EQUALLY mindful of his aged bones and exalted station, Berosus the High Priest slowly mounted the stone ramp that spiraled seven times around the great ziggurat and brought him into the presence of the Beings. They blazed and glittered in the night sky above the sleeping city of Babylon far below—imperceptibly wheeling in the ancient celestial dance that contained the secrets of the future of the kingdom. The signs, he saw, were good. Zibbati was well advanced in the Way of Enlil, supported by glowing Ishtar, which favored success in arms. On the morrow, he would tell the king that the time was opportune to move against the Assyrians.
In the basement of the Shambala Bookstore on Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue near the university's campus, 20-year-old Sheila O'Neil looked up from her calculations on the chart before her and shook her head. "We'd better postpone the organization meeting until next week," she said. "Mercury's going into opposition with Saturn in the 3rd House, which will mean bad communicating. But next Tuesday all systems will be go."
Figures in the Ascendant
Berosus would have understood perfectly what Sheila was up to. Indeed, Sheila's astrological calculations would be one of the few things he would find familiar in the modern world after 50 centuries. It is one of the stranger facts about the contemporary U.S. that Babylon's mystic conceptions of the universe are being taken up seriously and semiseriously by the most scientifically sophisticated generation of young adults in history. Even the more bc.cult arts of palmistry, numerology, fortunetelling and witchcraft—traditionally the twilight zone of the undereducated and overanxious—are catching on with youngsters. Bookshops that cater to the trend are crammed with graduate students and assistant professors.
Isn't astrology just a fad, and a rather absurd one at that? Certainly. But it is also something more. The numbers of Americans who have found astrology fun, or fascinating, or campy, or worthy of serious study, or a source of substitute faith, have turned the fad into a phenomenon. Astrologers insist that since their art is actually a science, its renascence was foreordained. The world, they contend, is just entering the Aquarian Age. The movement of the vernal equinox westward at the rate of about 50 seconds a year is bringing it from 2,000 years in the zodiac's sign of Pisces —characterized by skepticism and disillusionment—to the next 2,000 in Aquarius, an airy sign that will influence the world toward aspiration and faith. The highly successful Broadway musical Hair, which lists a staff astrologer in the program credits and includes another astrologer, Sally Eaton, in the cast, opens with the song:
When the moon is in the Seventh
House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars Then peace will guide the planets And love will steer the stars.
Carroll Righter, the best-known and most successful of U.S. astrologers, puts it into a Christian context. "The Piscean Age," he says, "was an age of tears and sorrow, focused on the death of Christ. In 1904, we entered the Age of Aquarius, which will be an age of joy, of science and accomplishment, focused on the life of Christ." Righter is already counting his accomplishments and measuring his joy. The dean of