Ramblings, Reflections and Ruminations of Daniel Giamario | July 22, 2025 |
TOTAMS’ Philosophical Foundations:
Establishing and further developing the philosophical and spiritual foundations of the Turning of The Ages Mystery School and its astrological paradigm is an ongoing project. Several other articles have previously emerged as part of this theme, including The Individual vs The Collective and others.
This article builds on the same theme and explores the similarity between the views of Dane Rudhyar and Rudolf Steiner regarding the historical evolution of global humanity. This will help us better understand the current junction point, embracing the end of Kali Yuga, the Age of Aquarius, and this pivotal point in the greater Turning of The Ages.
Other than Dane Rudhyar and Rudolf Steiner, many sources of wisdom are foundational to the ways of TOTAMS and my life’s work. A partial list includes
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Sri Aurobindo in connection to Involution
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G. Jung with regards to archetypes and the concept of anima and animus, inspiring our Sacred Marriage Process https://turningoftheages.com/course3/ and an understanding of individuation and the Self
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Sylvia Pererra, Jean Bolen, Esther Harding, Toni Wolf, and Merlin Stone, involving archetypal mythic themes often relating to the Sacred Feminine
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and many others.
See our Fire Branch resource center for more information on this topic. And be sure to tune into our Free Fire Branch Esoteric Circle on August 3!
Dane Rudhyar
As many of you know by now, Dane Rudhyar was the original inspiration for my involvement with astrology in the first place – back in 1969! Rudhyar first founded “Humanistic Astrology” which thereafter evolved into “Transpersonal Astrology”. His view of human development was magnificently articulated in his seminal 1970 book The Planetarization of Consciousness.
I first became aware of his philosophy of history when I read that masterpiece in 1970. It had a profound effect on me. Known these days most often as the creator of the new forms of astrology mentioned above, first “Humanistic” and then “Transpersonal”, Rudhyar’s spiritual and philosophical principles have always formed foundations for the Shamanic Astrology Paradigm ™ and the school. But Rudhyar was even more than that: a veritable renaissance man, at the avantgarde edge of music and art as well. The Planetarization of Consciousness book actually had no astrology in it at all. It was crafted around his views about the historical development of global humanity, which was, in my view, equally important.
Researching for this article, I took the opportunity to re-read important sections, even reading them aloud. Even now, 55 years on, its depth of wisdom brought me to tears and re-connected me to Source, leaving me with the impression that this work is even more important today than it was in 1970!
One of Rudhyar’s core ideas was that of “Seed People”, This idea has since formed into another foundational TOTAMS principle. You can see a document about this here.
Rudhyar used a dialectic approach, developing a thesis, antithesis, and then a synthesis. In summary:
Thesis
Prior to the 6th or 7th century BCE, the vast majority of global humanity lived in a more collective clan-tribe-land consciousness, without the concept of the individual; a concept that has variously been described as the Self, Individuation, or even a personal Ego. When referring to what developed in the following antithesis phase, both Rudhyar and Steiner often used the expression “the I”.
But back then, most of global humanity was tied to land and tribe, and even within the Hindu caste system, status was pre-determined by the culture, without taking into account the individual as we would know it today. Global humanity was also in animistic identification with nature and the Earth.
Antithesis
What began to arise across global humanity was the emergence of individual consciousness separate from clan, caste and tribe. In Rudhyar’s subsequent writings, he pinpointed the Uranus-Neptune-Pluto alignment of 577BC. You can see that chart here:
It is remarkable to notice how many world changing individuals began to appear around that time. The following characters, all 6th century BCE, can certainly be seen as progenitors of the antithesis:
- Pythagoras
- The Buddha
- Heraclitus
- Lao-Tzu
- and Zoroaster
Followed in the 5th century BCE by
- Chuang-Tzu
- Socrates
- and Plato
For us astrologers, it’s also worth noting that horoscopes of individuals did not appear on Earth before this particular period. Prior to that, what can be called astrology was confined to omens and portents of weather, business, war and politics.
The development of an individual “I” was, however, a double-edged sword. Individual paths of self-realization and enlightenment emerged, but so did the ego, domination paradigms, and separation.
This antithesis is absolutely necessary for an intended synthesis.
Synthesis
Surely now, at the end of Kali Yuga, with the deepest descent of Spirit into Matter and the stark domination of materialism, wild excesses of the individual through the ego have gone as far as they can go, without a connection to a “Higher I”: individuation and the Self in the West, and Atman and Brahman in the East.
Of the synthesis as The Planetarization of Consciousness, which requires Seed People to create, Rudhyar wrote in 1970:
“The glorification of individualism came in the Mosaic revelation of the greatest Name of God: ‘I am that I am’ — which I believe really means: I am the absolute fact of being ‘I’ — ‘I’ without any attribute — just ‘I.’ For Western man ,* individuality is God’s signature within him. He is an individual by divine right; a king in his own kingdom. But it soon becomes a lonely kingdom disturbed by constant feudal conflicts. Moses was perhaps the first rugged individualist; he also spoke with God ‘face to face as a man speaketh unto his friend.’ Then began what became known as a dialogue between God and man, between the personal I and the absolute Thou (cf. Buber’s writings). Indeed the individual must be able to communicate with a divine absolutely and always reliable Thou, because he is no longer able to enter into relationship in the depths of his existence with other individuals, so alone and alienated from his fellowman has he become. Today, LSD is taken by even more alienated young people in order to exorcise their sense of ego, and to reenter the lost Edenic state of unity with all — a return to Paradise, but alas artificial and dangerous paradises that present only relief perhaps, but no lasting ultimate solution to the tragic tensions of individual existence.
If the communal, unconscious and compulsive identification of tribesmen with the living and psychic wholeness of the tribe constituted the thesis of a dialectical process, and the pure, quasi-absolute individualism which has been an abstract ideal for many men in our theoretically democratic Western world is the antithesis, what kind of a synthesis can we then expect will emerge from our historical Age of conflicts when, or if, a New Age begins?
The phrase ‘unity in diversity’ has been used by a number of thinkers working toward the ushering in of such a New Age whose motto would indeed be ‘synthesis.’ But such a phrase, however beautiful and hopeful it sounds, needs explanation; above all, it fails to consider the most essential element in the situation. What is needed is a clear realization of the fact that unless men participating in this postulated New Age enter it as conscious ‘selves’ and not only as egos, there will be no New Age. The final WE-realization which represents the state of synthesis cannot emerge from human minds whose consciousness is structured by a rigid and closed ego, but only from human persons who have clearly realized that the very source and sustaining power of their total field of existence is the self, and whose egos have become utterly dedicated servants of the self — and therefore of humanity as a whole.”
Dane Rudhyar, the Planetarization of Consciousness, page 97-98
Rudolf Steiner
Through Elizabeth Vreede, another school of astrology known as Astrosophy grew out of Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy after his death in 1925. I had been integrating certain insights from Astrosophy into the foundations of the Shamanic Astrology Paradigm™ from as far back as the 1980s. Only more recently have I gone to investigate Steiner’s voluminous writings themselves. It is his overview of global humanity’s development through the Ages and Epochs that I will explore here. It turns out to be in astonishing resonance with Rudhyar’s views!
Though Steiner was born a full generation before him, Rudhyar was aware of his work. His overall historical understanding was quite similar. The only major difference was that Steiner thought that it was the arrival of Christ Jesus that sparked the possibility of the coming synthesis. They both saw that a New Age or Aquarian Age was not a return of Christ, but rather the reality that all of Global Humanity universally can be connected to the Christ within, or, in Steiner’s language, the Etheric Christ. In the 1960s, we knew this as the “Aquarian Dispensation.”
The following quotation from one of his 1908 lectures explains the concept. It also describes what the synthesis is not.
“This conception of the ‘I’ offers difficulty to many people. It has become clear to us that this ‘I’ of man* has developed from a group-soul nature, from a kind of all-inclusive universal ‘I’ out of which it has been differentiated. It would be wrong if man were to crave to go down again with his ‘I’ into some sort of universal consciousness, into some sort of common consciousness. Everything which causes a man to strive to lose his ‘I’ and dissolve it into a universal consciousness, is the result of weakness. He alone understands the ‘I’ who knows that after he has gained it in the course of cosmic evolution it cannot be lost; and above all, man must strive for the strength (if he understands the mission of the world) to make this ‘I’ more and more inward, more and more divine. True Anthroposophists possess nothing of the empty talk which continually emphasizes the dissolution of the ‘I’ in a universal self, the melting into some sort of primeval sea. True Anthroposophy can only put forward as the final goal, the community of free and independent Egos, of Egos which have become individualized. It is just this that is the mission of the earth, which is expressed in love, that the Egos learn to confront one another freely. Love is not perfect if it proceeds from coercion, from people being chained together, but only when each ‘I’ is so free and independent that it needs not love, its love is an entirely free gift. It is the divine plan to make this ‘I’ so independent that as an individual being in all freedom, it can offer love even to God. It would amount to man being led by strings of dependence if he could in any way be forced to love, even if only in the slightest degree.”
Rudolf Steiner, GA 104 Lecture 8 June 25. 1908
It is rather evident how this serves as a warning about a hive-mind “cloud” consciousness. Both thinkers, as so very many other spiritual teachers, are clear that the synthesis must be based on free, conscious, and sovereign individuals, Seed People who conceive, dream and create the synthesis. Evolution can only happen first in the individual, not through the collective.
Many names have been proposed for this necessary synthesis: “New Age”, “New Jupiter”, Golden Age, Age of Aquarius, the Pleroma, or our own great “Turning of The Ages.” The label matters little, for as long as the previous phases are incorporated, digested and synthesized! Both Rudhyar and Steiner have have given us important clues.
In These Days …
The collected works of Steiner and Rudhyar are comprehensive and cover every possible subject. Much like C.G. Jung, another seminal thinker foundational to my work and the school. All have been prophetic as well as inspiring us to become Seed People and actively and with hope, propelled by strong sovereign spiritual will, commit to co-create the synthesis with Great Mystery, and as Jung said, “Dream the Vision Onwards.”
In these days where less people read, and more are distracted by the engineered external proliferation of those distractions, and where attention span is shortening by the day, my hope is that this article can nevertheless provoke inquiry and offer fodder for our conversation at the Fire Branch Esoteric Circle.
I will conclude this ambitious dive into what may seem like a weighty subject with the closing paragraph of The Planetarization of Consciousness:
“We cannot escape the facts of our tumultuous and perhaps cataclysmic era. We can only refuse to see them, panicking when aware of their implications. We are afraid, just as the Jewish rabbis were afraid in Jesus’ presence, because men are always afraid of a new Image of God and Reality unless they are courageous enough, or perhaps desperate enough, to remain open and spiritually naked before the vision — unless they are forced to see that there is nothing to lose and plenitude of being to gain. Plenitude of being! I want to end this book, which is an act of faith in the creative power of Man, by these words, annunciating what is latent in all human beings simply because they are human. Plenitude of being, which means that the infinite and boundless Potentiality of existence and the Presence of ONE are also latent in every man, and that every individual person can become an agent for the ‘divine’ Power which silently, perpetually, ineradicably vibrates at the core of the Earth and in the heart of every human being. All we need do is to focus our attention, to hold steady our thoughts, to feel deeply the Presence that is now incarnating in the Earth toward the transfiguration of Man — and, above all, to be totally, vividly, dynamically awake, and in our wakefulness to have faith, faith in Man, faith in the Earth and in the Power that structures the immense field of activity which is our global home, faith in the plenitude of being that is Man’s incorruptible destiny.”
Dane Rudhyar, The Planetarization of Consciousness, Idyllwild, California, Summer 1969, page 343
* Both Steiner and Rudhyar wrote before the use of “man” as a collective term for global humanity fell out of fashion. It was not used to refer to sex or gender. After about 1972-73, Rudhyar began saying “men and women” in tune with the times.