Dr Geoffrey Cornelius
Geoffrey Cornelius has practised and taught astrology for many years. He has been teaching courses on astrological and divinatory practice and theory at the University of Kent since 2003, and has recently completed a Ph.D.on the hermeneutics of divination. Here is an extract from his paper, ‘Is Astrology Divination and does it matter?’
I came into astrology directly through the I Ching and a love of divination. I had, therefore, already come with a particular attitude toward the practice of astrology, viewing it within the context of other divinatory practices. That means I was already comparing the horoscope with the random cut of the Tarot deck, the throw of the coins, or the division of the yarrow stalks. For many people, however, astrology is the first form of symbolic thinking they have explored, making their experience somewhat different. For them, astrology seems to be evidence of a universal and impersonal pattern, at work at all times and places, lawful and not random at all, and certainly not in any way dependent on a diviner's decision to take a divination.
Because of my avid interest in divination and symbol systems, in my early years in astrology I eagerly attended astrology lectures and read astrology books for illumination on the topic. Lecture after lecture and book after book, I almost never encountered the word "divination" in relation to astrology, except in the general sense already mentioned, that astrology allows us to intuit some higher reality. But never in the sense that the formal practice of astrology - its methods, techniques, and its mode of interpretation - is a divinatory system that can be studied in the light of what we know about the I Ching, Tarot, tea leaves, that whole gamut of practices called divination.
It is my understanding that the core of our practice has omen reading at its origins. Astral omen reading goes back at least to the civilization of Mesopotamia, to a truly archaic mode of consciousness that observed the omen as significant. This idea is intimately bound up with the ancient conception that the whole universe is filled with spiritual being and intelligence of all grades and levels both close to us and far from us. These conceptions have come from societies with the polytheistic and pagan understanding that the planets, the stars, and all things of nature are innately divine. The work of the diviner and the stargazer is to divine, or know, the will or movement of these spirit beings and how they relate to us.
Click here for article by Kirk Little, 'Geoffrey Cornelius: defining the divinatory perspective'
Publications
- Astrology for Beginners (with Maggie Hyde and Chris Webster, London: Icon Books, 1995)
- The Moment of Astrology (Bournemouth: Wessex Astrologer, 2002)
- The Language of Stars and Planets: A Visual Key to Celestial Mysteries (with Paul Devereux, London: Duncan Baird, 2003)
- 'Verity and the Question of Primary and Secondary Scholarship in Astrology', in Astrology and the Academy, eds. Nicholas Campion, Patrick Curry and Michael York, Bristol: Cinnabar Books, 2004), 103-113.
- The Complete Guide to the Constellations (London: Duncan Baird, 2005)
- Horary Astrology: the Art of Astrological Divination (with Derek Appleby, Astrology Classics, 2005)
- 'Introduction' to The Imaginal Cosmos: Astrology, Divination and the Sacred eds. A.Voss & J. Hinson Lall (Canterbury: University of Kent, 2007)
- 'The Unique Case of Interpretation: Explorations in the Epistemology of Astrology' in Seeing with Different Eyes: Essays in Astrology and Divination eds. P. Curry & A. Voss (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008) 227-256