This presentation addresses the generally unrecognized reality of our cosmic environment; namely that it is far from being a remote celestial spectacle. It is, in fact, a cosmic medium in which we “live, and move, and have our being.” In historical terms, our home Galaxy is a relatively recent discovery. Its true nature was completely unknown to early astrology. (l suspect that even modern astrophysics has only a faint understanding of its actual character, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Astrology’s cosmology, once limited to the expanse of the heavens immediately visible to the naked eye, had settled over the millennia into a familiar Aristotelian cosmos of the heavenly spheres.

Our ancient ancestors, the very first astrologers, looked up at a sky that was much clearer, with stars seemingly brighter and nearer than we see today. From prehistory, the Milky Way was seen as a river of light stretching across the sky. Dubbed the Galaxias kyklos by the ancient Greeks – which literally translates as Milky Circle – it was viewed as a pathway of milk in the sky. No doubt this was reflected in the Greek myth that the goddess Hera pushed baby Hercules away from her breast, sending a stream of glowing milk gushing across the sky. The Hindus called it Akash Ganga, because it reminded them of the holy river Ganga. In China, it was called the “Silver River.”

Astrology from ancient times focused on the Sun and Moon (together called the Luminaries), the planets and the stars – but paid little attention to that river of light in the sky known today as the Milky Way. A century before Aristotle (4th Century BCE), the Greek philosopher Democritus – better known for his atomic theory – proposed that the river in the sky was in fact composed of myriad stars. It wasn’t until Galileo (17th Century CE) turned a telescope to the night sky that it was clear Democritus was right. A century after that, Immanuel Kant got a little closer to the truth when he suggested that the Milky Way was a rotating disk of stars, and that some of the nebulae seen in the night sky were also galaxies, which he called Island Universes.

It was only in the last 100 years that humanity started to grasp that our Milky Way with its billions of stars was only one of trillions of galaxies in an expanding Universe.

We think of the Sun as being a distant 93 million miles away, but it is in fact the center of the heliosphere, a bubble of charged particles (plasma) emanating from our local star and stretching some 123 Astronomical Units (AU) out into space beyond the Sun. (1 AU = the distance from Earth to Sun.) In that perspective, we live in what is analogous to a gigantic cell, with the Sun as its nucleus and the heliopause as its outer membrane – with the planets and moons, comets and asteroids etc. as functional organelles within the cell. That cell is in turn an integral part of a vast cosmic organism of matter and dark matter, of stars and galaxies and black holes stretching out for billions of light years in every direction. Or maybe it’s a Universal Mind, and all these various components are analogous to neurons and synapses, and the molecules and atoms etc. contained in them. A distinction without a difference?

The term heliosphere is misleading, if conceived in the purely geometric sense. Our heliosphere is not a spherical bubble in space. The solar system is in orbit around Galactic Center, and that motion is directional. The Sun’s plasma energy field has a bow shockwave in front, where the outgoing energy field of the Sun crashes into the field of cosmic radiation before it; leaving a trailing wake behind. Far from being spherical, it resembles a teardrop: bulbous in front, tapering off to the rear. In this context, the heliosphere is not geometrically spherical. It is rather a sphere of influence, the domain of our parent star.