Astrology

"From a process-oriented point of view, we can best understand the birth-chart - the map of the heavens drawn from the exact time and place of a person's first breath - if we picture it as a stop-motion snapshot of a moment in the flow of the life of the cosmos…

“A birth-chart is thus a celestial statement of where the universe 'is', and therefore what it needs next, at the moment of our birth."

— Dane Rudhyar

Against the backdrop of modern materialism, astrology seems like the youthful folly of a superstitious era of humanity that we have long outgrown. Why should the position of the planets of our solar system at the moment of our birth have any bearing on the lives we live?

The truth is, I don’t know why. My mind is as steeped in the dominant western paradigm as anyone else’s. When I hear modern atheists attack Astrology as ‘unscientific’, I can see that they’ve taken ‘It’s not true because it can’t be true’ as their starting position. A position that I, myself, inhabited until sometime in my mid-twenties.

Perhaps the real question is; what gets left out of a scientific paradigm that equates the measurable with the real? How would we go about discovering the immeasurable, the subtle, the felt, the metaphorical and the implied when our instruments are so solely attuned to the physical?

Again… I don’t know why Astrology works… And yet...

A deep dive into Astrology reveals an uncanny mytho-thematic alignment with the lived life. Working with the natal chart (the moment of birth), progressions (the unfolding chart over time) and transits (this moment of time overlaid on the natal chart) we can get a bountiful picture of the multi-faceted, ever-evolving experience of life on Earth.

Having Astrology on your side is like having a constantly moving multi-dimensional map of your existence. The language of the map is symbolic, mythological and deeply interactive. Once we know how to read a map such as this, we can knock on all sorts of doors including: ancestry; soul lineage; relationships; career and calling; the gift we come in with; the context we’re best suited to give that gift; our persona, shadow and deep self; and so much more.

One of the most common criticisms heard about astrology is the question: how can 1/12 of the population be the same sign? In fact, the astrological chart is not just one sign - it’s a unique combination of all 12 of the signs of the Zodiac. Everyone has a little of every sign in them; in the same way that the basic anatomy of a human being remains the same for everyone, yet we all appear to be unique from each other.

The Sun, in astrology, became everyone’s ‘sign’ in newspaper horoscopes from the 1950s onwards. And fair enough, the Sun is an important placement in an astrological chart. But perhaps not as relevant to who one is as the moon sign or the ascendant. Once we add in Venus, Mars and Mercury as the rest of the inner planets we get a fairly thorough map of the psyche to work with. The addition of Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, as well as the houses and angles, give us a blueprint that won’t be repeated in thousands of years. In this way, astrology speaks to the individual as a unique combination of collective archetypal forms.

Each of the planets that I’ve mentioned above are so-named after the Romanised version of the gods of ancient Greece. Although it is nowhere near the complete catalogue of deities, the eight planets (ok, 7+1 super-powerful dwarf-planet in Pluto) plus the Sun and the Moon give us a thorough, but not overwhelming, map of the multi-faceted (faced) self. Beyond this, many other old stories and fairy (magic) tales can be overlaid onto the 12-sign framework; hence astrology can go as deep as the practitioner or client are willing and capable of going.

In practice

In longer term psychotherapeutic work, the chart becomes, as Jason Holley says, ‘the wise elder in the room’ who sheds light on things that neither the client nor the practitioner would otherwise be able to see. It weaves its way into sessions on its own terms, making noise from the background when its insights are applicable, resting silently when not.

Sometimes we are off on our Mercury journey, learning about how we communicate and how that can evolve, or dancing our dance with the Trickster. Sometimes the goddess of beauty, Venus, has us in her grips or we’re exploring who we are in conflict with the help of the god of war, Mars. The Sun journey may have just come back online and our process of individuation becomes suddenly more relevant than usual. In any given life, at any given moment, it is some combination of planetary energies at play.

Let me be clear here that it’s not a case of the gravity of these planets pulling us in certain directions. That’s the literalism we were left with when astrology and astronomy split in the 18th century coming to the fore. Rather than some force acting on an object (‘it’ affecting ‘me’), we think of ‘as this planetary event happens, so I happen’; both the planets and myself being a part of a Universe getting to know itself.

Or as Hermes Trismegistis put it almost 2,000 years ago, ‘As above, so below. As within, so without. As with the Universe, so with the soul.’

In this way, we are able to more fully align with the soul’s language of myth and story, developing our gifts as a part of an ever-changing planet, as we move through the strange alchemical process of becoming who we actually are. Just like nature, the more we interact with our chart the more it comes to life. Which, perhaps, is another reason why that archetypal, mythical character of the ‘objective observer’ of modern science sees nothing but squiggly lines and something from the archaic junk folder.