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Are There (Hidden) Archetypal Patterns in Our Lives? — Part 4, Astrology and the Cosmic Loom
This article can be read in its own right for anyone interested in the subject matter. It is also, however, the latest in a series discussing strange patterns and coincidences in our lives. Part 1 gave an overview of the issues, and provided some examples with discussion. In part 2 I discussed coincidences/patterns involving names. Part 3 discussed number coincidences. Here I turn to the subject of weird coincidences in relation to astrology, as described by the late Dennis Elwell in his fascinating book The Cosmic Loom¹. I have already published a separate article about his work and underlying ideas, so here I’ll just mention material relevant to this series.
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Unlike the examples given so far in the series in which the coincidences or patterns are obvious to the participants, the connections between people and events that Elwell describes are noticeable only through astrology. He believes that making connections in this way enables us to understand the hidden meaning of the cosmos. Thus he says: “Astrological investigation can start with the many undisputed physical circumstances, even trifling details, which the cosmos freely scatters around as clues. Even names can spark a line of enquiry in which a larger understanding is built up piece by piece” (p 247). Thus you can see that the type of material I have been discussing so far in the series is directly relevant to his ideas. There is therefore a strong possibility that some of the examples to which, in the absence of the relevant charts, I have so far attributed other explanations, may indeed have a missing astrological component in their make-up.
I will begin by giving some of Elwell’s name-coincidences which add an extra dimension to the ones I used earlier, in that they seem to occur only in relation to astrological symbolism:
1. When discussing recreational activities he points out that music, depending on its character, could be associated with various planets. If the person were also interested in sailing, however, this would suggest Neptune. “In fact in the chart of a former British prime minister, Edward Heath, Neptune in the fifth house points precisely to these twin recreations” (p 114). He then points out that Heath’s yacht was called Morning Cloud, and that “the name Neptune has its root in a word that means ‘cloud’, (which also gives us nebula and nebulous)”. Heath was presumably involved in the choosing of the name; the suggestion would be that he was unconsciously attracted to a name associated with the symbolism of his horoscope.
2. The Challenger was the name of an American Space shuttle which blew up soon after launching in 1986. Elwell describes this as a “Mars name”, and says therefore that “that planet becomes a useful marker”. He provides much astrological background too long to quote here. Suffice it to say that the launch “took place under a calamitous sky”. There were important Mars connections in the charts of President Reagan, the USA, NASA, and the time of the launch itself. Also, “the launch ascendant was itself the place of that lunar eclipse — not a moment an astrologer would have chosen” (see p 121).
3. He mentions several coincidences in relation to Sagittarius the Archer. All of them occurred when Sagittarius was important in the charts:
a) “It is astrologically significant that the last major air crash of 1985 involved a plane operated by Arrow Air, and that it happened in New-found-land, a name evoking the exploratory side of that sign”.
b) the murder of the policewoman Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan People’s Bureau. Elwell points out that “the name Yvonne itself means ‘yew bow’ ” (both p78).
c) “The political career of Jeffrey Archer, noted author and darling of the Tory Party… went into eclipse following scandalous newspaper accusations” (p80).
4. “On 16 December 1998 Operation Desert Fox was launched against Iraq. Why was it called that? It was explained that the Pentagon had an alphabetical system for allocating names to operations. But it happened that the RAF squadron dispatched to the Gulf had long sported a fox’s head as its emblem. That was just coincidence, said the RAF. Moreover for the military there was no significance in the fact that Rommel… was nicknamed the Desert Fox. But astrologers become curious about such things, and might be moved to compare planetary positions at the launch of Desert Fox with Rommel’s birth. At both moments swift-moving Mercury was at the same place in the zodiac, 3½° Sagittarius” (see p 79). (Foxes have been linked astrologically with Mercury.)
Elwell also discusses in detail some major news items. Name coincidences play an important part in the astrological web that he spins around the Dunblane massacre (pp 261–281). (This took place at a primary school in Scotland on March 13th 1996.) The murderer in this incident was called Thomas Hamilton. Elwell points out that “criminologists date the modern spree shooting phenomenon from 6 September 1949, when Howard Unruh took a stroll in his home town of Camden, New Jersey, and randomly shot thirteen people. His last victim was a young boy who happened to be looking out of the front window. The boy’s name was Thomas Hamilton. He was indiscriminately murdered at the age of two, and two years later the Dunblane killer was born, a symmetry which may not be coincidental. Evidence given to the Dunblane inquiry indicated that Hamilton had been gestating his fearful plan for two years”. Elwell suggests that one is the reincarnation of the other.
The underlying cosmic theme to which Elwell believes the Dunblane massacre is related is the nation’s attitude towards armaments. Two days later the Queen opened a new Royal Armouries Museum at Leeds; ironically, it was her first public opportunity to express her sorrow about the incident. Elwell believes that the project crossed over a line, on the near side of which “war may be necessary, killing may be unavoidable”, but on the other side of which “the realities of mortal combat” were being commercially exploited for entertainment. Also in the run up to Dunblane “a 55-acre site had been earmarked for a national target shooting centre — again ‘family orientated’, meaning bring the kids — at a cost of £11 million, with £7 million of National Lottery money”. (And a similar project was being set up in the USA at the same time.)
With that information as background we can now return to another name coincidence. “The chosen site was at Stockton, Cleveland, a place that perversely recalled America’s own Dunblane, when a gunman killed five children and injured thirty more at Cleveland elementary school, in Stockton, California”.
Then some geographical coincidences intervene. Hungerford, the site of a previous massacre, and Dunblane are close in latitude, but “their mid-latitude works out to 53N47.5 — which is exact for the Royal Armouries” (his italics). A certain Robert Sartin “became obsessed with Hungerford” and “made a pilgrimage to the place. Then on 30 April 1989 he committed copycat shootings in his home town of Monkseaton, in Whitley Bay… Hungerford’s longitude is 1W30, and Monkseaton’s 1W28, which means they are on the same meridian, to within a couple of miles. High noon indeed! Leeds is a sprawling city, but the ordnance survey map shows the precise longitude of the Royal Armouries to be 1W32”. Thus the Leeds museum is connected by almost straight lines in both directions with scenes of mass killing.
Then geographical and name coincidences overlap, for if you draw a line north from the Armouries, “it runs — with gunsight precision — along the entire length of a long straight road called Hamilton Place. It is the spine of a grid of roads which include Hamilton Terrace, Hamilton Avenue and Hamilton Gardens, all within two miles of the museum”. (The story continues, but this should give you a flavour of the type of coincidences involved.)
Other items which Elwell discusses in relation to astrological patterns are:
1. the history of the Titanic. I mentioned his interest in this in a previous article, which for convenience I’ll repeat here:
In a Channel 4 Witness programme about astrology on June 18th 2000, Elwell claimed that in 1987 he saw in the charts a planetary configuration, “an eclipse contacting Jupiter and Neptune”, strongly reminiscent of the one which preceded the Titanic disaster. He went on to say: “Under the coming together of those type of planets there will be trouble on the ocean waves”. He wrote to the company P&O asking them to try to prevent a similar disaster. Their response was predictable, saying that it was difficult to respond to such “nebulous advice”. Ten days later their ship the Herald of Free Enterprise rolled over.
Here are some of his other observations. (Some of his material can only be understood in terms of astrological symbolism. Here I restrict myself to those patterns which can be understood as such by non-astrologers.)
A conjunction of Mercury and Saturn in the ninth house occurred at the time of the launch. There was a further conjunction of Mercury and Saturn at the time of the Oscar awards ceremony, 05:40 GMT on 24/3/98, Los Angeles, when the film The Titanic received its many awards (p 245).
At the time of the Titanic disaster, the chart revealed a pentagram (a five-pointed star) including Jupiter and Neptune as significant players. The same pentagram was the logo adopted by the White Star Line, owners of the doomed vessel. Elwell describes this as “one of those curiosities so often encountered in astrology”, and comments: “You may say, the majority of stars, on flags and logos, have five points. True, but there did not have to be star at all, and the company might have had some other name” (p249). The relationship between Jupiter and Neptune figures further in that a septile occurs between them at the birth of William McQuitty, who subsequently produced a major film about the Titanic, and who as a boy had been present at the launch.
Elwell is saying that the whole Titanic episode was imbued with meaning from the cosmic standpoint. Further evidence supporting this line of thinking is the fact that several works of literature ‘predicted’ the accident, thus suggesting that the forthcoming event was bubbling up in the collective psyche. The most detailed coincidences are to be found in Morgan Robertson’s The Wreck of the Titan or Futility, which he began to write in 1898 in response to a kind of vision. Several years before this, W. T. Stead wrote two articles in the Pall Mall Gazette, the first “about a ship as large as the Titanic which also sank in mid-Atlantic”, and the second “about a steamship colliding with an iceberg in the Atlantic”. Just a week before the disaster, Popular Mechanics carried another fictitious story about the maiden voyage of the largest ocean liner in the world, which sinks after a collision with an iceberg². And scientific sceptics will say that there is no such thing as precognition!
2. The life and death of Princess Diana. She is seen by Elwell as being symbolically connected through the astrological cosmic loom with:
a) Marilyn Monroe. “Both (were) renowned for their beauty and glamour. Both died at the age of thirty-six, in circumstances which were a gift to conspiracy theorists. Both suffered through their association with the most powerful family in the land, in Marilyn’s case the Kennedys” (p254). Their lives finally intersected when Candle in the Wind, originally written as a tribute to Marilyn Monroe, was performed at Diana’s funeral with new lyrics in her honour.
b) other deaths in cars, namely those of President Kennedy, and the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination in Sarajevo precipitated the First World War. The connecting factor is the prominence of 9° Virgo in the relevant charts³. Non-astrologers, especially those of a sceptical disposition, might respond ‘so what?’, thinking that these must be meaningless, irrelevant coincidences. Elwell, however, makes meaningful connections between all these events: “In the very month of her death Diana had been in Sarajevo in pursuit of her campaign against landmines… For Diana to have made a physical link with Sarajevo in this way, out of her own relationship with the god of war, may not have been unimportant for the invisible mechanisms which underpin events. In her birth chart Mars himself is in exactly the same degree it occupied at the assassination!” (p255).
c) the Duchess of Windsor who, through her first marriage, for ten years was also a Spencer. “The eclipse at 9½° Virgo looped back to two events of specific royal significance. At the death of the Duke… Saturn stood at 9½° Gemini. When the Duchess of Windsor followed him into the beyond, fourteen years later, Saturn was completing half its orbit, had reached 8¾° Sagittarius. Both had died in Paris, and their bodies were flown back to Britain for burial, a fate that was awaiting the unsuspecting Diana.
Diana established a physical contact with the Windsors when she visited their home on the last afternoon of her life… Diana and the Duchess would have had an interesting conversation comparing notes. Both fell in love with a Prince of Wales who had suffered a lonely upbringing by undemonstrative parents. Both were eventually frozen out by their in-laws. Both were glittering celebrities, leaders of fashion. And both became central figures in major British constitutional crises” (p256). He goes on to relate how both women were deprived of their title of HRH (Her Royal Highness).
d) Mother Teresa, who died on the eve of Diana’s funeral. Elwell’s believes their deaths were “signalled in the heavens” and therefore connected. He explains himself thus: “Consider that both deaths occurred at around the time of the aforementioned solar eclipse at 9½° Virgo. During the course of a day the earth’s rotation carries the sun, moon, and planets around the circle of the heavens, so that they all in turn cross the axis of the meridian and the horizon. Now it happens that at Paris the eclipse was exactly on the lower meridian (the ‘midnight’ point), while at Calcutta the eclipse was exactly rising. The precision referred to here is so close that only five minutes on the clock, either way, would make these positions inexact” (p 257–8, his italics).
e) the Statue of Liberty, and the USA: “As well as her torch Lady Liberty holds a tablet bearing the date July 4 1776, for the Declaration of Independence, and the horoscope for that event has been adopted as the birth chart of the United States. In that chart the Sun is in Cancer, the Moon in Aquarius, and the most plausible ascendant is Sagittarius, all of which happen to be the same placings as at Diana’s birth” (p260).
Elwell points out that there is a replica of the torch of the Statue of Liberty over the Alma tunnel, which Diana passed under on the way to her death, and that this torch immediately became “the focus for a Diana cult in Paris, a place to leave messages and flowers, which as a tourist attraction would soon rival the Eiffel Tower”. He comments: “From early in astrology’s history the ideal of liberty has been connected with Jupiter, and the female ideal with the moon, therefore the Statue of Liberty — and by association her torch in Paris — represents a fusion of these two principles”. He then points out that:
- “at the moment of the crash the moon and Jupiter stood in exact opposition in the heavens”
- “their opposition lay exactly across the Paris meridian”
- “at the same moment in New York, home of the statue, the opposition was exactly across the horizon” (pp 259–260).
f) Queen Astrid of Belgium, who gave her name to the road along which Diana’s car travelled on the way to the tunnel. They both “died young, …were killed in a car crash at the end of August. Not only the manner of her death, but her character bears a striking parallel with Diana. Born with the moon in Cancer (Diana had the sun there) Astrid was called the ‘Queen of Mothers’, and took a deep interest in hospitals and creches for children…” (p260).
I hope you have enjoyed this article. I have written in the past about other topics, including spirituality, metaphysics, psychology, science, Christianity, and politics. All these articles are on Medium, but the simplest way to see a guide to them is to visit my website (click here and here).
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Footnotes:
1. Urania Trust, 1999
2. The source for this information is: Ken Anderson, Coincidences: Chance or Fate?, Blandford, 1995, pp 58–59
3. An eclipse which coincided with Diana’s death was at 9½° Virgo. At the death of President Kennedy Uranus had been at 9¾°. At the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand the moon’s nodes lay across 9° Virgo-Pisces.
