Charlie Obert
Older astrology is sometimes criticized as being overly negative, or fatalistic, or judgemental.
Maybe.
It seems to me that some modern astrology has gone too far in the other direction – in the name of being ‘positive’ it can become unrealistic and unbalanced.
It might be true to say that there are no ‘good’ or ‘evil’ planets, or transits, or aspects.
A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of watching a presentation by a fine local astrologer, on the current transits and the state of world events. As she talked, I noticed something interesting.
When she talked about a planet’s effect, she was invoking, and embodying, the energy of the planet she talked about. Continue reading “Invoking the Planetary Energies”
Part of my study of astrology has been a quest to find, and understand, the philosophy or world-order that makes sense of it.
Most modern astrology that I have seen does not clearly address this issue. Implicitly, the question is dealt with in a number of ways.
1) It’s ignored. That doesn’t work, since astrology makes no sense within the context of the current scientific – materialist mainstream worldview.
2) It tries to make astrology ‘scientific’, by weeding out all that is ‘superstitious’ about it, and working with analytic tools like statistical studies. Continue reading “Astrology and Rational Order”
You remember that lovely song by Paul Simon, called, Tenderness?
I know you see through me,
but there’s no tenderness
beneath your honesty.
That comes to mind a lot lately, as I watch interactions in the community of astrologers I work in here.
Astrology is not a single monolithic discipline. As Donna Cunningham put it, there are hundreds of ways of doing astrology, and they all work. Continue reading “A Gracious Attitude”
Like most people brought up in our American urban industrial culture, I grew up in a world that assumes a disconnect between the inner world of my thoughts and feelings, and a meaningless, dead and random outer world. The outer world is ‘scientific’; it has no inherent meaning or significance.
That’s painfully obvious to me when I walk in a neighborhood where there are mostly factories or business buildings. It is obvious that the landscape was ripped up and re-ordered with no sense of aliveness, or reverence, or meaning. There was a job to be done, and the land here was Meaningless Stuff to be moved around and re-arranged to get that job done. Continue reading “Astrology and Re-Enchantment”
I have been looking at a lot of astrology charts, and reading for a lot of people this past several months. While I’ve been doing that, there is another part of me that is sitting up in observer position and just watching the process. Here’s what I’m finding out about how I read.
I think of a chart as a tuning device – hand me a chart and you’ve said something like, check out this radio station – 97.6, KAYZ – so I go to my radio and tune to those letters, do a bit of fiddling with the fine tuning… and in comes the music. Continue reading “On Reading a Chart”