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.
The worldview that Astrology came out of is profoundly different. It assumes an inner coherency, a correspondence, between beings and events in the outer world, and an inner intelligent order that expresses or works through those beings and events. In magick, the technical name for that is the Doctrine of Correspondences.
So, for instance, a soldier, a fire, a gun, a knife, surgery, bright red, tobacco, all share a correspondence with the intelligent energy we name, Mars. That same energy corresponds to events within me – assertiveness, aggression, irritation, anger, and so on.
Part of learning astrology is getting to know that system of correspondence, that are grouped in the planets, the signs of the zodiac, the houses, the elements, and so on. In modern magick the system of correspondences called the Qabalah serves the same purpose.
As you learn that language, internalize it, get to know the correspondences, they start to come alive. The objects and events of everyday life cease to be random and dead, and take on an aliveness as an expression of intelligent energy.
So, when I pick up a knife to cut cheese, I am invoking Mars, and am responsible for using that energy in an intelligent, reverent and life-giving way.
The more I work with astrology, the more I internalize a sense of the order, coherence, intelligence, and benevolence of the universe I find myself inhabiting. The world around me is no longer dead and random stuff, with events I have no control over that happen to me without reason. The world becomes an expression of an overall intelligence.
In the world of astrology, my job is not to figure out how to survive as a powerless mite in a random and meaningless world. My job is to discern the order of the universe, and find a way to work intelligently with that order, trusting that there is an overall meaning and benevolence to the pattern working itself out.
The world ceases to be random and dead. It becomes increasingly alive, intelligent, Enchanted.