In the beginning, astrology was alive. Life and especially that aspect of life we call mind, is shaped by the recurrent patterns of relationship between the living and the surrounding world. As humankind evolved it was always in the context of an existence upon a whirling sphere, cyclically exposed to sun, moon, planets, and stars, and interactive with them. Thus we may truly say that the patterns of heavenly movement are inherent in life, in mind, and in humanity. And as men and women further regarded the stars as their wandering companions, the diverse regularity of the heavens continued to inform them of the subtleties of pattern, as they in turn laid upon the stars a template revealing the qualities of emerging mind.

Human life at the beginning was not separate from creation. The stars must have been an intimate part of day to day life. Yet so little remains to inform us of our ancestors earliest attempts to grasp the heavens. Did they climb mountains to place themselves closer to the stars? Did they pile up bricks or stones to mark their course through the skies? We know that they did so as much as 4000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia, and at least by 1500 BC at Stonehenge--and who can say how long the Great Medicine Wheel, with its precise astronomical alignment of stones, has stood high in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming? In any event we are safe to assume that in the splendor of the dark, quiet nights, gazing into the starry vault, early man was transported; lifted to the realm of the gods. Many centuries later the Roman poet Manilius (first century AD) captured what early men and women may have felt: