What does the Electric Universe have to do with astrology?

Start with the Northern Lights.

Over a hundred years ago, a Norwegian physicist named Kristian Birkeland had an idea about them that most of his colleagues thought was crazy. He thought the lights were electric: currents pouring in from space and running down the Earth’s magnetic field into the poles.

So he built one. A little magnetized Earth, hanging inside a vacuum box. He fired electricity at it, and the little Earth lit up with its own aurora, ringed around its poles, just like the real thing.

Most of the scientific world waved him off. Space was supposed to be empty. Then, about sixty years later, satellites flew over the poles, and their instruments picked up currents running along the Earth’s magnetic field, right where he said they’d be.

They’re called Birkeland currents now.

Remember that. The first man who looked at the sky and saw a circuit was right.

Where the Northern Lights are tonight →

I found all of this by accident. In 2016, I was deep into Nassim Haramein’s videos. Black holes, the Schwarzschild proton, all of it. I was hooked, until I wasn’t.

Then, under one of his videos, somebody had left a comment.

The comment“There’s no such thing as black holes. We live in an electric universe.”

My first thought was, what kind of hubris does it take to type that? You’re telling me the black hole guy is wrong?

Then I looked it up. That one comment kept me from getting sucked into a black hole of my own. I’ve been following the circuit ever since.

Before it was a column in the newspaper, astrology was the most serious science on Earth.

In Babylon, scholars watched the planets every night and wrote down what they saw. Where Jupiter rose. When Venus disappeared. What happened in the kingdom afterward. They kept those records for centuries.

Two thousand years later, Johannes Kepler worked out the laws of how planets move. The same laws we still use to fly spacecraft to Mars. Kepler also cast horoscopes, and wrote a book on the foundations of astrology.

He didn’t think he was doing two different jobs. To him, the math and the meaning were the same circuit.

And here’s the strange part. Every culture gave the same points of light the same personalities.

In Babylon, Mars was Nergal, a god of war and plague. In Greece, it was Ares, the god of war. In Rome, Mars.

Jupiter was Marduk, the king of the gods. Then Zeus. Then Jupiter. Always the king.

The planet we call Venus was Ishtar in Babylon and Aphrodite in Greece. Love and desire. Mercury was Nabu the scribe, then Hermes the messenger.

Different languages. Different empires. The same characters. Why would they all agree about tiny dots of light?

The seven planets as circuit parts →

Venus has no magnetic shield of its own. It wraps the solar wind around itself and holds on, under air pressure ninety times ours. Astrology called it attraction, holding on to what it draws in. That’s a capacitor. A part that stores a charge.

Jupiter has the strongest magnetic field of any planet, and after the Sun, it’s the loudest radio voice in our sky. Astrology called it the king. Growth. More of everything. That’s an amplifier. It takes a signal and makes it bigger.

Uranus. Long before anyone measured it, modern astrologers made it the planet of electricity and sudden change. Then in 1986, Voyager 2 flew past and found its magnetic field knocked sideways, tilted almost sixty degrees and shoved off center. That’s a breaker. The part that trips without warning.

And some of its symbols have never been explained at all.

David Talbott, quoted“Astrologically, the cosmic twins find their most popular expression in the constellation of Gemini. Of course, this story itself is never explained.”

So let’s ask. Gemini is the twins, Castor and Pollux. Two bright stars, side by side in the winter sky. The Babylonians saw twins there too. They called them the Great Twins.

The Greeks and Romans gave the twins a job. They were the protectors of sailors, because sailors could see them, right there in the storm.

Almost two thousand years ago, the Roman writer Pliny the Elder wrote it down. In a storm, lights like stars would settle on a ship’s masts. One light alone was a bad sign. Two lights meant a safe voyage, and those two, he wrote, were Castor and Pollux.

Astrology never asked where its symbols came from. And the Electric Universe never asked what astrology was for.

There’s a reason the god of lightning sat at the top of the pantheon.

A few years ago, over lunch with my dad, an electrician and a lifelong student of astrology, we got to talking about the sky. And I said it out loud.

If space is really electric, and the planets are like electromagnets, maybe astrology is a really big, enormously complex circuit.

What is Electric Astrology? (the film) →

But the sky is only half of it. For thousands of years, astrology has been trying to understand the connection between the sky above and the people below. As above, so below. So I built the other half of the instrument. It reads your heart rate, your sleep and your nervous system from your own watch or ring, and lines them up against the storms coming off the Sun. I call it Bios.

What a geomagnetic storm does to the body (the Bios film) →