Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Suddenly, my room was torn by an enormous explosion. The smell of death filled the room. The floorboards broke open, and from the steaming earth rose a looming, ominous form...
Astrology was once a statelier business. It was a transaction that occurred between emperors and the absolute. The pageants of the zodiac projected themselves upon the lives of kings. The earth was at the center of the universe. Berosus, the high priest of Babylon, would climb the spiral ramp of the great ziggurat at night and ask the stars if the time was ripe to move against the Assyrians. Frederick II would not sleep with his wife, or Lorenzo de' Medici build his country house, until their astrologers prescribed the days and times for doing...
Astrology was the machinery of the universe. All the details of the world were wired to the vibrations of the heavens. The membranes of history thrummed to astral music. How cozy that stars and planets should intervene so intimately on earth...
...modern incarnation, astrology has become both charming and ridiculous. Somehow the old portentous shrinks down toward the bathos of the fortune cookie and the UFO. The earth is not the center of the universe. Democracy has a hard time sustaining the cosmic drama -- the stars must busy themselves with the fates of hairdressers as well as rulers. Astrology degenerates to advice that runs on the feature page slightly to the left of Garfield and the Wizard...
...over Jesse Jackson by almost a 3-to-1 vote in last week's Ohio and Indiana primaries and thereby flattened the last scant hopes of Democratic drama. With the vice presidency now the only game in town, the press is treating it with the same fate-of-the-earth gravity that was once lavished on the Iowa caucuses...