The vertical worldview: correspondence, not cause

There are two fundamentally different ways of bringing order into the world – and most arguments about astrology arise because the people having them are unwittingly using two different ones. In the German-speaking world a vivid picture has taken hold for these two approaches: the horizontal and the vertical worldview. The expression is closely tied to the name of Thorwald Dethlefsen. What matters here is not the person but the idea, because the idea can be followed without knowing anything about its author.

Horizontal: the chain of causes

Horizontal thinking follows time. Something happens because something else happened before it: the ball flies because someone kicked it. The cause always lies on the same level as the effect, immediately before it. This is the thinking that made the natural sciences great, and its successes are impossible to miss. It has a fixed procedure: an object is broken down into smaller components, those into smaller ones again, and the explanation is always sought one level further down. The whole is explained from its parts.

Vertical: the order of correspondences

Vertical thinking does not ask what came before, but what resembles what. It orders across the levels: this plant, this colour, this metal, this organ, this character trait and this planet belong together because the same pattern is recognisable in them – not because one of them produces the other. That is the core of the old formula “as above, so below”. The same order shows itself in great things as in small, without a wire running between the two.

This is where the real point for astrology lies. Anyone who thinks vertically is not claiming that Mars sends out rays that make a person angry. The claim is this: what is called Mars and what is called assertiveness in a person are two appearances of the same pattern on different levels. The stars cause nothing, they indicate something – the way a clock indicates the time without making it.

Why simplification is part of it

Both approaches simplify, they merely do it in opposite directions. Horizontal thinking simplifies downwards, towards the smallest units, and piles up more and more detail as it goes. Vertical thinking simplifies upwards: behind a boundless variety of appearances it looks for the few basic patterns – twelve signs, four elements, a handful of planets. That is why the symbolic language of astrology strikes newcomers as so coarse at first. It is not trying to depict every individual case, but the pattern that repeats across many individual cases.

The fundamental problem

The two systems are poorly placed to judge each other, because each recognises only its own kind of evidence. Ask astrology for a cause and it can supply none, because it knows of none. Ask measurement for a correspondence and it finds none, because it is not looking for one. From this follows an uncomfortable consequence that honest astrologers name openly: a system of correspondences cannot be refuted. After the event it finds the fitting image for every outcome. That is exactly what makes it rich as a language of interpretation and unreliable as an instrument of prediction.

What the model is good for

As a description of two ways of thinking, the picture of the horizontal and the vertical is usable and clarifying. It explains why astrology and the natural sciences regularly talk past each other, and it strips astrology of the claim to be physics in disguise. What it does not do: it proves nothing. Whether an order of correspondences really exists, or is read into things, is a decision no worldview takes off your hands.

In practice this comes down to something very sober. When you read a chart, you are not reading causes but images – and images call for judgement. Anyone who keeps that in mind gets further with astrology than someone who expects laws of nature from it, and stays protected at the same time from the self-deception that a symbol has proved anything.