Only here did I succeed. Once I’d moved out of the city, bought this house and taken on the job as guardian of my neighbours’ properties, a breathless young headmistress came across the hills to see me. ‘I know you’re a teacher,’ she said – and she used the present tense, which instantly won me over, for I regard my profession as a mental attitude rather than a set of isolated activities. She offered me a few hours teaching English at her school, working with small children, the kind I like. So I agreed, and once a week I started teaching English to seven- and eight-year-olds, who approach learning very enthusiastically but who just as quickly and suddenly get bored. The headmistress wanted me to teach music too – she must have heard us singing ‘Amazing Grace’ – but that would have been beyond my strength. It’s quite enough for me to scurry down to the village every Wednesday, to have to dress in clean clothes, brush my hair and put on a little make-up – I paint my eyelids green and powder my face. All this costs me a great deal of time and patience. I could have taken the PE class too, I am tall and strong. I used to go in for sports. Somewhere in the city I still have my medals. Though I had no chance of teaching PE any more because of my age.
But I’ll admit that now, in winter, it’s hard for me to get there. On teaching days I have to get up earlier than usual, when it’s still dark, stoke the fire, clear the snow from the Samurai, and if it’s parked away from the house on the surfaced road, I must wade through the snow to reach it, which isn’t fun at all. Winter mornings are made of steel; they have a metallic taste and sharp edges. On a Wednesday in January, at seven in the morning, it’s plain to see that the world was not made for Man, and definitely not for his comfort or pleasure.
Unfortunately, neither Dizzy nor any of my friends shares my passion for Astrology, so I try not to flaunt it. They regard me as a crank already. I only spill the beans when I need to obtain someone’s date and place of birth, as in the case of the Commandant. For this purpose I have questioned almost everyone from the Plateau and half the town. In giving me their date of birth, people are actually revealing their real name to me, they’re showing me their celestial date-stamp, opening their past and future to me. But there are many people whom I shall never have the opportunity to ask.
Obtaining a date of birth is relatively easy. All it takes is an identity card, or just about any other document, and sometimes, by chance, it turns up on the internet. Dizzy has access to all sorts of lists and tables, though I won’t elaborate here. But what really matters is the time of birth. That’s not recorded in the documents, and yet it’s the time that’s the real key to a Person. A Horoscope without the exact time is fairly worthless – we know WHAT, but we don’t know HOW and WHERE.
I tried explaining to the reluctant Dizzy that in the past Astrology was much the same as socio-biology is today. Then at least he seemed a little more interested. There’s nothing outrageous about this comparison. The Astrologer believes that the heavenly bodies have an influence on human personality, while the socio-biologist thinks it’s the mysterious emanations of molecular bodies that affect us. The difference is in scale. Neither of them knows what’s behind this influence or how it is transmitted. They’re really talking about the same thing, except that they’re using different scales. Sometimes I’m surprised by the similarity, and by the fact that while I adore Astrology, I have no respect for socio-biology at all.
In a natal Horoscope the date of birth determines the date of death as well. That’s obvious – anyone who has been born is going to die. There are many places in the Horoscope that point us towards the time and nature of death – one simply needs to know how to spot and connect them. For example, one has to check the transitory aspects of Saturn to the hyleg, and what’s going on in the eighth house. Also to cast an eye on the relative position of the Lights – meaning the Sun and Moon.
It is quite complicated, and it could be boring for anyone who isn’t an expert. But when you look carefully, I told Dizzy, when you join up the facts, you’ll see that the concurrences of events down here with the position of the planets up there are crystal-clear. It always puts me into a state of exhilaration. But the source of my excitement is understanding. That’s why Dizzy cannot feel it.
In my defence of Astrology I’m often forced to use statistical arguments, which I hate, but which always appeal to young minds. Without any thought but with religious zeal, young people believe in statistics. It’s enough to give them something expressed as a percentage, or as a probability, and they take it in good faith. So then I referred to Gauquelin and his ‘Mars effect’ – a phenomenon that seems bizarre, but the statistics confirm it. What Gauquelin did was to demonstrate that, statistically, in the Horoscopes of sportsmen, Mars – the planet of fitness, competition and so on – is more frequently found in one particular location than in the Horoscopes of non-sportsmen. Of course Dizzy made light of this proof, and of all the other evidence that he found uncomfortable. Even when I offered him a whole string of examples of predictions that had come true. For instance, concerning Hitler, when Himmler’s court Astrologer, Wilhelm Wolf, predicted ‘eine grosse Gefahr für Hitler am 20.07.44’, meaning great danger for Hitler on that day, and as we know, that was the date of the assassination attempt at the Wolf’s Lair. And later on, the same sinister Astrologer predicted impassively: ‘dass Hitler noch vor dem 7.05.45 eines geheimnissvollen Todes sterben werde’, meaning that Hitler would die a mysterious death before the seventh of May.
‘Incredible,’ said Dizzy. ‘How’s that possible?’ he asked himself, but then instantly forgot it all, and let his incredulity flare up again.
I tried using other methods to convince him, by showing him the perfect harmony between what happens down here and what’s going on up there.
‘Look at this, for example, look carefully – the summer of 1980, Jupiter in conjunction with Saturn in Libra. A powerful conjunction. Jupiter represents the authorities, and Saturn the workers. What’s more, Wałęsa has the Sun in Libra. Do you see?’
Dizzy shook his head dubiously.
‘What about the Police? Which celestial body represents the Police?’ he asked.
‘Pluto. It also represents the secret services and the mafia.’
‘Well, yes, yes…’ he repeated, unconvinced, though I could see he had a lot of goodwill and was doing his best.
‘Keep looking,’ I said, and showed him the position of the planets. ‘Saturn was in Scorpio in 1953 – the death of Stalin and the political thaw; 1952 to 1956 – repression, the Korean War, the invention of the hydrogen bomb. The year 1953 was the toughest for the Polish economy. Look, that’s just when Saturn rose in Scorpio. Isn’t that incredible?’
Dizzy fidgeted in his chair.
‘Well, all right, look at this: Neptune in Libra – chaos, Uranus in Cancer – the people rebel, the decline of colonialism. Uranus was entering Leo when the French Revolution erupted, when the January Uprising occurred and when Lenin was born. Remember that Uranus in Leo always represents revolutionary power.’
I could see he was finding it painful.
No, it was impossible to persuade Dizzy to believe in Astrology. Never mind.