Methods of Analogies

Chapter 4. The astro-calendar analogy: stars as foretellers of the seasons, as calendars.

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Husband to wife:

Your talk about our horoscopes being incompatible is complete nonsense!

And don't even think of arguing with me, out of sheer stupidity!

Because arguing down an Aries is impossible!

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4.1 The Law of Rhythm

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In nature, nothing stands still. Everything moves, breathes, pulses, shifts. Day gives way to night, and night to day. Winter yields to spring, spring to summer. High tide gives way to low tide, and low tide to high. Animals migrate, plants burst into bloom, fruit ripens—and all of it right on time.

Hermes Trismegistus, distilling the observations of millennia, formulated this as the law of rhythm: ‘Everything flows out and flows in; everything has its tides and ebbs.’

People grasped a simple truth very quickly: trying to pick mushrooms in winter is pointless. Sow too early, and you will ruin the harvest. Hunt animals out of season, and you'll go hungry. Nature does not tolerate whim. It has its own schedule.

There was only one question: how do you discover that schedule?

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4.2 First Observations

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The most obvious rhythms are written in the sky.

The sun rises and sets — that is day and night. The moon waxes, turns full, wanes, and vanishes — that is a month. The sun climbs higher, then sinks lower — that is a year.

For thousands of years, people simply looked up and remembered. Over time, patterns emerged: when a certain star appears, it is time to sow. When the Moon is in a certain phase, it is time to harvest. When the Sun reaches a certain point, it is time to migrate.

That is how astronomy was born.

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4.3 Astronomy as a Survival Science of Synchronization

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Today, astronomy seems like a lofty science of distant worlds. But its roots lie in Maslow’s pyramid, at the very bottom.

People began watching the stars not out of idle curiosity. They needed to know:

When the snow melts and the hunting begins.

When the rivers spill over and fish grow plentiful.

When roots and berries ripen.

When the birds return.

When it is best to conceive children so they will be born in the warm season.

The sky became a calendar. The mechanism that turns the heavenly bodies turned out to be the very mechanism that governs the harvest, the floods, and the behavior of animals.

Human beings were too weak to argue with nature.

So he aligned his earthly rhythms with the rhythms of the heavens. And it worked.

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4.4 Astrology as an Applied Discipline

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Here a subtle point arises.

If celestial rhythms govern the changing of the seasons, the flooding of rivers, and the behavior of animals, why should they not govern human behavior? After all, human beings are part of nature too.

That is how astrology was born.

Official science still refuses to recognize it. But if we look at astrology not as a way of predicting fate from a newspaper horoscope, but as an attempt to synchronize human psychology and social behavior with cosmic rhythms, the picture changes.

Astrology is a method of analogy built on rhythm and resemblance, in which the heavenly bodies become models for human character, relationships, and events. Is Mars aggressive? Then people with a strong Mars will tend toward aggression. Is Venus harmonious? Then Venusian types will tend toward love and art.

This is not a cause-and-effect relationship in the scientific sense. It is analogy developed into a mature, ordered system.

Does it work? That’s a complicated question. But the fact that astrology has survived for thousands of years and is still sought after suggests that it must, apparently, be solving some real problem.

If we make the right analogy, astrology plays much the same role as a navigator on a long ocean voyage. Of course, you can ignore natural ocean currents and sail blindly, against the prevailing flow.

But a good navigator, skillfully plotting the course with currents and winds in mind, saves time and resources.

It’s a fact.

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4.5 Feng Shui, Taoism, and Other Systems

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The same logic is at work in systems that seek to bring people into sync with place and time.

Feng Shui is not just about 'how to position your bed so money will come your way.' It is an attempt to discern the flows of energy (Qi) moving through space and time, and to place a person within them so that they do not hinder those currents, but harness them.

In its practical forms too—alchemy, medicine, qigong—Taoism starts from the premise that the human being is part of a cosmic mechanism. A person’s health, longevity, and spiritual growth depend on how closely they are attuned to the rhythms of nature and the heavens.

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All these systems share one central idea: the world is a vast piece of clockwork, and human beings have two choices:

either force their way through, ignoring its rhythms,

or learn to move in sync with them and tap into the energy that is already there, already flowing—you simply have to catch the current.

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4.6 The Method of Synchrony

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If we step back and generalize from everything said above, we can discern a single method underlying astronomy, astrology, feng shui, Taoist practices, and many other systems.

This is the method of astrological-calendar analogy, or more broadly, the method of synchronism.

Its essence:

Observe the rhythms of nature—especially the heavens—and discern periods, cycles, and recurring patterns.

Map those patterns onto human life: when to sow, when to hunt, which periods favor certain pursuits and which do not.

Bring your actions into sync with those rhythms.

Tap into energy that is already flowing, instead of wasting your strength struggling against the current.

This is not fatalism. It is navigation.

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4.7 Why This Works

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There are two versions.

The first (esoteric): the world really is shot through with common rhythms, and by tuning into them, a person comes into resonance with the cosmos.

The second (pragmatic): any cycle, even one chosen at random, creates structure. Someone who plants by the lunar calendar does so regularly, attentively, and with faith in success. And regular attention and faith are success factors in their own right.

The truth is, most likely, somewhere in the middle. But for the method of analogies, that hardly matters. What matters is that the analogy works: people align their lives with the rhythms of the heavens and gain predictability, confidence, and a sense of connection to the world.

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4.8 Modernity

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Today, when we live in a world detached from natural rhythms (artificial lighting, 24-hour work, air conditioning, heating), the need for synchronization has become even more acute.

People consult astrologers, arrange their furniture according to feng shui, and follow the lunar calendar for haircuts and planting. Mainstream science may frown, but the demand never lets up.

Because this method answers a real human need: to feel that we are not lonely cogs in the chaos, but part of a larger world—meaningful, ordered, and alive with rhythm.

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4.9 Moving On to the Next Chapter

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By watching the sky, people learned to synchronize their actions with cosmic rhythms. But one more task remained—to preserve these observations, pass them on, and make sure knowledge did not die with the one who carried it. That is how writing arose—the next great method of analogy.

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Chapter 5. Sign substitution (Sumerian)—from the clay token to cuneiform, the birth of writing.

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At every question, I only laugh softly.

To every question, there will be no answer.

For my name is Hieroglyph.

My garments are patched by the wind.

(Piknik, “Hieroglyph”)

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5.1 Analogy on Three Levels

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The method of analogy is not confined to magic or totems. It permeates every level of human perception. And each level produces its own result.

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Level

What happens

Result

Bodily

The body finds its analogue in movement, posture, and rhythm

Dance, ritual, the kinematics of martial arts

Sensory

Emotions find their analogue in other emotions—through empathy and resonance

Art, music, poetry

Mental

Thought finds its analogue in thought—through sign, symbol, and image

Writing, hieroglyph, rune, letter

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Humanity did not invent writing overnight. He arrived at it through a bodily, sensory grasp of likeness.

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5.2 From Gesture to Sign

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Before people drew hieroglyphs, they gestured. A gesture is already a sign, but one still bound to the body. The pointing finger means “there.” A hand pressed to the chest means “mine.” A palm covering the eyes means “I can’t see”; a dismissive gesture means “no.”

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Dance is already a system of gestures unfolding in time. Ritual is dance fixed by tradition. And when a ritual must be passed on, fixed in place, ensured so that it does not die with the shaman, it becomes ritual as tradition.

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The first drawing is a gesture frozen in time.

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5.3 Two Hemispheres, Two Systems of Writing

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This is where things start to get really interesting. The human brain is not uniform.

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The right hemisphere governs holistic perception, imagery, space, and the ability to grasp things all at once. It thinks in pictures. A storehouse of information from past lives and incarnations.

The left hemisphere governs sequence, analysis, speech, and detail. It thinks in linked chains. The realm of Castaneda’s “logic.”

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When a person tries to pin down a thought, they inevitably use whichever tool happens to be dominant at that moment.

In cultures where right-hemisphere, image-based thinking predominates, hieroglyphic writing is born. Each sign is an image compressed to its bare minimum. “House” is drawn as a little house. “Person” as a little stick figure. “Mountain” as three peaks. China, Egypt, the Sumerians in the early stages.

In cultures where left-brain, logical thinking predominates, symbolic writing emerges. A sign does not resemble the thing itself; it stands for it by convention. "A" looks nothing like a bull, though historically it came from the head of a bull (aleph). But over time the image was worn away, and only the function remained—the recording of a sound. The Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Latin alphabet, Cyrillic.

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And conversely.

Symbolic writing trains and develops the left hemisphere and logical thought.

Hieroglyphic writing trains and develops visual thinking and the right hemisphere of the brain.

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5.4 Runes — a possible synthesis

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Runes seem to occupy a curious middle ground. On the one hand, they are letters—they can be used to write text. On the other hand, each rune has a name and an image that cannot be reduced to mere sound.

Fehu — “cattle, wealth.” It is not just “F”; it is a concept.

Ansuz — “god, breath, speech.” Not just “A.”

Raidho — “path, wheel, order.” Not just “R.”

Runes can be used for writing, but also for divination, incantation, and meditation. They function simultaneously as signs and as images.

Perhaps this is because runes emerged where two traditions met: the Mediterranean one (alphabetic) and the northern one (shamanic, image-based). Or perhaps it is because their creators maintained a balance between the hemispheres that was later lost.

In any case, runes are a hybrid form of writing. And your hypothesis about the syncretic interplay of the hemispheres is perfectly plausible.

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And so runic writing may well train both hemispheres to work in sync. Setting off a synergy between them. Something we know, when it appears, as “magic.”

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5.5 From the Sign to the Library

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When signs grow numerous, they begin to take on a life of their own. Lists, catalogs, and dictionaries emerge. Writing becomes a form of distributed memory.

Now knowledge no longer dies with the elder. It is preserved in clay, stone, and papyrus. Humanity gains direct access to the experience of its ancestors, bypassing oral transmission and all its distortions.

This leap is the direct result of the method of analogy carried to its logical conclusion: if an image can stand in for an object, and a sign for an image, then ultimately the sign comes to stand in for reality itself. And that substituted reality can be manipulated without ever leaving the cave.

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5.6 Image-Based Traditions as Guardians of Archetypes

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In cultures where writing remained image-based—hieroglyphic—their distinctive way of thinking endured as well. The philosophical schools of China, Japan, and Tibet do not operate through concepts, but through archetypal images.

Dao is the Way. It cannot be defined; one can only point the way.

Yin and Yang are not terms but images: shadow and light, mountain and valley, woman and man.

The five elements are not elements at all, but phases of matter: wood, fire, earth, metal, water.

The same is true of the Hermetic tradition, of heraldry, and of Tarot. Each symbol is a dense cluster of meaning that no single definition can exhaust. It can only be unfolded, the way a hieroglyph unfolds into a story.

Plato called this the world of ideas. The world of things is nothing but the pale shadows cast by ideal forms. The hieroglyph, the rune, the Tarot trump—each is an attempt to capture the idea itself: a superposition, a many-sided meaning, a hologram, rather than its shadow.

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5.7 What We Discovered

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Writing emerged not as an invention, but as a natural extension of the method of analogy at the level of thought.

The kind of writing system a culture develops—hieroglyphic or alphabetic—depends on which hemisphere holds sway.

Runes may be a rare example of a synthesis between the two approaches.

Pictorial writing systems retained a link to archetypal thought—a link that alphabetic cultures lost or allowed to recede into myth and legend.

Writing became humanity’s distributed memory, allowing knowledge to be accumulated and passed on regardless of any individual bearer’s lifespan.

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5.8 Moving on to the Next Chapter

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Once people had fixed thought in a sign, they gained the ability to build structures that had previously been impossible. The next step is to project this ability onto the scale of the entire cosmos. How people built temples and pyramids in the image of the heavens is the subject of Chapter Six.

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Chapter 6. Cosmic Projection (Celtic) — the temple as an architectural model of the world.

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— Heard the news? Turns out they conceived Stonehenge as a kind of little calendar!

Can you imagine the kind of cuckoo clocks they must have had?

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6.1 The Sky as a Clock

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If you watch the night sky long enough, you begin to notice that it is not standing still. The stars drift slowly from east to west; some rise, while others set. The Sun and the Moon move too, but along their own, more intricate paths. Look more closely, and the starry sky seems to revolve around a single star—the Pole Star—as though it were the very center of the universe.

For the people of the ancient world, this motion was no abstraction. Everything depended on it: when the Nile would flood, when the right star would rise for sowing, when the equinox would arrive. The sky functioned like a gigantic clockwork mechanism, only its dial was the whole vault of heaven, and its hands were the Sun, the Moon, and the planets.

The priests had a single task: to learn how to read this mechanism and predict what would come next from the rhythms of the cosmos.

More precisely, to bring earthly affairs—agriculture, winemaking, animal husbandry, navigation—into sync with them.

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6.2 Why the State Needed It

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Today, astronomy seems like a pure, abstract science, far removed from everyday life.

In the ancient world, it was a tool for survival and rule.

Agriculture depended on an accurate calendar: when to sow, when to reap, when to expect the rivers to flood.

Religion and political power were bound up with the cycles of the heavens: the pharaoh was the son of the Sun, the emperor ruled by the Mandate of Heaven. Whoever controlled the calendar controlled the ritual. Whoever controlled the ritual controlled the people.

Navigation—the stars were the guide at sea and in the desert.

Taxes and record-keeping required a single system of time: when to collect taxes, when the year began.

When to begin sowing, when to bring in the harvest, when to drive livestock from summer pastures to winter ones, and so on.

The priests became the first professional astronomers. Their knowledge was secret because it gave them power. And for calculation they needed not only tables, but instruments as well.

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6.3 The First Architectural Computers

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Long before the Antikythera mechanism, people were already building stone observatories that functioned like analog computers.

The principle is simple: if a structure is precisely aligned with the cardinal directions and the key points where celestial bodies rise and set, it can tell the time on its own—through shadow, light, or the position of a star in an opening.