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THE TESTAMENT OF ASTROLOGY
DR. OSKAR ADLER (June 4,1875-May 15,1955)
PART 1:
LEGENDS OF MAN'S WANDERING ON EARTH: RISING SIGNS

Lecture 1 7 Lecture 2 27 Lecture 3 39 Lecture 4 65 Lecture 5 87 Lecture 6 117
Part 2:
B ETWEEN THE WORLD OF THE PLANETS AND EARTH: PLANETS IN
HOUSES
Lecture 1145
Lecture 2 155
Lecture 3 171
Lecture 4 179
Lecture 5 189
Lecture 6 199
Lecture 7 209
Lecture 8 219
Lecture 9 229
Lecture 10 239
Lecture 11 249
Lecture 12 259
Lecture 13 269
Lecture 14 279
Lecture 15 293
PART 3:
FATE AND DESTINY
CONTENTS OF ALL SEQUENCES
Lecture 1 305
Lecture 2 317
Lecture 3 325
Lecture 4 335
Lecture 5 345
Lecture 6 355
Lecture 7 363
Lecture 8 371
Lecture 9 381
Lecture 10 389
Lecture 11397
409
%

$ Veil-well, the world must turn upon its axis
And all mankind turns with it...
Byron, Don Juan
In our studies thus far we have won a deep insight into human nature, based on
man's cosmic union and special stellar concord awaiting him at birth. But we have
not yet comprehended the full significance of this moment for man, to be cognizant
of the particular occurrence by which the previously "free floating between heaven
and earth" human enters his Earth juncture as his destined residence. In the center
of our investigations stood the human being before he acquired his body by birth to
thus unite with Earth, the actual arena of his existence until death. By this birth,
uniting the bodily material connection with conditions of terrestrial life, new
astrological values are created that includes Earth in the chain of cosmic
interpenetration.
We have spoken often of the cosmic meshwork, of the geocentric perspective of
the astrological world-concept, the Zodiac partition having four signal-points, the
formation of aspects and synodic planetary cycles, all based on an
Earth-perspective.
The new astrological values of our studies are a more individual kind. They
obtain this individual importance by the timely and locally defined dates of the
moment of birth. Thus, what we formerly termed the Earthperspective becomes the
spatial and temporal perspective of a point on Earth in a specific moment of its
movement - as well as the movement around the Sun, and especially its turning on
its axis. It is just this latter motion, containing a number of astrological indications,
that now interest us, showing Earth in its most terrestrial aspect and man
connected to this "most terrestrial aspect" of the planet he inhabits. Thus we will
learn to know man as true son of the Earth, observing the "Zodiacal" man, whom we
regarded until now, in his terrestrial apparel, as he stands before us with all his
occupations, experiences and destinies - reaching into the most trivial everyday
occurrences.
»
Looking over the plan of our studies so far, it resembles a delivery of man from
the depths of the universe to Earth, where he now finds himself in conditions
defining his historical and geographic position beyond doubt. We enter now the
most terrestrial and individual part of mundane astrology, dealing with man's true
habitat on Earth, with his personal weal and woe, personal fate and all the

particulars of his everyday life. All this is mundane astrology, whose particular laws
are based on the astronomical facts of Earth's movement, especially its rotation
around its axis. From here results a view of the heavenly globe solely pertaining to
the Earthperspective, and a principle of dividing it into separate segments, forming
a sort of inflexible or graduated net around the Earth, imagined as motionless,
through which the rising and setting stars seem to proceed. These separate
segments, only hinted at in the General Foundation as the "houses of the sky," form
the foundation of mundane astrology. This always interested people most vividly, as
their most personal matters of banal life: will I be successful or not in this or that
enterprise, will I marry, and when, how many children shall I have, will I become
rich? Etc. To obtain such information was what most people asked of astrology. To
fulfill this demand, one must place mundane astrology on a foundation worthy of
astrology as esoteric wisdom, and leams by this foundation to comprehend those
questions in a deeper cosmic sense, to thus examine the essence of mundane
astrology first from an esoteric perspective.
Let us first recall our earlier occasions whereupon we spoke of the "houses" in
general. We then spoke of the birth place horizon as the borderline between the
parts of the celestial globe above and below Earth; as regions of day and night; of
freedom, and of past- and heredity dependent necessity. We further spoke of the 12
heavenly "tree" of the human race, and its 12 terrestrial roots (Sequence Two). We
explained how the 12 heavenly Zodiac signs are quasi brought down to Earth by the
planets effectuating 12 correlations representing 12 terrestrial roots of man, a "third
Zodiac" transplanted to Earth, whose 12 segments are projected back to the
heavenly Zodiac also, subject to a different classification, found by the geographical
conditions of the planet Earth, in analogy to the laws of the heavenly Zodiac. These
segments of the terrestrial Zodiac are not "signs" but the heavenly "houses" of the
horoscope. The analogies or correlations, resulting from the translation of the
heavenly Zodiac into the Earth perspective, are easily understood. What was
formerly the heavenly equator becomes the birth place horizon; the ecliptic retains
its significance, superimposed by another scale expressing the Earth-relation as
arrangement of the houses. Accordingly, the intersection points between horizon
and ecliptic are especially important; similar to the vernal and autumnal points, the
intersection points of the heavenly equator and
(
ecliptic. Two other important points of the ecliptic: the solstice points, acquire
their correspondences by the intersection points of the ecliptic and the meridian of
the place of birth. Thus originate on the ecliptic also four indicative points,

expressing the Earth perspective of the place of birth.
The eastern point of intersection between horizon and ecliptic is called
ascendant, or rising sign of the Zodiac — corresponding to the Aries-point
- the western point of intersection of horizon and ecliptic; the descendant, or the
setting point of the Zodiac - corresponding to the Libra-point. The intersection
point between meridian and ecliptic above the horizon is the Mid-heaven or
Medium Coeli (MC), corresponding to 0° Capricorn, the intersection point between
meridian and ecliptic below the horizon is the lowest heaven, nadir, or Imum Coeli
(IC), corresponding to 0° Cancer.
These four signal points divide the ecliptic into four quadrants, which are now
subdivided into 3 more segments each, by auxiliary constructions based on a
12-partition of the equator, whose rising and culminating points in the moment of
birth form the basis for calculating the projection of these points on the ecliptic. We
shall not discuss the various methods that determine the position of the
subdivisions, since we deal here mainly with the house problem's esoteric side. For
the interested student, many sources of instruction and calculation supports are
available.
Let us keep in mind that the four signal points: ascendant, descendent, MC and
IC remain beyond doubt, no matter which methods were used for these
subdivisions. Six houses or Zodiac-partitions are counted below, and six, exactly
opposite, above the horizon, whereby the houses are counted - in the described
analogy - from the east horizon, to progress in the normal direction of the Zodiac
signs, that is from Aries over Cancer to Libra and further over Capricorn to Pisces.
Therefore the houses 1 to 6 lie below; the houses 7 to 12 are above the horizon.
The Sun wanders in the course of a year through the entire wheel of houses of a
certain place the Earth's surface, in the just described direction; the same for the
Moon and all the planets in their "direct motion" in the corresponding periods, if we
regard them "zodiacally," according to the heaven-perspective. But when we observe
the movement of these planets from the pure Earth-perspective - from the
standpoint of Earth revolving around its axis, then the circling movement of the
whole celestial globe, with all its starts, is generated, which we term the "rising" and
"setting" of these heavenly bodies. This movement represents - in contrast to the
one mentioned before - the pure projection of Earth's axis-rotation onto the sky,
showing us this sky with all its stars in a direction opposed to the one earlier
mentioned. It concerns the entire celestial globe, which in accordance to this
movement goes always, above the horizon, from east to west, and below the horizon

from west to east.
)
This mundane movement, the planets' movement on the background of the
Zodiac - assumed as stationary - we will call the Zodiacal movement. In ancient
astrology the movement of the first kind, the mundane, was named also "primary"
and the "zodiacal" as "secondary" movement. Now our interest is centered on this
primary movement. According to it all the stars and all points of the firmament
enter, at the moment they rise - that is, when they appear above the horizon - the
area of the 12th house, then proceed to the 11th, then to the 10th, reaching the
meridian, whereupon they enter the 9th house, then the 8th and then the 7th. After
wandering through this house they reach the western horizon: they set, and enter
now the 6th house, already lying below the horizon. Their movement goes further
through the houses 5 and 4, after crossing the IC to the 3rd and 2nd house, to
finally, after wandering through the 1st house, whose area lies close below the
eastern horizon, rise again.
Since - as stressed before - this rising and setting of stars is based on the
Earth's rotation around its axis, it is easily understood that this manner of rising
and setting, and the angle in which this is done, offers on different parts of Earths
surface a different appearance. As this rotation must always parallel the Earth, or
celestial, equator, the angle under which the stars rise depends on that angle which
the equator forms at that geographic place, with the horizon. This last angle equals
90° less the geographical latitude. If, for example, this place lies directly on the
Earth equator, all stars rise there vertically, since Earth's axis lies now horizontally
and the celestial rises vertically above the horizon, that is, under an angle of 90°.
The inhabitant of equatorial zones sees in the course of a day the entire celestial
globe. It is different with the inhabitant of polar areas. For him, horizon and
celestial equator coincide. Since the Earth-axis now stands vertical to the horizon,
all the stars rise parallel to the horizon, that is, they do not rise or set at all. For the
inhabitant of the North Pole all the stars north of the celestial equator remain
eternally visible, and all the stars of the southern celestial hemisphere remain
forever invisible. Of the planets those which occupy the northern part of the ecliptic
remain visible as long as they do not leave that part of the ecliptic.
If for instance the Sun goes from the sign of Pisces into Aries, then it rises in
exactly that moment of transition at the North Pole. Day by day the Sun spirals
somewhat higher, parallel to the horizon, reaches the highest point of its spiral
course at 0° Cancer then sinks ever deeper in lowering spirals, to sink below the

horizon at 0° Libra for half a year. It is similar with the Moon, who remains only
half a month above the horizon, or Jupiter, which remains above the horizon for six
years to vanish again for another six years. For the South Pole conditions are the
opposite. For all locations on Earth, whose polar height lies between 0° and 90°,
rising and
1
setting of all heavenly bodies occur at an oblique angle equaling 90° less than the
polar height.
There is a larger or smaller part of the celestial globe for all these places whose
stars remain "eternally" above or below the horizon. This is that part of the celestial
globe which is distanced from the heavenly poles for the amount of the geographical
latitude. With these short skygeographical observations the astronomical need may
be satisfied.
A few remarks referring to names for the individual houses may be added
before going into our actual astrological topic. Three groups of 4 houses each had
been defined among the 12 houses. One spoke of comer or angular houses, of
succeeding houses and lastly of falling or cadent houses. Angular houses were called
the 1st, the 4th, 7th and 10th houses, therefore those houses directly adjoining the
four signal points. The 1st house lies directly below the eastern horizon, below the
ascendant, the 4th house directly west of the IC, the 7th house directly above the
western horizon, above the descendant, and the 10th house directly east of the MC.
The 2nd, 5th, 8th and 11th houses are called succeeding houses, which expression
explains itself. The 3rd, 6th, 9th and 12th houses are name d cadent houses. We will
explain the meaning of this nomenclature later.
There were three different graphic representations of the houses, and thus
natal chart. The following drawings reproduce these representations of the same
horoscope, for 12:00 AM, London, January 1,1931.
The first chart is rectangular, with the angular houses in the center.

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The next chart shows a wheel with house cusps, for the same date.

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This third wheel below shows the same cusps, but different outer rim and lines
indicating different angles for the houses.

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These brief remarks about the graphic presentation of the horoscope houses
may suffice. We now turn to the question of the sense and meaning of this ancient
division of the Zodiac into houses, wherein the heavenly Zodiac seems to prepare its
terrestrial branch, destined to play a role, in man's work and life on Earth,
analogous to the true Zodiac's in regard to
microcosmic man as reflection of the universe. Our introductory meditations
may lead us to expect that we have to deal here with a far reaching analogy not only
to the four elements, but also to the three gunas. Their order may fundamentally
rule the structural plan of the twelve houses, if we succeed in finding here also the
relative Earth coefficient through which the interpretation-transfer from the Zodiac
sign to the mundane house becomes possible.
If we begin by entrusting ourselves once more to tradition, we find a
characteristic of the single successive houses, at first seeming not only astounding,
but at the same time repulsive to modem thinking, by the seeming arbitrary manner
of its meaning, or remindful of primitive superstition. According to this tradition:

The 1st house deals with the native's total personality, appearance and his
innate physical, emotional, mental and moral disposition.
The 2nd house deals with "property", money and estates, richness and poverty, as
well as the emotional disposition.
The 3rd house deals with brothers and sisters, letters and literature, with criticism
and authorship, and small trips.
The 4th house deals with the parental home, parents, especially the father, with the
native country, later with one's own home, finally with the last years of life.
The 5th house deals with everything concerning love, with children, and posterity,
with education, school, all kinds of amusement, gambling and speculations.
The 6th house deals with health and illness, as well as subordinates, with service
and servants.
The 7th house deals with all sorts of partnership and relations, especially with
marriage and with open enemies.
The 8th house deals with processes and law-proceedings, with dowry, last will,
inheritance, with death and presentiment of the beyond, dreams.
The 9th house deals with religion, life philosophy, occultism, inner maturity,
extensive travels.
The loth house deals with vocation and reputation, public activity, honor,
acknowledgement, relation to the mother.
The lith house deals with friendship and sympathy, sociability
The 12th house deals with secret enemies, aspersions, various restrictions,
loneliness, jail, institutions, hospitals, deprivation of freedom, and relations to
mother-in-law.
A strange thing about this old tradition is that, despite its apparent arbitrariness,
the 12 areas of life characterized by it - as a thousand-fold tested experience
teachers - are in indubitable manner in each case defined in minutest detail by the
Zodiac signs in the corresponding house regions,
!#
and the planets therein, although, as we will demonstrate, the significance of
the houses quoted above does not completely encompass the laws working here,
especially not in their causes.
For better understanding, we return to esoteric contemplation, to comprehend
the problem of mundane astrology in its core and to disclose its roots. We once
more take up those lines of thought as indicated in the lecture six of the General
Foundation, regarding the concept of the horizon, reviewing what was said on this
subject. We started from the fact that the horizon draws a limit between the supra-

and the subterranean part of the firmament, or between the visible and the invisible
part of the celestial globe. What belongs "above" radiates free and unrestricted
down to man: but what pertains to the "below" must first penetrate the Earth-mass
to reach man, it must be filtered by the planet Earth. This filtration causes all
celestial powers at the moment of birth situated below the horizon, to experience a
modification, before they can each the new bom infant, a sort of preparation by the
planet Earth. This led us to recognize in this filtration of the subterranean
radiations a screening of heavenly powers below the horizon through that which ties
man to Earth, to his terrestrial pre-history, his terrestrial line of descent, to all the
intermediate links of his ancestors, who, through their history, are finally connected
with the history of the Earth-globe itself. The radiations coming from the heaven
below the horizon stretch, so to speak, through the entire pre-history of man, and
bring him its extract as the result of that filtering process. Owing to this pre-history
man can not receive these subterranean radiations unclouded, but must accept this
obscuration through his past as the endowment of his terrestrial birth. This past is
simultaneously the sum of all transgressions of the ancestors, and all the ways and
aberrations of the ancestors, through thousands of centuries — the inherited burden
of man, his inheritance-mass, or heredity. By it he is connected with everything that
existed before him on Earth. Heredity endows him with all that he has inherited
from his forefathers, making him dependent on it. Thus the horizon as borderline
separates a realm of dependence and of compulsion (the realm of necessity) from
the realm of freedom or self-determination.
We can now somewhat understand the significance of the six houses below the
horizon. Based on the above statements, we will try to interpret this significance
only briefly and generally, to penetrate deeper into it later, from a different angle.
The corner or angular house below the horizon, the 4th house, means, as is
already known, the paternal home, — the father and mother and family in which we
were bom, that which is expression of the total heredity of the forefathers whose
last outposts and deliverer of the heredity our are parents. My parents, without
whom I could not have come to life on this
!$
Earth, whose existence therefore represents - sit venia verbo - the most
unchangeable part of my past, are the most "necessary" of all connecting links
between myself and the beginning of Earth. To our parents we are related, as the old
Romans termed it, in the first degree. This relationship is the most direct and
deepest. It becomes the paradigm of all connections lying in this direction, and
must be recognized as blood- and speciesrelationship, as membership in a tribe,

race, nationality, homeland, and lastly, in a more comprehensive sense, also such
relationships which would correspond to the relationship with the father or
ancestor in the emotional, mental and moral regions, thus representing a degree of
kinship of the first order, with all the consequences pertaining to this association. In
the course of this sequence we will elaborate on this in each single instance.
The 3rd house lies next to the 4th, on the eastern side of the meridian
- a falling or cadent house, termed the house of brothers and sisters. This house lies
also deep below the horizon, turned toward morning. Here we find the relatives of
the second degree, brothers and sisters - since in Roman opinion two procreations
are necessary to create this degree of kinship. Here exists the direct relation of
coordination regarding heredity. It is a kindred attachment based on equality in
rank, the arch-paradigm of a true association. Brothers and sisters are members of
an organic life partnership based on common heredity. With direct communications
of the thoughts based on equal heredity which keep this community together,
becomes a law of life, the foundation of all understanding and agreement. Thus it
becomes comprehensible that this house also represents communication
kafexochen - communication in the physical sense (travel, mutual visits), in the
emotional sense (brotherhood), in the intellectual sense (oral and written
thought-exchange) in the moral sense (mutual criticism and adaptation through
compromise and concessions).
The 5th (successive) house, adjoining the 4th in the west, is the house of
eroticism, posterity, teaching and gambling. Here also we see heredity at work to
create the conditions for this house. For posterity is the true mechanism by which
heredity is created, and eroticism or sexual love is nature's arch-strategy by which
man is entangled in heredity's chain, and pressed for its propagation.
(Schopenhauer: Metaphysics of Sexual Love). Thus, everything connected with
eroticism is like something pre-ordained before which all alleged freedom of
decision surrenders, unconditionally. Sexual love thus becomes the arch-paradigm
of fatality, which in its essence unavoidably makes man the inevitable heir of his
history, the slave of the past. But just because the fact of heredity is less clearly
expressed, this 5th house may be termed the house of fatality in its most
comprehensive meaning, including the so-called game of hazard in any form. For
what else is this game of hazard than experimenting with
!%
"chance", a gamble with destiny, with fate's unknown powers, with pure fatality
that lies beyond human will-power. Fatality and heredity are united in the 5th house
in another sense, expressing the fateful character of heredity, and its mechanism, in

the realm of the intellect. Teaching, or the hereditary descent of all the treasures of
knowledge through the teacher, who transfers this gift to his pupils - as his
intellectual posterity - confronts us with another form of the mechanism of
heredity and of fatality, by which the native is compulsorily enmeshed in the chain
of tradition, placing teachers, as fathers, in the guilt-complex of the past. Yet: here
in the 5th, as well as in the 2nd house, which are both not directly adjoining the IC, a
slight presentiment of a future, brighter freedom is felt.
Mohammed's Lay of the Teachers.
Mohammed said: The best of all men
Wandering on this Earth,
The ones who increase divine mercies,
Are the teachers.
When the teacher, spreading the seed Of the divined word, tells the child: Say:
"In God's, the All-Merciful's, name!"And the child repeats the words:
In God's, the All-Merciful's, name;
Then God, for His name's sake, Writes in the Book a threefold blessing. To the
child, a granting of a boon, To the teacher, canceling of one guilt, To the child's
paren ts, one forgiven ess.
Riickert. The 2nd house, the house of fortune, is also a house of heredity. At
first we may understand as fortune actually money and goods, which falls to the
native's share through the environment into which his birth has placed him. All
kinds of possessions connected herewith must be counted as belonging here, wealth
and poverty - however one may call it, make up the content of the 2nd house. But
here belong not only material possessions, but also the emotional and mental
talents, the innate "talent" and "un-talent". They too represent a wealth, a sort of
possession, which, obtained by man through heredity, is man's dowry for life. Did
not the Greeks name "talent" a coin? What is mixed in here (as we have mentioned
already on occasion of the 5th house) as a presentiment of future freedom is the
ability for using these possessions, for good or evil. To make the best use of it, is the
motto here.
!&
The two remaining houses reach the horizon in the east and the west: the 1st
and the 6th houses. The 1st house of personality contains everything pertaining to
the characteristic of the native's human nature, as endowed to him by heredity -
not his true character, but the personality extended in front of it, which determines
- like an actor's mask - the role reserved to him in life's drama. In Sequence Two of

our course, we elaborated on the difference between true character (individuality)
and personality. The true or intelligible character (Kant, Schopenhauer)
corresponds to man's true Self, with the fundamental tendency of his will, and thus
becomes to many people for their whole life, in a certain sense, an Arcanum. Only
gradually does one come to know one's true nature in the course of life. In the
struggle for existence, one learns to prevail against one's own personality; one's
inherited being, only step by step. We will see later how important for this are the
Moon's and Sun's position in the houses, determined by the birth time; the
mundane locations of the two heavenly lights are most important for this process of
Self-perception.
The native receives through the 1st house the extract of his physical, emotional,
mental and moral constitution, as it necessarily results from the heredity conditions
of his descent: his empiric character, or better expressed, his empiric
characteristics. Here belongs above all the total physiognomy of his psycho-physical
condition his complete being as "appearance" - let us term it the vehicle. This
vehicle is endowed to him, is the instrument through which alone he is able to
operate in the physical world which he entered at birth. All possibilities of his
terrestrial life depend on this vehicle, as far as they are an expression of his
personality.
The borderline between the 1st and the 12th houses, across which at birth until
then pre-formed human being endeavors toward the terrestrial day, the "ascendant"
has been always considered as the true significator for the complete physiognomy of
the native. The degree of the Zodiac rising at the time of birth determines all
possibilities of his life and fate on Earth.
After completion of this preliminaiy description of the 12 houses, we will
devote ourselves first to the problem of the ascendant, developing 12 human or
personality types according to the 12 rising Zodiac signs. Inasmuch, as with these 12
ascendants the position of the other houses is codetermined, we will not only face 12
types of personality, but also 12 biographies, 12 pure legends of life, like perhaps the
Aries-legend, Tauruslegend, Gemini-legend, etc. Then, at a later occasion, we will
conclude the special designation, which in each individual case the distribution of
the planets, found there at birth, brings in these, until-then assumed as empty,
houses. We then will deal with the Zodiacal significance of the planets' positions
and their mundane significance; in other words, each single house in relation to
each planet in this house,
r

Continuing our general observations, of the houses below the horizon we still
must discuss the 6th house. This also touches the borderline between above and
below, as the house which all stars enter after setting. According to tradition it is the
house of health and illness, of "servants." Health and illness depend on body's
general constitution and also belong to the region of heredity. They are the
expression of the functional fitness of the vehicle, which fell to our lot by heredity.
Inasmuch as the body is man's first and original "servant" for his life on Earth, it
becomes the archparadigm for all kinds of servants. Now also in this house a clearly
discernible shimmer of day presses forward, for what signifies health or illness in
our body, the harmonious or disharmonious cooperation of the organs toward a
salutary final goal, becomes later in one's conscious life, in a broader sense, the
significator for one's harmonious or disharmonious adaptability into the social
organism of the state, or of the body of mankind in general - the standard for his
social fitness.
Above the horizon lie houses beyond heredity and its compulsion, in which we
gradually acquire Self-determination and are allowed to add something of our own
to that which flows purely from hereditary sources.
The first house above the horizon which we will now examine is the 12th house,
of secret enemies, of imprisonment. As each star, as the Sun, at their rise first enters
this house, thus also the human being, at his birth, crosses the horizon, arrives in
the world of daylight, equipped with the vehicle prepared by heredity. He enters his
12th house and encounters all the misfortunes of an absolutely hostile environment.
Birth itself may well be the most terrible life event of all, being suddenly pulled from
absolute shelter, pushed into an alien, hostile, unknown world, helplessly exposed
to its unknown perils. If we could remember this event, there might be no
anxiety-dream quite equal to the horrors of this act of birth.
Here the remark may be permitted that the transition of man to a higher stage
of his development (second birth, see General Foundation) is connected with
similar terrors as his physical birth. In certain initiation rites it was attempted to
imitate the birth-event. In ancient Greece, there was an oracle (see Stoll: The Role
of Suggestion in the Psychology of Peoples) where the person to be initiated was
pushed into a dark room, whose exit could only be found by him who had attained
inner maturity. But even then he did not know what was waiting for him.
The 12th house brings the first clash with life's inimical powers, presenting
themselves as unrevealed, secret enemies, lurking around the native everywhere,
filling him with the painful feeling of impotence and solitude. At first, one's own

body is jail, in which the soul is quasi imprisoned, incarnated, and experiencing the
whole weightiness of this incarnation feeling like an immense emotional burden.
Thus, the first
!(
eastern house that promises the beginning of freedom is also the house
carrying the feelings of incapacity and bondage. The first house of freedom is the
house of well perceived imprisonment in one's own being.
The nth house, the house of friends, in contrast to the 12th, showed us the
whole difficulty of the fight for the freedom to be gained, and indicates the help we
receive in this fight. If the 12th house showed us the calamity of life, the 11th shows
us the friendly room - the house of friends, as tradition calls it.
Let us stay with the picture of the newborn man, just released from the
motherly womb and the protective covering of heredity, then this help apportioned
to him after birth signifies the mother's natural protection, which becomes his first
nourishment, tended to him in freedom. Here is the source of first and direct
sympathy, and again it becomes the archparadigm for everything that in later life is
felt as sympathetic, distinguished from what is antipathetic, as understood in a
physical, emotional, mental or moral sense. Sympathy and antipathy are natural
instincts, teaching us to recognize friends and to differentiate them from enemies.
Mother-love is the first helping power in life, the first source of sympathy and
friendship. In later life, it attains the symbolical significance of any willingness to
help, one's own and assistance expected from others, whose friendship one has won.
Herein is expressed an essential difference from the 5th house, which lies directly
opposite the lith; love, or rather tobe-in-love, overcomes man like fate, here is no
conscious or responsible freedom of choice. But friends we are allowed to choose or
to deserve. We will speak about this later in more detail. A pretty verse byChmisso
may find room here, to characterize this contrast:
Friendship is a knotted stick for travel,
Love a slender cane to stroll along.
The 10th house touches the middle line; highest above the horizon, as the 4th
house lies deepest below it. It is the house of action in the realm of freedom, in the
truest sense. As heaven's energies reach man most directly and freely here, thus he
also, on his part, radiates his activity most directly and freely into his environment
lying wide open before him. It is human activity in public, the direct and responsible
revelation of his being, as a moral individual, responsible before himself and others
for his actions, for every utterance expressing his free resolve. The essential

designation of this angular house is the irrevocable incorporation in the
surroundings as the direct field of action, by which the native leaves his
arch-original traces in terrestrial occurrences to fulfill his vocation, his mission in
the terrestrial world. What thus emanates from, and returns to him as the echo from
his
!)
environment is his reputation, for better or worse, as honor or dishonor, as reward
or punishment, as his later karma.
We cross the midday line and turn to the 9th house of extensive travel, deep
studies, and religion. Man has made his impact on his surroundings, he has pressed
in his spoor, he has given of himself to the outside - now he must return into
himself to find his Self, must start on the great voyage to his own ego, which is not
the heredity-ego, but his true Self. This great voyage, carrying the native through
many lands and seas, often symbolizes life's erratic course, leading back home in the
end, the Odyssey of life.
It teaches man, on his way toward the inside, to perceive the outside truly, as
reflection of the inside. Thus every voyage, understood physically and spiritually is a
pilgrimage to the "holy land" that may be nothing but our true home in the Self, in
whose deepest core God Himself is revealed.
Know Thy Self; And Thou Wilt Know God -The Delphic Temple.
The small trips (3rd house) led us to the knowledge put down in books; only the
9th house leads to wisdom.
The 8th house, the house of death and judgment is already a western house, the last
but one above the horizon - let us term it the house of life's harvest. The ancients
liked to represent death as reaper with his scythe. But life's harvest can be brought
home in full only when the last fetters of clinging to Earth are loosened, and full
freedom is gained. This loosening of the fetters means, to be sure, for most people
physical death. But for those who have found the way to their Self, or who at least
are searching for it, it means the great transformation from which one emerges as
from a second birth (see General Foundation).
We will elaborate on this later. Here a remark may be made, tied to a very vulgar
and wide-spread superstition, which, in truth, may be the profane remnant of
esoteric wisdom. By the 8th house the secret meaning of the number 13 is brought
closer to us, which, according to common belief, is a number of death - the 13th at
the table dies. Actually, the number 13 has always been the number of death,
corresponding to the 13th letter in the old Hebrew alphabet, the letter M - Majim,
water, or the element Water - Tamas - one of the three Mothers. This letter

signified at the same time the number 40, which we meet everywhere in occult
language, where - as in the Bible - the topic is the great transformation, which in
some interpretations leads through the portals of death. 40 days and nights it rains
before the Flood ... Gen. 1, 7.12 40 days and nights Moses fasts on Mt. Sinai... Ex.
34, 28 40 days and nights Jesus fasts in the desert ... Math. 4, 2 40 years Moses
leads Israel through the desert
40 weeks the embryo floats in the amniotic fluid ...
n
The desert and great solitude correlate with death. We thus understand that the
house of death is in truth also the house of awakening to a higher life forms, and
house of judgment and inner purification that precedes this awakening. For, in the
desert, judgment passes over oneself inwardly before one is permitted to rise to a
higher level. Each night's dream, as far as we are conscious of it, symbolizes such an
all-nightly inner judgment, accounting for the just passed or the "last day". Sleep
and death are twins.
Theyth house is the last house above the horizon which the stars pass before
setting. It is named the house of marriage, open enemies, and all partnerships. In
this last house, still pertaining to the region of day, the key-stone shall be laid for
life on Earth. The "above" shall be linked with the "below", the realm of freedom
united with that of necessity - as well as we are able, according to our stage of
development. The heaven- and the earth-heredity shall be brought to a harmonious
unity, to elicit the greatest possible perfection in man from this union of the
contrasts of above and below. This combination of the divine and earthly parts of
our being, or of the arch-male - Rajas - and the arch-female - Tamas - is termed,
in the occult sense of the word, marriage. In the region of Earth, as in the sense of
mundane astrology, marriage between man and woman becomes the actual
correspondence of what we have termed the keystone to life on Earth. Marriage
becomes the area of probation for man's capacity to unite heavenly and terrestrial
energies, to overcome all friction opposing this task. Man cannot reach perfection
(Sattwa) before he has accomplished it.
This task must be undertaken fully consciously originating in an act of
freedom. One courts and frees a woman, and in the marriage ceremony both parties
must reinforce their free decision by saying "yes." Therein lies a remarkable
contrast to the relations which the 5th house helps create, which are ordained
compulsory, not freely detennined. We will return to all these relationships later,
when we discuss the separate houses in detail.

It can easily be imagined that every relationship between two people, sprouting
from free choice or free action, becoming one's responsibility, can be understood in
analogy to the arch-paradigm of marriage as mutual complement. Wherever a
partnership occurs, as a mutual complement of two opposite polarities, it becomes
the touch stone for man's readiness to sacrifice that which in balancing the
polarities would remain an alien body. Without this readiness for sacrifice, the
polar contrasts prove incompatible
- the partner becomes an opponent, an open enemy.
The above intimations on the houses' significance harmonize the old traditions
with the interpretation of below and above from the General Foundation, may
suffice for now. To adequately penetrate into the depths of the problem of mundane
astrology, it is necessary to grasp the problem of the houses and their significance
where the true source for the basis of
"!
the total mundane astrology is to be found, namely the projection of the second
on the third Zodiac, or the reflection of the zodiacal spectrum in the spectrum of
man's life on Earth. Here it is necessary to use an analogy, of the Earth-co-efficient
of the heavenly signs, a task for later. It is important now to examine another
problem first, which forms a transitional problem between zodiacal and mundane
astrology; the so-called ascendant. It is the starting point for the mundane spectrum
similar to the Aries-point for the zodiacal spectrum. By this ascendant the Aries
point is fetched down to Earth and put at the start of life on Earth.
At the start of this life on Earth is birth, which is similar to "breaking through
the circle" and fixing a signal point, by which the circle that would otherwise return
indifferently back into itself. By receiving a starting point a new circle joins the old
one. By human birth a signal point is formed, as the hatched chicken breaks through
its shell; so the human being breaks through his eggshell, fixing a signal point of his
life at the start of his Earth's existence as independent being; for the first time he
breaks through the cover of Earth heredity, and by his birth the human being
crosses a threshold between the realm of Earth-heredity and Heaven-heredity, into
the realm of individual freedom.
Let us recall that we said the Moon represents all earthly legacies, the Sun
represents the heavenly heredity treasure. Thus, all that is "below" or the
subterranean heaven, belongs to the Moon or night, and all "above" as the realm of
the Sun or day. At birth, man sees the "light of the world." We have indicated how
the ancients related this threshold between "day" and "night" to the Moon: the

so-called rule of Hermes expressed this relation, correlating the position of the
ascendant and Moon in the moments of birth and conception. The child's ascendant
or descendant is the location of the Moon at conception, and the child's Moon is the
ascendant or descendant at conception.
It was easy to demonstrate the Sun's inclusion, since pregnancy lasts about 9
synodic Moon-months, the child's Sun squares the conception Sun; the Moon's
phase at conception must be repeated in the angular relations between the Sun and
the birth ascendant. The constellation in the moment of conception decides the
child's ascendant and Moon, and the child's Sun location by house.
Let us keep in mind, the ascendant is a transition point between the regions of
the Moon and Sun, and the realm of night and of day. It suggests to seek an analogy
between what the ascendant imparts to the horoscope and what radiates from the
8th house, as a transition from life to death. If we bring these two houses into closer
relationship to the 1st and 8th sign of the Zodiac - Aries and Scorpio - we observe
that both signs are ruled by Mars, and its transcendent interpreter Pluto.
"Everything comes from
NW
Hades and returns there again" (Schopenhauer). Analogy between birth and death
is very old; they are the two opposite poles of life.
In the tides of life, In action 's storm,
A fluctuant wave, A shuttle free,
Birth and grave, An eternal sea,
A weaving, flowing, Life, all-glowing,
Thus at time's humming loom, 'Tis my hand prepares The garment of life. Which
the deity wears.
Goethe's Earth-spirit (Pluto?), evoked by Faust.
Parallel with this ancient analogy of birth and death is the analogy of sleep and
death, awakening and being bom, dying and falling asleep. If we consider the
transition from one realm into the other from the standpoint of this analogy and
apply it to the 1st and the 8th houses, then we may say:
In the 1st house man awakens on the threshold of the here In the 8th house
man awakens on the threshold of the beyond In the 8th house man dies into the
beyond
In the 1st house man dies into the here.
Now we face, as mentioned earlier, the physiological analogy of these two
realms before us in the form of the state of being awake and asleep, at whose border

stands awakening and falling asleep. Each morning as man awakens from his sleep
he emerges from the realm of dreams into reality, passing from 8 to 1. What does
that mean? He comes from the "judgment" of the past day - the last day - he arrives
after a "last judgment" in the new day. This is the key we have sought for
interpreting the ascendant.
As man awakens from his dream - the symbolic expression of inner judgment
- he is still filled with the mood this judgment left in the human being emerges at
his birth from the lower realm. This emergence is filled with the mood evoked by
past judgment, but without memory of the past day, without remembrance of the
past life on Earth, which follows him now in the vital mood like a forgotten dream.
The expression of this mood is the ascendant; it is the significator for the basic
mood with which man is bom, the basic mood of his present earthly existence. To
come closer to the essence of the ascendant, we may form the auxiliary concept that,
what it places in our cradle may also represent a sort of heredity, as perhaps the
Moon, but that this heredity is like a lost memoiy of a former life experience, with
perhaps the Sun in the same sign which now has become that basic mood in which
the new life began. What has become of our former solar position, and what we
could gain by it, becomes Moon at the time of conception, and appears in the birth
chart as rising sign of the Zodiac, as our individual vernal point. This thought may
be carried further.
"#
The native takes over what was formerly his true character, his erstwhile solar
nature, as the fundamental mood of his present life on Earth or - as protest against
this former solar nature.
Then one may imagine that perhaps a life with Sun in Aries now, as echo of that
desire-protest which must have been formerly strong enough, gives Libra as
ascendant. But this changes nothing essential in the key function of our auxiliary
concept for the interpretation of the ascendant. No matter if the former Sun stood in
the Zodiac sign of the present ascendant, or in the sign opposed to it, the present
ascendant stands under the rulership of the same planet, which formerly stood in
closest relation to the Sun, as ruler of the solar sign or of the opposite sign, in
positive or negative dignity.
It is the planet called to play the most important role in the nativity; the lord of
the ascendant, or lord of the horoscope. The native with Aries ascendant has Mars
as lord of the horoscope, accompanied by its transcendent reflector, Pluto.
Remembering that this auxiliary concept for interpreting the ascendant is first

to be taken as mere fiction, we must look for other, more realistic footholds to
interpret the ascendant-problem, to gain the coefficient to set before the rising sign,
to learn to understand its general significance correctly and expediently, to
comprehend its mundane function. Remember that with the position of the
ascendant, under consideration of the geographical latitude of the place of birth, the
position of the remaining houses of the horoscope in the Zodiac are always also
determined. Each single house, added to its general significance, receives thereby a
special tint, coming from the Zodiac sign in which it is found. All these tints unite to
a total effect, radiating back to the ascendant to contribute to form a picture of life.
This picture resembles a blank form, not yet filled by the planets. The separate
columns of this form contain special, unmistakable examination questions posed to
the native in and for this life, which he can only answer in the spirit of the Zodiac
sign accompanying each question. They present the textbook for the answers. The
basic mood in which all these questions are answered comes alone from the
ascendant.
If for instance someone is born with Aries ascendant, he can answer the vital
question for partnership only out of the spirit of Libra and out of the basic mood of
the ascending Aries. In the same way the question of public activity will have to be
answered out of the spirit of the sign of Capricorn. But this question, too, he can
answer only out of the vital mood of a man bom with Aries ascendant.
If we keep in mind, that also for part of the people born with Taurus ascendant,
Capricorn governs the 10th house, it becomes clear, that the same question will have
to be answered out of the spirit of Capricorn, but
"$
out of an essentially different vital mood, out of the Taums mood. The analogy
is true also for all the other houses regarding the relationship of the ascendant to the
signs in which they are found. It is necessary to increase these examples, because all
variations coming into consideration here will be examined individually as we study
the 12 possible schedules for life in particular. In preparation, we must clarify how
to interpret the transposition of the fundamental mood of life to the separate vital
regions, represented by the houses; how the single houses, whose significance we
learned, are experienced from the ascendant's point of view, which changes the
meaning they attain by this viewing from the perspective of the ascendant. We will
examine these distinctions in the next lecture.
For today we will add a brief remark referring to the attitude which the native
himself takes toward his ascendant. We will recognize here an essential difference

between this and his attitude toward his Sun and Moon positions. "Through the Sun
we will, through the Moon we must", thus we characterized what stems from our
first nature contrasted to what comes from the second, our hereditary, nature. We
identify with our first nature. We acknowledge it willingly. We do not want it in
another sign, we would like it in the same sign in our next incarnation also. It is
somewhat different with our second nature. It has helped us come to ourselves; it
has prepared the way for freeing our solar nature. Moon has done its duty; made us
conscious of the hereditary dross which we would not like to carry a second time in
the same manner. But, however that may be, we must acknowledge it also. With the
ascendant the conditions vary again. Here a strange psychological fact appears that
most people will deny from the start the descriptions of their ascendants as fitting
them, while their acquaintances and friends will find them highly characteristic of
the person. What may be the reason for this? The same reason that makes people
painfully distressed upon seeing their photograph, while friends and family find it
an excellent likeness. Something similar happens when, for we first see our profile
in a combination of mirrors. The reason for most people's discontent with the
description of their ascendant lies mainly in the fact that in the inward examination
their Sun-nature and Moon-nature is revealed, but of the ascendant only that
general vital mood, which, once clearly recognized, seems rather an obstacle - even
something one likes least in oneself - and which, perhaps most importantly, does
not attribute to oneself at all morally - from which one prefers to turn one's eyes. As
far as the regions of the other houses (by which the native connects himself with his
environment), permeated by this personal vital mood, become felt and visible to
others and thus begin to become objects of criticism, — as far as, according to this
criticism an objective picture begins to form in the eyes of his surroundings, of the
nature of the native, — that clings merely to
"%
the externally visible marks of his vital legend; then the same discomfort is
generated with this criticism, as with his own, only too well depicted photograph,
which also represents only the outward contour of the human appearance
"objectively". On the other hand, to the look of the external observer, which does
not penetrate to the depths of man's true nature, first appears what lies on the
surface of the human appearance, his external habitat or the nature of his
ascendant, and only much later are his Moon- and Sun-character revealed to him.
Thus the now following 12 descriptions will hold before the native a sort of mirror,
from which that picture looks out upon him, which is brought about by the
reflection of all "utterances" or radiations of his being, radiated back from his

earthly field of action, above all radiated back from the eyes, the hearts, and the
sympathetic or compassionate souls of his fellow-men. What the ascendant thus,
regarded unbiased, can teach man, that is not only his pre-ordained way between
day and night, freedom and necessity, created by conditions prepared long before
his birth in the womb of the past, this narrow path is at the same time the first
bridge connecting him with the world, and leading him back to himself from there,
toward self-knowledge. For: Inside no man learns to perceive... His innermost self;
for he measures ... With personal standards, once too small... And unfortunately
often too big.... Man recognizes himself only in man, ... Only life teaches everyone
what he may be. ~ Goethe, Torquato Tasso.
With this magnificent verse of Goethe, we will close for today. "&
»
fiard to discern, still harder to fathom, are men. Schiller, Don Carlos
Supported by what was expounded in the last lecture, we will now sketch the
main traits of the twelve legends of man's pilgrimage on Earth.
Legends - the single representations we are about to offer do not pretend to be
anything else; 12 variations of a general legend of man's life, different according to
the basic mood in which this life on Earth began, different according to the
character of the Zodiac sign rising at birth - and even the degree of this rising sign.
Legends of man's pilgrimage on Earth,
— not of an individually defined man, bom on such and such a day, hour, and year,
of such parents, etc., but of man per se - these legends would offer us only the
general fact of the existence of the 12 regions of life, representing as many stations
of the terrestrial course of life: the 12 houses of the horoscope. Man is born (1st),
and dies (8th), foe struggles and strives (loth), he has father and mother (4th), he
has brothers and sisters, mixes with people his own age who are his companions for
shorter or longer periods (3rd), he falls in love, begets children, learns and teaches
(5th), he commands and obeys, is healthy or sick (6th), he marries and makes other
lasting connections (7th), he has talents, is rich or poor (2nd), acquires friends
(lith), suffers misfortunes and hostility (12A1), ponders about life and the world, is a
believer or agnostic (9th)... That is the general legend of human life - the legend of
the life of Everyman.
Poets and thinkers of various nations and languages have repeatedly attempted to
present this legend. The following are a few examples. First, a poem by the German
poet, Christian Fiirchtegott Gellert, about a man who has perfectly fdled a long life:
The Old Man

Of an old man I will sing,
Who saw the world for ninety years. And if I new shall not succeed, I never ' 11 sing
that song again.
iif
A poem of an old man I'll write Reporting what was done by him. And I'll sing
what in stories I've seen of him, this old man.
Sing, poets, with urges aflame, Sing for your fame of love and wine! I leave all
love and wine to you; That old man shall be my paean.
Sing of whole nations' bold protectors, Immortalize yourself and them! I do not
sing heroic deeds:
The old man is my poetry.
Oh fame, penetrate posterity's ears, Thou fame, which my old man attained.
Hear it, ye times! He was bom,
He lived, and married, and died.
This legend of the contents of man's life tells us merely of the 1st, 7th and 8th
houses; it gives us a small, perhaps most important sector of the total legend of
human life and endeavor. Something similar is reported by Goethe, in the often
quoted verses: Why does the crowd so push and shout: it wants to feed itself...
Beget children, and feed them as well as it may. ... This, oh traveler, remember,
and do the same at home. ... No man can do more, he may try ever so hard. This
legend of human life speaks of houses 4, 5, 6 and 10.
And now Seneca: vivere est militare! To live means to fight! This also is a sort
of legend, speaking of the 1st and 10th houses, and concerned with the contrast
between the six houses above and six houses below the horizon, and of the
experience of this contrast as the arena of life. To live means to fight.
Somewhat similar is Edward Lytton Bulwer's: "there is but one philosophy,
thought there are a thousand schools, and its name is - Fortitude. To bear is to
conquer our fate!" (The Last Days of Pompeii). To suffer and to bear - that is the
other side of the struggle for life. This wisdom proclaimed pertains to the 9th house,
as the extract of all 12 houses. Such examples could be multiplied immeasurably.
Perhaps we would soon find that every poem seeks to bring us close to this legend
of life, and truly relates of just this legend, from the personal view of the poet.
"(
This thought may lead us back to our actual assignment, for the 12 pictures of
life we shall now draw present that general legend of life as also seen from a

particular viewpoint, in each case representing the special perspectives of the 12
signs of the Zodiac.
Before we start this task an important remark must be made, without which
the following could not be completely comprehended. Aside from the just described
general legend of man's pilgrimage on Earth there is also the legend of the life - if
the expression is pennitted - of zodiacal man, of the man as he lives "floating
between heaven and earth". Whether he knows it or not, man lives, simultaneously
with his life on Earth and his pure star-life, whose main representative s are Sun and
Moon, and their wandering through the Zodiac. The Sun's yearly circle through the
12 signs of the Zodiac, and the Moon's monthly orbit through them, also tells a sort
of legend of the general course and significance of life. This is starting point for
many myths and mystical poetry providing the realities of life on Earth with their
extra-terrestrial background, representing this as projection in the
terrestrial-temporal sphere. These relations will be discussed later. Many mythical
and mystical legends speak of that great wandering through the 12 signs of the
Zodiac, as for instance the legend of Hercules and his 12 labors, through with he
surmounts life on Earth; it is the legend of mankind's victory - as cosmic stage of
life - over the "animal", aided by all the energies which the Zodiac bestow upon us.
Far be it from us to venture forward into the jungle of the mythicmystic poetry,
or to hope to bring home perceptions from such ventures, which, won in other ways
beforehand, are interpreted into them. But the indication of the Zodiac legend could
nevertheless not be omitted, since now, as we go into more detail, we must also
consider in each of the 12 cases, in which Zodiac sign the individual houses fall,
determined beyond any doubt by the ascendant.
Our first task must be the examination of the manner in which the general
significance of the houses must be modified, in the sense of the fundamental
perspective given by the ascendant. Remaining with the concept that the houses,
depending on the ascendant, resemble a questionnaire with 12 columns, which must
be fdled out of the presentiment of the Zodiac signs presiding over these columns,
according to the general vital mood bestowed by the ascendant: what questions are
asked there? How does this questionnaire look?
One thing is clear above all! The questions do not refer to some objective facts,
corresponding to the single houses, but to the personal relationship, the native's
attitude toward the content of the single house regions. The questions are not
concerned with what but with how. Thus, if it concerns the 2nd house, the question
is not what do you possess? But:

")
ho w are you predisposed concerning the question of possessions? Or, if the 4th
house is concerned, the question is not: who or what are your parents? but: how is
your inner relationship with your parents, or, expressed differently: with
parenthood? The answer to such questions is not given through some sort of
theoretical deliberation; the answer is lived by my life, through the person bom
with this ascendant. In this sense we will now attempt to understand the single
houses for our purpose, characterizing the single houses with catchword-like
expressions.
1ST HOUSE: This, as was explained before, provided the key for interpreting
the subjective tinge in which the other 11 houses present themselves, the vital mood
or, as one might express it, the vital temperament, the first apperceptive spectacle
through which we experience not only the outer world and our relation to it, but
above all our own being and the relation of our Self to it.
2ND HOUSE: This signifies our personal attitude toward possessions, our
degree of attachment to all kinds of property, abilities and talents; here are
expressed satisfaction and dissatisfaction with the "heirloom" in the most
comprehensive sense.
3RD HOUSE: This house may be brought into contrast to the 2nd house. While
stability and inertness rule there as consequence of all attachment, here mobility
governs. We can now interpret thus afresh what brothers and sisters, what the
communication with them and with fellowmen, the exchange of physical, emotional
and mental gifts brings about, according to the vital temperament of the native,
experienced in correspondence to the sign which gives the 3rd house its character in
every single case. The degree of inner vitality and the inclination to live socially on
equal terms with one's surroundings, the inclination and ability to adapt oneself to
this environment, in short, the relationship to one's fellow men as "brother" and
"sister" now characterize the 3rd house.
4TH HOUSE: This is an angular house, thus of special importance. Seen from
the ascendant it signifies our relation to the parents and to all those who may in a
certain sense substitute for them, that is above all the educators and leaders,
superior to us in knowledge and years, to whom we may look up in some sense. The
4th house determines our degree of humility and reverence which feel for such
persons. Expressed here is the ability for awe — again in the word's most
comprehensive sense.
5TH HOUSE: Here our attitude is formed toward the erotic complex, and

posterity in the broadest sense, physically, emotionally and intellectually. Here also
we deal with heredity; how we are entangled in it through this house, does not grow
in the region of our freedom, but in our heredity bondage. Thus this house brings to
us eroticism as primarily the manner of our choice of an object, which proves
dependent on the
#
fundamental temperament, and of that Zodiac sign that gives the 5th house its
stamp. A clever French writer compared this subjective attitude toward eroticism,
with a poor Chinese hostelry, in which the guest is served only what he has brought
along himself. This intimate dependence from the heredity complex, expressed in
the choice of the object, and in the special kind of love, and in the gift to equip the
compulsory chosen object with those attributes, fetched from the storage of one's
own physical, emotional and mental needs, to adorn the loved one with it, will
become comprehensible to us by those Zodiac signs which rule the 5th house. The
relation to children and pupils will be judged similarly, and the gift for
self-delusion.
6TH HOUSE: This house deals with health, illness and servants. Experienced
from the ascendant, it represents that vital region which expresses the feeling of
health - or, more generally - of the constitution of our total organism with regard
to all that with which this organism comes into contact. Here the modem term,
readiness for health or sickness would be apt, related to the physical body, and
social body of human society. Here are expressed social or asocial feelings and the
degree of adaptability to social order per sc.
7TH HOUSE: Another angular house. The sign ruling this house is always
opposed to the rising sign; it contains all the conditions complimentary to the rising
sign to form a close unit; one's partner for life and the native's attitude toward him
or her. Man's ability for marriage, his fitness for a lasting tie and the special kind of
partner preferred are here indicated; especially one's attitude toward the problem of
marriage and partnership in general.
8TH HOUSE: This is the house of death and judgment, inheritances and last
wills. Experienced from the ascendant, this house becomes the house of eternal
dying, which is the true meaning of every development, by which in every moment
something is made to die, to be replaced by something new, which awakens to life in
its place. Here is judgment, last will and legacy, for we awaken every moment as
heirs of our own, just expired past. By such vital development, that which we might
call the fruit of life gradually matures. It is the fruit from our tree of life — in

contrast to the inherited property of the 2nd house - which now truly becomes our
own possession; the manure for the soil of our future life.
9TH HOUSE: The house of extensive travel, philosophy and religion,
represents the native's personal vital wisdom, and life's maxim as a result of all
whatever could be learned in the "long voyage of life", begun with this ascendant,
and won from the soil of the Zodiac sign which gives the 9th house its signature. If
the 3rd house made man outgoing in communicating with his "brothers and
sisters", the 9th house shows us man
#!
in intimate communication with himself, man wandering his road toward God.
10TH HOUSE: Again an angular house, the most important among all angular
houses, as it shapes the individual's outward physiognomy. Here, in public
activities, the hardest clash with the world of reality occurs in life's struggle for
self-assertion. You must be either hammer or anvil! Here the degree of man's
aptitude for resistance, the degree of his hardness, is determined. If the 4th house
determined man's degree of humility, the 10th house determines the degree of his
vital stamina.
11TH HOUSE; This house of friendship gains through the perspective from the
ascendant a correspondingly subjective designation. Above all it tells of man's
loyalty to himself, as result of the devoutly or instinctively perceived maxim for life,
which now also determines his loyalty toward others. As the 5th house determined
the erotic physiognomy, so the unth house determines the physiognomy of the
friendship of which the native is capable; it determines the manner in which the
native views the idea of friendship and his friends, chosen corresponding to this
idea, based on the signs which rule the 11th house.
12TH HOUSE: This house of imprisonment becomes, experienced from the
ascendant, the house of yearning for freedom. Here is determined how the ideal of
one's own freedom is conceived, which, in one of the extremes imaginable, is called
bondage, in the other case the affirmed inner freedom won through one's own
strength in the victoriously fought battle of life, in accordance to one's character. If
the 6th house assigned to man his place in the social organism, the 12th house
determines his claim to the right of self-preservation against everything which
inimically endangers it. Here is determined one's attitude toward the idea of
hostility, corresponding to the basic temperament of his life and the nature of the
sign, which puts its stamp on the 12th house.
Herewith we have characterized essentially the 12 columns of the

questionnaire, handed to the native at his entrance into life on Earth, a blank form
- not more than that, but also no less. From the manner in which he fills it, he,
above all, will leam, what fundamental inclinations he brought along before this life
started, he will perceive that something within him gives the answers required of
him, something that is not even himself, but which is rather like a forefather
inhabiting his body, joined to him to lead him, until he has learned to recollect his
true Self, until he has learned to add to the legend of his life, which the ancestor has
lived for him, his own - to awaken to the light of his Sun.
The difference between the position of the Sun and the ascendant should be
clear by now. If the Sun is located in a sign, then all the designations of this solar
nature flow exclusively from this sign of the
#"
Zodiac. If a sign becomes the ascendant, then all the other signs of the Zodiac,
as they dominate the separate houses, have their part in forming that, of which the
ascendant is significator. Above all the position of the 9th house, or the MC, will
have a decisive influence upon the physiognomy of the ascendant, since through its
position in the Zodiac is determined the individual's vital stamina. It will be found
practical to express the difference between the position of the Sun and the
ascendant in a Zodiac sign in two different terms. Following the general usage we
will say that someone is born in the Zodiac sign of his Sun, and under the sign of his
ascendant.
Before concluding our introductory remarks, to proceed to the individual
descriptions of the 12 life legends, we must, to protect the beginner against all kinds
of errors, by indicating the decisive role, which the geographical latitude of the place
of birth plays in regard to the positions of the individual house cusps (thus we call
the border points between the houses). A few examples shall clarify this. If
somebody is bom under 1° Cancer, the cusp of the 10th house, at a northern latitude
of 49 0 lies in Pisces; at 50 0, and further north from there on, in Aquarius. South of
the 49 0 latitude a combination of Cancer ascendant with Aquarius in MC is thus
impossible, a human type of this sort can only be born on the northern hemisphere
of the Earth, north of the 50 0 latitude.
Conditions on the southern hemisphere are different. To remain with our
example: if somebody is bom there under 1 0 Cancer, his M.C. will be in Aries if the
birth took place north of 46 0 southern latitude; north of it in Taums. The human
type thus created is not possible in the northern hemisphere. If we follow the sign of
Cancer in the entire course of its ascent above the horizon we see, to name the two

extremes, that in the northern hemisphere no combination between ascendant
Cancer and Taurus or Gemini as MC can exist, and in the southern hemisphere no
combination with Aquarius or Pisces as MC, but that within the degrees of lower
latitude in both hemispheres there exists that type, where the ascending Cancer is
combined with Aries in MC.
Let us observe another example: If someone is bom under Pisces rising, of any
degree, his MC can only be Sagittarius. This is valid in all northern latitudes.
Something similar is true with ascendant Aries which can only combine with
Capricorn in MC. This singleness of meaning of the two mentioned ascendants
regarding the "vital stamina" does not exist in the southern hemisphere. But it exists
for the two ascendants opposite these signs, Virgo and Libra. The southern Virgo
ascendant at any southern latitude can only combine with Gemini MC; Libra only
with a Cancer MC. Inversely, the northern Virgo ascendant - according to the rising
degree and the geographic latitude - can combine with Taums or Gemini as MC,
##
and accordingly, the southern Pisces ascendant aside from Sagittarius, also with
Scorpio.
These are only a few examples. We will return to all possible single cases when
treating each ascendant separately. We will base our observations on conditions
found in the northern hemisphere, supplementing them with distributions of the
cusps of houses for the southern hemisphere. One fact remains the same in both
hemispheres: the 7th house cusp is in each case the sign opposed to the ascendant,
thus, through all degrees, determined distinctly.
For each ascendant, one type - common to both hemispheres - is characterized
by the fact that ascendant and MC find themselves in signs of the same modality
-both in cardinal, in fixed or in mutable signs.
Aries in the 1st with Capricorn in the 10th house, Taurus with Aquarius, Gemini
with Pisces, Cancer with Aries, Leo with Taurus, Virgo with Gemini, Libra with
Cancer, Scorpio with Leo, Sagittarius with Virgo, Capricorn with Libra, Aquarius
with Scorpio, Pisces with Sagittarius are those combinations, which occur in a wide
zone north and south of the equator, and are the most frequent combinations in the
equatorial regions. With growing distance from the equator these cases become
rarer, until at last that degree of latitude is reached when for the corresponding
degrees of the ascending signs only "northern" or "southern" types are possible.
From which limit this occurs is decided by not just the sign of the ascendant, but its
degree. This observation indicates that we can fix three types of ascendants. The

type common to both hemispheres - ascendants and MC in signs of the same
modality - we will from now on term the common type - typus communis or T.C. -
the type appertaining only to the northern hemisphere, as northern type or T.N. and
the one only pertaining to the southern hemisphere as T. S.
If we place instead of the signs in MC the planets which rule these signs, and to
the ascendant the ruler of the ascendant or - as it is also named - the Lord of the
Horoscope, then important indications for the interpretation of the "vital stamina"
of all types result. Something similar is true for the interpretation of the humility
degree (4th house cusp) and lastly for the determination of the native's readiness
and ability to associate with others according to the descending sign (descendant),
which naturally remains the same for all types of the same ascendant.
The position of the other cusps of houses, that is the cusp of the 2nd,
3rd, 5th and 6th house, and those opposed to them, — the cusps of the 8th,
9th, 11th and 12th house— will be examined, in their possible variations - changing
according to the degree of the ascending sign and geographical latitude - in the
same way, so that from the following descriptions it shall become possible in all
cases where the degree of the ascendant can not be
#S
asserted beyond doubt, to gain important facts from the single psychological
indications of these descriptions, helping to define a more accurate - in some cases
even a most accurate - determination for the ascendant.
Herewith is indicated the path to penetrate the essence of what the ascending
sign of the Zodiac may contribute to the perception of human nature, and to the
unveiling of all the possibilities which man encounters upon entering this world,
possibilities representing at first as many questions, which he was called upon to
answer out of the character of the just rising sign, to unite the general legend of this
sign with the Zodiac legend, in his own fashion - the Zodiac legend which for him
begins with the degree of that sign under which he was born.
For exoteric thinking, the moment of birth and ascendant it gives may appear
accidental, considering all the incidents, capable of accelerating or slowing the birth
process, among which, within certain bounds, human caprice also belongs. But he
who sees all events in the sense of "astrology as occult wisdom" and man's entrance
as a physically organized living being into this world, in absolute correlation with
the whole living cosmos, as organic event vitally incorporated in the cosmos, he
must seek deeper lying laws, which express a great cosmic vital unity, and dominate
that segment of human life which is concluded in the moment of birth and begun in

the moment of conception. Between these moments we may assume an
astrologically comprehensible vital connection, as in the "Rule of Hermes,"
inasmuch as by this moment of conception, father and mother join the living chain,
as whose temporarily last link the newborn infant enters Earth; the demand results
to seek an astrological law, that, retrospective to generations farthest back, reflects a
rhythm of the stars, through whose single phases the chain of ancestors is defined
for each person.
The just mentioned rule of Hermes maybe regarded as presentiment of such a
law. It sees the position of the Moon and ascendant corresponding in mutual
relation with the same elements and their position in the moment of conception.
But a simple reflection must lead us to perceive at least that we can not stop in our
need for exploration at the moment of conception.
At first: the rule itself. It says that in the Moon's place of the nativity always
ascendant or descendant of the conception-horoscope is to be found, and vice versa,
in the Moon's place in the conception horoscope the ascendant or the descendant of
the infant. This ancient rule, which in recent times was remarkably proven by the
careful investigations of the English physician and astrologer Bailey, confronts us
with the fact of rhythm in the
#%
change of generations, reaching deep into the cosmos. It is not easy to understand
and interpret the connection hidden here.
We spoke about a surmise in our last lecture, which should help us shed some
light upon the ascendant, that tied directly to that rule, inasmuch as by the
ascendant is drawn the immovable borderline between the "day-" and "night-"
region in the horoscope, and thereby in the life of the native. The border is between
his inherited personality and all that, which it brought along from its heredity past
on the one side, and that which he — dissolving old and creating new karma — will
add to his heredity past. Then the concept forced itself upon us, that, what rules as
conceptionMoon the hour of conception, was the former Sun of the native, now
paled into Moon, which later, as ascendant, brings to him all the forgotten
memories of former free will and endeavors, now as the vital temperament or the
fundamental mood of his life. But what does then the Moon of the infant mean in
the hour of conception? What the ascendant of this so fateful moment?
Here too a thought forces itself upon us, which may appear even farther from
reality as the one just expressed, yet which, at closer examination, proves more and
more akin to the esoteric fundamental idea. It is not the ascendant in the moment of

conception at all, which determines the natal Moon position; inversely it is the
future position of the child's Moon, which so reacts upon the moment of conception
that, what shall be brought into the reality of life on Earth, reaches in just this
moment the border between night and morning. Ovum and sperm can find each
other only when in the east - or west - horizon that Zodiacal space in heaven
appears which will carry the child's Moon.
Is thus a retroactive energy is emanated by this Moon? What kind of energy
would that be? What signifies in this connection the child's Moon itself? In the
chain of heredity-interrelations, to which belong, above all conception and birth,
what does it indicate?
Let us remember that we saw in Moon a sort of mediator between the Sun and
Earth. Moon is the eternal store-room of the heredity measure of mankind - the
astrological equivalent for that which natural science calls the "immortality of the
germ plasma". The germ plasma is forever passed through generations and becomes
ever again the basic substance of ovum and sperm, as "eternal germ of life" through
all generations. It is the bearer of the terrestrial-female, or of the substantial side of
the species man, the vital uniting link in the heredity process of humanity's
development.
We will learn to know in a later part of our course the secret connection
between the Moon rhythm in the mother's horoscope and the moment of birth of
the child; thus we will gradually understand better the Moon-legend of mankind,
which is the most ancient, to which is tied the
#&
mystery of world revelation. It reaches back to the beginning of time and to the
arch-Tamas, the female arch-principle, or the world egg, the eternal reservoir of
world memory, from which the world, after its negative phase
- Brahma-night - ever again rises renewed above the horizon of revelation.
Inasmuch as with birth and conception of man again and again the
arch-mystery of world revelation is repeated on the level of human existence, here
too the secret rhythm of the Moon-legend is renewed ever again, whose bearers now
are the planet Moon itself, and woman in her physical form. Therefore in the
mythological symbolic language of antiquity the Moon-goddess, Artemis-Diana
appears as patroness of the act of procreation. With this indication of matters
expounded earlier, we will conclude our general remarks about the essential
function of the ascendant, to turn now separately to the individual ascendants.
#'

t
# We now turn to the task of developing the vital legends of all 12 signs
singularly. As before, we will start with the three Fire signs: Aries, Leo and
Sagittarius.
What we shall create here are life histories, not character descriptions. Not
Aries-man, Leo-man or Sagittarius-man is to be sketched here (as we referred to
people born with Sun in the sign), but now we turn to people at whose birth the sign
of Aries, Leo or Sagittarius was rising. We will adhere to this differentiation also in
our expressions, and speak not of Aries-man, but of the Aries-type, or Aries-bom, in
characterizing people who are not born "in" Aries but "under" Aries, etc. We will
also discuss the three subtypes: the typus communis or T.C., the northern type or
T.N. and the southern type or T.S. If we look at all these three types and their
possible combinations, a peculiar symmetrical reciprocity strikes us, refening to the
position of the MC in regard to the single ascendants north and south of the
equator. It is not hard to understand the astronomical basis for this reciprocal
symmetry. But what is its astrological meaning? What secret law is hidden behind
this symmetry?
Here a remark may be inserted which might prove profitable when we later
confront in our analyses the T.N. with the T.S. Let us first start from the fact that the
polar contrast of both hemispheres of the Earth gets more obvious the farther we
wander from the equator and the closer we come to the poles. We reach hereby
those regions where the change of the seasons begins to play a role interfering so
mightily with life, with the growing difference in the length of day and night, that it
actually dominates the rhythm of life. The rhythm in the sequence of the four signal
points of the ecliptic: equinoctial point, solstice point and again equinoctial point
and again solstice point, or vernal point, summer solstice point, autumnal point and
winter solstice point, becomes more important for the course of life and definition
of time.
These signal points are also experienced in the equatorial regions between the
tropics; there also the solstices in Cancer and Capricorn and the equinoxes in Aries
and Libra could not escape human observation; but the rhythm given hereby has
the effect of vital rhythm for the organic world of the Earth only n the regions
beyond the tropics. It becomes
#)
externally discernible in the changes of plant- and animal-life, and internally in
the change of the basic mood accompanying all phases of this external natural

rhythm, as emotional-spiritual echo of the rhythm of year and day. In the General
Foundation we have indicated this mood-content - now it concerns us in its
fundamental significance for the contrast between northern and southern
hemisphere. Let us consider that the rhythm in the sequence of the seasons differs
always in both hemispheres for the length of half a year, that it is winter in the
southern hemisphere when it is summer in the north, etc., then the following
reflection will explain many things connected with the problem of the ascendant in
an essential manner. As man's attitude toward his inner world is different in broad
daylight from that at night, different even at different hours of this day, it is the
same also in summer compared to winter, in spring compared to fall. When the
"Seeress of Prevorst," the somnambulist made famous by Justinus Kerner, was once
asked, why apparitions of ghosts were observed more frequently in winter than in
summer, she replied briefly: Because people live in summertime more externally,
but in winter more internally. The analogous difference - if we may appropriate
this thought of the seeress - exists also between night and day, and the transitions
between both phases, as morning or evening, or spring and autumn.
Spring (morning): the turning from interior to exterior life, autumn (evening):
the homecoming to the inside. If we transfer this vital rhythm to the signs of the
Zodiac, it strikes us that Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn imply spring, summer,
fall and winter for the northern zones, but for the southern zones they mean fall,
winter, spring and summer. When it is spring north of the equator, it is fall south of
it, etc. Only night and day do not exchange their roles. If the Sun stands in
Capricorn people in the north have winter, and those in the south, summer. But if
the Sun stands in the upper meridian (MC) then it is noon, no matter whether north
or south of the equator.
This simple astronomical observation induces a reflection that is best included
in the region of a cosmo-biology, or an astrological psychology. It shall lead us now
as auxiliary concept in the following analyses.
Let us stay with the analogy, according to which the ascendant would have to
be regarded as the personal vernal point, the descendant as personal autumnal
point, MC as personal summer point and lastly IC as personal winter point; we then
arrive at rather odd consequences of these analogies.
As man, born under Aries - in any month - receives with the basic mood of the
ascendant also something characteristic of the season which begins when the sun -
his lost Sun - enters the sign of his ascendant (in our case: Aries). He thus becomes
- in mood - a man of spring. In other words: he not only enters life as a man of

spring, no matter what season he
$
is bom, he also experiences every year his inner spring, when the Sun in its
wanderings reaches his 1st house. Then he feels an inner sprouting and growing, an
awakening of the thousand voices seeming to want to shake him up from sleep,
calling him with all temptations to the fulfillment of external life, of which the
external world of spring is capable. This applies only to people of the northern
hemisphere. The Aries-man of the southern hemisphere is an autumn-man,
experiencing his spring in fall, as the Sun enters his 1st house. And further: When
the Sun enters the 10th house, reaching the sign at the 10th house cusp, each type
experiences his summer; and his winter, when the Sun enters the 4th house. Thus
the Aries type of the northern hemisphere has his summer, when it is winter
outside, when the Sun enters Capricorn; he has his winter when it is summer
outside; the culminating point in his activities, of his creative energy and joy in
external life comes in winter every year; but if the Sun enters his 4th house (perhaps
Sun in Cancer), he is most inclined to turn within himself. The yearly rhythm of the
southern Aries-type is inverted. When the Sun reaches his 10th house (Capricorn),
when it is summer outside, he experiences his inner summer, and he experiences
his winter (Cancer) when outside it is winter also, but his autumn coincides with
external spring (Sun in Libra) and his spring-awakening with nature's autumn.
This reflection c an be applied to all types. It will serve us as auxiliary concept in
the following analyses. The external rhythm of nature continues always in its power
over the external vital rhythm - it cannot be obliterated by the just discussed
internal rhythm. But the more delicate, personal mixed forms that depend on the
ascendant, and personal vernal point of every type, play an essential role in the
legend of man's life.
Now we will begin our assignment in detail, starting with Fire signs. Those
energies of the Zodiac revealed in Fire stimulate and penetrate man's will. Man with
Sun in a Fire sign is a person of will, with Sun in Air, a thinker, with Sun in Water, a
sufferer, and with Sun in Earth, a man of action. When not the Sun or another
planet, but the ascendant stands as mediator between Zodiac and man, when the
horizon as border between the day- and the night-region assumes this role, then, a
will results as a vital mood, which may be felt as a pale, half-forgotten, dream-like
memory of a life, once experienced with the Sun in a Fire sign. What remained as
impulse of will seems like the expression of a will no loner my will but neither a
stranger's, like a forgotten intention which lost its moral significance, or like the
power of a post-hypnotic suggestion. Only the secret commander can be no one but

I myself. Thus every Fire-born person stands under the force of an order, which he
must obey without knowing how this compulsion originated. The coercion
resembles a moral compulsion, without being moral in its character. It never lets go
of him,
$!
because the true meaning of the command has been lost. The fundamental key
to his vital mood is that he must will in every moment of his life. Aries-, Leo- and
Sagittarius-born people must, each in his fashion, live their life in the mood of will,
of a person whose moral leanings must stay alive in each moment, save that this
moral compulsion does not originate in moral freedom, or in his solar nature. This
compulsion is not the same as the mania as we found with Moon in a Fire sign. If we
must make a comparison, one might rather think of the compulsive neurosis. The
Fireborn person stands all his life under a continuous impulse to live his life in the
style of "another" who commands him from the depths of the subconscious regions
of his soul, which he cannot evade, but with whom he does not identify himself.
Lost, unfulfilled energies from the Zodiac, wafting across from dark Aries-, Leo- and
Sagittarius-memories form now the legend of the present life, which must be vitally
penetrated with the present Sun and the other planets. We now turn to the
individual signs.
Aries Ascendant (Lord of the horoscope: Mars): The fighter was our motto
for Aries-man, born with the Sun in Aries - the belligerent was our motto for him
born with the Moon in Aries. But for man born under Aries these characteristics do
not fit.
What prevails for man born under Aries is the Mars energy, which
accompanies him into and through life also as a sort of fighter driven to fight as
perhaps a member of a storm-trooping assault column. He is commanded to fight,
not a fighter by inclination' but driven into the arena of life, a chased man. This is
visible in Aries-born man's general behavior. His way of walking shows the
peculiarities of a man driven forward. With body bent forward he storms through
life in every meaning of the word. This storming forward has nothing in common
with the moral inconsideration of Aries-man, who, if need be, walks over corpses,
nothing of all that which we have described in "Zodiac and Man" as pertaining to
the moral structure of Aries-man. All the attributes we deduced there show here that
strange transformation, which makes them turn against the native himself. He is
inconsiderate, above all toward himself, as for instance the soldier, ordered to
attack, does not regard his life, he is audacious for want of moral counter-motives;
he is like someone pushed, who, according to the law of "inertia" must now, in the

continuous effect of that push - as his innate vital energy - ceaselessly storm
through life. Above all, he has no talent for one thing: indifference, for the
comfortable leisure of compromises. "Either - or" becomes a gesture, taking an
essential part in forming the physiognomy of the readiness for life; it becomes the
paradigm of all the numerous exaggerations, showing in every imaginable region,
even in moderation itself, if occasionally it is at stake, if the solar or the lunar nature
press for it. In the course of life the main region where
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the just described fundamental inclination for those superlatives, so hostile to
compromise, will settle may develop from here.
We may not pass an essential element of the Aries attributes because this will
become especially important for the probation in the Aries-born person's struggle
for existence. It determines essentially the vital stamina of this type. As soon as the
solar nature is awakened, life will always bring to the front line of his storm-troop
the man chased by his own ideals. He must feel called, if not as their "leader", at
least as their commander. This word "Ahfiihrer" has a strange double meaning in
German, reminding of our earlier expressions of "leader" and "mis-leader". In the
person born under Aries both qualities are united in the morally indifferent office of
commander; but just in this role, assigned by the lord of the horoscope to the man
born under Aries, the degree of his vital stamina is proven. And it is not small; for
all Aries-bom inhabitants of the northern hemisphere it is under the rulership of
Capricorn, while in the southern hemisphere there is, apart from this T.C., also the
T.S. with Aquarius in MC.
That all degrees of ascendant Aries north of the equator can only combine with
one Zodiac sign as MC is connected with Aries' being a socalled "short-rising" sign,
in that part of the ecliptic where Aries belongs, when in the east rising, lies so flat
above the horizon (the flatter, the higher the geographic latitude is), that it rises in
its whole extent faster over the horizon than the time it takes to pass through the
MC. Apart from Aries, such short rising signs are Pisces, Aquarius and Taurus,
while Leo, Virgo, Libra and Scorpio represent long-rising signs. Conditions in the
southern hemisphere are inverted, where Aries belongs to the long-rising signs.
The fact that the strongest of all Earth signs, Capricorn, determines the degree
of Aries-bom man's hardness gives him the power of resistance of the hardest
material. This enables all Aries-born people, to an astonishing degree, to resist all
storms of life, never surrendering or resigning. There exists no inclination to retire
from life's arena.

On the southern hemisphere there is, aside from the just described T.C. also a
second (T.S) with Aquarius inMC, when the higher degrees of Aries rise (from 20°
up). Here too the vital stamina is momentous. But while with the T.C. the native's
power of resistance is exercised and increased, mainly in the material energies of
practical life, the T.S. opposes those forces of life with the obstinacy of an absolute
intransigence. To maintain the inner defiance of his mental world, here even, in
contrast to T.C., a sort of defiant resignation may develop toward the realities of the
external life-struggle, a sort of monkish mentality, against whose strength all
external forces are shattered; fanatics of obstinacy.
We will now examine the separate regions of life in view of the just described
characteristics.
S#
The second house determines the degree of attachment to all kinds of
possessions, in the material as well as in the immaterial sense. For the northern
hemisphere it stands in Taurus, and for the ascendant's higher degrees in Gemini
(T.N). Taurus is the sign for attachments and possessions anyway. So in this case,
one may count on all Aries-born people with their 2nd house cusp in Taurus as
being strongly attached to everything that has become their property. The native
clings to possessions, yet is least satisfied with just this fact, because his Ariesnature
always drives him further. It is therefore less the property which becomes decisive
here, but the ownership as a moral concept. Thus is often an inclination to change
objects of possession, or have several objects of the same kind, to exchange them
with each other, so that the possessing may not freeze in possessions. Behind this
peculiar behavior stands, as motive, the inner protest against the all too strong
temptation for attachment in general. (T.C.).This becomes especially clear when the
cusp of the 2nd house advances into Gemini (T.N.). Then we see attachment
originate to not being attached to property. The dissatisfaction with every perhaps
germinating yearning for repose and satisfaction does not allow any enjoyment of
possessions. Here Goethe's words in Faust fit: When on an idler's bed I stretch
myself in quiet, There let, at once, my record end.
For T.S. with the first degrees of Aries ascending, the 2nd house may also be in
Aries. Then a peculiar, almost intimate, relationship to possessions exists, which is
in no case related to the material, but to its moral value, inasmuch as any
imaginable assault on it hits me, even if it is only blind fate which will deny or spoil
my property. My being is reflected in my belongings, my Aries-born being.
Therefore we will always find here the endeavor to make the most of these assets.
The same is true of all gifts and talents; they must be used as much as possible.

The third house tells us of the emotional and intellectual mobility of the native
in associating with his environment. For all persons born under Aries in the
northern hemisphere it stands under Gemini (T.C.). The inner vivacity and
incentive are always alert, and ask for a constant renewal of this alertness. It is
important to find ever-new angles for all relationships to people and also in them,
to keep these relations alive, as long as they are considered worth the effort, as long
as the people in his environment can match his vitality. But here also belongs the
freedom of a far-reaching, sometimes rather violent, criticism on his environment.
One can keep one's peace best with an environment with which one may constantly
quarrel, which is equivalent to so-called "being on good terms". Only where this
contradiction is possible, this ever-alert vitality is asked by the 3rd house.
Aside from the just characterized T.C., two more cases are possible in the southern
hemisphere. For the first degrees of the ascending Aries also
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Taurus, and for the last degrees, Cancer may rule the 3rd house. In the first
case a definite inclination for loyalty exists that is, for stabilizing one's relations
with the surroundings.
If Cancer occupies the 3rd house, it becomes all-important for the Aries-bom
person to be understood by his surroundings; a sensitivity - absent in the northern
Aries-type - suffering in an unusually acute manner under criticism (which he
himself is fond of exercising), when turned against him. Bitterness may be
frequently found, casting also a shadow of resignation upon every kind of human
association.
The fourth house is the significator for one's degree of humility. Here relations
with parents and teachers are determined. For the northern hemisphere it stands
under the Cancer. The character engendered here is not without contradictions. A
strong yearning for submission to authority exists, which could offer a sort of safe
support to the driven person, an emotional asylum for child-like faith, but he cannot
bear this asylum for long. In practical life, up to old age, he clings to the teachers
and leaders of his youth and to the theories absorbed from his educators with
grateful remembrance, without being inaccessible to other teachings. But the
standard gained in early youth remains the same. If Leo occupies the cusp of the 4th
house (T.S.) the relationship to parents and teachers changes. That asylum now
takes the form of a comfortable home, where one likes to rest as long as possible.
The fifth house determines the native's erotic physiognomy. It is under Cancer
(T.N.), Leo (T.C.) or Virgo (T.S.); expressed more precisely: for the northern

hemisphere it is under Cancer or Leo, for the southern hemisphere, Leo or Virgo.
If the 5th house cusp is in Cancer, a remarkable tendency for romanticism and
reverie is always accompanied by an inner restlessness. / would prefer suffering
pain to bearing so many Joys of life. All that inclining, From heart to heart, Alas,
how oddly It causes pain! How to escape? Shall I flee to the woods? All is in vain!
Crown of all life, Restless happiness, Art thou, oh love! ~ Goethe, Restless Love.
Yearning for bondage, denied by constant inner protest, characterizes a
contradiction similar to that in the 4th house. Conditions are different if Leo
occupies the 5th house cusp. Then people like to bask in their erotic nature and are
satisfied when they can love and be loved. There is no source for dissatisfaction and
pain, no bitterness: one revels at the meal in the Chinese inn. Enjoy life as long as
the lamp still glows!
Apart from this type there is also the following one in the southern hemisphere.
If the 5th house stands under Virgo, then the erotic event is always combined with a
sort of fear, which could be termed as awe before love's majesty. The feeling of one's
own, or also of the partner's
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unworthiness is mixed in here and augments the sufferings of the driven man, who
would best like to escape his own passion.
The sixth house defines the degree of man's social adaptability, and his attitude
toward the heredity complex, that is, toward his won constitution. For the northern
hemisphere it stands under Leo (T.N.) or Virgo (T.C.) and for the southern
hemisphere under Virgo or Libra (T.S.).
If the 6th house stands under Leo there is a tendency to be content with one's
constitution as well as with one's position in society. One does not worry about
either of them. One is not responsible for this or that position, which could not be
changed even if one were dissatisfied with it. One is just so as one must be through
one's birth and one prefers to be proud rather than complain about it. But if the 6th
house cusp moves into Virgo, the "grumbler" emerges. It is a bad thing to be bom at
all, and worse to be the victim of heredity. Every dependency is bad; independence
is no better, because it is based on delusion.
Apart from this T.C. is the T. S, with a certain resemblance to the T. N., only
here, Libra on the 6th house cusp gives a stoic attitude toward the
dependence-complex. All the questions of the 6th house are more or less
unimportant; they can not reduce the vitality of the ever-alert inner sense.
With the seventh house we enter the Zodiac's part above the Earth. It is the

house of marriage and in all cases stands under therulership of Libra. The marriage
problem belongs to the most difficult ones of the Aries legend. It is as if being driven
should find its limit here, which rather resembles imprisonment. But just here that
vital contradiction asserts itself, which we met several times in the life of the
Aries-born person. The driven man yearns for rest he cannot find. He is attracted to
a partner for life who contrasts the restlessness of the eager forward striver with the
peacefulness of the artist-of-life, who adapts easily to any situation, and is serenely
distanced from life and its storms, offering him a sort of port-of-life, to which he
may always return from his Aries-expeditions, until he is cured of the pursuit of life.
No difference exists between the northern and southern hemispheres, other
than the fact that the Aries-born person of the southern hemisphere is the
"autumnal" man, born with an inclination for resignation, which may render the
marriage problem essentially easier for him.
The eighth house, house of death and judgment, inner maturity and
transformation, stands under Scorpio or Sagittarius (T.N.) for the northern
hemisphere, under Scorpio or Libra (T.S.) for the southern hemisphere. Here the
fruit of life shall mature. Before one may harvest it, the inner development path of
the Aries-bom person is full of thorns. Here applies the desire of Goethe's Faust:
Show me the fruit that ere they're gathered, rot, And trees that daily with new
leafage clothe them!
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In the house of judgment the Aries-bom person is always willing to sit in
judgment over himself - but the manner of this judgment differs vastly between
Scorpio and S agittarius as president of the court. Under Scorpio this session is open
to the public. All those who surround me become equally guilty, with or against their
will and, whether they know me or not, in "public" proceedings. They are always
co-defendants or witnesses, counsel for the defense or prosecutor, but never judges.
Life is a constant areopagus, but the sentence is different daily, until at last the
Aries-born person realizes that life cannot be lived without acknowledging a judge,
who, in the end, cannot be myself, but something which, although active within me,
stems from a region above me. This belief, which Aries-born with Scorpio on the
8th house must obtain by exertion, is innate to one whose 8th house cusp is
Sagittarius. But while the type just described is fervent regarding the inner judicial
proceedings, in bondage to the voice of his conscience though without faith and
confidence, here something is developed akin to a dedication of the soul, no matter
whether to God or to the devil; a belief - but here also the belief of a driven man. A
fanaticism of aggressive principles may originate here, exercising their power

mainly on other people's resistance.
In the southern hemisphere Libra may also occupy the 8th house cusp. Here,
insecurity about the sentence to be passed is greatly augmented; one has more
patience with oneself and likes to pacify one's conscience, and leave the fruit, which
are never ripe enough, on the tree as long as possible.
In the ninth house originates the life-maxim of the Aries-born person
- the basic traits of the thesis of the Aries-legend become perception here. For the
Aries-born person in the northern hemisphere the 9th house stands under
Sagittarius. The life philosophy developing is not theoretical; it is a philosophy of
one who wills or rather is compelled to will. Life is governed by imperatives, which
impart to the native a "Thou must" as guidepost, not originating in a principle of
reason. Aries-born man is no philosopher and does not want to be one. He is rather
a prophet. The wisdom he proclaims originates in the wisdom of Sagittarius and
teaches: Never to be one's own servant, but always one's own master. He would also
like to signature Lessing's sentence: "No man is compelled to compulsion" but only
he who is always alive in his will can realize this. No man is compelled to
compulsion but the Aries-born person shall exercise his will. To find the goal of
life's journey is to become one's own master.
In the southern hemisphere, two other Aries-maxims exist: Scorpio and
Capricorn. With Scorpio, a maxim is generated, not: be always your own master, but
rather; be always the master of others, no matter whether for good or evil. Develop
your will until it is strong enough to dictate your law to the other fellow. In the case
of Capricorn the maxim may be; Never
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relent, and if necessary, start undismayed again and again from the beginning, with
the same energy as if it were for the first time.
We know the tenth house indicates vital stamina.lt is the house of vocation. In
the frame of the legend of life, it determines the native's attitude toward the
problem of vocation and call. Capricorn MC places before his soul the ideal of a
never slackening loyalty to duty in one's accepted office - no matter the profession.
Here he feels absolutely called to serve. One may be the servant of somebody else as
long as the dignity of remaining nonetheless one's own master is maintained. Thus,
to be a servant, becomes first of all a moral matter of one's own conscience, which
always remains master of the master whom one serves.
In the southern hemisphere, where Aquarius may also rule the 10th house, the
professional problem becomes more difficult, because no profession, originating

only in the moral intention of taking a once espoused responsibility seriously,
satisfied for any length of time. The profession becomes a matter where the need for
maintaining individual independence prevails above all. Rarely is lasting
satisfaction achieved with one's profession, or with one's professional
accomplishments.
The eleventh house of friends, detennines the native's capacity for friendship,
and his attitude toward the event of friendship per sc. It stands for the northern
hemisphere under Capricorn and Aquarius, for the southern hemisphere under
Aquarius and Pisces. With Capricorn at the 11th cusp, friendship and the duties it
implies are taken very seriously, with the same seriousness demanded of others.
Disappointments lead immediately to a break up - one has "finished with" the
friend. The ideal of friendship shows a brittleness similar to that of the profession.
With Aquarius friendship becomes more personal; the ideal of friendship in its
hardness falls back behind the personal human relation - but the "eitheror" as
claim of friendship remains, and grows more important the more personal the
friendship becomes.
In the southern hemisphere a further modification is brought about for the
Aries-born person in the region of friendship, through Pisces, which above all
concerns the need for friendship, reaching unusual heights. One likes to pardon,
and suffers quietly. It is more blessed to give than receive, which is already
"receiving".
The twelfth house, of secret enemies and of yearning for freedom; in the
northern hemisphere it stands under Aquarius or Pisces, in the southern
hemisphere, Pisces or Aries. Thie strongest contradiction in the Arieslegend is
revealed, whereby the urge for freedom clashes directly with the vital feeling of
being constantly driven. The issue is the yearning for setting one's own free will in
the place of the unknown "whipper" in the course of life. Free will ever loses or
comes too late in life's chase. For the
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Aries-born person, one of the gravest dangers lies herein, threatening to make
him almost his own secret enemy. It creates a sort of vital defiance, rebelling
against his own nature, which may easily arrive at mistaking his own moral
inhibitions for the protest against the Aries-character. Thus, if Aquarius occupies
the cusp of the 12th house, a defiant sullenness may occur against all moral laws
that do not originate in one's own free will. The exterritorial feeling toward every
accepted value characterizes the attitude of him who fundamentally revolts only

against his own, innate basic mood of life.
If Pisces governs the 12th house, one rather feels victim of a hereditary
character, forcing one into a direction of life lying far from one's own line. Therefore
one must give offence everywhere. It is, as if everyone and everything had conspired
to not allowing me to come to myself. Now it is the others who wish to place me, to
my detriment, outside the law, but they may only do so because I am a driven man.
If Aries occupies the 12th house, only possible in the southern hemisphere, one
is reconciled with one's character, far from being one's own enemy. There is only a
slight inclination of compatibility with those who prove hostile toward me. These
are, above all, those, whom I suspect to be rivals. Jealousy plays a role in all
germinating hostilities. The easy transition from friendship to enmity dominates
the concerns of this house.
Leo Ascendant (Lord of the horoscope: Sun): To sketch the legend of
Leo-born man, we must revisit the basic mood in which the person bom under Leo
awakens on the physical plane to earthly life; that mood which remained with him
from a vanished dream, in which he was "Leo-Man". The description of all the
symptoms which constitute Leo-man's character was given in detail in "Zodiac and
Man," where we defined the sign of Leo as the sign of the "victor". With this sign
ascending we must choose another symbol to characterize the vital mood of the
native under Leo; we will call him, in contrast to the "driven man" the "sedate" or
the "arrived" man. Let us imagine someone has braved a great danger victoriously
and then watches from a safe port how the others toil and worry. We can then
further imagine that the fact of his present safety imparts to him that inner peace
and superiority which belong to the necessary tools for all sedateness. The sensation
of having escaped a danger gives him also the secret concept of being favored, even
if not through merit, so at least by the kindness of fate. This has allotted to me a
throne, a royal throne, which may be more or less comfortable; less comfortable if
Aries dominates the MC, more comfortable if Taurus rules there. In every case, the
native is accompanied throughout life by a feeling of being lucky, of being a favorite
of fortune. His sentiment assigns to him at the same time the duty to experience
himself constantly in the inner dignity of such a king on an
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invisible throne, and to affirm and uphold life under all circumstances. Life is
the most supreme gift; its innermost core is joy, which bestows the royal crown of
life. But with this affirmation of life enjoyment is connected a vital hardness of the
Leo-born person. It is characterized in the northern hemisphere by the signs of

Pisces (T.N.), Aries (T.N.) and Taurus (T.C.), and in the southern hemisphere by
Taurus (T.C.) and Gemini (T.S.)
We regard the vital hardness of the Leo-born person as important because it is
supported by a constant and unshakable optimism. Similar to the driving impulse of
the "chased man", it represents an elementary energy not derived from any kind of
conscious motivation. This optimism surrounds Leo-born man as a protective
cover, keeping everything degrading away from him. He is thus unaware if he may
be scorned or disregarded, because his royal dignity does not allow the thought of
anything like that being possible.
If Pisces occupies the MC, only possible in the northern regions of the northern
hemisphere, he cannot be awakened from his royal dream. The deepest
humiliations by fate, poverty and misery are incapable of shaking his secret royal
dignity; the native has no need to prove his nobility.
If Aries occupies the MC, one demands, although unconsciously, to be treated
according to one's status. Especially susceptible for all kinds of flattery, one has
little sympathy for anyone not showing due courtesy; one passes them by with no
regard.
A happier life is led when Taurus rules the 10th house cusp (T.C.). Here one
likes to sun oneself in a comfortable easy chair, into which the more uncomfortable
throne is now changed. "If it would only last forever thus" characterizes an
optimism shunning all changes, connected with the risk of inconvenience. In
contrast to the former type, the T.C. does not tend to oppose anyone who may be
disagreeable to him; it is best to ignore inimical tendencies as long as possible. This
characterizes this peculiar form of hardness, which stretches from philosophical
eudemonism to the extremist Philistinism of absolute indolence.
The T.C. of Gemini in MC is unknown in the northern hemisphere, thus not
easily understood in his psychological fundamental constitution. Here Leo-man is
not, as in the northern hemisphere, a man of glowing summer; he has not his
individual spring when it is blazing summer outside, nor his inner winter when it is
spring outside, but he is rather a man of late winter. His royal mood is, on the
whole, far more turned inward and cooler. As philosopher on the royal throne, he is
equipped to meet the life's vicissitudes with a quietly smiling softness, sense of
inner dignity and superiority. I am stronger than fate, if I would care to will in
earnest, if it were worth the trouble.
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We will now study more intensely the further characteristics of the Leo-legend

in the separate regions of life.
The second house stands under Leo or Virgo for the northern hemisphere, under
Virgo (T.C.), Libra or Scorpio for the southern hemisphere. Four possible attitudes
of the Leo-bom person toward his possessions are generated hereby, or four forms
of attachment in general. If Leo occupies the cusp of the 2nd house, then a motto is
created that may sound like: to be not narrow-minded or miserly, but to be as
generous as possible, almost prodigious. This applies to the material and higher
meaning of the word: to remain always open-minded and confident, and avoid
suspicion of any kind.
If Virgo occupies the 2nd house, an admonition to be cautious is added, chilling the
frankness and blind confidence. A visible reserve is expressed in a tendency for
thriftiness, appearing from time to time, but is too unstable to prevail completely.
There exists no gift for lasting distrust in the emotional-intellectual region too. In
both cases (Leo, Virgo), attachment to property is not essentially developed - life's
true values are not tied to it. Fate will not allow me to starve, if I myself am not
stingy.
In the southern hemisphere are two more possibilities. If the 2nd house cusp is in
Libra, one loves to share one's possessions, which otherwise one does not properly
enjoy; sharing doubles one's possessions. This is true in the material and
supra-material sense. If the 2nd house cups is Scorpio, fit to make the Leo-nature
unrecognizable, a sort of covetousness is found, which is not avarice, as it does not
aim at anxious preservation of property, but rather at increasing the authority
possessions provide. Here the motto could be; one must ever more be able to be
ever more extravagant.
The third house stands in the northern hemisphere in Virgo or Libra, in the
southern hemisphere in Libra, Scorpio, or Sagittarius. So also, four types of the
Leo-type are possible with regard to the 3rd house affairs, and the inner mobility
and the relation to people in his close environment. This inner mobility manifests
itself in a strangely diversified manner in communications with the surroundings.
Virgo on the 3rd house cusp gives a remarkable impartiality in communications
with people, whom one is able to judge with astounding penetration, without
engaging in any psychological analyses. Here is a tendency to judge based on first
impression, for this first impression is free from subjective obscuration. Thus
natural psychologists are generated; the talent for a natural "art of physiognomy
interpretation" is very often encountered, at least one believes to possess it and has
confidence in it.
If Libra occupies the 3rd house something similar occurs, only the firm contours in

judging people are more blurred; they become more
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subjective. More of myself than of him is recognizable in the person I judge. A
tendency is created to bring a sort of model to others, whereby they lose their vital
identity and become types, in which the Leo-nature is reflected. Thus this
Leo-Libra-type lives surrounded by people ordered in castes, of whom he knows,
are men with individual characteristics; just this individuality does not interest him
— he considers it irrelevant, only confusing the clear view directed at the "essential".
Herewith is combined an undeniable respect for the sanctuary of inner man, which
remains inviolable, and thus does not even want to know. In the end we all are men
with our faults and merits. But most important of all remains the general human,
the "being allowed to be man". Here I am Man, dare man to be! ~ Goethe, Faust 1.
In the southern hemisphere the 3rd house can also be in Scorpio. In this case
the interest in people of one's surroundings grows; the inner mobility attains a
belligerency unknown in the northern hemisphere. This belligerency prefers being
hammer, not anvil. The issue is indeed not the physical, but the emotional struggle
for supremacy; each person I meet is a potential rival. I have to be on guard and
alert in advance.
If Sagittarius rules the 3rd house, an accent of contrariety is added, rendering
the "mutual understanding with the other person" more difficult. Here too
something of an ordering into castes of one's fellow-creatures is felt. They are either
as I want them to be, adapting themselves to my picture of them, or they are on the
wrong path - they find out in time!
The fourth house determines man's degree of humility in his relationship to
parents and teachers. For the northern hemisphere it stands under Libra or Scorpio
and for the southern hemisphere under Scorpio or Sagittarius. It corresponds to the
royal dream of the Leo-born person that he must regard as pertaining to his dignity,
his ability to bow before the higher-ranking person. It is never beneath him to
recognize the higher one as such, but this recognition has the effect of a distinction
in which he himself participates. This also determines his relation to parents and
educators, already in youth, and is especially effective if Libra rules the 4th house
(T.N.). If Scorpio stands in the 4th house a further enhancing of the royal gesture is
added - namely the real or presumed power to bless. Here also is intensified the
power of self-consciousness, which, with all its willingness to revere, never forgets
criticism, which one is entitled to exercise also on the higher ones, at the same time.
In the southern hemisphere Sagittarius may also occupy the 4th house. Then

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dislike of labor, and enured to wretchedness and hunger; and, on every
failure of the potato crop, hundreds of thousands were starving.”
Horrible as such a picture is, it is but a faint sketch of the reality.
All readers of Irish history know it, and no student of English
legislation should forget or pass over that dark chapter in England’s
history. Our own readers have seen the whole system vividly
sketched in these pages recently in the series of papers on “English
Rule in Ireland.” What, in human nature and human possibilities,
was to become of a people thus submitted to so long and
unbending and systematic a course of degradation? They had
nothing left but their faith, and the eternal truth of the promise that
this is the victory which overcometh the world; and that our faith
shall make us free was never more gloriously and wondrously made
manifest than in the case of the Irish people.
Ignorance was made compulsory by this Protestant government.
The statute law of Ireland forbade Catholics to open schools or to
teach in them. The Irish people, of all peoples, have ever had a
craving for knowledge. What was left to them to do?
“The Catholics,” says Mr. Froude, “with the same steady courage and
unremitting zeal with which they had maintained and multiplied the
number of their priests, had established open schools in places like
Killarney, where the law was a dead-letter. In the more accessible
counties, where open defiance was dangerous, they extemporized class
teachers under ruined walls or in the dry ditches by the roadside, where
ragged urchins, in the midst of their poverty, learnt English and the
elements of arithmetic, and even to read and construe Ovid and Virgil.
With institutions which showed a vitality so singular and so spontaneous
repressive acts of Parliament contended in vain.”
Ignorance is esteemed to be the prolific mother of vice. The
social condition of the Irish people was made as bad as legislation
could make it. Where was the room for morality in such a case? In
vainly trying to explain away that most brutal project of law for the
mutilation of the Irish priests, Mr. Froude says (vol. i. p. 557): “They
(the Lord Lieutenant and Privy Council) did propose, not that all the
Catholic clergy in Ireland, as Plowden says, but that unregistered

priests and friars coming in from abroad, should be liable to
castration”; and he adds in a note:
“Not, certainly, as implying a charge of immorality. Amidst the
multitude of accusations which I have seen brought against the Irish
priests of the last century, I have never, save in a single instance,
encountered a charge of unchastity. Rather the exceptional and signal
purity of Irish Catholic women of the lower class, unparalleled probably
in the civilized world, and not characteristic of the race, which in the
sixteenth century was no less distinguished for licentiousness, must be
attributed wholly and entirely to the influence of the Catholic clergy.”
Mr. Froude cannot be wholly generous and honest in a matter of
this kind, but what is true in this is sufficient for our purpose
without inquiring into what is false. It is plain from his own words
that the one thing that saved the Irish people from perdition, body
and soul, was their Catholic faith. Yet this is the man who, having
thus testified to the rival effects of Catholicity and Protestantism on
a people, has the effrontery to tell us in the “Revival of Romanism”
that
“If by this [conversions] or any other cause the Catholic Church
anywhere recovers her ascendency, she will again exhibit the detestable
features which have invariably attended her supremacy. Her rule will
once more be found incompatible either with justice or intellectual
growth, and our children will be forced to recover by some fresh
struggle the ground which our forefathers conquered for us, and which
we by our pusillanimity surrendered” (p. 103).
With his own testimony before us we may well ask in
amazement, Of which church is he writing? It would seem as
though Heaven, which through all ages has looked down upon and
permitted martyrdom for the faith, had in this instance called upon,
not a tender virgin or a strong youth, not an old man tottering into
the grave or an innocent child, to step into the arena and offer up
their life and blood for the cause of Christ, but a whole people. And
the martyrdom of this people was not for a day or an hour; it was
the slow torture of centuries. A legacy of martyrdom was
“bequeathed from bleeding sire to son.” Life was hopeless to the

Irish people under the Penal Laws; the world a wide prison; the
earth a grave. They could only lift their eyes and hearts to heaven
and wait patiently for merciful death to come. This was the
supreme test of faith to a noble and passionate race, as it was
faith’s supremest testimony. No work of the saints, no writings of
the fathers, no Heaven-illumined mind ever brought to the aid of
faith stronger reason for conviction than this. As words pale before
deeds, as the blood of a martyr speaks more loudly to men, and
cries more clamorously to heaven, than all that divine philosophy
can utter or inspired poet sing, so the attitude of the Irish people,
so opposed to all the instincts of their quick and passionate nature,
bore the very noblest testimony to the reality of the Christian
religion. A world looked down into that dark arena and waited for
some sign of faltering in the victim, for some sign of pity in the
persecutor. Neither came. The victim refused to die or sacrifice to
the gods; the persecutor to relent. The struggle ended at length
through the sheer weariness of the latter, and brighter times came
because darker could not be devised.
Faith conquered. The Irish people arose from its grave, and at
once spread abroad over the world to preach the Gospel and to
plant the church which for two centuries it had watered with its
blood. The Act of Catholic Emancipation was the first real sign of
resurrection, and that was only passed in 1829.
So much for Protestantism having “ceased to be aggressive after
the middle of the seventeenth century.” How aggressive are certain
Protestant powers to-day all men know.
Another thing happened to Protestantism after the middle of the
seventeenth century:
“It no longer produced men conspicuously nobler and better than
Romanism,” says Mr. Froude, “and therefore it no longer made converts.
As it became established, it adapted itself to the world, laid aside its
harshness, confined itself more and more to the enforcement of
particular doctrines” (of no doctrines in particular, we should be inclined
to say), “and abandoned, at first tacitly and afterward deliberately, the
pretence to interfere with private life or practical business.”

In plainer words, Protestantism, having secured its place in this
world, left the next world to take care of itself, and left men free to
go to the devil or not just as they pleased. Mr. Froude faithfully
pictures the result:
“Thus Protestant countries are no longer able to boast of any special
or remarkable moral standard; and the effect of the creed on the
imagination is analogously impaired. Protestant nations show more
energy than Catholic nations because the mind is left more free, and the
intellect is undisturbed by the authoritative instilment of false principles”
(p. 111).
This strikes us as a very easy manner of begging a very
important question. However, we are less concerned now with Mr.
Froude’s Catholics than with his Protestants.
“But,” he goes on, “Protestant nations have been guilty, as nations, of
enormous crimes. Protestant individuals, who profess the soundest of
creeds, seem, in their conduct, to have no creed at all, beyond a
conviction that pleasure is pleasant, and that money will purchase it.
Political corruption grows up; sharp practice in trade grows up—
dishonest speculations, short weights and measures, and adulteration of
food. The commercial and political Protestant world, on both sides of
the Atlantic, has accepted a code of action from which morality has
been banished; and the clergy have for the most part sat silent, and
occupy themselves in carving and polishing into completeness their
schemes of doctrinal salvation. They shrink from offending the wealthy
members of their congregation.” (We believe we heard concordant
testimony to this from distinguished members of the late Protestant
Episcopalian Convention and Congress.) “They withdraw into the affairs
of the other world, and leave the present world to the men of business
and the devil.”
Mr. Froude having thus placidly handed Protestantism over to the
devil, we might as well leave it there, as the devil is proverbially
reported to know and take care of his own. And certainly, if
Protestantism be only half what Mr. Froude depicts it, it is the
devil’s, and a more active and fruitful agent of evil he could not well
desire. One thing is beyond dispute: if Protestantism be what so
ardent an advocate as Mr. Froude says it is, it is high time for a

change. It is time for some one or something to step in and dispute
the devil’s absolute sovereignty. If this is the result of the Protestant
mind being “left more free” than the Catholic, the sooner such
freedom is curtailed the better. It is the freedom of lethargy and
license which has yielded up even the little that it had of real
freedom and truth to its own child, Materialism, the modern name
for paganism.
“They” (the Protestant clergy), says Mr. Froude, “have allowed the
Gospel to be superseded by the new formulas of political economy. This
so-called science is the most barefaced attempt that has ever yet been
openly made on this earth to regulate human society without God or
recognition of the moral law. The clergy have allowed it to grow up, to
take possession of the air, to penetrate schools and colleges, to control
the actions of legislatures, without even so much as opening their lips in
remonstrance.”
Yes, because they had nothing better to offer in its place. And
this Mr. Froude advances with much truth as one of the causes of
the “Revival of Romanism”:
“I once ventured,” he tells us, “to say to a leading Evangelical
preacher in London that I thought the clergy were much to blame in
these matters. If the diseases of society were unapproachable by
human law, the clergy might at least keep their congregations from
forgetting that there was a law of another kind which in some shape or
other would enforce itself. He told me very plainly that he did not look
on it as part of his duty. He could not save the world, nor would he try.
The world lay in wickedness, and would lie in wickedness to the end. His
business was to save out of it individual souls by working on their
spiritual emotions, and bringing them to what he called the truth. As to
what men should do or not do, how they should occupy themselves,
how and how far they might enjoy themselves, on what principles they
should carry on their daily work—on these and similar subjects he had
nothing to say.
“I needed no more to explain to me why Evangelical preachers were
losing their hold on the more robust intellects, or why Catholics, who at
least offered something which at intervals might remind men that they
had souls, should have power to win away into their fold many a tender
conscience which needed detailed support and guidance” (pp. 112–
113).

One ray of light in the universal darkness now enshrouding
Protestantism shines before the eyes of Mr. Froude. It falls on the
present German Empire. Here at least the weary watchman crying
out the hours of heaven may call “All is well” to the sleepers. Here
Protestantism had its true birth; here it finds its true home. In this
blessed land lies hope and salvation for a lost world. But the picture
is so graphic that we give it in Mr. Froude’s own words:
“As the present state of France,” he says, “is the measure of the value
of the Catholic revival, so Northern Germany, spiritually, socially, and
politically, is the measure of the power of consistent Protestantism.
Germany was the cradle of the Reformation. In Germany it moves
forward to its manhood; and there, and not elsewhere, will be found the
intellectual solution of the speculative perplexities which are now
dividing and bewildering us” (pp. 130–131).
“Luther was the root in which the intellect of the modern Germans
took its rise. In the spirit of Luther this mental development has gone
forward ever since. The seed changes its form when it develops leaves
and flowers. But the leaves and flowers are in the seed, and the
thoughts of the Germany of to-day lay in germs in the great reformer.
Thus Luther has remained through later history the idol of the nation
whom he saved. The disputes between religion and science, so baneful
in their effects elsewhere, have risen into differences there, but never
into quarrels” (p. 132).
“Protestant Germany stands almost alone, with hands and head alike
clear. Her theology is undergoing change. Her piety remains unshaken.
Protestant she is, Protestant she means to be.... By the mere weight of
superior worth the Protestant states have established their ascendency
over Catholic Austria and Bavaria, and compel them, whether they will
or not, to turn their faces from darkness to light.
[106]
... German religion
may be summed up in the word which is at once the foundation and the
superstructure of all religion—Duty! No people anywhere or at any time
have understood better the meaning of duty; and to say that is to say
all” (pp. 134–135).
These glowing periods are very tempting to the critic; but it is a
mark of cruelty and savagery to gloat over an easy prey. We forbear
all verbal criticism, then, and simply deny in toto the truth of Mr.
Froude’s statement. It is so very wrong that we can only think he
wrote from his imagination—a weakness from which he suffers

oftenest when he wishes most to be effective. Had he searched the
world he could not have found a worse instance to prove his point
than North Germany.
Prussia is the leading North German and Protestant state, and in
various passages Mr. Froude shows that he takes it as his beau-
ideal of a Protestant power. How stands Protestantism in Prussia to-
day?
The indications for more than a quarter of a century past have
been that Protestantism in Prussia was little more than the shadow
of a once mighty name. These indications have become more
marked of late years, especially since the consolidation of the new
German Empire. Earnest German Protestants are continually
deploring the fact; the press proclaims it; the Protestant ministers
avow it, and all the world knew of it, save, apparently, Mr. Froude.
“Protestantism in Prussia” formed the subject of a letter from the
Berlin correspondent of the London Times as recently as Sept. 7,
1877. His testimony on such a subject could scarcely be called in
question, but even if it could be the facts narrated speak for
themselves.
“Forty years ago,” he says, “the clergy of the Established Church of
this country, including the leading divines and the members of the
ecclesiastical government, almost to a man were under the influence of
free-thinking theories.
“It was the time when German criticism first undertook to dissect the
Bible. History seemed to have surpassed theology, and divines had
recourse to ‘interpreting’ what they thought they could no longer
maintain according to the letter. The movement extended from the
clergy to the educated classes, gradually reaching the lower orders, and
ultimately pervaded the entire nation. At this juncture atheism sprang
forward to reap the harvest sown by latitudinarians. Then reaction set
in. The clergy reverted to orthodoxy, and their conversion to the old
faith happening to coincide with the return of the government to
political conservatism, subsequent to the troublous period of 1848, the
stricter principles embraced by the cloth were systematically enforced
by consistory and school....

“The clergy turned orthodox twenty-five years ago; the laity did not.
The servants of the altar, having realized the melancholy effect of
opposite tenets, resolutely fell back upon the ancient dogmas of
Christianity; the congregations declined to follow suit. Hence the few
‘liberal’ clergymen remaining after the advent of the orthodox period
had the consolation of knowing themselves to be in accord, if not with
their clerical brethren, at least with the majority of the educated, and,
perhaps, even the uneducated, classes.”
He proceeds to mention various cases of prominent Lutheran
clergymen who denied the divinity of Christ, or other doctrines
equally necessary to be maintained by men professing to be
Christians, and of the unsuccessful attempts made to silence them.
As the correspondent says “irreverent liberal opinion on the case is
well reflected in an article in the Berlin Volks-Zeitung,” which is so
instructive that we quote it for the especial benefit of Mr. Froude:
“As long as Protestant clergymen are appointed by provincial
consistories officiating in behalf of the crown our congregations will
have to put up with any candidates that may be forced upon them.
They may, perhaps, be allowed to nominate their pastors, but they will
be impotent to exact the confirmation of their choice from the
ecclesiastical authorities. Nor do we experience any particular curiosity
as to the result of the inquiry instituted against Herr Hossbach. In
matters of this delicate nature judicious evasions have been too often
resorted to by clever accused, and visibly favored by ordained judges of
the faith, for us to care much for the result of the suit opened. A sort of
fanciful and imaginative prevarication has always flourished in
theological debate, and the old artifice, it is to be foreseen, will be
employed with fresh versatility in the present instance. Should the
election of Herr Hossbach be confirmed, the consistorial decree will be
garnished with so many ‘ifs’ and ‘althoughs’ that the brilliant ray of truth
will be dimmed by screening assumptions, like a candle placed behind a
colored glass. Similarly, should the consistory decline to ratify the choice
of the vestry, the refusal is sure to be rendered palatable by the
employment of particularly mild and euphonious language. In either
case the triumph of the victorious party will be but half a triumph.... It is
not a little remarkable that the Protestant Church in this country should
be kept under the control of superimposed authorities, while Roman
Catholics and Jews are free to preach what they like. The power of the
Catholic hierarchy has been broken by the new laws. Catholic clergymen

deviating from the approved doctrine of the Church are protected by the
Government from the persecution of their bishops. Catholic
congregations are positively urged and instigated to profit by the
privileges accorded them, and assert their independence against bishop
and priest. Jewish rabbis, too, are free to disseminate any doctrine
without being responsible for their teaching to spiritual or secular
judges. Only Protestant congregations enjoy the doubtful advantage of
having the election of their clergy controlled, and the candor of their
clergy made the theme of penal inquiry.... And yet Protestant
congregations have a ready means of escape at their disposal. Let them
leave the church, and they are free to elect whomsoever they may
choose as their minister. As it is, the indecision of the congregations
maintains the status quo by forcing liberal clergymen into the dogmatic
straight-waistcoat of the consistories.”
“In the above argument one important fact is overlooked,” says
the Times’ correspondent.
“Among the liberals opposed to the consistories there are many
atheists, but few sufficiently religious to care for reform. Hence the
course taken by the consistories may be resented, but the preaching of
the liberal clergy is not popular enough to create a new denomination or
to compel innovation within the pale of the church. The fashionable
metaphysical systems of Germany are pessimist.”
A week previous to the date of this letter the Lutheran pastors
held their annual meeting at Berlin. The Rev. Dr. Grau, who is
referred to as “a distinguished professor of theology,” speaking of
the task of the clergy in modern times—certainly a most important
subject for consideration—said:
“These are serious times for the church. The protection of the
temporal power is no longer awarded to us to anything like the extent it
formerly was. The great mass of the people is either indifferent or
openly hostile to doctrinal teaching. Not a few listen to those striving to
combine Christ with Belial, and to reconcile redeeming truth with
modern science and culture. There are those who dream of a future
church erected on the ruins of the Lutheran establishment, which by
these enterprising neophytes is already regarded as dead and gone.”

“The meeting,” observes the correspondent, “by passing the
resolutions proposed by Dr. Grau, endorsed the opinions of the
principal speaker.” And he adds:
“While giving this unmitigated verdict upon the state of religion
among the people, the meeting displayed open antagonism to the
leading authorities of the church. To the orthodox pastors the sober and
sedative policy pursued by the Ober Kirchen Rath is a dereliction even
more offensive than the downright apostasy of the liberals. To render
their opposition intelligible the change that has recently supervened in
high quarters should be adverted to in a few words. Soon after his
accession to the throne the reigning sovereign, in his capacity as
summus episcopus, recommended a lenient treatment of liberal views.
Though himself strictly orthodox, as he has repeatedly taken occasion to
announce, the emperor is tolerant in religion, and too much of a
statesman to overlook the undesirable consequences that must ensue
from permanent warfare between church and people. He therefore
appointed a few moderate liberals members of the supreme council,
accorded an extensive degree of self-government to the synods, at the
expense of his own episcopal prerogative, and finally sanctioned civil
marriage and ‘civil baptism,’ as registration is sarcastically called in this
country, to the intense astonishment and dismay of the orthodox. The
last two measures, it is true, were aimed at the priests of the Roman
Catholic Church, who were to be deprived of the power of punishing
those of their flock siding with the state in the ecclesiastical war; but, as
the operation of the law could not be restricted to one denomination,
Protestants were made amenable to a measure which, to the orthodox
among them, was quite as objectionable as to the believing adherents
of the Pope. The supreme council of the Protestant Church, having to
approve these several innovations adopted by the crown, gradually
accustomed itself to regard compromise and bland pacification as one of
the principal duties imposed upon it.”
The correspondent ends his letter thus:
“When all was over orthodoxy was at feud with the people as well as
with the authoritative guardians of the church. Yet neither people nor
guardians remonstrated. For opposite reasons both were equally
convinced they could afford to ignore the charges made.”
So important was the letter that the London Times made it the
subject of an editorial article, wherein it speaks of “the singular

revival of theological and ecclesiastical controversy, which is
observable in all directions,” having “at last reached the slumbering
Protestantism of Prussia.” It confesses that
“The state of things as described by our correspondent is certainly a
very anomalous one. The Prussian Protestant Church has, of late years
at least, had but little hold on the respect and affections of the great
majority of the people; they are at best but indifferent to it when they
are not actively hostile. We are not concerned to investigate the causes
of this lack of popularity; we are content to take it as a fact manifest to
all who know the country and acknowledged by all observers alike.”
“German Protestantism was a power and an influence,” it says,
“To which the modern world is deeply indebted, and with which, now
that ultramontanism is triumphant in the Church of Rome and priestcraft
is again striving in all quarters to exert its sway, the friends of freedom
and toleration can ill afford to dispense. There is no more ominous sign
in the history of an established church than a divorce between
intelligence and orthodoxy. This is what, to all appearances, has
happened in Prussia.”
We could corroborate this by abundance of testimony from all
quarters; but surely the evidence here given is sufficient to
convince any man of the deplorable state of Protestantism in
Prussia. Why Mr. Froude should have chosen that country of all
others for his Protestant paradise we cannot conceive, unless on
the ground that he is Mr. Froude. “The world on one side, and
Popery on the other,” he says, “are dividing the practical control
over life and conduct. North Germany, manful in word and deed,
sustains the fight against both enemies and carries the old flag to
victory. A few years ago another Thirty Years’ War was feared for
Germany. A single campaign sufficed to bring Austria on her knees.
Protestantism, as expressed in the leadership of Prussia, assumed
the direction of the German Confederation” (pp. 135–136).
And whither does this leadership tend? To the devil, if the London
Times, if Dr. Grau, if every observant man who has written or
spoken on this subject, is to be believed. The only religion in

Prussia to-day is the Catholic; Protestantism has yielded to atheism
or nothingism. The persecution has only proved and tempered the
Catholic Church; not even a strong and favoring government can
infuse a faint breath of life into the dead carcase of Prussian
Protestantism. It is much the same story all the world over. Mr.
Froude sees clearly enough what is coming. Protestantism as a
religious power is dead. It has lost all semblance of reality. It had
no religious reality from the beginning. It will still continue to be
used as an agent by political schemers and conspirators; but in the
fight between religion and irreligion it is of little worth. The fight is
not here, but where Mr. Froude rightly places it—between the
irreligious world and Catholicity, which “are dividing the practical
control over life and conduct.”
And thus heresies die out; they expire of their own corruption.
Their very offspring rise up against them. Their children cry for
bread and they give them a stone. The fragments of truth on which
they first build are sooner or later crushed out by the great mass of
falsehood. The few good seeds are choked up by the harvest of the
bad, and only the ill weeds thrive, until all the space around them is
desolate of fruit or light or sweetness, or anything fair under
heaven. Then comes the husbandman in his own good time, and
curses the barren fig-tree and clears the desolate waste. It will be
with Protestantism as it has been with all the heresies; Christians
will wonder, and the time would seem not to be very far distant
when they will wonder that Protestantism ever should have been. It
will go to its grave, the same wide grave that has swallowed up
heresy after heresy. Gnosticism, Arianism, Pelagianism,
Nestorianism, Monophysitism, Protestantism, all the isms, are
children of the same family, live the same life, die the same death.
The everlasting church buries them all, and no man mourns their
loss.

A RAMBLE AFTER THE WAITS.
“Chêistmas comes but once a year,
So let us all be merry,”
saith the old song. And now, as the festal season draws nigh,
everybody seems bent on fulfilling the behest to the uttermost. The
streets are gay with lights and laughter; the shops are all a-glitter
with precious things; the markets are bursting with good cheer. The
air vibrates with a babble of merry voices, until the very stars seem
to catch the infection and twinkle a thought more brightly. The
faces of those you meet beam with joyous expectation; huge
baskets on their arms, loaded with good things for the morrow,
jostle and thump you at every turn, but no one dreams of being ill-
natured on Christmas Eve; mysterious bundles in each hand contain
unimagined treasures for the little ones at home. And hark! do you
not catch a jingle of distant sleigh-bells, a faint, far-off patter and
scrunching of tiny hoofs upon the snow? It is the good St. Nicholas
setting out upon his merry round; it is Dasher and Slasher and
Prancer and Vixen scurrying like the wind over the house-tops. And
high over all—“the poor man’s music”—the merry, merry bells of
Yule, the solemn, the sacred bells, peal forth the tidings of great
joy. Is it not hard to conceive that the time should have been when
Christmas was not? impossible to conceive that any in a Christian
land should have wished to do away with it—should have been
willing, having had it, ever to forego a festival so fraught with all
holy and happy memories?
Yet once such men were found, and but little more than two
centuries ago. It was on the 24th day of December, 1652—day for
ever to be marked with the blackest of black stones, nay, with a
bowlder of Plutonian nigritude—that the British House of Commons,

being moved thereto “by a terrible remonstrance against Christmas
day grounded upon divine Scripture, wherein Christmas is called
Antichrists masse, and those masse-mongers and Papists who
observe it,” and after much time “spent in consultation about the
abolition of Christmas day, passed order to that effect, and resolved
to sit upon the following day, which was commonly called Christmas
day.” Whether this latter resolution was carried into effect we do
not know. If so, let us hope that their Christmas dinners disagreed
with them horribly, and that the foul fiend Nightmare kept hideous
vigil by every Parliamentary pillow.
But think of such an atrocious sentiment being heard at all in
Westminster! How must the very echoes of the hall have shrunk
from repeating that monstrous proposition—how shuddered and
fled away into remotest corners and crevices as that
“Hideous hum
Ran through the arch’d roof in words deceiving”!
How must they have disbelieved their ears, and tossed the impious
utterance back and forth from one to another in agonized
questioning, growing feebler and fainter at each repulse, until their
voices, faltering through doubt into dismay, grew dumb with horror!
How must “Rufus’ Roaring Hall”
[107]
have roared again outright with
rage and grief over that strange, that unhallowed profanation! What
wan phantoms of old-time mummeries and maskings, what dusty
and crumbling memories of royal feast and junketing, must have
hovered about the heads of those audacious innovators, shrieking
at them what unsyllabled reproaches from voiceless lips, shaking at
them what shadowy fingers of entreaty or menace! And if the
proverb about ill words and burning ears be true, how those crop-
ears must have tingled!
Within those very walls England’s kings for generations had kept
their Christmas-tide most royally with revelry and dance and

wassail. There Henry III. on New Year’s day, 1236, to celebrate the
coronation of Eleanor, his queen, entertained 6,000 of his poorer
subjects of all degrees; and there twelve years later, though he
himself ate his plum-pudding at Winchester, he was graciously
pleased to bid his treasurer “fill the king’s Great Hall from Christmas
day to the Day of Circumcision with poor people and feast them.”
There, too, at a later date Edward III. had for sauce to his
Christmas turkey—not to mention all sorts of cates and confections,
tarts and pasties of most cunning device, rare liquors and spiced
wines—no less than two captive kings, to wit, David of Scotland
and John of France. Poor captive kings! Their turkey—though no
doubt their princely entertainer was careful to help them to the
daintiest tidbits, and to see that they had plenty of stuffing and
cranberry sauce—must have been but a tasteless morsel, and their
sweetbreads bitter indeed. Another Scottish king, the first James, of
tuneful and unhappy memory, had even worse (pot) luck soon after.
Fate, and that hospitable penchant of our English cousins in the
remoter centuries for quietly confiscating all stray Scotch princes
who fell in their way, as though they had been contraband of war,
gave him the enviable opportunity of eating no less than a score of
Christmas dinners on English soil. But he seems to have been left to
eat them alone or with his jailer in “bowery Windsor’s calm retreat”
or the less cheerful solitude of the Tower. It does not appear that
either the fourth or the fifth Henry, his enforced hosts, ever asked
him to put his royal Scotch legs under their royal English mahogany.
Had Richard II. been in the place of “the ingrate and cankered
Bolingbroke,” we may be sure that his northern guest would not
have been treated so shabbily. In his time Westminster and his two
thousand French cooks (shades of Lucullus! what an appetite he
must have had, and what a broiling and a baking and a basting
must they have kept up among them; the proverb of “busier than
an English oven at Christmas” had reason then, at least) were not
long left idle; for it was their sovereign’s jovial custom to keep open
house in the holidays for as many as ten thousand a day—a
comfortable tableful. It was his motto plainly to

“Be merry, for our time of stay is short.”
Such a device, however, the third Richard might have made his
own with still greater reason. That ill-used prince, who was no
doubt a much better fellow at bottom than it has pleased Master
Shakspeare to represent him—if Richmond had not been Queen
Bess’ grandpapa, we should like enough have had a different story
and altogether less about humps and barking dogs—made the most
of a limited opportunity to show what he could do in the way of
holiday dinner-giving. The only two Christmases he had to spend as
king at Westminster—for him but a royal stage on his way to a
more permanent residence at Bosworth Field—he celebrated with
extraordinary magnificence, as became a prince “reigning,” says
Philip de Comines, “in greater splendor than any king of England for
the last hundred years.” On the second and last Christmas of his
reign and life the revelry was kept up till the Epiphany, when “the
king himself, wearing his crown, held a splendid feast in the Great
Hall similar to his coronation.” Wearing his crown, poor wretch! He
seems to have felt that his time was short for wearing it, and that
he must put it to use while he had it. Already, indeed, as he
feasted, rapacious Fortune, swooping implacable, was clawing it
with skinny, insatiable claws, estimating its value and the probable
cost of altering it to fit another wearer, and thinking how much
better it would look on the long head of her good friend Richmond,
who had privately bespoken it. No doubt some cold shadow of that
awful, unseen presence fell across the banquet-table and poisoned
the royal porridge.
What need to tell over the long roll of Christmas jollities, whose
memory from those historic walls might have pleaded with or
rebuked the sour iconoclasts planning gloomily to put an end to all
such for ever; how even close-fisted Henry VII.—no fear of his
losing a crown, if gripping tight could keep it—feasted there the
lord-mayor and aldermen of London on the ninth Christmas of his
reign, sitting down himself, with his queen and court and the rest of

the nobility and gentry, to one hundred and twenty dishes served
by as many knights, while the mayor, who sat at a side-table, no
doubt, had to his own share no fewer than twenty-four dishes,
followed, it is to be feared, if he ate them all, by as many
nightmares; how that meek and exemplary Christian monarch,
Henry VIII., “welcomed the coming, sped the parting” wife at
successive Christmas banquets of as much splendor as the spoils of
something over a thousand monasteries could furnish forth;
[108]
how
good Queen Bess, who had her own private reading of the doctrine
“it is more blessed to give than to receive,” sat in state there at this
festival season to accept the offerings of her loyal lieges, high and
low, gentle and simple, from prime minister to kitchen scullion, until
she was able to add to the terrors of death by having to leave
behind her something like three thousand dresses and some
trunkfuls of jewels in Christmas gifts; or what gorgeous revels and
masques—Inigo Jones (Inigo Marquis Would-be), Ben Jonson, and
Master Henry Lawes (he of “the tuneful and well-measured song”)
thereto conspiring—made the holidays joyous under James and
Charles. Some ghostly savor of those bygone banquets might, one
would think, have made even Praise-God Barebone’s mouth water,
and melted his surly virtue into tolerance of other folks’ cakes and
ale—what virtue, however ascetic, could resist the onslaught of two
thousand French cooks? Some faint, far echo of all these vanished
jollities should have won the ear, if not the heart, of the grimmest
“saint” among them. Or if they were proof against the
blandishments of the world’s people, if they fled from the
abominations of Baal, could not their own George Wither move
them to spare the cheery, harmless frivolities, the merry pranks of
Yule? Jovially as any Cavalier, shamelessly as any Malignant of them
all, he sings their praises in his
“CHRISTMAS CAROL.

“So now is come our joyful’st feast,
Let every man be jolly;
Each room with ivy leaves is drest,
And every post with holly.
Though some churls at our mirth repine,
Round your foreheads garlands twine,
Drown sorrow in a cup of wine,
And let us all be merry.
“Now all our neighbors’ chimneys smoke,
And Christmas blocks are burning;
Their ovens they with bak’d meats choke,
And all their spits are turning.
Without the door let sorrow lie;
And if for cold it hap to die,
We’ll bury’t in a Christmas pye.
And evermore be merry.
“Now every lad is wondrous trim,
And no man minds his labor;
Our lasses have provided them
A bagpipe and a tabor.
Young men and maids, and girls and boys,
Give life to one another’s joys;
And you anon shall by their noise
Perceive that they are merry....
“Now poor men to the justices
With capons make their errants;
And if they hap to fail of these,
They plague them with their warrants:
But now they feed them with good cheer,
And what they want they take in beer;
For Christmas comes but once a year,
And then they shall be merry....
“The client now his suit forbears,
The prisoner’s heart is eased,
The debtor drinks away his cares,
And for the time is pleased.
Though others’ purses be more fat,
Why should we pine or grieve at that?
Hang sorrow! care will kill a cat,
Andthereforelet’sbemerry....

dteeoeetsbeey
“Hark! now the wags abroad do call
Each other forth to rambling;
Anon you’ll see them in the hall,
For nuts and apples scrambling.
Hark! how the roofs with laughter sound;
Anon they’ll think the house goes round,
For they the cellar’s depths have found.
And there they will be merry.
“The wenches with the wassail-bowls
About the streets are singing;
The boys are come to catch the owls,
The wild mare
[109]
in is bringing.
Our kitchen-boy hath broke his box,
And to the kneeling of the ox
Our honest neighbors come by flocks,
And here they will be merry.
“Now kings and queens poor sheep-cotes have,
And mate with everybody;
The honest now may play the knave,
And wise men play at noddy.
Some youths will now a-mumming go,
Some others play at Rowland-boe,
And twenty other gambols moe,
Because they will be merry.
“Then wherefore, in these merry days,
Should we, I pray, be duller?
No, let us sing some roundelays,
To make our mirth the fuller;
And, while we thus inspired sing,
Let all the streets with echoes ring—
Woods and hills and everything
Bear witness we are merry.”
Or Master Milton, again, Latin secretary to the council, author of
the famous Iconoclastes, shield (or, as some would have put it,
official scold) of the Commonwealth, the scourge of prelacy and
conqueror of Salmasius—he was orthodox surely; yet what of
Arcades and Cornus? Master Milton, too, had written holiday

masques, and, what is more, they had been acted; nay, he had
even been known more than once, on no less authority than his
worshipful nephew, Master Philips, “to make so bold with his body
as to take a gaudy-day” with the gay sparks of Gray’s Inn. Alas!
such carnal-minded effusions belonged to the unregenerate days of
both these worthy brethren, when they still dwelt in the tents of the
ungodly, before they had girded on the sword of Gideon and gone
forth to smite the Amalekite hip and thigh. Vainly might the
menaced festival look for aid in that direction. So far from saying a
word in its favor, they would now have been fiercest in
condemnation, if only to cover their early backsliding; if only to
avert any suspicion that they still hankered after the fleshpots. Poor
Christmas was doomed.
So, by act of Parliament, “our joyful’st feast” was solemnly
stricken out of the calendar, cashiered from its high pre-eminence
among the holidays of the year, and degraded to the ranks of
common days. All its quaint bravery of holly-berries and ivy-leaves
was stripped from it, its jolly retinue of boars’ heads and wassail-
bowls, of Yule-clogs and mistletoe-boughs, of maskers and
mummers, of waits and carols, Lords of Misrule and Princes of
Christmas, sent packing. Then began “the fiery persecution of poor
mince-pie throughout the land; plum-porridge was denounced as
mere popery, and roast-beef as anti-Christian.” ’Twas a fatal, a
perfidious, a short-lived triumph. The nation, shocked in its most
cherished traditions, repudiated the hideous doctrine; the British
stomach, deprived of its holiday beef and pudding, so to speak,
revolted. The reign of the righteous was speedily at an end. History,
with her usual shallowness, ascribes to General Monk the chief part
in the Restoration; it was really brought about by that short-sighted
edict of the 24th of December, 1652. Charles or Cromwell, king or
protector—what cared honest Hodge who ruled and robbed him?
But to forego his Christmas porridge—that was a different matter;
and Britons never should be slaves. So, just eight years after it had
been banished, Christmas was brought back again with manifold
rejoicing and bigger wassail-bowls and Yule-clogs than ever; and,

as if to make honorable amends for its brief exile, the Lord of
Misrule himself was crowned and seated on the throne, where, as
we all know, to do justice to his office, if he never said a foolish
thing he never did a wise one.
And from that time to this Christmas has remained a thoroughly
British institution, as firmly entrenched in the national affections, as
generally respected, and perhaps as widely appreciated as Magna
Charta itself. Sit on Christmas day! A British Parliament now would
as soon think of sitting on the Derby day. To how many of their
constituents have the two festivals any widely differing significance
perhaps it would be wise not to inquire too closely. Each is a
holiday—that is, a day off work, a synonym for “a good time,” a
little better dinner than usual, and considerably more beer. Like the
children, “they reflect nothing at all about the matter, nor
understand anything in it beyond the cake and orange.” “La justice
elle-même,” says Balzac, “se traduit aux yeux de la halle par le
commissaire—personage avec lequel elle se familiarise.” His
epigram the author of Ginx’s Baby may translate for us—English
epigrams, like English plays, being for the most part matter of
importation free of duty; e.g., that famous one in Lothair about the
critic being a man who has failed in literature or art, another
consignment from Balzac—when he makes Ginx’s theory of
government epitomize itself as a policeman. So Ginx’s notion of
Christmas, we suspect, is apt to be beef and beer and Boxing-night
—with perhaps a little more beer.
Certainly the attachment of the British public to these features of
the day—we are considering it for the moment in the light in which
a majority of non-Catholics look upon it, apparently, as a merely
social festival, and not at all in its religious aspect (though to a
Catholic, of course, the two are as indistinguishably blended as the
rose and the perfume of the rose)—has never been shaken. If one
may judge from a large amount of the English fiction which at this
season finds its way to the American market—and the novels of to-
day, among a novel-reading people, are as straight and sure a
guide to its heart as were ever its ballads in the time of old Fletcher

of Saltoun—if one may judge from much of English Christmas
literature, these incidents of the day are, if not the most important,
certainly the most prominent and popular. What we may call the
Beef and Beer aspect of the season these stories are never tired of
glorifying and exalting. Dickens is the archpriest of this idolatry,
which, indeed, he in a measure invented, or at least brought into
vogue; and his Christmas Stories, as most of his stories, fairly reek
with the odors of the kitchen and the tap-room. Material comfort,
and that, too, usually of a rather coarse kind, is the universal
theme, and even the charity they are supposed to inculcate can
scarcely be called a moral impulse, so much as the instinct of a
physical good-nature, well-fed and content with itself and the world
—of a good-humored selfishness willing to make others
comfortable, because thereby it puts away from itself the
discomfort of seeing them otherwise. It is a kind of charity which, in
another sense than that of Scripture, has to cover a multitude of
sins.
One may say this of Dickens, without at all detracting from his
many great qualities as a writer, that he has done more, perhaps,
than any other writer to demoralize and coarsen the popular notion
of what Christmas is and means; to make of his readers at best but
good-humored pagans with lusty appetites for all manner of
victuals and an open-handed readiness to share their good things
with the first comer. These are no doubt admirable traits; but one
gets a little tired of having them for ever set forth as the crown and
completion of Christian excellence, the sum and substance of all
that is noble and exalted in the sentiment of the season. Let us
enjoy our Christmas dinner by all means; let the plum-pudding be
properly boiled and the turkey done to a turn, and may we all have
enough to spare a slice or two for a poorer neighbor! But must we
therefore sit down and gobble turkey and pudding from morning till
night? Should we hang up a sirloin and fall down and worship it? Is
that all that Christmas means? Turn from the best of these books to
this exquisite little picture of Christmas Eve in a Catholic land:

“Christmas is come—the beautiful festival, the one I love most, and
which gives me the same joy as it gave the shepherds of Bethlehem. In
real truth, one’s whole soul sings with joy at this beautiful coming of
God upon earth—a coming which here is announced on all sides of us
by music and by our charming nadalet
[110]
Nothing at Paris can give you
a notion of what Christmas is with us. You have not even the midnight
Mass. We all of us went to it, papa at our head, on the most perfect
night possible. Never was there a finer sky than ours was that midnight
—so fine that papa kept perpetually throwing back the hood of his
cloak, that he might look up at the sky. The ground was white with
hoar-frost, but we were not cold; besides, the air, as we met it, was
warmed by the bundles of blazing torchwood which our servants carried
in front of us to light us on our way. It was delightful, I do assure you;
and I should like you to have seen us there on our road to church, in
those lanes with the bushes along their banks as white as if they were
in flower. The hoar-frost makes the most lovely flowers. We saw a long
spray so beautiful that we wanted to take it with us as a garland for the
communion-table, but it melted in our hands; all flowers fade so soon! I
was very sorry about my garland; it was mournful to see it drop away
and get smaller and smaller every minute.”
It is Eugénie de Guérin who writes thus—that pure and delicate
spirit so well fitted to feel and value all that is beautiful and
touching in this most beautiful and touching service of the church.
To come from the one reading to the other is like being lifted
suddenly out of a narrow valley to the free air and boundless views
of a mountain-top; like coming from the gaslight into the starlight;
it is like hearing the song of the skylark after the twitter of the robin
—a sound pleasant and cheery enough in itself, but not elevating,
not inspiring, not in any way satisfying to that hunger after ideal
excellence which is the true life of the spirit, and which strikes the
true key-note of this festal time.
But Eugénie de Guérin is perhaps too habitual a dweller on those
serene heights to furnish a fair comparison; let us take a homelier
picture from a lower level. It is still in France; this time in Burgundy,
as the other was in Languedoc:
“Every year, at the approach of Advent, people refresh their
memories, clear their throats, and begin preluding, in the long evenings

by the fireside, those carols whose invariable and eternal theme is the
coming of the Messias. They take from old pamphlets little collections
begrimed with dust and smoke, ... and as soon as the first Sunday of
Advent sounds they gossip, they gad about, they sit together by the
fireside, sometimes at one house, sometimes at another, taking turns in
paying for the chestnuts and white wine, but singing with one common
voice the praises of the Little Jesus. There are very few villages, even,
which during all the evenings of Advent do not hear some of these
curious canticles shouted in their streets to the nasal drone of bagpipes.
“More or less, until Christmas Eve, all goes on in this way among our
devout singers, with the difference of some gallons of wine or some
hundreds of chestnuts. But this famous eve once come, the scale is
pitched upon a higher key; the closing evening must be a memorable
one.... The supper finished, a circle gathers around the hearth, which is
arranged and set in order this evening after a particular fashion, and
which at a later hour of the night is to become the object of special
interest to the children. On the burning brands an enormous log has
been placed; ... it is called the Suche (the Yule-log). ‘Look you,’ say they
to the children, ‘if you are good this evening Noel will rain down sugar-
plums in the night.’ And the children sit demurely, keeping as quiet as
their turbulent little natures will permit. The groups of older persons,
not always as orderly as the children, seize this good opportunity to
surrender themselves with merry hearts and boisterous voices to the
chanted worship of the miraculous Noel. For this final solemnity they
have kept the most powerful, the most enthusiastic, the most
electrifying carols.
“This last evening the merry-making is prolonged. Instead of retiring
at ten or eleven o’clock, as is generally done on all the preceding
evenings, they wait for the stroke of midnight; this word sufficiently
proclaims to what ceremony they are going to repair. For ten minutes or
a quarter of an hour the bells have been calling the faithful with a triple-
bob-major; and each one, furnished with a little taper streaked with
various colors (the Christmas candle), goes through the crowded
streets, where the lanterns are dancing like will-o’-the-wisps at the
impatient summons of the multitudinous chimes. It is the midnight
Mass.”
There you have fun, feasting, and frolic, as, indeed, there may
fitly be to all innocent degrees of merriment, on the day which
brought redemption to mankind. But there is also, behind and
pervading all this rejoicing and harmless household gayety, the

religious sentiment which elevates and inspires it, which chastens it
from commonplace and grossness, which gives it a meaning and a
soul. The English are fond of calling the French an irreligious
people, because French literature, especially French fiction, from
which they judge, takes its tone from Paris, which is to a great
extent irreligious. But outside of the large cities, if a balance were
struck on this point between the two countries, it would scarcely be
in favor of England.
This, however, by way of episode and as a protest against this
grovelling, material treatment of the most glorious festival of the
Christian year. As we were about to say when interrupted, though
Christmas regained its foothold as a national holiday at the
Restoration, it came back sadly denuded of its following and shorn
of most of its old-time attractions. So it fared in old England. In
New England it can scarcely be said ever to have won a foothold at
all, or at best no more than a foothold and a sullen toleration.
Almost the first act of those excellent Pilgrim Fathers who did not
land at Plymouth Rock was to anticipate by thirty years or so the
action of their Parliamentary brethren at home in abolishing the
sacred anniversary, which must, indeed, have been a tacit rebuke to
the spirit of their creed. They landed on the 16th of December, and
“on ye 25th day,” writes William Bradford, “began to erect ye first
house for comone use to receive them and their goods.” And lest
this might seem an exception made under stress, we find it
recorded next year that “on ye day caled Christmas day ye Gov’r
caled them out to worke.” So it is clear New England began with a
calendar from which Christmas was expunged. In New England
affections Thanksgiving day replaces it—an “institution” peculiarly
acceptable, we must suppose, to the thrift which can thus wipe out
its debt of gratitude to Heaven by giving one day for three hundred
and sixty-four—liquidating its liabilities, so to speak, at the rate of
about three mills in the dollar. In the Middle States and in the South
the day has more of its time-old observance, but neither here nor
elsewhere may we hope to encounter many of the quaint and
cheery customs with which our fathers loved to honor it, and which

made it for them the pivot of the year. Wither has told us
something of these; let a later minstrel give us a fuller picture of
what Merry Christmas was in days of yore:

“And well our Christian sires of old
Loved, when the year its course had rolled,
And brought blithe Christmas back again,
With all its hospitable train.
Domestic and religious rite
Gave honor to the holy night:
On Christmas Eve the bells were rung;
On Christmas Eve the Mass was sung;
That only night of all the year
Saw the stoled priest the chalice rear.
The damsel donned her kirtle sheen;
The hall was dressed with holly green;
Forth to the wood did merry men go
To gather in the mistletoe.
Then opened wide the baron’s hall
To vassals, tenants, serf, and all.
The heir, with roses in his shoes,
That night might village partner choose;
The lord, underogating, share
The vulgar game of ‘post and pair.’
All hailed with uncontrolled delight,
And general voice, the happy night
That to the cottage, as the crown,
Brought tidings of salvation down.
The fire, with well-dried logs supplied,
Went roaring up the chimney wide;
The huge hall-table’s oaken face,
Scrubbed till it shone, the day to grace,
Bore then upon its massive board
No mark to part the squire and lord.
Then was brought in the lusty brawn
By old blue-coated serving-man;
Then the grim boar’s head frowned on high,
Crested with bays and rosemary....
The wassail round in good brown bowls,
Garnished with ribbons, blithely trowls.
There the huge sirloin reeked; hard by
Plum-porridge stood and Christmas pye.
Then came the merry masquers in
And carols roared with blithesome din;
If unmelodious was the song,
It was a hearty note and strong.
Whlit ithi i

Who lists may in their mumming see
Traces of ancient mystery....
England was merry England then—
Old Christmas brought his sports again;
’Twas Christmas broached the mightiest ale;
’Twas Christmas told the merriest tale;
A Christmas gambol oft would cheer
A poor man’s heart through half the year.”
Let Herrick supplement the picture with his
“CEREMONIES FOR CHRISTMASSE.
“Come, bring with a noise,
My merrie, merrie boyes,
The Christmas log to the firing;
While my good dame, she
Bids ye all be free
And drink to your hearts’ desiring.
“With the last yeeres brand
Light the new block, and
For good successe in his spending
On your psaltries play,
That sweet luck may
Come while the log is a-teending.
“Drink now the strong beere,
Cut the white loafe here,
The while the meate is a-shredding
For the rare mince-pie,
And the plums stand by
To fill the paste that’s a-kneading.”
Does the picture please you? Would you fain be a guest at the
baron’s table, or lend a hand with jovial Herrick to fetch in the
mighty Yule-log? Are you longing for a cut of that boar’s head or a
draught of the wassail, or curious to explore the contents of that
mysterious “Christmas pye,” which seems to differ so much from all

other pies that it has to be spelled with a y? Well, well, we must not
repine. Fate, which has denied us these joys, has given us
compensations. No doubt the baron, for all his Yule-logs, would
sometimes have given his baronial head (when he happened to
have a cold in it) for such a fire—let it be of sea-coal in a low grate
and the curtains drawn—as the reader and his humble servant are
this very minute toasting their toes at. Those huge open fireplaces
are admirably effective in poetry, but not altogether satisfactory of
a cold winter’s night, when half the heat goes up the chimney and
all the winds of heaven are shrieking in through the chinks in your
baronial hall and playing the very mischief with your baronial
rheumatism. Or do we believe that boar’s head was such a mighty
fascinating dish after all, or much, if anything, superior to the
soused pig’s head with which good old Squire Bracebridge replaced
it? No, every age to its own customs; we may be sure that each
finds out what is best for it and for its people.
Yet one custom we do begrudge a little to the past, or rather to
the other lands where it still lingers here and there in the present.
That is the graceful and kindly custom of the waits. These were
Christmas carols, as the reader no doubt knows, chanted by singers
from house to house in the rural districts during the season of
Advent. In France they were called noels, and in Longfellow’s
translation of one of these we may see what they were like:

“I hear along our street
Pass the minstrel throngs;
Hark! they play so sweet.
On their hautboys, Christmas songs!
Let us by the fire
Ever higher
Sing them till the night expire!...
“Shepherds at the grange
Where the Babe was born
Sang with many a change
Christmas carols until morn.
Let us, etc.
“These good people sang
Songs devout and sweet;
While the rafters rang,
There they stood with freezing feet.
Let us, etc.
“Who by the fireside stands
Stamps his feet and sings;
But he who blows his hands
Not so gay a carol brings.
Let us, etc.”
In some parts of rural England, too, the custom is still to some
extent kept up, and the reader may find a pleasant, and we dare
say faithful, description of it in a charming English story called
Under the Greenwood Tree, by Mr. Thomas Hardy, a writer whose
closeness of observation and precision and delicacy of touch give
him a leading place among the younger writers of fiction.
Very pleasant, we fancy, it must be of a Christmas Eve when one
is, as aforesaid, toasting one’s toes at the fire over a favorite book,
or hanging up the children’s stockings, let us say, or peering
through the curtains out over the moonlit snow, and wondering
how cold it is out-doors with that little perfunctory shiver which is

comfort’s homage to itself—there should always be snow upon the
ground at Christmas, for then Nature
“With speeches fair
Woos the gentle air
To hide her guilty front with innocent snow”;
but let us have no wind, since
“Peaceful was the night
Wherein the Prince of Light
His reign of peace upon the world began.
The winds, with wonder whist,
Smoothly the waters kist,
Whispering new joys to the wild ocean,
Who now hath quite forgot to rave,
While birds of calm sit brooding on the charméd wave”—
at such a time, we say, it would be pleasant to hear the shrill voices
of the Waits cleaving the cold, starlit air in some such quaint old
ditty as the “Cherry-tree Carol” or “The Three Ships.” No doubt, too,
would we but confess it, there would come to us a little wicked
enhancement of pleasure in the reflection that the artists without
were a trifle less comfortable than the hearer within. That rogue
Tibullus had a shrewd notion of what constitutes true comfort when
he wrote, Quam juvat immites ventos audire cubantem—which,
freely translated, means, How jolly it is to sit by the fireside and
listen to other fellows singing for your benefit in the cold without!
But that idea we should dismiss as unworthy, and even try to feel a
little uncomfortable by way of penance; and then, when their song
was ended, and we heard their departing footsteps scrunching
fainter and fainter in the snow, and their voices dying away until
they became the merest suggestion of an echo, we should perhaps
find—for these are to be ideal Waits—that their song had left

behind it in the listener’s soul a starlit silence like that of the night
without, but the stars should be heavenly thoughts.
These are ideal Waits; the real ones might be less agreeable or
salutary. But have we far to look for such? Are there not on the
shelves yonder a score of immortal minstrels only waiting our
bidding to sing the sacred glories of the time? Shall we ask grave
John Milton to tune his harp for us, or gentle Father Southworth, or
impassioned Crashaw, or tender Faber? These are Waits we need
not scruple to listen to, nor fail to hear with profit.
Milton’s Ode on the Nativity is, no doubt, the finest in the
language. Considering the difficulties of a subject to which, short of
inspiration, it is next to impossible to do any justice at all, it is very
fine indeed. It is not all equal, however; there are in it stanzas
which remind one that he was but twenty-one when he wrote it.
Yet other stanzas are scarcely surpassed by anything he has
written.

“Yea, Truth and Justice then
Will down return to men,
Orb’d in a rainbow; and, like glories wearing
Mercy will sit between,
Thron’d in celestial sheen,
With radiant feet the tissued clouds down steering,
And heaven, as at some festival,
Will open wide the gates of her high palace hall.
“But wisest Fate says, No,
It must not yet be so;
The Babe yet lies in smiling infancy
That on the bitter cross
Must redeem our loss,
So both himself and us to glorify;
Yet first to those ychained in sleep
The wakeful trump of doom must thunder thro’ the deep,
“With such a horrid clang
As on Mount Sinai rang,
While the red fire and smould’ring clouds out-brake.
The aged earth, aghast
With terror of that blast,
Shall from the surface to the centre shake;
When at the world’s last session
The dreadful Judge in middle air shall spread his throne.
—————
“The oracles are dumb;
No voice or hideous hum
Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance or breathèd spell
Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.
“The lonely mountains o’er,
And the resounding shore,
A voice of weeping heard and loud lament.
From haunted spring, and dale
Edg’d with poplar pale,
The parting genius is with sighing sent.

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The Testament Of Astrology 4 Sequence Four Man And Earth Oskar Adler

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The Testament Of Astrology 4 Sequence Four Man And Earth Oskar Adler

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