they did not think the ensuing mania might be good for the business of selling more books. However, one-year after the trials, Increase Mather published Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits, but the primary source of the trials belonged to Cotton Mather, and his son’s enormously popular, Wonders of the Invisible World: Being an Account of the Trials of Several Witches, Lately Executed in New-England, printed in October 1692 3-months after the last execution. My reading of the account seems to suggest that both books were written after the events to reflect a softening of their views, and to be seen as more amenable and less superstitious than they might have been, which was in sympathy with the public outcry that steadily grew against the wrongful execution of friends and family in the aftermath.
Staying On Course
Western culture presumes personal responsibility for how we express and manifest our individuality, ambition, and accomplishment. This perspective may be true to some extent, but certainly is not the whole truth. There would be a much vaster and more comprehensive understanding on the way, long after Pythagoras touched upon his philosophical and religious views, or Franklin discussed his moral code using the invention of his 13 virtues. I am referring to a type of yoga introduced to the world at the turn of the 20th century, which we will make mention of again in the next essay. For this essay, let me ask, who has not experienced an exaggerated claim of some sort at a seminar or workshop, yet also felt that the program under delivered on its promise? Astrology courses or workshops are no exception to this rule. If not, if you feel you in fact got more than you bargained for, then my argument is to tread softly; you may be caught up in the moment, like the good people of Salem who piled on in a maniacal fashion, pointing fingers at what they believed was the cause of their “affliction”. The revivalist mentality in the form of stoicism, or traditional astrology as another example, may be a backlash to a pendulum having swung too far in the direction of self-construal, and not a balanced enough view between fate and fortune. As far as personality development goes there is a middle ground that invites a combination of both free will and determinism.
Jupiter-Uranus Conjunction
The next couple of posts deal with the case of “witch mania” because it fell under the auspices of the Jupiter Uranus conjunct of 1692, and this 14 year cycle is top of mind since we just experienced this conjunction again in Taurus. The correspondence to a “teeter totter” intimates how things can turn from incredibly good to horrifically bad, coming down much faster than went up, due to in no small part to the exaggerated beliefs we seem susceptible to, and that teeter on superstition. I think we can do better, but it will take a more disciplined Spirit, and one that Knows — buying a ticket to the circus is for entertainment purposes only.
- Schaffner, A. K., PhD. (2021, September 9). On the politics of self-improvement. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-art-self-improvement/202109/what-we-really-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-self-help
- The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) – IMDB. (n.d.). IMDb. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044672/characters/nm0001124
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials#cite_note-45
- Footnote 45 from the Wikipedia page on the Salem Witch Trial:
Caporael, Linnda R. (1976). “Ergotism: The Satan Loosed in Salem?”. Science. 192 (4234): 21–26. Bibcode:1976Sci…192…21C. doi:10.1126/science.769159. JSTOR 1741715. PMID 769159. Archived from the original on June 27, 2022. Retrieved June 27, 2022.
Hudson Valley Astrologer 
Leave a comment