TWENTY-FIRST LETTER - December 1945
Our Connection with the Stars - Tycho's Moon/Venus

If we take the positions of the planets in the Zodiac during the time of the transition of the Moon Nodes across the place of the Moon in the nativity and translate them into the language of the philosophical universe that we outlined in the last letter, then we can find the “philosophy” of a human being. Of course calculation alone does not suffice, because we have, in any case, at least two possibilities: one from the position before and one from the position after birth. In connection with historic nativities, it is not difficult to find the right event, because we can find from the biographies the general philosophical tendencies of these individualities. These historic studies also provide an answer to this problem that cannot be solved by calculation alone.

In Tycho de Brahe's nativity, we find the Moon in the constellation of Virgin. This is the gateway from the higher realms of spiritual existence into Earth existence, and after birth this leads to an awakening of the forces of the consciousness soul. We will now have to find the time when one of the two Moon Nodes was in this position and opened this gateway, as it were. It happened shortly before Tycho's birth in June 1541. Nine years later, October 1550, the other Moon Node had moved into this position in Virgin, but we can ignore this event for the moment and concentrate solely on the other event in 1541.

We can find at that time an extremely illuminating grouping of the planets in the Zodiac. Most of them, the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, and Mars, were concentrated in the constellation of Twins. Jupiter was in Lion and Saturn in Virgin. The accumulation in Twins suggests a strong inclination toward the philosophical mood of Mathematism, but in this case it is a rather intricate kind of Mathematism. Tycho de Brahe gave expression to this by becoming an astronomer. For astronomy, and especially the astronomy that in the days of Tycho de Brahe came into existence as a branch of modern science, was strongly based on mathematics. Yet in this case it was differentiated. The Sun was in Twins, which indicates that the philosophical mood was a Mathematism experienced as the tendency of Empiricism, that is to say a mathematical-astronomical conception of the world in the light of sense experience. Tycho de Brahe became famous for his star catalog, which contained the exact positions of about a thousand stars. Kepler based his work on Tycho's very accurate observations of the planet Mars.

This Mathematism had still different aspects. We found that the Moon, Mercury, and Venus were in Twins. They represent the philosophical tendencies of Occultism, Transcendentalism, and Mysticism. This may seem a contradiction to the world conception of Mathematism; however, we can come to understand this if we try to imagine the other side of Tycho's being. He was one of the most capable astrologers of his time, although without many people knowing of his capacities. When a comet appeared in the year 1577, he predicted from the study of it that “in the North — Finland — a prince would be born who would lay waste to Germany and then vanish in 1632.” Such a prediction cannot only be explained as a “lucky hit”; it indicates that Tycho de Brahe had a deeper insight into the mathematical structure of the starry universe, and that he was a true occultist in this sense, for this prediction, as well as others, literally came true. Long after Tycho de Brahe's death, King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, who was born in Finland, appeared in Germany, and died in the battle of Luetzen in 1632. Mars also was in Twins and this indicates that Tycho's conception of the universe was not at all an abstract Mathematism. He did not conceive the world as a gigantic mechanism working according to mathematical laws as scientists often conceive it in our day, but as an accumulation of Will forces that brought about the movements in the starry sky. Kepler, his scholar, had also still a similar power of understanding, and we can read in his writings how he experienced the heavenly bodies as if they were penetrated by soul beings.

Jupiter in Lion reveals another side of Tycho's world conception. It is the tendency of Logism in the mood of Sensualism. We must imagine that even in the days of Tycho it was still a great and courageous deed to rely on the senses and not to start from preconceived and old ideas, and then from them build up the picture of the universe. It was the time of the birth of modern science and Tycho de Brahe was one of the first scientists who let himself be guided in his thinking by Sensualism, that is to say by the language of the sense impressions. There is more of Tycho's Sensualism in the modern world picture and its practical applications than we generally realize.

Saturn was in the constellation of Virgin, which represents Gnosis in the mood of Phenomenalism. The manifestation of such a philosophical outlook can hardly be traced in that which is left as the documentary record of Tycho's life. It was very much in the background and only known to a few of his contemporaries. We have previously pointed out that Tycho was not only an astronomer he was also an alchemist. He knew that the seeker has to combine both in order to find the truth. Therefore, in his observatory he did experiments with the substances of the Earth side by side with his astronomical observations. And his aim was to discover the reaction of the events and conditions in the starry sky on the earthly substances. Tycho did not take the old alchemistic traditions for granted; he did the experiments so that the “phenomena” might reveal the truth. It was through this work that he unfolded the point of view of Gnosis in the mood of Phenomenalism.

This is the spiritual nativity of Tycho de Brahe. It is of great importance. Generally speaking the spiritual nativity reveals something of the higher nature of a human being, that which makes the true human nature in contrast to the beings of the other realms of nature. The astronomical facts show this. We went out through the gateway of the Moon in the nativity into cosmic space. In fact, everything that concerns the steps of the descent of a human soul into an earthly incarnation is related to this gateway of the “lane” of the Moon in the nativity. The stages of embryonic development are especially connected with the Moon, but all these events, leading finally to the physical nativity, take place, as it were, within the sphere of the Moon, which is encompassed by the orbit of the Moon. In order to find the spiritual nativity, we have to go further. However, following the “lane of the Moon”, we come to the border of the Moon sphere, and now we have to wait until a gate is opened from the Moon sphere into a higher sphere. This happens as soon as one of the Moon Nodes comes into the direction of the lane of the Moon. The Moon Node is the key that opens the gate from the Moon into the Sun sphere. (In the 14th letter we already described this fact.) We can now enter the Sun sphere, and in the same moment we have the aspect of the spiritual nativity. Therefore, we could also call it the Sun nativity in contrast to the Moon nativity. The Moon nativity shows how all the prenatal acquirements and predestined outlines of a human soul existence are brought down into the earthly substances and are finally incorporated into the stream of heredity. The Sun nativity shows just the opposite; it shows our “super heredity” being, our origin in the world of the Gods. For the Sun or spiritual nativity that is realized on Earth as the philosophy of a human being is the reflection of the Thoughts of the Gods, which the individual soul receives as the gift of the Gods before it descends into the sphere of the Moon. The soul receives this gift not in order that it may dominate the soul's earthly existence, but that the soul may develop it, widen it, and combine it with outlooks other than those that are indicated in the soul's individual spiritual nativity. This is the soul's task and this gives it divine dignity as a thinking being. This Sun nativity is so important, because it also opens the gateway to real human freedom or freehood.

The two nativities that we have described as the Moon and the Sun nativities are strongly related to each other. In order to show this relationship in connection with the nativity of Tycho de Brahe, we will have to work out some further details of his Moon nativity,

In the 16th letter, we pointed out the significance of the rhythms of embryonic development for the later life after birth. These rhythms are a kind of prophecy of the life on Earth within certain limits. We will now turn again to the nativity of Tycho de Brahe. He was born on December 14, 1546. Furthermore, we assume that his embryonic development lasted about 10 lunar months of four weeks each. Therefore, his conception must have taken place in March 1546. We have certain astronomical means by which we can define more exactly the moment of individual conception. These means are derived from very ancient wisdom that is partly contained in what we know as the Hermetic Rule of old Egyptian cosmology but that, in fact, goes much deeper. We cannot embark on this question here; it is a whole science in itself. Thus we can find that the moment, which we must consider as the beginning of the prenatal prophecy of Tycho's earthly life, was toward the end of March 1546, when the Moon was in the constellation of Goat. This is, then, the point that finally rose in the East when Tycho was born.

From this moment in March 1546, which we may call the epoch, we can now go forward toward the birth, and we can find that the Moon came back nine times to that point in Goat. Each one of these lunar months of 27.3 days contains an image of what became reality in one of the seven-year periods of the earthly life of Tycho after birth. For instance, if we take the first lunar month, or the time from the end of March till the end of April 1546, and read the starry events that took place during this time, then we will find that they are images of events that happened during the first seven years of Tycho's childhood. If we continue, we can discover in the second lunar month cosmic images of events that took place in Tycho's lifetime from 7-14 years, etc. The fundamental rhythm is the rhythm of the Moon. Within 27.3 days it always comes back to the same position in the Zodiac, and in between it moves through all the constellations of the Zodiac. This explains the basic rhythmic nature of human destiny. Very often we can experience that we are confronted with problems and situations similar to those which we experienced seven years before. This is the “realization” of the picture of the Moon, which before birth went through the same constellations again and again. But there is also differentiation. The planets, especially the Sun and the inferior planets, are moving through the Zodiac. We find in the case of Tycho de Brahe that in the time of the epoch the Sun was in the constellation Fishes. Then it moved on into Ram, and during the second lunar month we find it moving from Ram into Bull. Venus and Mercury and the other planets were also continuously moving. Thus an element of change and variation is introduced into the constantly repeating rhythms of the Moon. These facts are an image of influences in later life that constantly breaks down those life rhythms which want to persist in uniformity and repetition.

We can calculate that the Sun, Mercury, and Venus entered the constellation of Twins during the third and fourth lunar cycles, or months, of Tycho's embryonic development. They came into that part of the Zodiac which was impregnated long before these events by the positions of some of the planets during the time of the spiritual nativity. We said above that in 1541, when this spiritual nativity took place, the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, and Mars were in Twins. In the Moon nativity, as we may call the whole of those star events during the embryonic development, the Sun and the inferior planets moved into the same position. As this happened during the third and fourth lunar cycle, it is of course an image of Tycho de Brahe's destiny during the third and fourth seven-year periods or the time between 14 and 28 years of age.

During this age, Tycho de Brahe “realized” that which lived in his soul as his vocation and which we can read in the image of his spiritual nativity. It was the time when he became that peculiar type of astronomer and astrologer that we described above.

His father died early, and after this, in 1559 when Tycho was only 13 years of age, his uncle sent him to Copenhagen to study Philosophy and Rhetoric. Later on he was supposed to study Law. For this purpose be was sent with a tutor to Leipzig. The real aim was to prepare Tycho for a political career, for this was, so to speak, the family tradition. Here the forces of heredity became influential; but immediately after Tycho was sent to Copenhagen, the super heredity forces began to break forth in him, and gradually the plans made by his family were swept aside. As Tycho was a man of enormous will power, his individual soul impulses took on shape very distinctively. For instance, on August 21, 1560, he observed a great eclipse of the Sun, and he began to look upon astronomy as something divine. Later when he was at Leipzig, he spent whole nights in viewing the stars while his tutor believed his pupil to be safely in bed. In 1563 he observed the great conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, and he detected that the astronomical tables which existed in those days were far from being mathematically correct. Later he visited many places in Germany, and in 1569 we find him at Augsburg busily engaged in astronomical and alchemical researches. Then anincident occurred, which is very illuminating with regard to his position toward hereditary and family impulses. When he was 25 years old, in 1571, he returned to Denmark and married a peasant girl. Consequently, a violent quarrel broke out between him and his relatives so that even the Danish king had to interfere.

Thus we perceive how an influx of forces can flow into the Moon nativity, and these are liable even to upset the firm and preconceived image of a human destiny, but they, at least, lift human existence out of the sphere of mere tradition and heredity. The Moon nativity concerns the embodiment of cosmic spiritual qualities into a human body. The Sun nativity represents the purely individual condition of the soul of a person. The relationship of these nativities, as in the case of Tycho de Brahe, shows the struggle between the forces that are innate in the body of a person and the forces of the soul. This struggle is a necessity, not only for the evolution of the single human being but also for the whole universe, because it is there in order to redeem the past evolution of the world and to lead it toward the future.

We will now consider the planet Venus and its sphere in Tycho de Brahe's nativity, of which we have already spoken in letter 18. At the beginning of the prenatal development it stood in Fishes, and from there moved through all the constellations as far as the first stars belonging to Waterman, where it was at the time of Tycho de Brahe's birth. Hence, Venus had not moved through the full width of the constellations Waterman and Fishes during this time. In between it was in superior conjunction with the Sun in Bull.

In the 18th and 19th letters, we pointed out that the planet Venus as well as Mercury are the densest points of their spheres, which, although not visible, is of the greatest importance. It is in a certain way a contradiction to the planet, not only because — contrary to the power of contraction inherent in the planet — it has the power of expansion, but because its quality is more that of a spiritual Mercury nature. Still we can read its movements from the gestures of the planet Venus.

We need to remember that we found the cosmic history of the senses in the activities of this sphere, not only in the past cosmic evolution but also with regard to the future. It concerns the destiny of human beings with regard to the process of their incarnation into sense experience as well as their redemption of these and their evolution toward new sense capacities. Thus the space that is, as it were, left “open” by Venus in the nativity of Tycho de Brahe indicates the direction in which Tycho's “world of the senses” was the least limited by the contracting tendency of the planet. This was the direction of Waterman that represents the cosmic image of the sense of warmth. Yet, in this case we must consider this from a very wide cosmic viewpoint. In order to understand it we will have to use a picture. Within the human body we can observe the circulation of the blood. This bloodstream is allowed to flow only as far as the skin. If we now imagine that a human being could have a kind of ethereal bloodstream which does not stop at the skin but goes out into cosmic space and after some time returning again, then we have a picture of what was present in Tycho de Brahe as a special capacity. He could use those ethereal streams of warmth like a sense organ, going out into cosmic space and returning into his own organism. Therefore, he could experience the inner life of the starry world. All this happened more or less unconsciously, but it was the organic foundation of his brilliant capacity of experiencing future events on Earth by looking at the stars.

This great but vague and slumbering capacity was then condensed into stronger outlines by another event that was reflected in the superior conjunction of Venus with the Sun at the end of the second lunar month of Tycho's embryonic development. This referred to the time when he became 14 years of age. This was exactly the time when he was confronted with a cosmic event for the first time, with an eclipse of the Sun. It was also at this moment that the sense for predicting events from starry aspects awoke in him for the first time. The superior conjunction of Venus took place in Bull, and from the position of the planet we can assume that the sphere was expanded, as it were, toward the realm of Bull. Bull is the cosmic image of the sense for the perception of human thought. However, Tycho not only developed the sense for the perception of human thought with the help of those innate Waterman capacities, of which we spoke above, he was also able to perceive Divine Thought. Thereby, he could really read the future in the movements of the stars; it was not only a manipulating with traditional astrological rules. He was allowed to read the Thoughts of the Gods.

Figure 1 below shows the movements of the planets and of the Sun during the ten lunar months of Tycho de Brahe's embryonic development. Saturn and Jupiter can be seen making loops, but not moving out of their constellations. Mars starts in Archer, moves through Goat and Waterman, then makes a loop in Waterman and proceeds after this to Fishes. Furthermore, we can see Venus starting in Fishes and moving through the whole Zodiac to Waterman. The Sun goes from Fishes to Archer and Mercury moves about the same way. During this time Mercury makes two loops that are indicated in the drawing.

Figure 2 shows the spiritual nativity of Tycho de Brahe in the outer circle. In the inner circle we see again the path of the Sun during the embryonic development with reference to the position according to the sequence of the lunar months.