Astrology of the Heavens; Astrology of the Hands

This article first appeared in the FAA Journal and is now online at astro.com. To read the whole article click here.

A few years ago a woman named Anna came for a consultation. She was in her late 50s, in the midst of her second Saturn Return. Australian, of Chinese descent, she was the mother of a student of mine who was learning Craniosacral Therapy. Anna had just come back from Peru where she’d been participating in ceremonies using plant medicines such as Peyote and Ayahuasca.

As we sat down to read her chart together, she told me that in Peru she had been using these medicines to create a direct line to the energies underlying each of the planets. For her, when I mentioned Saturn, it was not an abstract concept, a list of keywords and phrases. It wasn’t even simply an ‘archetype’ or a ‘primordial form’. Saturn was a real being with definitive (and changeable) characteristics, just like her, you and me.

I’ll never forget how potent that session was. Rather than talking about Saturn we were able to talk with him (or her as the case may be). Suddenly the chart was alive in a whole new way. We were not so much reading her chart as communing with it.

In our modern Western consensus reality we would look at this as an example of anthropomorphising: giving human characteristics to non-human forms. It would be obvious to the logical, literal Western mind that the planet Saturn is simply made up of rocks and gases and has no sentience whatsoever. As far as Saturn, the Titan Cronus in Greek mythology, he’s a figment of human imagination, a character in a story. He isn’t real.

Maybe that’s what the medicines of the Amazon do for those who ingest them: turn off this linear, logical mind that can come in almost like an overlord of consciousness. Much like a friend of mine who felt so betrayed when she found out that Santa wasn’t real. As an adult, to protect her son, she told him from the start that there was no such thing. This saved him from that sense of betrayal that she herself had felt. But did she not perhaps also strip from him a sense of wonder? Is there value in a child imagining elves creating toys at the North Pole, flying reindeer and a generous philanthropist in a big red suit? She assumed that, for her son, the Truth was more important than a good, functional story.