Category: Psychology

Astrology, Perception and Interpretation

It has been a long time since I have written anything here on my astrology blog. I want to talk here about why.

I wrote a long post last month, analyzing the general astrology for 2022 using the Capricorn and Aries ingresses, and an eclipse that falls right around the US election in November. I sat on it for over a month, and I’ve decided I don’t want to publish it, for a couple of reasons.

One, what I am seeing in the astrology for the year is quite turbulent and dark.

And two, at this point, I don’t see any way that I, or anyone else, can dis-entangle general political views and opinions from the astrology I do, especially in our highly polarized world. I now think that is inevitable. I want to give a couple of instances here. Continue reading “Astrology, Perception and Interpretation”

Dealing with Death

Dealing with Death

These thoughts were triggered by a Facebook post I saw, talking about seeing signs of upcoming death in astrology data. More importantly, the question arose as to how to appropriately talk with a client about death when it is a real possibility, or when the client knows it is likely.

I’ve already done some writing about dealing with suffering and death in my book on Saturn, and there will likely be some overlap in that writing with what I am saying here.

I want to sort this essay into a few separate issues:
– Can astrology data show indications of possible or likely death?
– How do we as astrologers talk with our clients about this?
– Why we as astrologers need to come to terms with death.

Continue reading “Dealing with Death”

Mercury – As Above, So Below

On the Border Between Worlds

I am finishing up the first full draft of my book on the philosophy of astrology; the working title is, The Divine Dimension: The Spiritual Roots of Western Astrology. This is my attempt to go back to the roots of our western astrology in the Greek Platonist tradition, and think through the underlying philosophy and worldview.

There is a single core issue that is an underlying theme of our western philosophical tradition, reaching from the early Greek era, what we now refer to as the PreSocratics, all the way through to the world we live in today. The core issue is, the Mind/Matter dichotomy. Basically, we have a Mind in here and a world of Matter out there, and we need a way of thinking about how they connect.

In the Platonist worldview we are living in two worlds or dimensions at once, eternal and temporal. We access the eternal dimension by looking inward, within our minds, and we access the temporal, physical dimension by looking outward, sensing and perceiving the material world. Inner/mental and outer/physical really are two distinct dimensions of experience. Both are part of being human, and you can’t reduce either of them down to the other without leaving out a whole domain of experience. You can’t collapse inner experience down to an epiphenomenon or side effect of matter, and you can’t collapse outer sensory experience down to an effect of the inner, the Mind.

These are two dimensions of our full human experience; and they are related, they mirror each other, they are connected.

Platonism approaches the situation by making the eternal dimension primary and viewing the temporal world of matter as secondary and derived. Platonists view knowledge of the world as inherent in our minds and ultimately retrieved from within. The Aristotelian side of the Greek tradition starts in the other direction, with our deriving our knowledge of the world from outer experience, and abstracting from that to move to inner knowledge. They are trying to get at the connection from opposite directions, and both of them have valid points to make.

In this post I want to try looking at this from a somewhat different perspective, focusing on the role of the planet Mercury. Continue reading “Mercury – As Above, So Below”

Socrates and Hitler: Good and Evil Daemons

Socrates and Hitler: Good and Evil Daemons

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!
– Isaiah 5:20

“Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.”
– Hannah Arendt

In my previous post on Socrates and His Daemon I argued for the activity and guidance of higher intelligences in our lives, daemons who connect us to our highest good. This is a wonderful and comforting thing.

However, we need to pay attention to the other side of the mirror. If you are going to be open to the possibility of dealing with good and helpful daemons, you need to be aware of the possibility of evil daemons, those whose influence cause pain, harm and destruction.

Just because an intelligent spirit is discarnate does not mean it is a truth-telling force for good. All daemons are not created equal. You need a way of distinguishing helpful and harmful forces. You need what is called discernment of spirits.

In the previous post we looked at an extreme example of the influence of a positive daemon. To balance that, I want to look at an extreme example of the influence of evil, and the distinct possibility of possession by an evil demon.

Adolf Hitler. Continue reading “Socrates and Hitler: Good and Evil Daemons”

The Good Life

The Good Life

Essay by Charlie Obert, November 2020

Before you start reading this essay, consider the title, The Good Life, and just notice what comes to mind. How do you imagine the Good Life? I will ask you to consider that same question again at the end of the essay.

This is part of a series of posts in which I am looking at ways we can recover the Platonic tradition to give a firm foundation for making sense of astrology. I think it makes a lot of sense of life in general. I will cover one approach to it here that may sound abstract and theoretical at first glance, but that actually is very useful in a down to earth and practical way. Continue reading “The Good Life”

Astrology and Media Manipulation

The Purpose of this Essay

As astrologers we do interpretation by mapping the symbolic language of astrology onto the data and information about the world around us that we experience. Astrology does not exist in a vacuum; it does not come alive until we relate it to our world. That leads to a very important point that I am going to meditate on in this essay.

Our astrology on any topic is only as good
as the news data that we are mapping it to.

In today’s world this causes some problems. Like it or not, the state of the news media today is now such that much of the news we consume is badly distorted, contains a great deal of falsehood and fiction, and is usually slanted to support a political agenda.

If we follow only slanted and distorted sources of news
then our astrology becomes slanted and distorted.

We need to be aware of this process, and of the distortion in the news and media we consume. We also need to develop skills for viewing media with a critical discernment, and with awareness of the persuasion process going on that is being used on us to shape our opinion.

What I want to talk about in this essay is how the same skills that make us good astrologers also make us easily susceptible to programming by the media. Tarot readers, psychics, and practitioners of other forms of divination are similarly vulnerable if that is their only way of looking at the world.

In order to be good astrologers today we really need to be media-aware, media-savvy, have some understanding of how our minds work, and of how the media can easily exploit that if we are not aware of the process.

This also means that, along with our skills as astrologers in seeing patterns of meaning, we really need to develop balancing skills that allow us to stand back, to sort, to question, to sift and to compare news sources. Those skills don’t come naturally, and for most of us, those skills are not naturally a part of our astrology toolkit. We need to consciously develop them. That takes work, it takes exploration, it takes learning, and it takes practice. Continue reading “Astrology and Media Manipulation”

On the Late, Great Planet Pluto

by Charlie Obert

I don’t think well on my feet. I do my best thinking sitting relaxed, with a cup of hot tea and some classical music on in the background – at the moment it is Beethoven string quartets. This gives me time to really think through subjects before I say or write anything.

I have some things to think out in this post.

Yesterday I made a post to my Facebook page about how I thought it was time to stop treating Pluto as a full fledged planet, and that position could no longer be easily justified in either traditional or modern terms.

I reproduce my post here.

At the risk of being the party pooper in the astrology community – I really don’t think continuing to make a big deal out of Pluto works today with either traditional or modern astrology.

In traditional terms it is not one of the classical planets, and traditional astrology works very well without it. I have quit including it in the charts I do. (For that matter, most of the time I now leave out Uranus and Neptune.) Most of the meanings assigned to Pluto were originally part of the more complex traditional signification of Saturn – I talk about that in my recent book on Saturn.

In modern terms it is no longer considered a planet – it is in 2006 that Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet. Any astrologer that speaks at all about being “scientific” is on shaky ground in science terms by hanging on to Pluto’s significance as a full planet. Still treating Pluto as a planet is being way behind the times scientifically.

The concepts normally attached to Pluto are pretty ominous, and very vague, and you can attach them to pretty much anything because of that vagueness. At any given point in time you can find SOMETHING going on you could assign to Pluto.

I find that leaving Pluto out eliminates a kind of ominous background noise, like clearing away a cloud of smoke.

I am just starting to see occasional posts referring to the eight (rather than nine) planets, so maybe we’re starting to get caught up.

– Charlie Obert
Facebook, February 6, 2020

—-
The post drew quite a flurry of responses, most of them negative, mostly trying to “prove” to me that Pluto is a planet.

My reaction to pretty much all of the pro-Pluto posts was something like this: Continue reading “On the Late, Great Planet Pluto”

Hypnotic Realities

Many years ago I used to to be a character at the Renaissance Festival. Along with entertainers of all sorts there were also tarot readers, and for people who worked in that area it was a good venue to do a lot of readings in a very short period of time. Some readers I know made a good part of their living by doing festivals like this. From my experience, these were people who were committed to their craft and tried to practice it in a useful and ethically responsible manner.

I clearly remember one day there was a man who was out at festival, who was going around among the festies and asking where the tarot reader was who had done a reading for his wife the previous weekend… it seems the reader had told the woman that her husband was cheating on her. The man said this was not true, and he was seriously angry for this reader wrecking his wife’s trust of him. He was out at the festival that day looking for revenge.

Adultery… a very dangerous subject to touch in a reading. Especially if you get it wrong. I am assuming that the reader made this statement in good faith based on what she was seeing in the cards. Assuming that man was telling the truth when he said it was false, that reading might have wrecked a marriage. That woman was looking at her husband and seeing a man who was cheating on her, and anything he said to deny it would just look to her like he was lying. Once that idea was accepted by her it became self-validating. If I were that man I’d be ready to kill that tarot reader.

Continue reading “Hypnotic Realities”

Living Crone

Earlier this year I did a series of posts exploring the symbolism of Saturn as feminine and as an old Crone figure. This was based on a reference in Dorotheus classing Saturn as one of the feminine planets, and Dorotheus is one of the earliest sources we have for our Western astrology.

Saturn as feminine seems to strike a chord with a lot of people, and I received some strong responses from both readers and friends.

After one of the posts, a comment suggested that I consider looking at how Saturn as feminine could be used in chart interpretation. That is what I will look at here.

As I thought about it, I was surprised to realize that I already had a very good example of Saturn being feminine, in the chart of a client of mine.

Continue reading “Living Crone”