#116 Star Lore, Anthroposophy, & Astrology with Mary Stewart Adams

Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another; A wise man named Plato once said. Mary Stewart Adams has been on a journey of star communication and celestial wonder for what seems like her entire life. A star lore historian, leading dark sky advocate, author, and astrologist who weaves the esoteric knowledge of spiritual science, literature, ancient mythologies, and fairy tales into contemporary astronomy and astrosophy star wisdom. Mary's relationship with the stars is more than a personal journey; It's a quest to inspire others to know and understand the stars in a way that strengthens what it means to be a human living in the 21st Century. In what feels like an other-worldly conversation, Tahnee and Mary weave their way through Egyptian/Greek mythology, Rudolf Steiner's philosophy of anthroposophy, astronomy, and fairytales, all of which are threads in man's eternal relationship with the stars. It's not every day you get to listen to someone like Mary speak; her words will leave you longing for a deeper awareness of the constellations above. Her understanding as a star lore historian and unique expression of this ancient knowledge is truly something divine. Enjoy ~

We can describe our environment as everything that we can see, and we can see as far as the Andromeda galaxy without the use of the telescope. And so all of it is our environment, and it belongs to us, then we belong to it. So even though we can see it's far away from us, finding the stars reveals something deeply intimate to being human.

- Mary Stewart Adams

 

Tahnee and Mary discuss:

• Astrology and astronomy.
• The theory of seven year cycles.
• Egyptian and Greek star Mythology.
• Constellation mythology and fairytales.
• Building a relationship with the night sky.
• Rudolf Steiner's work on the platonic year.
• Tropical, sidereal, and Heliocentric astrology.
• Gregorian, Julian and Egyptian solar calendars.
• International dark sky movement; protecting natural darkness.
• Rudolf Steiner's philosophy of anthroposophy and star wisdom.
• Ancient architecture and ceremonial practises connected to star knowledge. 

 

Who is Mary Stewart Adams?

Mary Stewart Adams is a Star Lore Historian, and host of the weekly public radio program and podcast “The Storyteller’s Night Sky."  Through her research in spiritual science and her education in literary arts, Mary has developed a unique, humanities-based approach to understanding our relationship with the stars.  Her work is further augmented by an extensive knowledge of ancient mythologies and fairy tales, which she relates to the research and ideas of contemporary astronomy in order to understand the new star wisdom of astrosophy.

Mary has traveled extensively in fulfillment of her mission to safeguard the human imagination by protecting our access to the night sky and its stories, and has received numerous honors for her work.

As a global advocate for starry skies, Mary led the team that established the 9th International Dark Sky Park in the world in 2011, which later led to her home state of Michigan protecting 35,000 acres of state land for its natural darkness. Mary’s research in human biography and the stars began in 1981, when, at the propitious destiny moment in the life of the young adult, she opened her first book of mystery wisdom.  Mary’s book The Star Tales of Mother Goose~For Those Who Seek the Secret Language of the Stars, richly illustrated by her sister, artist Patricia Delisa, published in April 2021.

Mary is available for private readings, star parties, and public lectures, both online and in conscientiously-planned environments. As a dark-sky advocate and member of the International Dark Sky Association, Mary is keen on assisting communities that seek protection for natural darkness and starry skies.

 

Resources:

Mary's Facebook
Mary's Instagram
Star Lore Website
Storytellersnightsky.com
Mary's weekly radio reading
The Star Tales Of Mother Goose
International Dark Sky Association

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Check Out The Transcript Here:

 

Tahnee: (00:00)

Technology. Okay. I think we're recording now. Hi everybody, and welcome to the SuperFeast podcast. Today, I'm talking to Mary Adams, she's a star law historian, and I'm really excited to be talking to her. I feel like her work has come into my life at a really important time. For over 20 years, Mary has been working with this kind of extensive knowledge of spiritual science, of literature, of ancient mythology and fairytales.

 

Tahnee: (00:31)

And she relates these concepts to contemporary astronomy in order to help us understand the new star wisdom of anthroposophy, which is based on the work of Rudolf Steiner. So I'm excited to hear more about that. And Mary has also worked with Dark Sky Programmes. I've been to two Dark Sky parks, and I was really excited to hear your connection to this Mary, because there's such incredible places to just be with the stars.

 

Tahnee: (00:54)

And she's also worked a lot with fairytale, Moon Calendars. She has an ongoing weekly radio series. She works one-on-one with people, and she has a new book coming out, which I've ordered for my daughter and myself. And her work is really to help us understand and reconnect with the stars. And that's something that's become really resonant for me in the last five years or so. So I'm really grateful and excited to have you here today Mary.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (01:17)

Thank you. It's such a pleasure. Thank you.

 

Tahnee: (01:18)

Yeah. Really excited. And sorry, I did miss your Stewart, you're Mary Stewart Adams? I heard you describe on another podcast, how you were the Stewart before the French got to you. [crosstalk 00:01:29] And I remembered it, E-W-A-R-T, Stewart. Yeah. So I wonder, your background, how did you connect to the stars? What was your story to bring you to [inaudible 00:01:47] today.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (01:47)

I'm the seventh of eight children and I was always longing for more relationship with my mom, I would say. When you're the number seven, there's a lot going on in the life of the mother and I don't fault to her with that, but I was always looking for ways to connect. And one of the things that really intrigued me as a child was big words.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (02:10)

I liked big words and I couldn't wait to use big words to have real conversations with my mom. And then it was just a gradual step. She read to me a lot of nursery rhymes, a lot of fairy tales. And then one of the first things I remember is standing next to a horse fence with her looking up at the sky. And she had this bowl in her hands that had a... It was created so that you could have an imaginary horizon and move the bowl to see what time of night it was and which stars would be over the horizon.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (02:44)

And I wasn't so much trying to learn that as I was just wanting to be with my mom. So it was really about relationship. And I think that's one of the beautiful things about learning to know the night sky, is that the easiest way to find stars and constellations is knowing them according to whom they're next to. How does that relate to the environment that it's in? And I think that's one of the gifts that the stars give us, is that ability to relate to one another as human beings. So that's really where it began.

 

Tahnee: (03:18)

Yeah. Your little neighbourhood of star friends.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (03:22)

Yeah. And really climbing up on my mom's shoulders to have a look, but it was really about being with her. Because I think the very young don't need to be pulled out into the stars. I mean, they just can appreciate the natural world and it isn't until teenagers, young adults, then it starts to become important I think to know, all right. Now I should be able to identify things in my environment.

 

Tahnee: (03:47)

Yeah. And make that, because that was what really landed for me. One day I looked up and I was like, I mean, I know a couple of the really obvious constellations. My dad was pretty big on teaching us the basics, but I really, I was like, "Well, I don't really, I couldn't look at this as a map and really know my way through," and I couldn't identify some of the really major constellations in the astrological kind of sign constellations and stuff. And yeah, it's just something that landed for me that, I was like, "I want to know this. I want to know this language." Did that come later for you that brew longing or...

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (04:23)

Yeah. I mean, it's a significant moment I think, when you start to realise that you want to know that. I was introduced to astrology at the same time that I first heard the name Rudolf Steiner. So it was meeting his anthroposophy and astrology at the same time when I was 18. So it was pretty young and really astrology was a lot easier to get a hold of than the anthroposophy was.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (04:48)

But again, it was, my mom having conversations about these things with my older sister and I'm still lusting after this relationship. And so I thought, I need to figure this stuff out so I can, I need to be part of what's going on. I don't know, have the sense that when you're one of the younger children in a large family, you always feel like you're trying to catch up.

 

Tahnee: (05:09)

I can't imagine. I mean, I'm the eldest too. So it's not any relationship [crosstalk 00:05:14]

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (05:14)

But I have no fear of missing out.

 

Tahnee: (05:16)

I know, but I can imagine that you're, yeah. You're like this little being kind of seeing these conversations going on and really longing to be a part of that. And I can imagine the drive and the fire that, that puts in you.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (05:29)

Yeah. And longing is really important as even though longing can be difficult. It really drives a lot of what we do as human beings. We long for things, and that can be an inspiration or a motivation. So I started to really study astrology. It just immediately made sense, was like, "I get it." There's this definition of the planet, Saturn and it has a particular mood.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (05:55)

And if you put it here, that mood is coloured a certain way, you move it over here, it's coloured a different way. And I thought, okay, this is just like a living jigsaw puzzle, was really what I felt. And so it was like, "I get it." I really can. Now, I can figure everything else out that way. And I really just wanted to study my own chart and just see that it did occur to me pretty early on that this was coming out of ancient cultures and that something we were just talking about, but they weren't wrong.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (06:27)

And we might think that this was some wild idea that ancients had that we each come from a star, but I really felt like if this was true, then it must be knowable. And if it's knowable, then I'm going to know it, I want to find that. So it graduated from wanting to be in relationship with my mom and my older siblings and be in the conversation to now wanting to be related to ancient cultures in this kind of wisdom that comes to us out of what are called the mystery schools.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (06:53)

It's like, "All that unknowable stuff. I want to know all of that." Yeah. And then it was actually when I then became a parent, I was at that point started to read charts just for friends. And my daughter came into the room and she said, "What are you doing?" And I said, well, "I'm reading the story of somebody's life, the way it's written in the stars." She was pretty young. So I thought just really creative answer.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (07:17)

And she said, well, "You're cheating." And I said, "What do you mean I'm cheating?" And she said, "Well, you need to be out reading the stars." And this was a really remarkable moment for me because at that moment I realised, "Wow, I don't know what the constellations look like." I had had this experience in my childhood with my mom, but it wasn't about being able to identify constellations. It was just sharing something.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (07:45)

And so then I started to teach myself about the constellations, and my experience of that journey is that, I've said this before, but just that when we start on this path of seeking to know the stars, what we find out is they are also seeking to know us. And the only way to explain that is, you can't really explain it. You have to experience it. And so this quest to know the names of the stars and the shape of the constellations, and then the next level of that for me is, "Well, who named them? Where does this conflict?"

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (08:23)

Yeah. Right. [crosstalk 00:08:25] And then I think why, and then it's fascinating to look at least in Western culture, what happens in the age of exploration? Like the 16 hundreds, when now explorers are going out to different parts of the world and seeing stars over regions of the sky that were not available to Claudius Ptolemy and those that are coming out of the Greek, the way it moved toward the West.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (08:50)

And so now the race is on, and the 16 hundreds to start creating new constellations. But at that point in human history, it was no longer understood that we come from a star. So there weren't these deep mythologies and deep cultural influences connected to why you would name a region of sky a certain way. And I think this gets lost in the conversation about constellations, because there are these ancient constellations. And then there are these kinds of newfangled ones that are just based on what they might look like. And, that has consequences.

 

Tahnee: (09:25)

Yeah. Well, that's so interesting. You bring that up because one of the things I've found interesting and I don't have a strong reaction to it, but I'm just curious that our indigenous people here in Australia, had certain constellations and I've my partner had quite a close relationship with a leader from a tribe. And he was saying that they believed they were from the Pleiades.

 

Tahnee: (09:48)

And there's this kind of real sense of, yeah. For them, the stars aren't just this kind of concept or an abstract like mental conception, but they're literally a part of their living. And I think it's something that we've come over late, our own versions of things. And the way of the world, but yeah, it's what is there to learn from these traditions that helps us make some sense of the land that we live on and the environment that we live on and...

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (10:19)

Right. Yeah. And it's also, Pleiades is the most storied about group of stars in the sky...

 

Tahnee: (10:26)

The sisters.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (10:28)

Yeah the sisters. And it's oftentimes related to creation myths and stories of becoming. And in fact Rudolf Steiner makes a reference to Pleiades, that this is the point through which we enter our universe. So really, really takes it back to a deep place of creation and the brightest star in Pleiades, at least according to the Greek and then moving through the Arabic culture. It has the name Alcyone, which means foundation stone. So it's like, this is the foundation on which we stand to become in our realm of being. Yeah. So it's really lovely that way.

 

Tahnee: (11:10)

Goosebumps, again. Yeah. Because I think that's something that I... Yeah, when you hear those kinds of things and then you look, one of the things I'm really drawn to is looking across time and different myths, kind of misbearing cultures and where the similarities are. And like she was saying I can't remember this was, before we were talking just now, but you were saying about the knowing it's about, yeah. You sort of, okay, multiple people have seen this and experienced it over time. Can I have a direct experience of this? And then that makes it true for me. And and as a young child, Pleiades you're always so drawn to it and I've heard you speak about this. My cat is now visiting.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (11:54)

Okay.

 

Tahnee: (11:57)

I've heard you speak about when you want to learn to connect to a star that you sort of find the one you're drawn to and then learn about it. So I'm curious just to jump into that, if you're a new stargazer, and even if you're in a city where you don't have a lot of access to stars, how do you recommend people in the modern world, who maybe don't have access to these myths and these stories, how do they find the star?

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (12:20)

What I think, well, what I did was to get a map. And of course this was the day before apps. And I still will say maps, not apps because I like to have a map in my hands. And what I like to do is to orient a guy, I have to get into my environment and say, "All right, which direction is North, South, East, West?" Get the Cardinal points. And then looking at the map, figure out where is the thing that I want to see? Is it in the Southwest? Is it in the Northeast?

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (12:54)

And what time of day can it be seen or night? Rather, can it be seen and where do I need to go to see it? And what starts to happen is you're building a relationship with the environment, because now you're thinking very specifically in the geography where you find yourself. And this has a consequence, it's like you're building a container, so that you can think about something that seems to be really, really far away from us.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (13:18)

So far away from us, that scientists will say that the light that's coming from certain stars has taken so long to get here, that the star isn't even there anymore. Which is to me a really crushing thought because there's something about being affirmed when the light finally reaches us. And I feel like that moment is really sacred and it gets lost in this idea for me. And I'm not saying that it's necessarily so, but I feel lost in that thought like, "No, it's not that old because I'm present, I'm in the now moment."

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (13:50)

But just to really build a container in the environment for knowing, whereas Pleiades is going to be relative to my horizon tonight. Will I see it? And then out of that, you start to develop a relationship seasonally to what things are visible in which season. And then how does this inform when we look back into cultures prior to our own time, really prior to the use of electricity, how did this inform seasonal celebrations? Is it connected to what stars are overhead?

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (14:26)

And I'm also fond of saying that when we think about our environment, I would like to say, okay. So our environment can be described by everything that we can see, and we can see as far as the Andromeda galaxy, about the use of the telescope. And so all of it is our environment. So it belongs to us, we belong to it. So really even though we can see it's really far away from us finding the stars, it reveals something that's deeply intimate to being human.

 

Tahnee: (15:00)

Yeah. I've read or heard. I'm trying to remember where I got this from but I seem to recall one of Rudolf Steiner's big teachings was that it's our job to reconnect to the stars in this time of humanity. I might, I'm on the money obviously. So could you explain?

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (15:17)

Yeah. So this really wonderful verse that he gave to his wife in 1922, pretty popular in the anthroposophical community called the Stars Spoke Once to Man. So it's the stars, I'll see humanity, the stars spoke once to humanity, but it is world destiny that they are silent now. So this is, looking back at, at least as far back as the time of ancient Egyptian culture. When you can see that there was a great deal of architecture and at least as far as we can discern ceremonial practise, that was connected to a knowledge of the stars.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (15:55)

And that there is the idea in this verse, at least that this was the time when the human beings could still understand the speaking of the stars. And that to look at the gestures made between the planets relative to the stars was like a speaking of the divine. As we become more aware of ourselves, physically in the physical world and less aware of our roots in the celestial spiritual world, that kind of knowledge goes silent, takes thousands of years, but then we become more conscious in the physical world and less aware of ourselves as spiritual beings.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (16:30)

And this is world destiny. We have to become aware here in the physical, but the threat is that we will fall asleep and forget our connection. Forget that we have an origin that is, of course we get this physical body, the physical stuff from the physical earth. But the soul spirit nature is coming from beyond this and that in the human being, we have this kind of threefold nature that unites, but the risk is that we'll forget and sink just into the physical and not know that we come from a star or that we have a soul. And that it's the mediator between the physical and the spiritual.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (17:06)

And so the continuation of the verse is that this experience of the silencing of the stars can be pain for earthly humanity. There's pain in remembering, or at least knowing that once there was this great connection, but then out of the silence and out of this pain, their grows and their ripens, what the human being is speaking to the stars. And to be aware of this speaking can bring strength for the future human being.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (17:35)

And so really the quest now, is not so much, how do I get back to know the stars, the way the ancient Egyptians did. But how do I know the stars as a person living in the 21st century with all of this technology that's available to us and all of everything that's happening in our environment? How can I have a direct encounter in a way that is strengthening my ability to be human in the world right now?

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (18:01)

And I think that this is really important because so many of us live where we're cut off from the natural world and from being able to see the stars. And that's really, what's behind the international dark sky movement, is to protect natural darkness, wherever it is, and to look at how it's affecting habitat and the habitats that we share with all of the creatures of the earth and how we use our energy resources, how we're affecting our own health and wellbeing.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (18:29)

And then for me, it was not only that, but we need to have a kind of thinking to meet the challenges of our day that is really rich in imagination. I think it was Albert Einstein said you can't solve the problem with the same thinking that got you into the problem. So these pointing at the fact that we need a new thinking, and this is where the imagination starts to work and imagination as the kind of thinking that's about the world that we don't know, maybe we used to know it, but we no longer know that.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (19:05)

And we just have to begin to develop an imagination so that it can start to speak again. And so what I... This is where I go with that. It's like, "Okay, when I'm in the dark, if I'm in a dark space, I can either be inside or outside, but just truly dark. What's the first thing that starts to happen? Your mind starts to, you start to imagine."

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (19:27)

So imagination has its roots in the unknown, which we usually equate with being dark. That it's not unhealthy, it's really healthy to be in the dark and to let the imagination begin to move so we can know it, and then start to develop it to meet the world and to meet what faces us.Yeah.

 

Tahnee: (19:48)

Because I mean, you think about myth and every coach has these stories with, the hero goes into the darkness or the heroine and the great learning of the great experience happens. And then they bring this back to the world above and become these really powerful important figures in a community. And I mean, a lot of the traditions, I've studied Taoism and in yoga. They use dark rooms and dark... One of my teachers runs a three-week dark retreat, when you live in a dark house for three weeks and do all these wacky practises.

 

Tahnee: (20:27)

But what that also does the dreaming on a chemical level that stimulates a little turned into converting to DMT. And we open up into this kind of Chemonics space, I suppose. And I think that's something that we've sort of lost in our culture is that, a lot of these great scientists, they didn't think their way into these insights that they had. They had tracks of intuition.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (20:56)

Of inspiration. Right.

 

Tahnee: (20:56)

Yeah. And I think that's, when you think about what's going to get us out of some of the messes that we're in. It's probably not going to come from sitting down and thinking about it. I know for me, in my experience, like any of those strong pivotal moments of change in my life have come through, either a lot of suffering, and pain, death and those kinds of big events that really change you or through, yeah. Things that have...

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (21:21)

That throw you even emotionally or psychologically into the dark?

 

Tahnee: (21:26)

Yeah. And then...

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (21:26)

And I think that we can prepare for being in the dark the same way we might meditate in order to create inner space of tranquillity and calm so that when things are really hectic, you can meet it with that, what you've already cultivated in yourself. I have this experience at night sometimes when it's really dark and you're awake, but the activity of perception is engaged, but you can't see physically and it's like you can see inwardly.

 

Tahnee: (21:59)

I've had that experience.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (21:59)

Yeah. And I think that that's something that we can really cultivate and be conscious of. I can take advantage of that and have a practise that's connected to that. And it's not to say that intellect is bad, but that, because we need to use intellectual cognition in order to then kind of articulate what we're being inspired with, and make it meet the physical world that we're in, but we need access to something that's greater than this. And I feel like the natural darkness does that.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (22:27)

And then the stars, I mean, you think about a star, it's shining through the dark, but it's not diminishing the dark. It doesn't take darkness away. And it's, I think about this like, "Okay, how do I do that?" How do I do like a star? where you shine. But you let something be so free that you don't diminish where it is even though you're shining toward it. Beautiful, I think it's a beautiful thought.

 

Tahnee: (22:56)

It is a beautiful thought and a beautiful way to live really because yeah, I think it, I mean, I think that sense of the lessons that are held in the stars and the personalities, and I mean, I've been delving a little bit into planetary relationships with herbs and just with us as well. And I think that, obviously planets are big stars.

 

Tahnee: (23:25)

But yeah, I mean, I think that's something that even our astrology, that we're probably in this really powerful relationship with everything we can be observing within that, I just think about the movement of the sky and our place on this earth and how everything's affecting us. And we've sort of really lost touch with that. And [crosstalk 00:23:46]

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (23:46)

And I mean, yeah, we're having. Yeah, go ahead.

 

Tahnee: (23:49)

Well, I was just going to say, does that come in when you're thinking about people's charts and your own astrology? But yeah.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (23:55)

Yeah, it does. And I also in a much it's just this beautiful harmony that happens between the human being and the earth where, and this is something that I learned through a study of Rudolf Steiner's work about something that's called the great year or the platonic year. And it has to do with the wobble of the earth on its axis. All right. So this took centuries for human beings to figure this out. To be able to measure the rotation of the earth on its axis, which gives us a cycle of night and day.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (24:26)

And then to really concretely say, "Yes, the earth is in motion around the sun. So we have this orbital rhythm of about 365 days, but then also that earth is wobbling." So as it's rotating or it's wobbling along, and the wobble takes 25,920 years. So it's a really long time, but it's also, you could say it's like 172nd of a degree each year.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (24:50)

It's hard to measure in the space of one life, but after 72 years, earth has wobbled one full degree. That's the thing to hold on to like, "Okay, I can manage that." Then you look at the human being in the respiratory system, we breathe on average about 18 times a minute. And there's 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day. So we breathe 25,920 times in every 24 hour cycle, which is in this microcosmic complete harmony with this wobbling.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (25:27)

But you can say it is like the breathing of the earth. It's a living breathing being. And we are living and breathing with this being, really microcosmically. But then also this 70 seconds and the degree, shows up in the mythology of Osiris that when his mother, who was told that she was pregnant with him, I can never remember their names exactly.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (25:53)

So I think it's Geb is the God who knows that if he has an offspring, he'll be overtaken. So of course he doesn't want to have any children because he wants to remain top dog. So when she gets pregnant, he curses her and says, you shall give birth to this child in no month and in no year in the Egyptian calendar. But then Thoth, he is gambling with the moon and he wins the 72nd part of every day from the moon.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (26:18)

And after he has five full days together, he puts it at the end of the Egyptian calendar because it belongs to the no month and no year, then she can give birth. So she gives birth to Osiris, Seth, Typhon, Nephthys, and Isis. So these five great gods and goddesses of the Egyptian Pantheon. And it's this 72nd part of the day that Thoth is winning away from the moon. It's like, "Okay, they had this idea. They were already able to measure this wobble, which causes procession. It's just fascinating."

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (26:52)

And then, when you look astrologically, one of the things that I've learned through a study of ancient astrological tradition is that the idea that we each come from a star is rooted in this rhythm. And so that when we descend from the star toward the physical incarnation, you could imagine it this way. It's as though there's 72 years of life force. And of course not, everybody's going to live for 72 years. Some will die before that time. Some will live much longer than that.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (27:25)

But that, in the normal course of human evolution, we'll say it that way, that there is this imparting of forces from the celestial spiritual world that's connected to this breathing of the earth and the breaths that we take and the heartbeat and that you can then look at the life in these really interesting cycles that fit into that 72 year rhythm. And after 72 years, it's like you come back into relationship with your star, because the earth has wobbled enough, but now you have a direct relationship with God. Again, it's like the sun moves on and says, "Okay, handing you back."

 

Tahnee: (28:03)

Back to the stars. I was just wondering if that correlates to this idea of the sidereal astrology and the tropical Zodiac and how we as, I'm always curious about that, I guess, because it's something that I wonder if where, even reading accurately, if we're using it. So... yeah [crosstalk 00:28:22]

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (28:22)

It can be confusing. Yes. And it is directly related to that. So the reason the tropical and sidereal do not agree is because of this wobble, because if you imagine [inaudible 00:28:31] so the point of Equinox, when the sun seems to cross the celestial equator, is that, well, let me step back, one step further. The celestial equator is just the equator of the earth projected out into space.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (28:48)

And so I'm going to make a motion that you can see because we're on a screen, those who are listening, won't see this, but if you have this projection out and you slightly wobble, you can see that that point is moving. So the sun is crossing over that celestial equator slightly earlier, every year. And after 72 years, it's a whole degree earlier after 2000 years, it's a long way earlier. And so the point of beginning processes, and when we get to the time of the beginning, the way they Gregorian calendar is marked, it starts with the birth of the Christ child.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (29:26)

And at that point, actually the tropical and sidereal Zodiacs agreed at zero degrees of Aries. Since that time it's been processing. If you go back further than that, before you get to the Gregorian calendar and you have the Julian calendar system, and before that you have the Egyptian solar calendars. The Equinox is during... The Egyptian era it's the point of the Equinox when the sun is in front of Taurus. And so the bull is sacred and then this procession begins.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (29:55)

It doesn't begin, it continues on, and then you get to, for instance, the story of Jason and the Argonauts, and they have to go off to win the golden fleece. So this is related to Aries and part of what he has to do to win the golden fleece is he has to tame the fire-breathing bull. So he's got to overcome this kind of influence out of this ancient culture.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (30:16)

So the culture prior to their own, like the Egyptians had the bull. Now we're going to the fleece. So this is the procession from Taurus into Aries. And then you see the Christian symbolism that is oftentimes described by the symbol of a fish. So that's Pisces, who are into the Piscean age. And so the procession of the Equinox is something that's followed in sidereal and accounted for.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (30:40)

And sidereal means relative to the stars. Whereas with the tropical, it's fixed to the zero point as being at the beginning of Aries and that the sun is there on March 20th or 21st, which is no longer true. And so it's not, I want to qualify this though immediately and say, I don't think it's an error to use the tropical Zodiac. It's just to recognise that it has to do more with the physical, more with the day wake, more kind of with the egoic personality.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (31:15)

But then when we want to do the work of the soul and the spirit, then we move into the sidereal, at least with the soul nature. And then with the heliocentric. So looking toward the planetary system from the sun, then you get more with the spiritual nature. So it's kind of this three-fold way of looking, but first you have to grapple with, "Okay, am I dealing with my day wake personality, self? How aware am I of my soul? Can I actually touch the spirit?" And so all of it can be read.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (31:49)

I have a dear friend that does this wonderful work, he calls Foundational Flows, where he takes a few planets, he takes mercury, Venus and Mars. And I'm not going to be able to explain exactly how he's arrived at this relationship between these three planets, but looking at them in the tropical Zodiac, the sidereal Zodiac and the heliocentric Zodiac, and doing an exercise to align them within yourself, it's a really wonderful work. And it helps us to harmonise in that relationship to myself and who I am when I'm awake in the world and then in my soul nature and my spiritual nature.

 

Tahnee: (32:31)

I think that's such a beautiful because I think, I mean, I haven't looked a whole lot into it, I've definitely never looked into the heliocentric Zodiac. But sidereal, thinking of that soul personality being slightly different to that egoic personality, that just makes a lot of sense to me in terms of my lived experience.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (32:53)

Yes. And it's also it's, I mean, this gets pretty esoteric, but one of the experiences that would result from initiation into higher spiritual knowledge is that the flow of time is different in the different realms. So in our day, wake world with the sun rising in the East, going overhead, setting in the West, we live in a linear fashion. Beginning, middle, end, it goes kind of in a straight line.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (33:22)

But then when we sleep, when we dream, when we die, we are beyond this realm and things move from their end to their beginning. And when I think about this and try to imagine, is that something that I can become aware of while I'm embodied in life and the closest I've come so far. Because I really feel like I'm a neophyte at this. It's just, all right. So the sun rising in the East, setting in the West, but then when I go to sleep, I'm laying horizontally on my bed, on the earth and the earth is turning from the West back to the East.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (33:56)

So in the day, like my day wake personality, my ego is illuminated for me by the light of the sun, and it's going in a particular direction. But then when I go to sleep, something else is a different level of consciousness that's operating and it's moving in the exact opposite direction, and they don't cancel each other out. So for me, it's not necessary to say it's got to be either tropical or Sidereal.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (34:26)

It's like they're both operating. And we fix things in place so that we can come to awareness. For centuries, there was a teaching that the earth was fixed at the centre, even though the Pythagoreans taught that the earth was in motion, but that was mystery wisdom. You didn't just go talking about it with your neighbour because it was, it would be unsettling because first there has to become this conscious awareness of, I'm incarnate on the earth and the earth is stable and it can hold me.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (34:58)

And once I become mature enough in my relationship to being embodied and being on the earth, then I can set it in motion. And we got the scientific revolution now it's okay. Now everybody, "Hey, the earth is moving." Now you can talk about it on the corner with your neighbour.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (35:13)

This is common knowledge, but then the threat is that we'll forget that, "We came from something, something that emotion that stilled itself so we could become aware." And then, yeah, so this is, I think the challenge right now, I'm trying to take hold of star knowledge again, in a way that doesn't separate from the awareness, we can develop the scientific thinking, but also doesn't lose an awareness of our spiritual nature.

 

Tahnee: (35:47)

Just is for me sounding so much like just the individual human journey, it's like we come in and we need that security of family and community to make us feel safe and land here in this body in this time. And then we have to push back against that and develop through those kinds of years of our twenties and thirties and things. And then it's almost we come back full circle to remembering.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (36:14)

And we're growing through it. So in the first years of our life, where we are held very closely, and this would be described in esoteric astrology, and maybe in just general astrology as living through the moon sphere. So we live on the earth, we're below the moon. So the first seven years of the life are kind of contained with that. The moon has us at its centre, no matter what is going on with whether the planets are orbiting us, orbiting the sun or not it's, the moon is orbiting the earth, and we are right in the centre. We're at the core of that.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (36:48)

And then we begin to breathe out and grow beyond that. And our relationships move from those that are defined by the bloodline, into which we are born, into those that come out of the comic encounter, shared spiritual striving, other things that define our relationships, that then allow us to become more cosmopolitan, more worldly, more earth conscious, aware of ourselves as having this origin beyond something other than just this family that held us ideally, very securely and beautifully in the beginning.

 

Tahnee: (37:24)

I heard you speak of Saturn and the moon, being related in terms of time. And also, because I was actually speaking to a friend who's in her fifties about her next Saturn return. Okay. Well, I am right now.

 

Tahnee: (37:39)

It's sort of a running joke in our office, I'm like, [inaudible 00:37:43]

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (37:43)

Yeah, I do. Well, there's a... I read a quote [inaudible 00:37:47] not too long ago, "You must own your Saturn."

 

Tahnee: (37:51)

Look, And I mean, it's such a powerful and important transition as well. A lot of grace and gratitude for that time. But when you're in it, it's pretty wild. Yeah. Could you re remind me of that relationship-

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (38:07)

Yeah. I can talk about it. [crosstalk 00:38:09]

 

Tahnee: (38:09)

Yeah, that was really interesting.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (38:10)

It's good to know. I think because when we look at astrology, now we are oftentimes including in the interpretation, the outer planets, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, asteroids, other things, the galactic centres and points in space. We talk about the nodes. And actually I think in an ancient astrology, the nodal, well, I'm not going to go there. Let me just stay there.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (38:33)

So before the introduction of a telescope, the farthest of the wandering stars, the planets that could be seen, it was Saturn. So the fixed stars are much further away from us than the planets are. And if you look into the sky, even if you don't know the sky, if you watch night, after night, after night, you'll see that the stars stay in place relative to one another. But the rest of them, there's a few that seem to move. Those are planets.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (38:59)

And the one that's moving the slowest always connected to father time that's Saturn. And so Saturn was used to describe the boundaries of time. And when you look at the rhythm of Saturn, it takes it about 29.5 years for it to come exactly back to the place where it started, if you were measuring it, you marked the point. So we will say that the Saturn return starts to begin in the 28th year.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (39:26)

And depending on apparent retrograde and our own wobbling, sometime between 28 and 30 Saturn is coming back to the place where it was when you were born. And so you can divide that 28 year cycle of Saturn into seasons, so we have four seasons of the year. You can divide the first 28 years of the Saturn cycle into four quarters. So you have birth to, birth and early childhood, then you have childhood proper then adolescents, then young adulthood. And then you've got Saturn.

 

Tahnee: (40:02)

[crosstalk 00:40:02] the seven year?

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (40:03)

Yeah. So this is the seven year cycle. So it's four, seven year cycles. Four times seven is 28. So birth to seven, that's the first leg. And then seven is when you get the change of teeth and sometimes it's happening earlier, but you can see there's bodily things that are going on. And the physiology of the human being, there's these significant shifts that happen.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (40:23)

So first we're physically born. And then the change of teeth happens. Then we come into puberty. Then we come into adulthood proper, and then seven years later, you're back at Saturn returning to the position it was when you were born. And now what can happen is it's reviewing, all right. These were the circumstances I was born into that it seems to me like I didn't have anything to do with, except if I take the perspective of being a soul spiritual, being with incarnational intentions, I had a lot to do with what circumstances I came into.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (40:58)

But then now, I'm conscious of myself in a way where I can make a decision that separates from or further develops those circumstances I was born into. But when we're coming, so we were coming from our star, I'm giving you a really long answer. But the idea is that the midnight of the soul is something we actually experience when we're in the vicinity of our star. So it's not just a moment of sadness or heaviness or depression on the earth, but the midnight of the soul is an actual stage of becoming when we're between the time, between death and rebirth and a decision is made.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (41:35)

That's the only way to say it. I'm reaching up like, "Okay, you're up there with your star. You're making a decision to come toward earthly incarnation." And a process begins whereby you would get the forces for the physical body, from the stars. So Aries the head, Taurus the larynx, Gemini the limbs all the way through to Pisces the feet, and then moving through the wandering stars, the planets. We get the rhythms of the inner organism. So Saturn is connected to the spleen, Jupiter to liver, Venus to kidneys.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (42:04)

So this whole body is articulated out of our, the staring system. And Saturn as the one marking the boundary of like, "Okay, you're coming out of space and into time." These are two elements that are not synonymous. So we move out of space into time at the planetary spheres. And then the time that Saturn marks as the boundary is in perfect harmony with the moons with them of 28. So Saturn has a 29.5 year rhythm as does the moon. And so that's kind of give a long roundabout answer to what you were asking, but there's this-

 

Tahnee: (42:41)

Is a beautiful one.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (42:43)

So when we get to the moon sphere. So you imagine now you've come from your star, you're gathering together these forces that will build this body that is related to I mean, I've used the word karma, but what I mean by that is that there are things that we must meet of necessity out of our soul's intentions.And it's not predestination. It's just that these things will be in my path and how I meet those things it's up to my free will.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (43:10)

I can turn away from it, I can dive in, but nonetheless there are certain things that are going to happen along the way. And that, but as this body is being formed out of these forces, then I feel like I'm way out on the limb here.

 

Tahnee: (43:28)

I love this.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (43:28)

I can complete the picture. So the last place that the soul spirit germ is resting before incarnating is in the moon sphere, because the moon is like the guardian around the earth. It has the earth at its centre, it's orbiting the earth. And there's just this lovely imagination, that new souls that are coming to birth, they come on the moon beans [inaudible 00:43:48] fairytale, but these fairytales are rooted in these ancient ideas.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (43:53)

And so when they... The kind of this seed of our becoming drops into the womb of the mother after the conception, then this weaving process begins where the moon will then go through 10 lunations or 10 x 29.5 day cycles, that matches with Saturn that completes this formation of the body, and here in the physical, until we can really support the breathing and the heartbeat, we still can't stand, we don't, aren't born fully complete.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (44:29)

We still need this really strong, we have a strong relationship and out of necessity with other human beings. And so it's all kind of built in, but that, so you look at this relationship between Saturn and moon as kind of holding the rhythm of what life are you going to build into this structure that you've been gifted from the stars?

 

Tahnee: (44:54)

And I mean, that I'm feeling like into that Saturn return thing, as well about that almost coming back to rebirth and this approach [inaudible 00:45:04] to like, which is certainly my experiences [inaudible 00:45:07] to recreate yourself again. And that the seasonal thing of like, I'm really feeling a lot of the Daoist stuff, even though it's different.

 

Tahnee: (45:16)

I don't know about the Western astrology, but in Taoism, the liver, all the organs have a spirit and the liver holds the hun, which is the one that holds our visioning and our dreaming. And it said that when we lay down horizontally at night, it goes out into the stars and dances amongst the stars.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (45:33)

That's Beautiful.

 

Tahnee: (45:34)

Keeps us to that higher realm, I suppose. And that made me laugh when you were saying that, because it's also this sense that we do move back from the West to the East, through the underworld. And so there's this kind of, and that would also be correlated to winter time and these darkness and descent.

 

Tahnee: (45:55)

And yeah, I can really feel like that in that sort of flow with Saturn and with the moon and that feminine essence as well of coming back. I always think of Saturn as a masculine archetype, but in that it's in a relationship with the moon that feels like a really beautiful kind of dance.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (46:11)

Yeah. I think traditionally the moon is regarded as feminine and Saturn as masculine, but it is that it has that sense of being embraced or in wound. And I think when we do come back to when Saturn returns to the place where it was when we were born or when the moon comes back to that place, which it does every 19 years or so that we can have this sense of, "This is who I am. I'm walking in my own shoes."

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (46:40)

And for those moments, it's an opportunity to assess where have I been? And to really sense in the feeling of life that I did have an intention and where am I in relationship to that? So I think that looking at these rhythms in our lives can be really healthy, because it allows us to say, there are these markers that happen naturally and rhythmically in every human life.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (47:04)

Whether we accept that we have a relationship with the planets and the stars or not, it's a matter of fact that each one of the planets will return rhythmically to the place where they were when we were born. They won't all be in the same place when that happens, but each time they return, there's just this encounter we have with ourselves. And in the anthroposophical worldview about the planets, it's that moon, and mercury, and Venus are destiny determining.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (47:39)

So this is where we can look for the forces of destiny. And then that Mars, and Jupiter, and Saturn are liberating. And there's just this really wonderful way that they are woven together through the days of the week. So I hope it's not hard to conceive of this without seeing, but we go from Monday, which is moon day to Mars day.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (48:02)

So the moon is between earth and sun. Mars is beyond the sun from the earth. And then, so we go from moon day to Mars day for Tuesday, then to Wednesday, which is mercury. So we're going from a destiny determining planet out, to a liberating planet, back to a destiny, determining planet, back to a liberating planet back and forth weaving in the cycle of the week. And then the sun is there mediating.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (48:33)

So the sun being the sun hero in Christianity, this is the Christ being in Egyptian mythology. It's RA, there's always, it's her own Mazda. There's always this sun being, that is mediating between these forces of karmic, necessity and liberation. And the reason I think that they weave together through the week is because we are incarnate on the earth and we do have to deal with being human in the world and sorting out our relationships to one another, to our environment, to the other creatures that live in this space.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (49:06)

And then we get this opportunity also to lift that up, weaving back and forth. It's really beautiful, but when you think about like, "Why is it ordered that way? Who did that?" Do you know who did that? Because, I mean, I've shipped from the... Yeah. I mean, I know calendars are so different all over the world, but the shift to a Gregorian calendar's has a big impact on outlook.[crosstalk 00:49:36]

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (49:36)

Yeah. So that, yeah, Gregorian calendar reform happened in the 15 hundreds, but then of course there was Napoleon in France during the French revolution. They got it... It wasn't Napoleon or maybe it was in the French revolution and he re-instituted it, they got rid of the Gregorian calendar and tried to go to a 10 day week and change things up. But I think really it was the Babylonians, the ancient Babylonians that divided the sky or at least the Zodiac into 12 parts.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (50:08)

It doesn't get fixed right away. And I can't, I wish I could answer that question. I'm not really sure who gets credited with saying, "Okay, seven days of the week and how it's related to the planets," but in many different languages, you hear the planets in the name of the days of the week.

 

Tahnee: (50:26)

Yeah. Well, that's, I know that with some, the Vedic culture as well. [inaudible 00:50:29]

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (50:29)

Yeah. So it seems that it's pretty universal? But all right. Here's these planets were related to that and it's right into the days of the week for us. Yeah.

 

Tahnee: (50:38)

Have you ever seen this huddle shell that has the 13?

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (50:42)

Yes.

 

Tahnee: (50:42)

Yeah. That's always been really interesting to me, because we do have 13 moons in a year.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (50:47)

Right. Yes.

 

Tahnee: (50:50)

[crosstalk 00:50:50] often, so there's this sort of little bit of a normal-

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (50:52)

Yeah. And then making that shift from a lunar based calendar to a solar based calendar. So for instance, in the Islamic culture, the new year is connected with the moon and the moon doesn't occur on the same day, from one year to the next... That's the same date, rather it's always processing through the year.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (51:14)

And so this is a very interesting dynamic culturally, that's a lot different from a culture that is rooted in the rhythm of the sun. And I think that it's, I just really think it's really important to pay attention to that, the calendar system, when trying to understand different cultures. That if you're basing your high ceremony and sacred observance on the moon, it's quite different than if you're basing that on the sun, your rhythms are going to be different and the culture will be different. And that's okay. Because the sun and moon are different.

 

Tahnee: (51:53)

Yeah. Well that makes me think, because we were off the camera, when we were talking earlier, we were talking about anthrosophia

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (51:58)

anthroposophy.

 

Tahnee: (52:02)

anthroposophy. Yes. Happy now, you've explained that to me. But that feminine, that this is a feminine age and it's sort of almost if you feel that strong, like masculine, again, I relate to the sun is very masculine, strong energy, a very young energy from that Daoist sort of perspective. And then, you've got this Gin kind of moon energy. Yeah, you can feel that it's a challenge to be in a feminine space in this culture. It's a very linear forward moving coach, which I think has its benefits in some ways, but it's also, it does take away a lot from that soft.

 

Tahnee: (52:41)

And that's always been what attracted me to those sort of Daoist wisdom traditions is that they're very fluid, they're very water like, they're very feminine in a way, almost soft and yeah, I think it's, can be difficult to embody that feminine essence in this time. And can you speak a little bit to that? What is that calling for humans at this time?

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (53:03)

Yeah. [crosstalk 00:53:04] So if I went back to this verse that said from Rudolf Steiner, about becoming aware of our speaking to the stars, there's also in this idea that, again, I feel like I keep talking about the ancient Egyptians, but they had this wonderful art about the sky goddess, not who at the end of every day, she swallowed the sun and then it would move through her body. And the Starlight that we see was actually the light of the sun radiating through her body.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (53:33)

And then every morning she would give birth to the sun. And so this being is a celestial goddess and she bears the stars toward us. And then one of the things that Rudolf Steiner describes is that in the Egyptian myth of Osiris, he slain and then it's Isis, his concert and queen that has to remember him. She gathers together the parts of his body and puts it in a common grave.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (54:02)

But she also goes throughout Egypt to gather the parts of his body, and everywhere she goes, she teaches ceremony, according to what part of the body does the community have. So to be crude, but like, okay, if you have the left foot, you do a certain ceremony different than the right arm. But in this way, all of the culture is engaged in re embodying this great God.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (54:26)

And then what Rudolf Steiner brings to this mythology is that it goes on and Isis, herself is slain. And that she's slain in the thought about the cosmos that only looks at it according to the laws of gravitational force and celestial mechanics. And only looking at how to measure distances, and speeds, and chemical composition, and things like that, that this is the grave of Isis.

 

Mary Stewart Adams: (54:53)

It's the grave of this celestial goddess that bears the star wisdom toward us, and that we are living in a time now where we have to li