Adolph Ernestus Thierens – in English the ‘h’
would be silent as in ‘Thomas,’ and the name would rhyme with ‘appearance’ –
was one of the great 20th-century Dutch astrologers. In the eyes of
some, including myself, he was the greatest. He was born in 1875 and died in
1941 at the age of 66.
It is not easy to find biographical information
on Thierens, and it is still less easy to find information that is reliable.
There are a few websites that mention him, but what they say or imply is
sometimes incorrect or misleading. For example, it is not true that he was one
of the co-founders of the organization called in Dutch the Werkgemeenschap van
Astrologen. Dutch writers are wont to call this organization the ‘Workcommunity
of astrologers’; I prefer to call it the Astrologers’ Collaborative. That
organization was not formally established till 1947. It is true that Thierens
was one of the three thinkers whose ideas in various proportions went into what
has survived as the astrological theory and practice of the Collaborative. But
it is also true that Thierens emphatically disapproved of the later development,
synthesis and use of those ideas. In that sense, it is a serious distortion to
regard him merely as a sort of sponsoring avuncular precursor who made a few
contributions to a single later line of development whose legitimate heir was
Theo Ram.
In Dutch usage, a distinction is sometimes made
between ‘astrology’ as a set of philosophical ideas structured or symbolized
along the lines of astronomy, and ‘horoscopy’ as the practice of drawing up and
interpreting horoscopes. My own interest is decidedly more in the former. I am
not a member of the Astrologers’ Collaborative, but I have studied its theory
and practice in great detail and have enjoyed dialogs with some of its leading
exponents. I first read Thierens some forty years ago and have never really
stopped re-reading him. I am not a Theosophist and do not ‘believe in’
Thierens’ philosophical system as such, but I have sympathy with the spirit if
not the letter of much of it, and there are many passages in his writings which
have remained important signposts for me personally. In 2018, while re-reading
his works I tried to find out more about his personal life and background. It
was then that I discovered not much had been written about him, and in such
information as there was, he had been rather seriously misrepresented. Searching
here, inquiring there, between then and now I have managed to put together what
I believe to be a meaningful and fair outline of Thierens’ life and career.
The early years – Navy man, thinker, and writer
Thierens was the son of a naval officer, and he
originally aspired to a career in the Royal Dutch Navy. Becoming a cadet in
1890 and an officer in 1894, he was stationed in the Dutch East Indies for
several years. An injury sustained in the line of duty left him unfit for
active service, and he was discharged with a
pension in 1903. This mishap, which temporarily ended his regular worldly
employment, left him with time and freedom to pursue a strong personal interest
in Theosophy and astrology. He began writing and publishing on these subjects.
In 1906 he joined the Theosophical Society. Thierens met the prominent British
astrologer and Theosophist Alan Leo (1860-1917) when the latter visited the
Netherlands; this meeting soon resulted in a Dutch version of Leo’s magazine Modern Astrology under the editorship of
Leo and the Dutch Theosophical writer H.J. van Ginkel. Starting in 1907 the
magazine, under Dutch editors including Thierens, was published as Urania. The same year saw the founding
of the Association for Astronomy and Modern Astrology, eventually to be called
the Dutch Astrological Association (Nederlands astrologisch genootschap), which
Thierens chaired for many years.
Never the loner in either worldly or occult
matters, in 1908 Thierens made
commitments on both sides. He became a Freemason (in the Cazotte Lodge,
which admitted both men and women), and he married Wilhelmina Maria Smol, with
whom he would eventually have four children. He was active as a journalist and
a lecturer. The responsibilities of family life did not prevent him from
becoming a prolific writer on astrology. In 1909 he published his Textbook of Astrology (Leerboek der
astrologie) in which the text was written by himself and the mathematical
tables were provided by Alan Leo. In the next couple of years he wrote and
published his ‘Cosmology’ series of three books in Dutch on astrology: Elements of Practical Astrology
(Elementen der praktische astrologie, 1911), Astrology as a Philosophy of Life (De astrologie als levensleer,
1912), and Essays on Natural Philosophy
(Wetenschappelijke opstellen – natuurfilosofie, 1913). The ‘Cosmology’ books
were published by ‘Luctor et Emergo,’ one of whose owners was a fellow
Freemason. This house had a certain prominence as it published one of the leading
Dutch literary magazines, De nieuwe gids,
as well as literary studies by the famous poet Willem Kloos.
Now that he had discovered in himself a deep
affinity with both Theosophy and astrology, Thierens’ great project as a writer
and thinker was to combine the two: to reinterpret the elements of traditional
astrology as analogs or symbolizations of what he felt to be the cosmological
truths of Theosophy. If Theosophy explained the underlying motives or
mechanisms of human life, astrology could be a meaningful and instructive
charting of those same motives and mechanisms.
Thierens did not attempt to conceal the
Theosophical sources of many of his ideas. On the contrary, he urged readers to
study the works of H.P. Blavatsky as he had done. He also referred often to The Science of Peace by the Indian
writer Bhagavan Das (1869-1958), first published in 1904. In The Science of Peace, a central concept
was the ubiquitous dichotomy of ‘ego’ and ‘non-ego’ and the creative interplay
between the two. In his Elements of
Esoteric Astrology Thierens quoted Bhagavan Das in detail on this idea as
relevant to ‘the process of evolution of the Self.’ He made it clear, not
unproudly, that the description of the process was from Bhagavan Das but it was
himself, Thierens, who had found the astrological correlation with the
so-called ‘aspects,’ i.e., the type and degree of relationship between any two
planets.
The idea of ever-present interaction between
‘ego’ and ‘non-ego,’ or the similar but not identical presentation of a
‘subject’ as inseparably distinct from an ‘object,’ was to become a hallmark of
Thierens’ thought, both in his own works and as it was adopted by the
Astrologers’ Collaborative. Over the years there were (and still are)
discussions as to the degree to which a horoscope could or could not adequately
be used to describe the ‘subject,’ but the centrality of such a dichotomy has
remained one of the main distinguishing features of this line of Dutch
astrological thought as it has come down from Thierens via Ram (Theo Ram or
Th.J.J. Ram, 1884-1961) and the Astrologers’ Collaborative.
Collaboration and recognition
In these early years, many of Thierens’ ideas
were developed in close collaboration with a remarkable woman whose name is now
seldom if ever mentioned – Lena C. de Beer (1877-1938). Lena de Beer had been
one of the first women in The Netherlands to study at a university. Majoring in
Dutch language and literature, she pursued her studies through the level of
what was called the Candidaats,
roughly equivalent to an American bachelor’s degree. She did not, as many
students did, go on to further studies in Dutch because by that time she was
overwhelmingly attracted by the occult. She became librarian of the
Theosophical Library in Amsterdam, and by the 1930s would be running one of the
foremost occult bookstores in Holland. She would also be active as a spirit
medium who occasionally held seances in the bookstore.
In 1910, a lecture by Thierens and a follow-up
article in Urania by Lena de Beer alerted
Dutch astrologers to the notion that beyond the planets known to astronomers at
that time, there might or should be additional planets. Before long, subsequent
articles widened the discussion, and the notion became common that if there
were twelve signs in the zodiac, there must also theoretically be twelve
different planets to ‘rule’ those signs. (In traditional astrology, in which
planets beyond Saturn were unknown, a planet ‘ruled’ two different signs; e.g.,
Mars was the ruler of both Aries and Scorpio.) Thierens, who in 1909 had
already introduced new philosophy-based symbols for the planets Uranus and
Neptune for use within Dutch
astrological circles, went on to theorize as to what names and symbols should
be applied to the remaining planets. The results featured in his book Elementen der praktische astrologie
which appeared in 1911. Several years later, in 1916, Lena de Beer published an
article asserting on theoretical grounds that Thierens had long been confusing
the symbols for Uranus and the ultimate twelfth planet. Later in the same year,
Thierens admitted she was right; he retracted his earlier point of view and
admitted that a relevant passage in his 1911 book was erroneous.
Meanwhile, World War I had broken out. The
Netherlands remained neutral but the armed forces were mobilized. Thierens was
recalled to service as a Lieutenant in the Navy. He was put in charge of naval
artillery at Ymuiden, and of disarming sea mines which had drifted into Dutch
waters.
On the Masonic side of his occult life, there
were new developments in these years. In 1913, as a result of personal
conflicts within the Cazotte Lodge, Thierens had briefly become associated with
a new Masonic branch called the Washington Lodge. In 1917 he was involved as
Grand Master in the establishment of yet another Freemasons’ lodge: the Masonic
Astrological Humanist Rite, sometimes referred to as the M.A.H. One of its
co-founders was his fellow Theosophist Theo Ram, who also joined the
Astrological Association in 1917. Ram would later become the dominant figure in
the Astrological Association, a pathbreaking new astrological theorist, and in
some respects a rival to Thierens.
In 1920 Thierens was sent to Surinam, then a
Dutch colony, to supervise the government ships there. His wife and children
joined him briefly but soon went back to Europe. Thierens’ new government job
was supposedly to be a permanent one, but in 1923, as a result of drastic
retrenchment he was sent back to The Netherlands on half pay. Meanwhile his
marriage had become problematical, and he entered into a new common-law partnership.
He worked intensively on his Masonic involvements, and in 1924 set up his own astrological
office in Zandvoort.
In 1925 at an event in Lausanne, Switzerland,
Thierens received an honorary doctorate for his astrological contributions. The
school issuing the degree was an American institution: the College of
Journalism, Political Science and Languages. From now on, in the byline of his
writings Thierens would often refer to himself as ‘A.E. Thierens, Ph.D.’
Knegt: the rift begins
In 1928, a bombshell was dropped into the world
of Dutch astrology. Leo Knegt (1882-1957), a professional astrologer and a
friend of Ram’s, published a massively technical book titled Astrology: Scientific Technique
(Astrologie, wetenschappelijke techniek). In it, he presented revolutionary new
ways of calculating two of the most basic factors in a horoscope. It would go
beyond the scope of this article to explain Knegt’s ideas in detail. But
briefly, in the calculation of both the house boundaries and the planetary
positions, for Knegt the locality as focused in the ascendant plays a major co-determining
role.This supposedly yields a more individual perspective than in most other
methods. For example, traditionally the positions of the planets (by zodiacal sign
and degree) were taken to be the same for all persons born at the same moment.
They were reckoned simply by zodiacal longitude, which remains the same regardless
of where an observer on earth may be. Knegt proposed a novel spherical-trigonometric
configuration by which the planetary positions were mapped into the individual
horoscopic frame, assigning to each planet the degree in which it would actually
have been seen from the locality of birth. If this method is used, horoscopes
of two persons born at the same moment but in different places may show the
same planet in differing degrees, perhaps even in different signs. Knegt
referred to this individualized projection as True Zodiacal Position. And in
his method of house division, which he called the Ascendant Parallel Circle
system, the degrees and possibly the signs appearing on the boundaries of
houses on opposite sides of the horoscopic circle may be different. In
traditional terms this is unheard of, since the very meanings of the houses are
often explained as derived from their standing in exactly 180-degree or polar
contrast to the opposite houses.
From the outset, Thierens opposed these
innovations. Soon after the appearance of Knegt’s book, he tried to get the
Astrological Association to set up a committee to experiment with Knegt’s
proposals, and published a critical review in Urania. His criticisms were of several kinds. For one thing, he
found it arrogant and misleading of Knegt to present his system as the ‘scientific technique’ of astrology,
rather than as one possible approach among others. As for the new prominence
given to the ascendant in the calculations, Thierens felt this amounted to
reading the planets and signs within a ‘mundane’ (i.e. earth-centered)
framework, thereby de-emphasizing the larger cosmic significance which gave
them their character and values in the first place. In that sense, he could not
agree that the increased ‘individualization’ of the chart was a good thing.
Another question he asked was: if Knegt has
just now finally revealed the one-and-only valid system, how is it that so many
of us, for years and decades now, have been achieving such convincing results
using traditional methods?
In 1931, Thierens again wrote a short piece in Urania on this subject. Not much had
come of the idea of getting a committee to investigate the validity of Knegt’s
ideas. By now Thierens was calling it ‘the Knegt-Ram method.’ He regretted that
its proponents seemed little interested in demonstrating the success of their
new system to others. At about the same time, Theo Ram’s article ‘The Mystery
Planets’ assigned to the last three still-undiscovered planets, whose probable
existence was widely accepted in Association circles, names different to those
Thierens had been proposing for decades. Thierens must have felt his authority
as a thinker being eroded by the increasing prominence of the brilliantly
unorthodox Knegt-Ram duo.
The following year, seemingly in response to
these destabilizing new developments, Thierens published an astrological manual
of his own called Astrological
Calculations (Astrologische berekeningen). Unlike Knegt’s tome, it was
compact – only 128 pages – and easy to follow. In it, he referred to what he
had already published in Urania on
the unorthodox methods now being proposed by Knegt and Ram. Again recommending
the venerable Campanus system of house division which he had been using for
many years, he provided a short conversion table by which Dutch readers, if
they were not in possession of house tables made specifically for Campanus,
could calculate the Campanus house boundaries based on more generally
accessible astrological tables.
Meanwhile, his personal life had not been
unruffled. A divorce from his first wife in 1927 had been followed in the same
year by remarriage to a baroness. In 1932 that marriage also ended in divorce. In
1933 Thierens was married yet again, this time to a woman 31 years younger than
himself. But he continued his astrological writing unabated. In 1933 he began
editing the quarterly magazine Esoterische
astrologie which was published in the Dutch East Indies. He also published
a Dutch version of Elements of Esoteric
Astrology, which he had published in England and the United States in 1931
following two other books in English since 1928.
If Thierens was showing such an interest in
publishing outside The Netherlands, it may well have been because developments
in Holland were not to his liking. The uncertainty and continuing debate caused
by the Knegt-Ram technical innovations would continue for some years, but there
also seem to have been other issues within the Astrological Association that
were coming to a head in the mid-thirties. At the same time, Thierens was aware
of his approaching sixtieth birthday (20 December 1935). In the course of 1935,
a serious crisis developed within the Association. At one point, the whole steering
committee quit in protest. Whether or not in reaction to these developments,
perhaps mindful that his father had lived to be only 54, Thierens decided the
time had come to lay down all his worldly responsibilities. He relinquished all
his official posts within the Association, including the chair. At about the
same time, on the Freemasonry side of his life, he declared that he would no
longer continue as Grand Master of the M.A.H....and, much to the consternation
of the other members, that the M.A.H. was herewith disbanded! For a while the stunned
members, led by Ram, took refuge in an alternative lodge which they called Astrological
Freemasonry (Astrologische Vrijmetselarij; AvM). Several years later, it was
superseded by the new Order for Astrological Ceremonial Mysticism, again under
Ram, which has continued in existence down to the present.
At this distance in time, it is not easy to
reconstruct exactly what happened within the Astrological Association during
the 1935 crisis. According to a report published in Urania afterward which referred to recent ‘unpleasant’ happenings,
by November 1935 the Association was in debt, its archives had been impounded,
and its bank account was frozen pending the outcome of a lawsuit. But by 1936, the
Association had been reorganized on a more authoritarian basis, clearly headed
by Ram. In June 1936, a list published in Urania
gave the new standard terms and names to be used in all publications of the
Astrological Association; the names designated for the Mystery Planets were not
those used by Thierens.
The Mystery Planets – which names, which
mysteries?
By the late 1930s Thierens, Knegt and Ram were
clearly going three different ways in both theory and practice. The sensational
new calculating methods which Knegt had launched with his 1928 book, and which
from an early stage had captured Ram’s heart, continued to form a cornerstone
of Ram’s now-dominant system. But Thierens had never accepted these
innovations, and in this he was now joined by...Knegt himself! By the end of
1937, Knegt was publicly disavowing the notion of True Zodiacal Position, and
in his formidably technical last book which came out in 1939, he used
sophisticated arguments to reject the Ascendant Parallel Circle method of
calculating the houses.
Superficially, it might have seemed that the
three were still in agreement on the matter of the so-called Mystery Planets –
i.e., the planets lying beyond Saturn including the newly discovered Pluto and
the three additional planets which all three men theorized to lie beyond. It is
true that all three theoretically accepted the idea that the true rulers of the
twelve astrological signs should be twelve different planets, whether or not
they had been ‘objectively’ discovered by astronomers. But whereas for Knegt
and Thierens this remained a theory suggested by underlying philosophical
assumptions, Ram tried to integrate the Mystery Planets into the
bread-and-butter mechanics of horoscope calculation. He believed their actual zodiacal
positions could be worked out by educated guesswork. The three trans-Pluto
planets were posited to be the true rulers of the signs Taurus, Gemini and
Cancer. By examining horoscopes with the ascendant in one of those three signs,
he reasoned, it might be possible to surmise where in the horoscope, hence
where in the zodiac, the relevant ‘ruler’ must be lurking. By 1935, at the very
end of his book Psychologische astrologie,
he felt confident enough to include a ‘condensed ephemeris’ of two of these
three planets – Persephone and Hermes as rulers of Taurus and Gemini
respectively. When the second edition came out in 1949, the ephemeris would
include Demeter – Ram’s name for the true ruler of Cancer.
Thierens not only refrained from any attempt to
locate the last three Mystery Planets concretely in actual horoscopes; in his
last book Cosmic Law (Cosmische wet,
1937) he even considered it unlikely that the three trans-Pluto planets would
ever actually be discovered by astronomers.
This brings us to another area of lasting
disagreement between Ram and Thierens – the names of the last three Mystery
Planets. Ram, in his 1935 version which became standard and has continued in
Collaborative usage to this day, used Greek names for the putative rulers of
Taurus, Gemini, and Cancer: Persephone, Hermes, and Demeter. Thierens, though
in publications over the years he was not always consistent, from an early
stage used Egyptian names as well. The last three planets, as he called them in
the 1930s, were Isis, Hermes, and Horus. (When Knegt published a book on horary
astrology in 1936, he called these hypothetical planets by Thierens’ names for
them, though politely mentioning that his ‘friend and colleague Ram’ was now
using Persephone and Demeter.)
The difference in names is not a mere
curiosity. It reflects a fundamental difference in point of view. Put simply,
from the beginning Thierens’ conception of the Mystery Planets was that they
were indeed mysterious, distant and different from everyday notions, cosmic
rather than ‘mundane’ in their import. In 1915, in an article in Urania he even suggested that Latin
names were inappropriate for these planets because the Romans had integrated the
cults of their gods into everyday life, whereas the Egyptians in their Book of
the Dead had maintained a mystical and more-than-physical concept of such
deities as Isis and Horus.
In Ram’s publications on this subject, starting
with his 1931 article ‘De
mysterie-planeten’ which even today is quoted as an important new
departure, the accent was not so much on what exactly the Mystery Planets were, but rather on what they concretely
did. Ram saw in the six direct
parallels with a group of six primal forces (shakti) described by the Indian Theosophical author Subba Row. In
Ram’s book Psychologische astrologie
(1935/1949) this remained the framework of his discussion. Ram seemed to be
saying that although these six forces affected individuals’ lives, at the
present stage of humanity’s development those affects were still mainly on a
vast scale of collective happenings and there was little scope for the
individual to interact meaningfully with them. He did not, as Thierens did,
suggest that the individual cycle of development had something to ‘give back’
to the greater framework: that the solar system itself was in process of
becoming more conscious.
Thierens always stressed that incarnation
involved a phase of coming into this world, but also a phase of going back out
of it. As he wrote in Elements of
Esoteric Astrology: ‘The outflow of life from the solar centre must be
completed by an inflow back from the circumference.’ An alternative formulation
in his publications was an ‘outbound arc’ followed by an ‘inbound arc.’ This
again was an idea from Bhagavan Das which Thierens had adapted for his own
theory of the planetary aspects. In various publications over the years, he
reprinted his own version of a diagram of this cyclic process that had appeared
in 1911 in an article by Lena de Beer.
De Beer had taken the position that in deeper or cosmic perspective, the zodiac
should be viewed as running from Leo to Cancer rather than from Aries to
Pisces. The process of incarnation could be symbolized as a continuous loop
starting with the sun (associated with Leo), moving on an ‘outbound arc’
through the other planets representing types of experience gained during the
course of life, and then returning to the origin through Cancer as the last
phase of ingathering and summation. In Thierens’ version of the diagram, the
series of planets along the loop was expanded to include the planets beyond
Saturn: Uranus, Neptune, Pluto (which Thierens liked to call Osiris), and the
undiscovered but hypothesized true rulers of Taurus, Gemini and Cancer. Cancer
is the twelfth and closing phase of the loop which begins with Leo, and its
ruler Horus is mythologically the child, not the parent, of the ruler of the
tenth phase (Isis as ruler of Taurus).
For Ram, by the mid-1930s when his charting of
the Mystery Planets had found its lasting form, the ruler of the twelfth stage
(Demeter) was the mother of the ruler of the tenth (Persephone), suggesting
that Cancer or its mythological ruler represented an originary rather than a
concluding phase. In general, in the later writings of Ram and his school on
the Mystery Planets, the planets are often charted not as a continuous loop but
as a complex arrangement of symmetries in which the anciently known planets are
divided into two contrasting groups of three headed respectively by the sun
(called ‘Apollo’) and Saturn, while these groups are counterbalanced by two
more groups of three made up of the Mystery Planets both known and
hypothetical. In the whole scheme, there are four ‘planets of the Will’ or ‘planets
of Being,’ and Demeter, ruler of Cancer, is one of them. This makes Demeter
(the equivalent of Thierens’ ‘Horus’) not a phase in a continuing chain but a
full-fledged source. It seems to envisage Cancer’s ruler as causative or
impelling toward the earth-life,
rather than gathering or harvesting back
away from earth.
Last years and legacy
An outstanding difference between Thierens and
either Ram or Knegt was that Thierens did not publish his books only in Dutch.
By the early 1930s a British publisher, Rider, had brought out three works by
Thierens which are still occasionally read: Natural
Philosophy (1928), The General Book
of the Tarot (1928), and Elements
of Esoteric Astrology (1931). The latter two books were also published in
the United States by David McKay. The copyrights have now expired and the books
are available for download. Like many well-educated Europeans, Thierens seems
to have thought his English was good enough not to require editing by a native
speaker before publication. As a result, occasionally a word or phrase is
unclear or misleading as it stands (e.g., ‘addicted’ for ‘attributed’), but on
the whole the books are ‘difficult’ only in the sense that the philosophy
behind them is certainly not simple. Judging from internet comments, there is
still quite some demand for these books internationally. In particular, the
book on the Tarot, which is actually an astrological reading of the Tarot or a
projection of astrological equivalents onto the Tarot cards, has been reissued
numerous times.
In the mid-1930s, Thierens published a book in
Dutch on the Tarot. Called The Tarot in
Practice (De Tarot in de praktijk), it featured Thierens’ original drawings
of the 22 cards of the so-called Major Arcana. The drawings were based on
Thierens’ own philosophical interpretation of the cards. This was in striking
contrast to his English book on the Tarot, first published in 1928, in which he
had reproduced the illustrations from the so-called Rider-Waite Tarot deck. The
exact year of Thierens’ Dutch book is uncertain; the catalog of the National
Library in The Hague lists it tentatively as 1935.
In any event, 1935 saw the publication of
another monograph by Thierens in English, Astrology
in Mesopotamian Culture, issued by the respected Leiden publisher E.J.
Brill.
Whether or not because publication in English
offered him a chance to express his ideas unhindered by the increasing strife
and competition in the Dutch astrological arena, Thierens was originally
planning to go on beyond Elements of
Esoteric Astrology to at least one additional book in English, which was to
be called Astrology in Ethics. He
announced it in E.E.A. but as things
turned out, in the turbulent 1930s it never materialized. Perhaps the ideas he
had in mind for it formed the gist of his last book, published in Dutch in 1937
as Cosmic Law (Cosmische wet). At the
very beginning of that book, there is a short introduction: ‘After the trilogy
comprising Natuurfilosofie, Elementen der esoterische astrologie and
De astrologie als levensleer
(Astrology as a Philosophy of Life), something remained to be said. A
conclusion was still to be drawn...May this little book provide it.’
In the summer of 1939, Thierens suffered a
serious stroke. Understandably, after that date no further publications are on
record. He died on 30 December 1941, ten days after his 66th
birthday.
Thierens’ ideas continue to survive both in
their own right and as elements in the still-vital theories of Theo Ram and his
school. Between 1979 and 1987, the occult publisher Schors brought out reprints
of Thierens’ Elementen der praktische
astrologie, Elementen der esoterische
astrologie, and De tarot in de
praktijk. Thierens’ own major publications in Dutch do not seem to have
been reprinted since then, though they remain easily and cheaply available
secondhand. His English publications, by contrast, have weathered well and
continue to be in demand. Natural
Philosophy, Elements of Esoteric
Astrology, and General Book of the
Tarot (title may vary) were all reprinted as recently as 2013, and an
e-book of the Tarot manual came out in 2018.
Theo Ram wrote only one book as sole author: Psychologische astrologie. The first
edition appeared in 1935 and the second in 1949. A paperback reprint, curiously
based on the first rather than the revised second edition, was published in
1976 and is still easily available in Holland. Ram’s book undoubtedly continues
to be widely consulted by Dutch astrologers, probably often not in the way that
he would have wished. It is said that he was reluctant to write down his ideas
systematically in the form of a ‘cookbook’ which astrologers would mechanically
consult without learning to draw their own conclusions: Venus in Scorpio
‘means’ this; Jupiter square Mars ‘results in’ that. But the tone and
organization of the book make it both tempting and entertaining to browse
passively.
In his brief chapter called ‘The General Theory
of the Aspects,’ Ram acknowledges that it was Thierens who first introduced the
notion of aspects between any two planets as ‘successive phases of a cyclic
process.’ But in Ram’s presentation, the ‘outbound arc’ and ‘inbound arc’ are
not worked out in relation to the (re)incarnation process and its cosmic
background. Rather, the frame of reference is this-worldly and psychological.
The ‘I’ or ego is described as a ‘central’ element which must learn to ‘realize
itself’ in conscious distinction from its ‘circumference’ of objective
experiences.
I have often wondered why the 1976 paperback
reprint of Ram’s book, which since its first appearance has undoubtedly been
the most widely read edition, was based on the first and not the second version
of the original. For one thing, the 1949 second edition is marred by a
dismaying number of uncorrected misprints; it is possible that the paperback
publisher found these objectionable. But it may also be that the original
edition, in which the supposed last and hypothetical planet Demeter is less
discussed, seemed less likely to be daunting to potential buyers who might just
want to ‘consult Ram’ without seriously studying his complex and controversial
philosophical system. In any case, Ram’s book has never been translated into
English. At one time I was considering translating it myself; I was stymied by
the realization that I could think of no serviceable English equivalent for one
of the most crucial and recurrent words in the book – wezen as a noun.
There is not the slightest likelihood that I
will still translate any book by Thierens as a whole. But if I were to try my
hand at a short selection of memorable quotes out of context – one of my
favorite genres – it would certainly include the following:
--Experience is a change in being.
--Experience is the reward paid by the
environment to the central point.
--We do not dive into this sublunar world to
‘learn lessons,’ but to be our Self.
--Consciousness is the life of the Human Tree.
It grows with the tree; it makes the tree grow and is the fruit thereof...
Lloyd Haft
Taipei, Taiwan
June 2020
