Astrology and Politics: Drawing the Line
“In matters of truth the fact that you don’t want to publish something is – nine times out of ten – proof that you ought to publish it.” ~ G.K. Chesterton
This post is inevitable, and I have seen it coming for a long time. I’d really rather not publish this, but I think it important that I do.
I need to make clear where I stand on the issue of mixing astrology and politics – or, to be more precise, of astrology being taken over and forced to follow a political and social agenda. I think this will corrupt and ultimately destroy traditional astrology, and I won’t let that happen.
This post is where I draw the line.
John Michael Greer has been one of my favorite bloggers for years. He currently has a blog he calls Ecosophia, and in a recent post, titled, Rice and Beans in the Outer Darkness , he discussed a phenomenon of our current cultural landscape he called, Entryism.
Here is his one sentence description.
“Entryism? That’s the strategy of joining a group that exists for some purpose unrelated to yours, getting established there, inviting in your friends, and then using every sleazy trick in the book to take over the group so you can use it to promote your own agenda. ”
I am seeing that happening throughout our culture – a radical political agenda is taking over many aspects of our culture. It’s been happening for a long time, and it has become much more widespread and visible in the past year.
If you haven’t yet noticed Entryism in action, the steps go something like this:
- First the political group asks to be welcomed in, and asks that their convictions be respected.
- Most groups respond by doing just that. More people than not prefer to be tolerant.
- One of the ways they take over the group is to change and corrupt the use of language, and to insist that others “accept” and use their language. I will be talking about that a lot in this post and in the future.
- The next step is for the political group to loudly insist that everyone support their social agenda and use their language, and bully, yell, scream at and cancel everyone who refuses to comply. This is easy to do if you pick off the dissenters one at a time and gang up on them and force them out, one by one. Most other people will either join you, or keep quiet to avoid being attacked themselves. The majority of people who disagree will just quietly leave.
- At the final stage, the original group exists as nothing but an extension of the political agenda. Everything else is suppressed or discarded or rewritten. The original language and meaning is gone.
This has already happened in the mainstream media and social networking platforms. It has been happening in mainstream Christian churches for decades, to the point that political and social language and agendas have replaced talk of God or the traditional faith. (In my opinion, this is likely one of the most important reasons the mainstream churches are in increasingly rapid decline. I know it is one of the main reasons I left.)
As Greer pointed out, this also happened to the neo-Pagan community which has been pretty much decimated by it.
This year I see all the signs of it happening in astrology. It’s happening to major astrology organizations. It’s happening to online conferences. It is happening to small local groups. It is happening in online forums and discussion groups and blogs and podcasts.
I’ve been approaching the “Quietly Leave” stage for awhile now – but, I think it is important that I not be quiet about it. I want to stand up to what is going on, and maybe help be a voice for other people who don’t like this process.
So, to make it very clear, here is where I stand on the issue of political agendas taking over astrology.
In one word, No.
Language and Gender.
There are three main topics I need to touch on here where I need to draw the line, and the three are inter-related. The topics are language, gender, and race.
I want to start with language and gender.
Words have meaning. Words are not arbitrary. Words refer to existents outside of language. Language maps to reality. Using words correctly affects our ability to think clearly.
Disconnect language from reality – disconnect words from their meaning – and you rob language of all its power. It becomes a floating abstraction with no reality. It hurts your ability to think clearly.
Corrupt language and you corrupt the reality you live in.
I want to illustrate what I mean by doing a thought experiment here with gender related words. This is the best way I can think of to illustrate my thinking on language and gender.
The words Man and Woman have meaning and refer to existents outside of language.
The pronouns He and She, Her and Him, have defined meanings that refer to existents outside of the language system.
A Man. That word means something. It brings up a rich set of associations in my mind.
A Woman. That word means something. It brings up a rich set of associations in my mind.
“A Man who thinks of himself as a Woman”. (If someone wants to do that, that is their choice. It is their mind, their body.) I now have a separate category in my mind for Men-who-think-of-themselves-as-Women. It is a separate concept from either Man or Woman. It is also a more complex concept; it does not have the simplicity of either Man or Woman. It takes more effort to think it, and it is much less clear.
It is a whole other step to say that, a Man who wants to think of himself as a Woman IS a Woman. I do not recognize that step as valid. It makes no sense to me. I can’t think it. If I try to think it my brain hurts.
Similarly it is a whole other step to say that, if a Man wants to think of himself as a Woman, I am required to think of that person as a Woman. I cannot take that step mentally, and I will not take that step mentally. It blurs and fogs my mind to even try thinking in those terms. If I try to refer to a Man-who-thinks-of-himself-as-a-Woman as She, I can feel my teeth clench and my shoulders tighten up. It is like I am trying to tell my mind to think a contradiction in terms, and my entire mind-body system reacts to that contradiction with tension, confusion and a sort of blurring or fogging of consciousness.
As far as thought goes, it makes about as much sense as saying, Blue is Red. If I try thinking ‘blue is red’ my mind internally blurs and gets dimmer. If I push it too far I lose the word Blue and it is harder to think of that simple color. Go ahead, try it for yourself. Think of blue, then think ‘blue is red‘ and watch what goes on in your mind.
Or, to take a more famous example these days, try thinking 2+2=4, then try thinking 2+2=5. Again, watch what goes on in your mind. What is most distinct to me is the profound difference in clarity, in brightness, and in tension.
The process of writing down and working through this simple chain of reasoning here makes my mind feel much clearer and more relaxed, simpler and much less convoluted. The difference is quite pronounced. I’ve been wrestling with this issue for a long time, and getting it sorted out here helps my thinking – not a little bit, but a lot.
Traditional astrology refers to signs and planets as having gender, as being masculine and feminine. The texts refer to fathers and mothers. The symbolism is quite rich, flexible and concrete, and I am keeping it.
In my use of language, I trust it is clear that I cannot and will not play the Preferred Pronouns game. Once I accept that, I accept that language is arbitrary, that it has no referent to anything outside of language, and that it can be taken to mean anything a person would like it to mean. At that point language and reality are disconnected, and my ability to think clearly is greatly impaired.
If someone else chooses to work with Preferred Pronouns, I let them. I don’t legislate how others think. Them is welcome to do that.
My thoughts on Astrology and Race
I have read many books on astrology, and I have read or browsed parts of dozens more.
In all of my familiarity with traditional astrology I cannot bring to mind a single instance in the literature of a significant framing of astrology based on race. The emphasis just isn’t there. I seriously doubt you will find much at all about astrology and race in writing that is less than 10 years old, and probably a lot more recent than that.
As far as I can tell the concepts of of race and racism are fairly new, and thinking primarily in terms of race categories is much, much more recent, perhaps a decade or two at most.
Traditional astrology does not emphasize race, and I’m not going to go back and rewrite the texts or reframe them in terms of race. That would be falsifying the tradition.
Here I need to discuss my own thoughts and opinions. I can’t separate them out from who I am and how I teach and write.
For me personally, I don’t categorize people in terms of their skin pigmentation. I try to deal with people as individuals.
I don’t judge or rank people based on skin color. I judge people on character, on how they act, how they treat themselves and others.
I have written and published six books on astrology (so far), I teach astrology classes, and up to now there has been no emphasis on race in my teaching. I intend to keep it that way. I am not rewriting my books or my blog posts or my classes to match a political agenda.
If you have issues that are important to you, fine; I respect that. You do not define what issues are important to me. I refuse to view the world primarily through the filter of race. To me, that filter warps and distorts reality. (I also think it hurts people and robs them of their power, and that it hurts black people and communities the most. That may be a topic for a future essay.)
For me personally, as I have said elsewhere, I am Christian. I view every single individual person as a beloved Child of God. Every single person is infinitely valuable in the eyes of God, and I try to honor that.
Conclusion
I teach and practice traditional astrology. I intend to continue teaching and practicing traditional astrology, and I have no intention of rewriting or censoring what I do to match a political agenda. It is far too rich a tradition to be cut down to match an ephemeral set of political demands.
The language and conceptual structure of traditional astrology is rich, complex, nuanced and specific. I ‘m not going to censor or neuter or redefine or corrupt it.
As much as I can, I try to keep overt political agendas out of my astrology work. I am not going to let anyone demand I match their agenda.
I do not dictate other’s political opinions – AND, I do not allow other people to dictate mine.
I draw the line here.
All quite reasonable. I take no issue with any of it, although I don’t get as much exercised over men who think they are women and vice versa; yet I agree that one cannot accept that they ARE women. Almost surely there have always been people like this but it’s only during this particular era that such attitudes and orientations have been so openly expressed.
I don’t think racism has been injected into astrology so much as it’s become a topic of conversation in astrological forums. I don’t see it as a subject relevant to astrology and I’m not interested in the race of other astrologers, only how good they are.
I think almost everybody in astrology who puts their work into the public domain has an agenda. I try to avoid indulging it although my bias toward the sidereal zodiac often makes me aware of my pre-judgment. I try to tone it down but not silence it. My concern about the country being corrupted by the forces of the far right that would make pawns of us all also causes me to adopt a political stance vis-a-vis astrology, for which I don’t apologize; but I also try to limit it and therefore to respect a purist like you.
Thank you for all you’ve said. I appreciate you.
I am a new Kepler College student, but a longtime student of astrology. As an example of what I want to bring up, I just tried to read an article by Nicolas Culpeper published in 1654, on one’s physical appearance according to one’s rising sign. I cannot absorb what he means to say, because of his use of the generic he. Ancient writings, of course, use it all the time. I am to a point (age 63) where I feel it simply doesn’t address me, include me, apply to me. I have no patience with it.
Journalists do not go back and re-write the quote they got from their source to fix its grammar. They go with the original. We must go with the original texts as they’re written. But can modern writers please not use the generic he, can they please not even use mankind? I wonder if you have any thoughts about this and I particularly wonder whether you or others have awareness of and sensitivity about the generic he?
Thank you for all your excellent work.
Thanks for you comment. Here are some of my thoughts in response. I hope you find them interesting.
I personally do not use the generic he or mankind in my own writing, but I do not judge others who do.
Interesting that you mention Culpeper – I happen to adore him. I came to appreciate Culpeper after watching a delightful presentation about him by Deborah Houlding, who is one of my favorite astrologers – and you probably noticed that Deb Houlding is a woman. Hearing Deb read Culpeper with her thick British accent made his language come alive for me. Houlding obviously did not feel excluded by Culpeper.
If you choose to feel excluded by Culpeper I think that’s a damned shame because you’re missing something delightful, and you are reading back into him something that is not part of his writing or his world.
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I don’t know if you’ve heard of Thomas Bowdler. He was a writer in the Victorian era, the late 1800’s in England. He published The Family Shakespeare, an edition of Shakespeare’s plays which omitted all the passages and expressions that offended late Victorian ideas of sexual propriety – meaning pretty much any reference to sex. The word ‘bowdlerize’, meaning to censor, comes from him.
Bowdler’s edits of Shakespeare don’t age well from our standpoint. However, that was the Victorian era, and his filter on the world. That was what he found offensive.
I have a similar reaction when I look at translations of Plato’s Symposium from the 1600’s or the 1800’s. The translators are doing their best to tap dance and circumlocute their way around the fact that Plato was obviously referring to same sex sexual relationships in that dialog, and tried to explain that away or ignore it or apologize for it. From my standpoint their edits don’t age well – But, times change.
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About that issue of being offended by language – my favorite feminist writer, Christina Hoff-Sommers, has some good work in that area. You might want to check her out if you’re interested.
Obviously wherever you come out on this issue is your choice, and I respect that.
Thank you again for your comment; it made me think.
You said, “I don’t see it as a subject relevant to astrology and I’m not interested in the race of other astrologers, only how good they are.” You don’t have to be interested in the race of other astrologers, but it’s most likely the privilege of being White that you don’t have to see race as a subject relevant to astrology. But since astrology is often about mundane life and affairs, how could race not be relevant if that’s also what’s in the larger society? And astrologers have interjected the issue of race into their discussions even when unsolicited, like how Lilly talks about various complexions and hair colors for various signs or planetary placements. Yes, of course, he was writing for a European audience, but we’re still reading him in a modern, multi-cultural time. So, that prompts various people of color now to interrogate what much of these ancient and modern texts mean for them.
“As far as I can tell the concepts of of race and racism are fairly new, and thinking primarily in terms of race categories is much, much more recent, perhaps a decade or two at most.“
TWO DECADES?!
Some of the earlier documented literature on race categorization is from the 1600s. Scientific race theory was established in the 1800s. All by aristocratic white men who conveniently believed their race superior.
You don’t have the range for this conversation and you really lament the idea YOU have to accommodate perspectives not centered around your narrow beliefs and social power.
Bow out for all of us non white and queer astrology students. Please.
You are criticizing me for something I didn’t say.
About William Lilly – I know his work very well; I have been living with it for over 15 years now. I cannot think of a single place in his writing where he emphasizes race distinction. Are there probably mentions of race in his work? Of course; he is a product of his time, and I consider it anachronistic to fault him for that.
I do not “interrogate” old texts through the filters of race and gender. I do not find those filters useful. If you choose to use and identify with them, fine; I don’t legislate your thinking.
I do not accept your hallucinations of my “supremacy”. Sorry. That is a semantic spook I don’t buy into.
You are criticizing me for something I didn’t say.
A general comment – the tone of your messages comes across sounding disdainful and contemptuous to me. That greatly weakens your argument.
The current obsession with race and gender is very new in astrology. You won’t find Alan Leo talking about astrology and race. You won’t find Dane Rudhyar writing on astrology and the transgender problem.
When I attended local astrology meetings in the early 2000’s we didn’t obsess over people’s race; we didn’t announce our preferred gender or pronouns. We just said, everyone is welcome, we meant it and we acted that way.
About race – I came of age in New York City in the 1960’s, during the Civil Rights demonstrations. I took part in a lot of those, and some of my lifetime heroes are from that era, including Martin Luther King and Harry Belafonte. If you pay careful attention to what King said, it is the inverse to the current obsession with race. King was working for a world where people would no longer be judged by skin color; today the demand is that we judge people primarily by skin color.
So yes, I think the modern obsession with race is very recent.
My own stand – I do not judge people based on pigmentation or plumbing. I judge them based on character, how they treat others and themselves.
And no I am not “bowing out”. I don’t force you to follow me.
Note – Going forward, all comments that are disrespectful, or insulting, or condescending, will be deleted.
I try to be respectful in my own writing. I expect the same from any comments I allow on my site.
Actually, Charlie, I was talking to Kenneth Bowser. I thought that would be clear since I quoted his comment, not anything you said. I figured you didn’t want to speak to me since when I addressed you on FB last year, your answer was to block me.
And apparently you’ve not read Lilly well enough to read between the lines when he’s clearly talking about complexions and hair color in his book, like the corporature of a Lunar person that he describes as ” a man of fair stature, whitely coloured, grey eyes, etc.” Or what “a palish complexion” for Pisces might mean for many people of color, say Nigeria. I already conceded that Lilly was maintaining connection to his main audience, White Europeans, so it’s not so much a fault of his. But when the world has become so much more vast, it’s natural for others to update and seek innovation on classical ideas.
I never made mention of supremacy to you or Kenneth Bowser. Neither of you have any. What you do have is privilege, because you don’t have to think about how you don’t have anyone in your immediate family or neighborhood who looks like the folks that Lilly describes in his book. That’s just one small example of privilege. I can supply more. And to have privilege is not to have supremacy, though it is suggestive of advantages. You can call it an hallucination all you want, but doesn’t mean that I’m wrong.
You clearly also haven’t paid enough attention to what King has said, including his last book, Where do we go from here?: Chaos or Community. He talks a lot about race and Black power even and the onus on Whites to remedy the issue of racism. You’re just going on what you heard from his 1963 speech. Read more, Charlie.
I appreciate your candor and hope the sincerity of my response comes through.
I understand you have an embodied resistance against the concept of calling a “man” a “woman.” Have you had personal experiences with people who were born male, present and identify as women, and your reaction persists? Or doesn’t?
It’s one thing to think of gender in the abstract like this, that Man means this and Woman means that, but in my experience humans rarely read as fitting so neatly into these identities, and often I have met trans folks who I don’t know are trans until after the fact, their preferred pronouns coming out of me with ease. My experience of gender is that it’s performed, cultivated, not within the genes, not determined by biological function.
What may seem like a blurring of lines in your mind, the making of something simply needlessly convoluted, may be adding complexity and nuance to something superficial and facile to someone else. The clarity of your vision isn’t more natural or neutral than the uncomfortable inaccuracies experienced by others.
On the topic of race, I just finished with Harvey, Campion, and Baignet’s Mundane Astrology and they point out that regional populations were frequently assigned the rulership of different signs and planets, essentializing the character of peoples and their destinies. I returned the library rental so I can’t cite it but it seemed like explicitly racializing astrology to me.
Wanting to treat every person as an individual is important to me, too. I learned how to view the world through social structures and identity politics in my early twenties and found it taxing to be so clued into the ways power is unequal and oppressive all the time, and see astrology as a radically egalitarian framework that, in conjunction with my political lens, helps me remember the individuality of everyone, with unique Moony emotional needs and Saturnine orthodoxies. These worldviews don’t have to conflict, and you shouldn’t be obligated to view identity through any particular lens, nor speak of it in an ordained way.
But I hope you can see how the recent attention to issues of race and gender aren’t just a contemporary panic about something minor. #MeToo didn’t emerge from a sudden rash of sexual harassment. #BlackLivesMatter isn’t because police impunity, harassment of minorities, and unequal law enforcement is new. Inequities baked into society can remain hidden and build pressure to points of explosion, as Pluto teaches us. And these issues are exploding. It’s uncomfortable and brings extremes, but in the long term I believe it will bring healing as the promise of equal dignity for all peoples that these movements are fighting for is realized. I imagine that’s what you want as well.
I appreciate your response; thank you. This gives me a chance to clarify a couple of things.
Do I have experience with transgender people? Yes – I have three transgender friends, two of them quite close, close enough that we embrace when we meet. I love them and respect them, and we get along well. We have never had any difficulty or tension in communicating. I try to respect their reality.
I also want to make clear that I completely respect how others think of themselves or speak of themselves. I have no desire to legislate that, or to have others agree with me.
I think what I am saying is that I need to be honest in my thinking and speaking, and that my speaking needs to honestly reflect my thought.
On the issue of race, and mundane astrology assigning countries and areas to different signs – that goes all the way back to Ptolemy. I am aware of some of the source texts. In the earliest material the places are assigned on the basis of compass direction – Northeast to fire, Northwest to Air, and so on – and as far as I know race is not mentioned at all. It is trying to categories countries in the same way astrology categorizes things parts of the body, or animals, or plants, and so on. In that case I think you are reading race into a situation where it is not intended.
I think that clarifies an important point – there is a push in some political movements to make race the primary filter to view everything, and race is read into every text and every interaction. That is a primary tenet of Critical Race Theory. I think that point of view is a dangerous mistake.
There is a similar push to view everything through the filter of gender, and I think that is similarly mistaken. I had an earlier comment from a woman who could not read Nicholas Culpeper because she felt excluded by his language. That is reading a current issue back into an author where it is not intended. She is excluding herself from enjoying Culpeper, and I think that’s a damned shame. She is limiting her own world.
About #MeToo – I think it is good those issues are being raised and talked about.
In general I respect the need for honest and balanced discussion in all the areas you mention. I think we share the same goal in that regard.
You responded to my post honestly and with respect, and I sincerely thank you for that. I am trying to do the same in my response to you.
I find this back and forth of viewpoints to be fascinating reading. Personally, as a white woman, I KNOW that I’m “privileged”, because that’s the result of the whites having conquered and subjugated the world, especially (I think) since the Industrial Age that started in the 1700s. And, of course, it’s still going on, but in a more “velvet glove”, behind the scenes fashion, i.e. “white” countries demonizing leaders of “colored” countries in media, creating “fake news” so that the white countries’ people will be molded into supporting the manufactured wars against these “demon” leaders under the guise of bringing “democracy to the world”, when in reality their real agenda is to steal the resources of those countries to make themselves even richer (I read a lot of alternative news reporting that reveals what’s really going on – but these alternative sources must be critical thinkers and researchers – not just conspiracy theorists).
Anyhow, as a white, “straight” woman, I can’t imagine what it’s like to be in the shoes of a person of color or a person who doesn’t feel like they are the biological gender they were born with.
I myself am studying Arabic astrology in Ben Dykes’ natal traditional astrology course. It does bother me sometimes when certain passages of the old texts we’re studying say things to the effect that, if this planet in a certain house or place applies to that planet in another house/place and that planet is an infortune, then “he will have lots of sex with women”, or “his woman will be whorish” – things of that nature. I’m bothered only by being confused when looking at, say, my own chart and I see those types of configurations. In other words, the ancient astrologers obviously delineated men’s charts mostly, if not always, so in my chart, as a woman, I don’t know what their interpretations mean, and that frustrates me A LOT! Charlie, do you have any insight on how to handle these kinds of configurations in women’s charts?
Thank you for your response. Here are some thoughts that it triggered.
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Your comments about some of the passages in the Arabic authors you are studying in Ben Dykes’ class – yes, I get your point. I don’t have an easy answer there. They are among a lot of specific details that no longer apply today in the same way to the culture I know. What I try to do is to draw out general interpretive principles from the material that I can apply to situations that would never have occurred to those writers.
To use a different unrelated example, there are a lot of examples in William Lilly talking about cargo on wooden sailing ships. I never get clients asking if their ship will survive the perilous ocean crossing, but there are principles I can pull out that apply to other commerce situations.
That is my general response – I allow for the cultural contexts of the traditional texts, pull out useful interpretive principles where I can, and don’t dwell on them when I can’t.
I don’t judge those texts by today’s cultural standards, so for the most part they don’t bother me. To help me with that I try to picture what contemporary astrology works will look to someone five hundred years from now. I can’t tell what they will find amusing, or quaint, or limited, or offensive, since I have no idea what cultural standards they will have.
To give you a better idea what I mean try looking at Victorian era translations or comments on Plato’s Symposium. They thought they were being superior and morally enlightened, while to my eyes their sexual squeamishness is kind of amusing.
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When you say “as a white woman”, for that phrase to mean something the word woman needs to have an identifiable meaning. If the word can change in meaning at the whim of the person who speaks it, then your sentence is emptied of all significance.
I will never know what it means to be a woman, even if tomorrow I decide I identify as one.
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There is something else I want to get at here. This is tricky phrasing so please bear with me and grant me good intent.
I pretty much never start statements by saying “as a white man” or “as a straight male” because those are not the primary categories I use for my own identity or for other people.
I will never fully know what it means to be a woman, or black, or trans, or any of a number of categories. But, there is something I do know.
I know what it means to be a human being. That lets me sympathize with you, and with someone of a different skin color, or someone with a different sexual orientation.
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I want to recap the two main points I wished to make in my article, as they do not contradict any of the points you are making.
First, words have meaning, and I respect their meaning. I need to do that to be able to think clearly.
Second, I do not frame human experience primarily in the categories of gender or race. Both are too limiting. I frame my experience by viewing people as individuals, equally worthy or respect, which includes respecting differences.
We are all humans, and that common identity is of far more importance than skin color, gender or sexual preference.
Thank you again for your comment.
Thanks for your thoughtful response, Charlie.
I just want to clarify that I also don’t use “as a white woman” when I’m writing or speaking, unless it is in the context of the point I was making in my earlier comment, which I guess mostly to do with being compassionate towards people of color and those who are a biological sex but feel like the other sex, because of what my race has done/is still doing to colored people, and because of how the extreme right-wing (I’m guessing, mostly white folks) views people who identify with the other gender. And all that I wrote was largely in response to some of the people’s comments to your essay. I, too, judge people solely on their characters as human beings – I care not what color they are or what sexual orientation they are – they’re people, just like me, struggling to find their “philosophy of life”, just like I am.