Biblical Creation And Evolution
Can astrology, tarot or the esoteric arena have anything to say about biological evolution? Yes, absolutely, in my opinion! Mystical concepts cannot substitute for scientific evidence or the scientific method, but they certainly can describe and symbolize them so that we can see how they fit in the big picture, perhaps helping us to understand how the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin IS compatible with the Biblical story of creation from Genesis.
Let's start by looking at the conflict, which has been nicely set up for us in the US education system, where some religious schools, mostly in the middle bit of America (the East and West Coasts are full of liberal intellectuals) refuse to teach biological evolution, and political candidates are sometimes questioned about their views on the matter. The issue reached a crisis point in this country in the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925. The trial was given this unfortunate name after a schoolteacher, Scopes, was accused of breaking The Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of anything which contradicted the literal word of God as written in the Bible. As opponents of evolutionary theory often coldly point out, Darwin’s theory claims that humans evolved from monkeys, which although scientifically shown by similarities in bone remains between Primates and early man, does seem to contradict the Bible story, which says that God created man in His own image.
In the 1960s the story was made into a film called Inherit the Wind (after the Proverbs 11:29 passage), starring Spencer Tracey, Frederic March and Gene Kelly, and recently there has been a colored remake of this film, starring Jack Lemmon and George C.Scott. The former plays Clarence Darrow, the lawyer who defended Scopes and the latter portrays William Jennings Bryan, Scopes’ prosecutor, and a political candidate running for President. All the names in this new version of the film have been changed, and the teacher in question now has the name Cates.
The final scene is the crux of the whole matter. In this scene, Darrow points out that in the story of Genesis, God invented the Sun, Moon and Stars on the fourth day of creation. Since our sense of time is dependent on the motion of the earth’s revolution around the Sun, giving us a 24 hour day, anything that happened before then could have taken weeks, months, years or even billions of years, and still have been created by God. In my blog about the planet Uranus, I describe how the mystical side of Judaism and Christianity sees God as timeless, eternal and ineffable, certainly not limited to time as we know it. And if we know just a little about Einstein's theories - which are similar to Darwins's Theory of Evolution in that they and it has never been been dis-proven, but like all scientific theories, they are all open to that attempt using the scientific method - we know that time and space are what's called a continuum, partially causing gravity by being curved. Doesn't this sound a bit like the passage in Revelation which says that God is both Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end? And with that premise, we can surmise that God simply used evolution to produce the result that He'd already created in the future.
So what happened down in this three dimensional Newtonian world in those billions of years before the fourth day of Biblical creation? Biologist Richard Dawkins explains it best in his wonderful series of Royal Institution Christmas lectures in London in the 1990s, which includes one called "Climbing Mount Improbable". In it, he describes how an organism's adaptation to its environment is the key factor in Natural Selection, and consequently to whether the organism reproduces, evolving the species to which it belongs.
Now lets see how the people who designed tarot portrayed this principle, 800 years before Darwin wrote his book On The Origin Of Species. The Tarot sometimes combines several astrological concepts into one picture. There are 22 keys in the major deck of tarot, representing the 12 Zodiac signs and 10 planets, and although all of them symbolize creation, both cosmic and psychological, the one representing physical evolution most appropriately is the card named the Moon. In the Rider, or Waite Tarot, this is given the numeral 18, and is associated with the sign Pisces. The main figures in the picture are two dogs who seem to be howling at the Moon. One dog is wild, like a wolf, and the other is some sort of cute family pet. The difference between them is a combination of nature and nurture. They stand on either side of a path, which starts from a pool which is bordered with stones, and undulates over hill and dale into the background of the picture, up a mountain and between two stone watchtowers. A crayfish is crawling out of the foreground pool on his way along the path. On the path in this tarot key, the various stages of complexity are represented by the stones for the Mineral Kingdom, the grass for the Vegetable Kingdom, the dogs for the Animal Kingdom and the two towers representing our current stage of development, because they have been built by Man.
As noted by Richard Dawkins, Darwin realized that only animals that were adapted to their environments were able to mate and reproduce. He saw for example how a whole species of finches had evolved on the Galapagos Islands because that environment had exactly the right conditions for this animal, where they would not have had a chance to grow and breed in another more hostile environment. Later biologists noted similar adaptations in other environments, for example a breed of “peppered” moth in the Northern England only managed to survive the Industrial Revolution by changing its wing color from white to gray. This did not happen overnight of course, but over several generations. Firstly, just a few of the original white moths gave birth to gray ones because gray wing color was a recessive trait at that time, being carried in the genes of the white butterfly, but only coming out in a small percentage of offspring. Although genes were not discovered until nearly 50 years later they were understood in theory and called “atoms of heredity”. These gray-winged moths were more suited to the smoky environment produced by he growing number of factories, and so survived to breed further gray moths, whereas the white moths found it very difficult to find a mate in all that smoke. Also they stood out against the black industrial environment of England at that time - the “dark satanic mills” of William Blake in his poem Jerusalem - and were easy prey for moth-eaters and so eventually died out. Of course, the gray moths now also had the genes for white wing-color, but as a recessive trait, which would come out in a small percentage of their offspring. As we now know, when the Industrial Revolution subsided, and the citizens of England decided to clean up the air, the white-winged moths again managed to survive and reproduce. Relating the path in the tarot key to Darwin's theory, the dips would represent those periods when a species was not well adapted to its environment and was forced to evolve - through Natural Selection - into one that was.
If we look at the Tree Of Life, in my first blog in this series you can see how Cosmic Law, or Saturn, is at the top of the left hand pillar of the tree. It is that principle, which produces physical creation, and its consequent illusion of separateness. And it is these laws of the universe which are the powerhouse of evolution, because they are absolute and unchanging. If an organism gets preyed upon because it doesn't have the tools to fight back or run away it dies out. A few of the species might survive to reproduce, and some of the offspring might have gene mutations which enable them to be stronger in their environment. This is Natural Selection. Die-hard sceptics will (and should!) ask why we should believe in the Tree Of Life as having any sort of wisdom. Isn't this diagram just another system made up by men? Yes, it is, but the reason it is stronger than all the other religious symbols combined, is that it 1. looks like a man/woman, 2.correlates well to modern disciplines such as astronomy, physics and psychology.
But what is the real power behind evolution? Remember the Crayfish in the foreground of the picture? The crayfish, which in Egyptian symbology is known as Kephra, looks rather like a cross between a crab, the symbol for the sign Cancer, and a Scorpion, symbol of the other water sign Scorpio. We could say that all the water signs are talking about evolution: in Cancer it is the beginning of life cradled in the protective environment of the mother, in Scorpio it is the reproductive process, or death of the old life and birth of the new, and here in Pisces, it is the adaptation of this new life to its environment, symbolized by the dogs. The common power in all these processes is reproduction, represented by the planet Pluto. Remember those two fishes in the astrological symbol for Pisces? The fish is another symbol for the reproductive power, without which there would be no evolution.
But what about us humans? Are we subject to Natural Selection and survival of the fittest? That Darwinian idea has been terribly misconstrued by some political movements in the past, but the truth is that because we humans have a self conscious mind and developed intellect we are no longer at the mercy of our environment. In fact we have altered our earth home so much through the use of fossil fuels, whose emissions have caused the overall temperature of our oceans to melt our global ice caps, the cooling system of the planet, that it is essential for us to transmute that reproductive power into changing how we live on earth. Part of the transition of Pisces to Aquarius is this transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. In my blog about Neptune, which is the planetary ruler of Pisces, we can perhaps see the esoteric symbolism of The Hanged Man to oil, because this fossil fuel is found below the ground. The other parts of this transition include the big social issues of freedom and equality, and peace on earth.
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