Burckhardt’s Mystical Astrology According to Ibn ‘Arabi

Not even 50 pages and still one of the toughest astrology texts I’ve read, Mystical Astrology According to Ibn ‘Arabi is a super-concise, super-dense explanation of the symbolism underlying traditional, spiritual astrology.

Quick context: Ibn ‘Arabi was a great 12th-13th century thinker and a prodigious writer, born in Moorish Spain and dying at age 76 in Damascus. You can learn about Ibn ‘Arabi at the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society.

Titus Burckhardt was a 20th century German Swiss thinker and writer of the traditionalist or perennialist school who published the work of Ibn ‘Arabi and others. More information from World Wisdom Books.

This weekend I read Mystical Astrology in six- or seven-page bouts, pencil in hand, dictionary in lap. I think I understood about 25% of what I read, and I take that to be a significant gain over my original attempt to read it (which was hopeless). Here’s some of what I understood from it this time.

• Just because something may be empirically true doesn’t necessarily make it experientially relevant. It may even be harmful. Case in point: spiritual astrology is based on the geocentric perspective: our human experience or perception that the sun, moon, planets and stars move around us. Now, we know the heliocentric truth of the matter: there is a solar system, earth moves around the sun, etc. Though that is the universe’s construction, Burckhardt writes, “the possibility of conceiving the planetary world as if one were contemplating it from the non-human position… had produced an intellectual dis-equilibrium which shows clearly that the ‘artificial’ extension of the empirical knowledge has in it something of the abnormal, and that it is, intellectually, not only indifferent but even detrimental.” Burckhardt also quotes traditionalist thinker Frithjof Schuon as saying, “the destruction of the natural and immediate symbolism of facts – such as the flat form of the earth or the circular movement of the sun – brings about serious inconvenience for the civilisation wherein they are produced.”

• There is a hierarchy of celestial spheres, in which the sun actually does take a central role: it has its own sphere, with an equal number of spheres above and below it. This extends what I knew about planetary spheres, adding in lower spheres for the elements and higher spheres beyond that of the fixed stars. But “only the planetary spheres and those of the fixed stars correspond as such to the sensible experience.”

• I already knew of the importance of the numbers 3 and 4 in astrology. Three is the number of modalities; four is the number of elements (or, as described here, the two pairs hot/cold and dry/moist, which combine to form the elements). And I knew that 3 + 4 gives us the 7 of the planets; and 3 x 4 gives us the 12 of the signs. But this is the first place I’ve read about the significance of the Pythagorean sum of numbers 1 through 7, which produces 28: the number of lunar mansions. Burckhardt says, “the lunar rhythm develops or exposes, in a successive mode, all the possibilities contained in the archetypes” of the sky.

• There is a lovely business about the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet being the microcosmic expression of those 28 macrocosmic lunar mansions. And the Arabic hiatus, the first letter which is “not properly speaking a sound, but only a transitory instant between silence and locution,” corresponds (to me) gorgeously with 0 Aries, the initial A sound of AUM – the first impulse to engage, whether with word, breath, or activity, in the world.

But there’s as much or more in the book that I didn’t understand. And I’m not even sure I’ve got all this right. I’ll let it cook on the back burner for a few months.