The third eye

The “third eye” is an image that occurs in several traditions and that popular accounts regularly equate with an organ of the brain. Both can be taken apart.

Where the image comes from

In the Indian tradition, Ajna names a centre between the eyebrows — one of several in a system that describes the body as a series of levels. What is at issue there is inner perception, not a hidden sense organ.

Other traditions have similar images. Merging these different notions into a single “third eye” is an achievement of nineteenth-century Western esotericism, not of the sources.

The pineal gland

The pineal gland is a small organ in the centre of the brain. What it does is well studied: it produces melatonin and thereby governs the day-night rhythm. Its activity depends on incoming light, relayed through the visual pathway — hence the link with light that turns up in many accounts.

Some vertebrates have a parietal eye, an organ on the roof of the skull that really is sensitive to light. In certain lizards it is visible under the skin. That is the real state of affairs from which the phrase “third eye” as an organ arose — in humans it does not exist.

How the equation came about

In the late nineteenth century, theosophical literature linked the Indian Ajna with the pineal gland, then newly described, and with the parietal eye of reptiles. The connection was a phenomenon of its time: a recent anatomical discovery set into an older image.

Everything that circulates today about “calcification of the pineal gland” and its “activation” goes back to that. Calcification of the pineal gland is a real finding, and one that increases with age — its interpretation as a lost faculty of perception is not.

What this has to do with astrology

Nothing, and that is the point.

Astrology calculates positions in the sky. It is neither tied to notions of inner perception nor dependent on them. The two fields are regularly offered together, and that proximity does most harm to the field that has a verifiable basis.

Anyone who wants to learn astrology needs no heightened powers of perception. They need the methods of calculation, the meanings and the patience to look at many charts.

See also: Occultism — the term, its history and its boundaries.