h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Most mysticism denies the possibility of progress through human action. Astrology for instance claims to be able to predict an inevitable future. If it's inevitable, there's no point in trying to change make people's lives any better. And so progress is impossible. Which is the core agenda of fascism, which seeks instead to take society backwards to a mythical past.

Much mysticism has a cyclical world-view, in which things happen over and over again. As in the favourite reactionary slogan 'There's nothing new under the sun.' Which is used to belittle all achievements which might make people's lives better and to reinforce the idea that man is a base animal who only responds to cruelty and force.

This cyclical universe was most famously depicted in the Swastika, of course.

There are always far more classified adverts for mystics in right-wing publications than in left-wing ones (if any). And many more column inches devoted to this kind of mumbo jumbo.

And before anyone tries to put a fag paper between religion and Mysticim',ask The Endtimers if the future is predetermined or in the hands of mankind. They are Christian, Jewish and Muslim, after all.

http://www.prophecyupdate.com/End_time_signs.htm

The political power lies in the fact that there has to be a secret code or lore to the understanding of the cycle and predicting its stages.

This secret is naturally too dangerous for anyone but a semi-devine sect to have access to. They, in turn must be protected and nurtured and feared as befits their elite status. The the member of the sect who succeeds in monopolising the lore becomes the natural leader, in constant touch with the very workings of time and space. The Divine Leader, repository of all justice and wisdom is created. All others are inferior by definition, but those nearest are less inferior.

And so a rigid, exclusive hierarchy is encouraged, relying on inequality and fear to maintain itself.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime.shtml

While accepting that this was entitled 'Renaissance Astrology', I was nevertheless disappointed at the failure of the programme to examine the political uses of astrology throughout the ages, which would surely have answered the qustion of why it survives in spite of centuries of scientific refutation.

In his essay on WB Yeats and other places, Orwell (who else?) notices the correllation and sympathy between cyclical, closed exclusive systems of thought dependent on trusted custodians of the keys to supernatural knowledge - and reactionary thought in general. A world in 'there is nothing new under the sun' and which everything is predictable given knowledge of the secret code is not compatible with any notions of human progress. This, combined with a predictable nostagia for feudal trappings in general makes astrology and predestination highly attractive to fascism and other methods of political stagnation and reversion. As happened to Yeats, who abhorred the idea of progress, and also, in a more refined form, to Joyce in Finnegan's Wake with his infatuation with Vico (when Joyce 'went off his coconut' according to Orwell). Orwell mentions that fascist magazines of his day were always full of advertisements for clairvoyants.

It is true that astrology is a coherent system, and therefore attractive in a pseudo-aesthetical sense, and therefore marketable in the popular press, and therefore profitable. But how could it be anything else? It is essentially cyclical, and like the most succesful logos, possesses an ordered graphic symmetry which it seeks to impose on the world. Like a popular soap opera of the cosmos. Or the swastika.

Symmetry is comforting, but, as Orwell points out, the enemy of human self determination and struggle, and therefore anathema to political action. It's message, suitably enough, is Resistance is Useless. Or, put more cosily, Know Your Place. Or less cosily, Arbeit Macht Frei.

I thought when Reagan was mentioned that we might be getting somewhere, but then we lapsed back into the same cyclical acknowledgment of the continued existence of this superstition, while refusing to examine its modern appeal, which is a political question, the ignorance of which (in its literal sense) has led ultimately to the subsidy of this cyclical narcotic quasi-philosophy by the taxpayer in numerous sponsored community education classes across Britain. Which naturally gives further validity to the superstition, and reinforces the notion that people are ultimately unable to shape their own destinies. As Orwell says:

"...the theory that civilisation moves in recurring cycles is one way out for people who hate the concept of human equality. If it is true that 'all this', or something like it 'has happened before', then all science and the modern world are debunked at a stroke and progress becomes forever impossible. It does not much matter if the lower orders are getting above themselves, for, after all, we shall soon be returning to an age of tyranny."

I was disappointed at the failure of the programme on astrology to examine its political uses throughout the ages, which would surely have....