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.
So I look at a chart, and I start by scanning for the most important parts – seeing what kind of pattern catches my eye – starting with sun sign, moon sign and ascendant – seeing if any other planets catch my eye. For the first couple of minutes there is that checking, feeling, fiddling with the tuning knobs… and then the chart snaps into focus and I’m ‘reading’ it from another level.
Is this Intuition, or Being Psychic? Probably. When I did a lot of tarot reading, my teacher used to accuse me of reading without looking at the cards.
Could I do this without the structure of astrology? No, not anywhere nearly as well. I think the structure of astrology provides a framework that keeps my intuitive or psychic insights honest and on-track. I find that, the closer I stay to established rules of astrological interpretation, the more right-on accurate my insights are.
And conversely, the insights that jump ‘outside’ of the rules of astrology, often go wildly astray.
In fact, I’ve had it happen more than once, that I’ve had someone tell me that what I told them in a chart reading changed their life… and when I ask what I said, it ends up being a straight Astrology 101 basic interpretation, that seemed so self-evident at the time that I hardly noticed it.
So, this interesting tuning device, or mandala, that is an astrology chart, gives me a doorway into the living pattern of the person sitting opposite me that I am reading for.
I suspect that the chart pattern works the way the sigil of a spirit works, when you are doing ritual magic and invoking or ‘tuning in’ to a specific spirit or intelligence. The pattern embodies, and contacts, the entity that it ‘names’.
When someone asks me to read their chart, I often mention to them that they are giving me permission to peer into their soul. Whether or not they hear me when I say that, I mean that literally. When the process works – and it seems to work far more often than not -the chart lets me tune into, and read, their inner pattern.
There also seems to be a kinesthetic, or feeling, component to reading a chart – but more on that later. That is a topic broad enough to deserve its own post.