Robert Schmidt’s project
Sometimes as I’m listening to recordings of Robert Schmidt’s talks, I become filled with sadness verging on grief for the noble and ambitious project he was attempting but wasn’t able to complete. And sometimes I struggle not to succumb to feelings of anger verging on malice towards his detractors, whose envious opinions, like poisonous whispers spread around court, undermined and distracted his work. He might not agree that it distracted him—and certainly he still managed to do an amazing amount of work—but I can at least say, as I follow him closely in his lectures (and especially as I work to edit the transcripts), that his detractors were a distraction. And I guess what infuriates me at times (whether reasonably or unreasonably, I don’t know) is that they appear to have been blind to the valid beauty of what he was doing.
Or were they simply just too envious to allow it? This is a thought that often comes to me, but that I entertain uncomfortably. Were Robert’s naysayers and detractors, who have puffed themselves up with academic aires while dismissing the value of his work (they are willing to give him credit, but only as a translator), motivated to do so by envy? I don’t believe they really understood what Robert was doing. Or if they did, if they were able to spy it thanks to his brilliance, that it daunted them. I suspect they found it threatening to have the fullness of astrology revealed as something requiring a quality of intelligence they feared they or their followers might lack. The astrology that Robert revealed was not a simple thing. It was complex. To master it would require real work and a willingness to become humble. What, then, about their expertise? What about their careers, built upon what they already considered themselves to know?
As with a Rubik’s Cube whose only solution is a precisely prescribed set of moves, realisation of the original system of horoscopic astrology, at least as Robert presented it, required a willingness from modern astrologers to throw almost every preconceived notion into the fire of humble apprenticeship. Anyone trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube in a manner other than the prescribed method may get one or two sides complete and even look promisingly close on a third, but so long as they try to maintain these gains, proud to show what they’ve accomplished, they’ll shy away from the necessary prescribed steps required to actually solve the entire thing. It will seem too risky. The thought that keeps revisiting me is that Robert’s detractors were proud of what they considered their accomplishments and were unwilling to let them go. And that like a kid who has painstakingly managed to get first one side of a Rubik’s Cube and then another all the same colour—and having won some respect from their peers for doing so—they didn’t want to hear that they were going about it all wrong.
Envy is an ugly emotion, which makes it hard to admit. I know. I have wasted a lot of my life derailed by envy and am only now making more conscious effort to address this stymieing tendency within me. Envy is like a lead weight that keeps one pegged to the floor; one can only climb so high without ditching it the way a balloonist ditches sand bags in order to rise. Rather than admit the ugliness of envy within one’s own heart, it is very tempting to let reason have a go at justifying it as an ugliness not within oneself, but outside oneself. It’s not that I am wrong, it’s that he is wrong.
“Someone thinks he’s Hermes Trismegistus!” I literally heard one of Robert’s more prominent detractors say this about him. It sounds reasonable. Who is anyone to think they are Hermes Trismegistus? What hubris! But did Robert really think he was? Or did he perhaps only think that he was tapping into whatever state of mind so permeated that of “Hermes Trismegistus” as to allow the original system of horoscopic astrology to be conceived? To participate in the state of mind of Hermes Trismegistus is different than to claim identity with Hermes Trismegistus. And if we’re ready to condemn one of our own for achieving such participation, what then do we consider ourselves to be attempting when we try to practice astrology?
I can’t say if Robert’s reconstruction of Hellenistic astrology is an accurate reproduction of the original. Even he admitted that he could have it wrong. But what he knew by his own direct perception is that the fruit of his considerable efforts had led to the revelation of a system of astrology so cohesive as to suggest an original system, suitably subtle and complex as to train one’s mind into seeing with stable knowledge the changing world of material existence. He was able to reveal how astrology can constitute valid epistemology. This is no small feat. But the problem is that the overwhelming vast majority of us, satisfied to simply feel that we know, never think to ask ourselves how it is that we know what we think we know. So, for most of us, Robert’s efforts and achievements don’t even register on the radar of things worth paying attention to, and the astrology he revealed easily appears overly and needlessly complicated. “He must be over-reading the texts,” is another popular critique. Is that the problem? Or is the problem that, despite the normalised vanity with which popular culture has appropriated astrology, most of us are simply unable actually to appreciate it fully?
This is going to sound both snobbish and pessimistic, but lately I find myself wondering if popular astrology is simply an oxymoron in the same way salvation for the masses, public privacy, and institutionalised freedom are oxymorons. They make for great slogans, but they’re not well thought out. It’s like promoting “space flight for all” while not taking into consideration the great cost of each launch and the fact that the capsule has only room enough for three. Or like saying “we’ll get through this together” when the challenge to be traversed is actually a tightrope spanning the Great Canyon. Like the beautiful realisations whose subtle logic dances atop the crude rudiments of established grammar, daunting all but the most intrepid poets, astrology’s perfection is finally a solitary affair. It cannot be taught en masse. The basics can. “What’s your sign?” But not much more than that. Most people simply won’t have the desire to delve so deeply into the subject, and even less the desire to be changed by it. This can only lead to offence. And that, in fact, is what we have. It’s as though the impact of Robert’s revelations produced a crater of offence at the centre of which he and Ellen found themselves blinking in shock. The institutionalisation of a revelation is always an insulation of its power. It is a covering. Like Saturn, which rules the skin, as soon as it is cut, immediately it is healed. The red blood cells aren’t prompted to curiosity; “Say, hold on a minute… what’s out there?” They have only one imperative: to heal the rupture and reknit the integrity of the commune. It’s a very special blood cell that thanks the knife.
Valens’ books have been famous for a long time, but he didn’t write them for mass distribution. He wrote them for one or more of his students. And he specifically asked them not to share the knowledge indiscriminately. Beyond the most rudimentary levels, astrology can only be taught by intimate means, from teacher to student. The higher one goes, the smaller the class size must be. Why? It becomes too personal. Astrology is not some dry accounting. At the lower levels an algorithmic approach might yield some results, and we can just feed the code into the computer. But just as with language, at the higher levels it’s a different matter. Language achieves its perfection not in dictionaries and grammar books, nor in the official dictates of authoritative websites, but in the intimate moment of communication where, somehow, amazingly, despite the multivalence of words and the great odds favouring equivocation, a settled sense of meaning is shared between the souls of two people. It’s personal.
Listening to a recorded talk given by Robert as a companion to his book, Definitions and Foundations,[1] I learned that some thought he had stopped publishing translations because he had decided to start a secret school and only teach the material to his private students. He clarified this was not the case. And I suppose I should be grateful, for otherwise I may never have come across his work. But I wonder sometimes if perhaps that would have been the wiser route, and I think he did too.
Let me say a word or two about his project, about what he was trying to do. In terms of translation, he took his role as translator very seriously. More, it seems to me, than most. His goal was to recreate in common English an experience similar to what an ancient Greek would have experienced reading the original texts. He didn’t want simply to transliterate technical terms like horoscopos and zoidion, or gloss them by using familiar equivalents like ascendant and sign. He didn’t want to do this because the words used by the ancient Greek authors were meaningfully evocative in ways that our modern equivalents are not, and he wanted us to experience the implications of the words chosen by the founders of Hellenistic astrology, which he considered to have been chosen very carefully. But there is a world of difference between modern English and ancient Greek. The languages do not simply line up in rows of words neatly equivalent to one another. This is why Robert talked about trying to match up the semantic fields of words. It took him time and a lot of study—not of the language, but of the Hellenistic astrological system—to come up with suitable English words that not only by themselves but together could represent the vision of astrology he was discovering in the ancient texts.
This really makes up what was the core of his endeavour. He wasn’t trying to establish himself in a professorial role as the academic-like explainer of ancient Hellenistic astrology—a role many of his detractors have fairly fallen over themselves to fill. He understood a measure of that would be unavoidable, for people would need help to understand. But that wasn’t his primary goal. His project was to leave us with fresh access to ancient knowledge. He was trying to give the original system of Hellenistic horoscopic astrology a new birth. That is why when he would sign the inside cover of Definitions and Foundations he would write, “Toward the restoration of the astrological tradition.” And that is why he and his partner, Ellen Black, chose the image of a mummy being watered by a servant, with wheat sprouting from the casket for the bottom of the title page. That was his goal; to rebirth this ancient astrology and give it new life. To insinuate that he was full of hubris, saying that he thought himself Hermes Trismegistus, is like accusing a woman in labour of thinking herself to be God. It’s an outrageously insensitive and ignorant thing to say.
If he had been able to complete his intended project, we would have all of the ancient Greek astrological texts available to us in carefully chosen English translation—not technical transliteration—complete with accompanying notes and explanations, in what he envisioned to be a thirty volume set. Can you imagine? The first volume was intended to be a companion volume, full of technical information like tables and diagrams and a glossary of terms that would be handy for reference alongside while reading the other volumes. The last volume was to be a kind of summary of the collection, meant to clarify the shape and form of the original astrological system underlying the collection of ancient texts. In between there were to be twenty-eight volumes of translation, beginning with the all-important Definitions and Foundations, which would provide the key to understanding the rest. Twenty-eight volumes to match the twenty-eight shafts of “mummy wheat” growing from the watered casket. And when you subtract Definitions and Foundations—which arguably stands apart on its own compared to the ancient texts—twenty-seven volumes would remain, matching the twenty-seven days of the moon’s sidereal cycle. Altogether, thirty volumes. Translated ancient texts, twenty-seven. Thirty and twenty-seven: the two minor periods of Saturn, and the idealised periods of the lunar month as measured by synodic and sidereal cycles respectively. It would have been glorious. It pains my heart every time I see the numeral “2” marked on the solitary spine of Definitions and Foundations. But I’m grateful to have at least that.
[1] Definitions and Foundations and the TARES walking tour lecture discussing the work are published by Project Hindsight and can be ordered by contacting kathryn@projecthindsight.net