by Charlie Obert
It is all too easy to fall into the trap of believing that being an astrologer automatically gives you the knowledge to be able to make pronouncements on any subject area. The result of this attitude is obvious in the large amount of astrology writing I see online that is little better than gossip and bias dressed up with astrology keywords.
There are two assertions I am making here that are the subject of this essay.
First – your ability to make meaningful astrology predictions in any area is only as valid as the depth and quality of your knowledge in that specific area.
Being an astrologer does not instantly make you an expert in politics or judicial law, just as being a famous entertainer does not make you an expert in constitutional law or the electoral college. Our astrology knowledge does not exist in a vacuum by itself; it is always based on our general knowledge. Whatever we stock our minds with in general is what is going to come out when we start talking astrology.
Second – Before you make an astrology statement, it is worth asking yourself, is this any different from what I would say without the astrology? If there is no difference, then omit the astrology. You would just be using the astrology as window dressing to justify your opinions.
I want to explore these assertions in a couple of different subject areas.
Medical and Health Related Astrology
In the traditional world the skills of astrology and medicine were intertwined and were based on the same model of the world. If you practiced medical astrology it was understood that you were educated in medicine, and vice-versa.
In modern terms, this means that you have no business making medical astrology pronouncements unless you are trained and competent in medicine. Without the medical knowledge you have no basis for judgment.
However, there is an additional complication today that makes me wonder what place if any astrology has with modern medicine.
Traditionally astrology and medicine shared the same assumptions, the same view of the world. Both astrology and medicine spoke in terms of the four elements, the four humors, and analysis of disease was framed in terms of unbalance in one or more of the elements or humors. Medical treatment was then framed in terms of correcting the unbalanced area.
In the modern world we have a profoundly different situation. Today the worlds of astrology and medicine are based on totally different models, so there is no easy translation between the two.
Can we still validly practice medical astrology, when the current models of astrology and medicine are so widely different and arguably incompatible? I don’t have enough information to answer that question, so I will just raise it here as a subject needing further thought.
“Energy Work” Medical Astrology
There is another related variant of astrology that purport to map the planets, and sometimes the signs, to different dimensions of the human “energy body”, most often mapping the planets to the various chakras or energy centers which have been borrowed from Indian sources.
First of all this is strictly a 20th century and later phenomenon – I am not aware of any references to astrology and the chakras prior to the mid 20th century. Even within this area there is no single agreed upon set of attributions, and you will see varying versions of how the planets and chakras coincide.
Also, when an astrologer would speak of an inbalance in the energy body, or need for work on a particular chakra, that is an assertion that can be neither confirmed nor denied. Having a client convinced that such energy work is necessary for their health is misleading at best and potentially dangerous at worst. In my opinion this crosses the line over into medical astrology, and the same need for qualified medical training to make such pronouncements applies here.
Mundane and Political Astrology
Watching the nightly news on CNN does not make you an authority on election law, or on legal precedent, or on the Constitution or on impeachment law.
I have noticed the disturbing tendency for astrology pronouncements at any given time to match what happens to be showing up in the media just then.
There is an especially bad situation today concerning astrology and politics with the news media in general being so badly biased. If you know anything about the use of language it is obvious that much if not most of modern news media exists to persuade and not to objectively report. I am not by any means an authority in the area of news reporting, but I do know enough about language and persuasion to be able to spot stories aimed at manipulating emotions and shaping opinions and actions.
The tools of persuasion and marketing are exactly the same as the tools for hypnosis. They are also exactly the same tools that are used in the modern news media to shape public opinion. Given the current state of the news media I consider a working knowledge of hypnosis and persuasion to be a basic survival technique to keep from turning into an unwitting media robot.
Specific Knowledge Needed
To make pronouncements in any area of mundane or collective astrology you need good knowledge in the specific area.
To talk about Iran and nuclear war you need to be widely knowledgeable of Middle Eastern history and culture, of current and past Islamic culture, of that area’s way of doing politics, of the internal state of politics in Iran, and so on. To predict Iran’s actions based on a sound byte from the USA evening news is worthless. That will be obvious even a week later, when the dust settles and the media sound bytes have moved on to a new crisis.
This need for good and reliable knowledge will be especially important in 2020 here in America since it is a Presidential election year.
In the area of American politics the level of bias and polarization in the news media makes it very hard to form a reasoned and objective opinion, let alone make valid predictions. Just watching the evening news or reading the headlines won’t cut it. At the very least you would need to be widely read across a wide variety of news sources on the web, spanning a wide spectrum of political opinions. You really can get no concept of just how biased and limited much of the mainstream media is until you start reading alternate news sources and start to see what gets left out, or how stories are spun to support political agendas.
If you make political pronouncements based on a single news source then your bias will be obvious to anyone who has read more widely.
This single news source bias is part of the reason so much political astrology today is basically just the opinions of the speaker dressed up with astrology buzzwords. It explains the prediction debacle with the Presidential election in 2016, and from everything I see online we are in the middle of another prediction debacle for 2020.
My observation is that 95 plus percent of the time the predictions astrologers make for the 2020 election just happen to somehow coincide with their political preferences. That is a very reliable law, and there are very, very few exceptions.
I’m thinking of one situation in particular with a traditional astrologer I greatly respect. This person cared enough about the subject to publish a very long and detailed astrology analysis that made sense of Trump winning back in 2016 and that predicted how he would fare in 2020. I happened to know that this person’s own political bias leans left, so I guessed that, after all this analysis, he was going to come to the conclusion that Trump would lose. I looked at the end of his paper, and guess what, I was right. Somehow, by coincidence, his conclusion just happened to come out to match his political preference. Gee.
This issue of the wide knowledge needed, and the effect of bias on prediction, is the reason why I do not do specific political prediction myself. While I do scan a variety of news media across the political spectrum I find it very difficult to get good and unbiased information to base my judgments on.
I have looked at charts related to the 2020 election and the people involved, and my reaction is that they are a tense, confused and possibly violent mess, a mess where I could easily spin the astrology data to support either side. Just as the data is not clear cut, the astrology is not clear cut. My knowledge base constrains and limits my ability to make useful astrology analysis, and my own preferences heavily influence my analysis.
I have my own opinions and preferences as to what I think will happen in November 2020, but they are just that, my opinions and preferences. My astrology analysis does not particularly affect my judgment in the area one way or the other. From what I read online I suspect that astrology by itself has very, very little influence on the political pronouncements most astrologers make.
It is worth noting that this predicament is not unique to our time. Do some reading on the state of astrology during the era of William Lilly, which was a politically volatile period in English history. The astrologers divided into camps on political and religious lines, and for some strange reason each side managed to make astrology predictions that were favorable to their side. Of course, one side did win, but that does not necessarily mean they had the better astrologers; all it means is that those astrologers happened to be lucky enough to be on the winning side.
Summing Up
I want to conclude this discussion by repeating the two assertions I made at the beginning of this essay.
First – your ability to make meaningful astrology predictions in any area is only as valid as the depth and quality of your knowledge in that specific area.
Being an astrologer does not instantly make you an expert in politics or judicial law, just as being a famous entertainer does not make you an expert in constitutional law or in the electoral college. Our astrology knowledge does not exist in a vacuum by itself; it is always based on our general knowledge. Whatever we stock our minds with in general is what is going to come out when we start talking astrology.
Second – Before you make an astrology statement, it is worth asking yourself, is this any different from what I would say without the astrology? If there is no difference, then omit the astrology. You would just be using the astrology as window dressing to justify your opinions.
If you happen to think that Orange Man is Evil Incarnate, and your astrology just happens to show Trump losing miserably in November – be very wary of how you are using astrology. Whether or not you are aware of it, your bias will be obvious to anyone who does not share your opinion.
If you like Trump and think he is unfairly maligned and attacked, and that a lot of the data off the mainstream radar shows him likely being re-elected in 2020 – and then your astrology analysis just happens to show Trump winning – be very wary of how you are using astrology. Whether or not you are aware of it, your bias will be obvious to anyone who does not share your opinion.
Other Questions
There are a couple of related questions I have not addressed here.
First, there is the question of how our awareness of astrology and our general knowledge affects personal client work. What do we need to be aware of to keep our personal opinions and bias from skewing our astrology?
Second, I mentioned earlier that a knowledge of hypnosis and persuasion is very useful to sanely survive in our media manipulated culture. It also happens to be true that the language of hypnosis and the language of astrology have much in common, and it is very useful to be aware of hypnosis and persuasion techniques to know how they usefully interact with the world of astrology practice, and also to make sure we do not abuse the tools of persuasion to manipulate our clients without fully realizing what we are doing.
Each of those topics is a whole separate can of worms, and I will reserve those discussions for separate posts in the near future. Stay tuned.
That’s right, folks, don’t touch that dial…
What a well thought out & well written article! Just saying thanks!