Some years back I worked on a book project on the Western spiritual basis of our astrology. It made more sense to me to look to our own traditions rather than following the fashion that goes back to the influence of Theosophy in the early 1900’s, and look to the East for spiritual guidance. Much as I love Eastern philosophy, and as much as I have personally been influenced by Theosophy, especially Blavatsky, it still seems to me to be more appropriate to look to our Western tradition for our Western spiritual roots.
I took my book project as far as a finished first draft and then had to just let it sit, as it felt incomplete, fragmentary. I think I understand why now.
I was searching for a system of ideas, a philosophical system, for the base, and I have now think that is inadequate. The philosophical underpinning is very important, but by itself it lacks roots. It isn’t deep enough.
A spiritual underpinning needs to be rooted in spiritual practice and realization. It needs to be alive.
It is clear to me now that the practice of astrology was originally meant to be reserved for initiates, and was not intended to be publicly revealed. I think that is especially clear in the writings of Valens, where he does talk about being careful to keep this knowledge from those who do not deserve it.
For we students of astrology in the modern Western world, our dilemma is that we do not have a continuous Western esoteric spiritual tradition. That has either been hidden or lost over the centuries.
Astrology at its root is an esoteric practice, and it requires a certain level of realization and experience to really be understood. That is our dilemma.
I often get the feeling when I am reading older astrology texts that there is a missing key. It is like I have the lecture notes to a subject where a lot of the most important material was never written down. What we are trying to do here is to piece together a system where we have a lot of the material but are lacking the spirit and the realization that ties it all together.
To borrow a metaphor from John Michael Greer, sometimes studying astrology feels like digging around in the ruins of a temple, where we have a lot of the pieces and fragments and are trying to figure out how to put it all back together again.
I think there are good reasons for the warnings in Valens not to share astrology indiscriminately. Astrology is for initiates, and should really only be practiced by initiates. It needs a spiritual underpinning to be understood and dealt with in a balanced way.
Astrology really is divination in the full meaning of that word – consulting the Divine – and it needs that context. When you work with astrology you are dealing with living Divine forces – study astrology and read charts for any length of time and you will start to sense that.
Is there a way to at least start to get at that context? I think there is, and it is a secret that is hidden within the symbols and structures of astrology itself. The symbols can teach us if we can learn to listen.
If we are going to practice astrology today I think it best that we learn to do it from within, by becoming attuned to it. That means building a practice of meditation, study and worship based on the cycles of astrology that structure our world.
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Astrology is all about interlocking cycles, and how we fit within them. A big part of learning astrology is about becoming aware of those cycles, and using it as part of a larger spiritual discipline to align ourselves with the world around us.
Astrology cycles work at multiple levels.
We have the cycle of the day, measuring the apparent daily movement of the Sun around the Earth caused by the Earth’s rotation.
We have the cycle of the month, measuring the phase cycle of the Sun and Moon, from new waxing to full, and waning back to new. The cycle of the week is related to that, since seven days is roughly one quarter phase of the Lunar cycle, and that seven day period cycles through each of the seven traditional planets. (There is an astrological wisdom to setting aside one day out of the weekly cycle for rest, worship and meditation.)
We have the cycle of the year, measuring the apparent movement of the Sun throughout the year through the circle of the Zodiac, and that directly affects us through the cycle of the seasons.
Those cycles – the day, the week, the month, the year – are the rhythms that our lives are built on. Awareness of those cycles has gotten blurred in our 24/7 techno world, where there is no longer a distinct rhythm of daily work and rest, of weekly work and rest days, of weekly days set aside for worship and re-alignment, and of religious festivals for alignment with the larger yearly cycle.
Within the larger collective cycles we have our individual life cycles which following a similar sort of pattern, from conception and birth, to growth and flowering, to decline and death, and on to whatever follows – and given the shape of all the other cycles it makes most sense to assume that our personal cycles do not end at physical death, any more than the Sun dies forever at the Winter Solstice.
There are also the cycles of the other planets, from Mercury and Venus who have cycles roughly the length of the Sun’s, to the outer planets that have cycles exceeding an individual human lifetime.
All these fit within the much larger cycles – the precession of the Tropical Zodiac relative to the Sidereal, and the very slow rotation of our solar system around the galactic center, but those take us too far afield for our purposes here.
This isn’t clock time; this is living cycle time. Even though we can somewhat map them to each other for measurement purposes, they are not identical.
It is all interlocking cycles, cycles within cycles.
Part of the malaise of our times is from our being increasingly disconnected and out of sync with these larger cycles. It is like we have quit being like planets or moons in a larger order and are more like renegade comets or meaningless space debris, chunks of stuff with no apparent relation to the world around us.
That is where the awareness of astrology comes in.
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I think a very good place to start that awareness involves attuning to the three main cycles – of the year (Sun), the month (Moon), and the Day (Earth).
The yearly Sun cycle is anchored in the four quarters of the seasons, the Cardinal sign ingresses, which mark the four phases of the Sun.
Similarly, you can take the monthly Moon cycle and break it down into four weekly periods which correspond to the Lunar phases.
You can also go down to the daily level and take the four phases of the cycle of the day – sunrise, noon, sunset, midnight.
Each of those are pivots, alignment points to the Sun, Moon and Earth cycles.
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I want to start by talking about the big Ingresses of the Sun into the four Cardinal signs that mark the seasons of the year. You have the start of Spring in the Aries Ingress at the Spring Equinox; the start of Summer at the Cancer Ingress at the Summer Solstice; the start of Autumn at the Libra Ingress at the Autumnal Equinox; and the start of Winter at the Capricorn Ingress at the Winter Solstice.
Those four points are power points; they are the World Axis, and they connect us to the larger cosmos. You can think of each of them has being like a phase point in a current of energy. That is why the Ingresses are used in Mundane astrology for predictive purposes, to learn about the shape of the coming time period.
The Ingresses are important at a mundane or global level, but they are equally important at a personal level since they are part of our connection to the world.
I think that a good way to start that attunement process is to set aside time for some meditative focus around the cardinal Ingresses, preferably some time in the few hours prior to the exact time.
I am not talking about using this time to do active change work, or to “set your intentions” for the coming period, or to manipulate the energy in any way. An attitude of prayer, of meditation, of worship and of receptivity and attunement, is a more fruitful approach.
As a practicing astrologer I think it makes sense to include time to draw up and study the chart of the Ingress, how it intersects with the country where you live, and also how it intersects with your own personal chart and your own life. I will talk about the Ingresses for personal astrology divination in another post soon.
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This idea of attuning to cycles can also be applied to the Lunar cycle, with meditation and attunement time at the New Moon.
As regular practice I think it also makes sense to have a daily practice, ideally aligned to the pivot points of sunrise and sunset.
Here in the West we still have the signs of that cycle alignment in the daily cycle of prayer in many traditional churches, where you have daily morning and evening prayer, and in the full monastic form you prayer at noonday and at midnight. You can still see the signs of alignment to the yearly cycle of Ingresses in the Catholic Church calendar, and I will talk some about that in another future post. I speak of the Christian tradition here because I know that from the inside by experience, but I am sure it applies to other spiritual traditions, Western and Eastern.
At the level of the Lunar phase cycle every spiritual tradition I am aware of is built on a regular schedule of weekly worship, corresponding roughly to the four lunar phases. The connections are there if you care to become aware of them.
In case you are wondering, this essay is being written as advice for myself also. I already have a daily and weekly prayer and worship practice. Now that I am back to practicing astrology I want to integrate it with the astrology cycles. If I am going to continue studying and practicing astrology that is now a personal necessity for me.
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If we practice astrology and work with these cycles, I think it makes sense to root that practice in a prayer, worship and meditation discipline attuned to those cycles. I think that can root the practice in a spiritual depth that just can’t be attained without it.