On Being Religious

On Being Religious

Essay by Charlie Obert, November 2020.

This essay originated with some thoughts I had after watching two online interviews – of Douglas Murray by Eric Metaxas, and of James Lindsay by Glenn Beck.

The same question came up in both interviews. Both Metaxas and Beck consider themselves religious – I am fairly sure they are both Christian. Neither Murray nor Lindsay believe in God or think of themselves as religious.

The question that was raised to both Murray and Lindsay was, where to you get the courage to be able to stand up against the crowd and speak what you believe, when you know you’ll be attacked and vilified for it?

Both Murray and Lindsay answered in about the same way. Neither said they thought of themselves as courageous. Both said they believe in truth, and believe in being loyal to the truth and having the responsibility to stand up for it.

That is what got me to thinking. There is some inner quality that both Murray and Lindsay have that they share in common with people who are religious and who live their convictions. It is that common inner quality that I want to explore here. Continue reading “On Being Religious”

The Gods Peeking Through

The Gods Peeking Through

by Charlie Obert, November 2020

This is going to be a short post. I’m going to start with a very beautiful quote, and then tell an anecdote of an incident that occurred earlier this fall. Put the two together and they are getting right to the core of something I am trying to get at in the series of essays I am currently working on.

First, the quote. This is from a very interesting book I am currently reading. The book is, Returning to Reality: Christian Platonism for Our Times, by Paul Tyson. (Cascade Books, 2014.) This quote opens the first chapter, titled, Two Views of Reality.

“Emma, my two year old daughter, has quite an astonishing understanding of reality. She is now adept at talking, but she does not just talk to her family and friends, she also talks to the cat, she talks to her breakfast, she talks to the flowers. And as far as she is concerned, her breakfast and the flowers talk back to her.

It seems that she inhabits a cosmos that is intelligibly animate in its own right and where she is in rich communicative fellowship with, well, everything.”

Now for the incident. Continue reading “The Gods Peeking Through”

The Web of Language: Meekness

The Web of Language: Meekness

Essay by Charlie Obert. All Hallows Eve, 2020.

This post a sequel to my previous post on caring for language. When I posted that essay out on Facebook I got this comment on the post from Robert G Walker.

I think “meek” is another word whose meaning has been diluted.

That got me interested in researching the meaning of that word. Like many people who were raised Christian, I’ve bumped my head on the meaning of this Beatitude.

Matt: 5:5 Blessed are the meek; for they shall inherit the earth.

I did not know how to make sense of that, given the modern meaning and connotations of the word. To be meek seemed to mean something close to being a doormat – shy, unassertive, yielding, weak. That sounds more like someone who would have their inheritance stolen from them without protesting.

Thanks to the comment by Robert Walker, I took the time to look it up in Webster 1828. This essay is all about what I found. I had to re-think the meaning of the word from the ground up. Continue reading “The Web of Language: Meekness”

Caring for Our Language

Caring for Our Language

by Charlie Obert, October 2020.

This essay is about the importance of language awareness in the world today. It is a vitally important topic; we need to study it to stay sane, we need it to practice astrology effectively – and, we need it to protect our political freedom, our ability to choose our own speech and thought rather than have it chosen for us.

This is going to be a wide-ranging essay. I will be looking specifically at language and astrology, and this includes the importance of recovering traditional astrology language. I want to discuss how our use of language shapes how we do astrology. Later in the essay I will branch out to the need for language awareness in a much wider sense. I will conclude with some thoughts on language and the nature of reality. Continue reading “Caring for Our Language”

(Not) a Saturn Culture

The immediate trigger for publishing this post is as a response to a comment I saw from a modern astrologer out on Facebook. The person was talking about the planet Uranus, and how Uranian people are the change agents, the rebels against what he called our Saturnian culture. This is a very common cliche of modern astrology.

I maintain that it takes only a moment’s thought to realize this is not true, and our current culture is very close to the exact opposite. In simple terms, Saturn represents age, tradition and that which is established and passed down to us. Uranus in modern astrology represents the new, the youthful, progress and change.

We live in a culture that worships youth, and change and the new, a culture that denigrates, attacks and despises anything old or traditional. We are not a Saturn culture at all.

This essay is extracted and adapted from my recent book, Saturn through the Ages: Between Time and Eternity. It is part of a series of chapters where I am examining various people throughout history and how they interpreted Saturn. In the section on modern astrologers I have a chapter on the influential psychologist James Hillman, who comes out of a Jungian framework and who has had a big influence on what is now called Archetypal Astrology.

Please note that this essay was originally written in late Summer 2019. I think that this essay anticipates and describes many developments in our society since then. Continue reading “(Not) a Saturn Culture”

Saturn and Ouranos

In my previous post, on Uranus and Neptune, I talked about how the meanings of the planets changed when we added the new outer planets. I want to address the enormous impact in modern astrology of having the outer planet Uranus be in an orbit beyond that of Saturn.

In the first part of this essay I will spell the name of the Greek god as Ouranos rather than Uranus. I want to avoid immediate association with the modern planet of that name. The word in the original Greek means the Heavens or the Sky. Ouranos and Gaia, or Heaven and Earth, together gave birth to a large number of gods, including Kronus, better known by his Roman name of Saturn. Continue reading “Saturn and Ouranos”

What About Uranus and Neptune?

This post is in response to a question to an earlier essay that I wrote, On the Meanings of Saturn and Pluto. In that essay I argued that the modern meanings of Pluto were originally associated with the planet Saturn, and that the meanings of Saturn ended up being simplified and impoverished.

Here is the specific comment that I want to respond to.

Hello.
I’ve been reading a lot of your journal posts recently. I’m wondering if you can write something about Uranus and Neptune in a way you did with Saturn and Pluto. Are Uranus and Neptune borrowing traits from some other planets (maybe Mercury and Jupiter)?

I haven’t done posts on Uranus and Neptune because I don’t think there is a simple, one to one correspondence between either of them and a single traditional planet. You also have to take into account that adding the three modern outer planets also changes the entire system.

Here are my thoughts on Uranus and Neptune, and traditional astrology.

Uranus

Of the two planets I think Uranus is the easier to sort out. In traditional terms I would say that Uranus has some meanings that were originally attributed to Mars, and some to Mercury.

From Mars we get the meanings of disruption, sudden cataclysmic change, shock, and so on.

From Mercury we get the association with technology, communication, ways of thinking, ideas and so on. Mix the two together and you also get pioneers, rebels, outcasts.

That’s part of it.

Beyond that, consider the question of how adding Uranus the Oddball outside of the traditional seven planets affects the meanings of the whole system in general, and of Saturn in particular. This is a complex topic, and I go into it in a fair amount of detail in my recent book, Saturn Through the Ages: Between Time and Eternity.

In the traditional system Saturn is the outermost of the seven traditional moving planets, at the border between the moving spheres of the planets and the unmoving sphere of the fixed stars and the unchanging heavens. Saturn is at the interface between time and eternity, and mediates the eternal order down into the world of motion and change. This has a rich and complex mix of meanings that I discuss in the Saturn book.

Add Uranus outside Saturn and the whole dynamic changes. Saturn is reduced to being associated with the past, with the establishment, the old order, and the limitations of the old order, while Uranus becomes the new, the rebel, the pioneer, the disrupter, the individual and individual thinker moving forward into the uncharted future. Future and New are good, while the Past and the Old are evil and restricting. There is a whole broad change in value judgments that goes with that change, and I analyze that in my Saturn book.

It gets complicated very quickly.

Neptune

When we turn to the planet Neptune, things get a lot messier and murkier, which is a very Neptunian sort of a situation. I connect Neptune to some meanings from at least three of the traditional planets.

There is the moon, especially the dark waning moon. The Moon is related to liquids and the ocean. The dark malefic moon is related to witchcraft, enchantment, illusion, deceptions, and also to poisons. (Just to make it more messy, poisons are also associated with Saturn.) Think of the cliche image of witches meeting at night under the moon to go on their journeys and work their malefic spells.

There is Venus, especially Venus debilitated and dangerous. Venus is associated with glamour, with dreams, with the magnetic attraction of beautiful and intoxicating things. Venus when debilitated is associated with enchantment. Venus associates with glamour, which is a very Neptunian sort of word, and also very Venusian – again, think lovely, glamourous, bewitching, intoxication. It is a very magnetic and seductive sort of energy. Venus is also associated with intoxicating drinks and drugs, and the deception from that. Think of lovely, enchanting, seductive and dangerous, coming under someone’s spell.

There is also a connection of Neptune with some of the meanings of Jupiter, and here things get especially complex. Neptune at its highest is now associated with spirituality, and that is traditionally under the domain of Jupiter.

The problem here is that the meaning and connotations of the words spirituality and religion have changed greatly in the past few hundred years, enough so that what we now think of as Neptunian spirituality would have made no sense to a devoutly religious and “spiritual” person of prior ages.

Just the fact that we split off the meanings of spiritual and religious from each other, and that we can talk about “spiritual but not religious”, is a very modern sort of phenomenon. The meanings of the word spiritual have become much more vague, nebulous, unformed, subjective, dreamy – much more Neptunian.

Along with that, the meanings of Jupiter, and the full meanings of the concept of religion, have become shallower, more negative, cheapened and even degraded. Like the Saturn and Uranus association of Past and Future, Religion becomes associated with a restrictive past and Spirituality with an open-ended and unformed Future. There are all sorts of complex changes in value judgments that go with that change in meaning.

Like I said, it gets complicated very quickly.

The Larger Question

Beyond any question of which traditional planet the modern planets took their meanings from, there is a larger issue of overall change in system and in meaning. The more I think about it, the more I am of the opinion that the original question, of which planet meant what, is the wrong question.

In modern astrology the meanings attributed to the traditional seven planets have become much simpler, thinned down, less complex and multi-dimensional. Rather than approaching the question in terms of the modern meanings, I think there is the larger question of recovering the fuller, richer and more complex meanings of the traditional seven. My most recent book, on The Classical Seven Planets, is trying to do just that.

If you  just start with the modern meanings of the planets and assume that they are adequate, you are missing a lot of the depth and subtlety of traditional astrology. If you want to learn traditional astrology I think it makes more sense to just set the modern planets aside and spend time immersing yourself in the entire traditional system. It is worth taking the time to get to know the traditional meanings of the planets on their own terms.

The Battle for Reality

Essay by Charlie Obert, October 2020

Back in November 2019 I released a video that I titled “The Grand Conjunction: 2020 and Beyond“, in which I talked about the triplicity shift going on in astrology, and its long term implications.  I want to revisit the main theme of that video here, and go a bit deeper.

Since this was a video about prediction for 2020 I want to quickly comment on what I missed – obviously, the covid pandemic. I greatly underestimated the combined effect of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars, the three outermost and slowest moving planets in traditional astrology, all conjunct is a single sign, with the two malefics both strong and dignified, and Jupiter debilitated and as weak as it can get.

More importantly for my purposes here, I want to talk about what I got right, and develop the theme further. Even the pandemic itself fits within my larger theme. Continue reading “The Battle for Reality”

Astrology and Media Manipulation

The Purpose of this Essay

As astrologers we do interpretation by mapping the symbolic language of astrology onto the data and information about the world around us that we experience. Astrology does not exist in a vacuum; it does not come alive until we relate it to our world. That leads to a very important point that I am going to meditate on in this essay.

Our astrology on any topic is only as good
as the news data that we are mapping it to.

In today’s world this causes some problems. Like it or not, the state of the news media today is now such that much of the news we consume is badly distorted, contains a great deal of falsehood and fiction, and is usually slanted to support a political agenda.

If we follow only slanted and distorted sources of news
then our astrology becomes slanted and distorted.

We need to be aware of this process, and of the distortion in the news and media we consume. We also need to develop skills for viewing media with a critical discernment, and with awareness of the persuasion process going on that is being used on us to shape our opinion.

What I want to talk about in this essay is how the same skills that make us good astrologers also make us easily susceptible to programming by the media. Tarot readers, psychics, and practitioners of other forms of divination are similarly vulnerable if that is their only way of looking at the world.

In order to be good astrologers today we really need to be media-aware, media-savvy, have some understanding of how our minds work, and of how the media can easily exploit that if we are not aware of the process.

This also means that, along with our skills as astrologers in seeing patterns of meaning, we really need to develop balancing skills that allow us to stand back, to sort, to question, to sift and to compare news sources. Those skills don’t come naturally, and for most of us, those skills are not naturally a part of our astrology toolkit. We need to consciously develop them. That takes work, it takes exploration, it takes learning, and it takes practice. Continue reading “Astrology and Media Manipulation”

A Change in Meaning – Complexity in Astrology

by Charlie Obert

In modern astrology as compared to traditional there is a change in the number of planets – you go from the seven in traditional to nine (or ten if you still count Pluto) modern planets. In addition, many modern astrologers also include various asteroids, dwarf planets and other significant points.

This is not just a simple adding of a couple of points to a set. Changing the number of points changes how we perceive the whole set, how we work with it.

There is a general principle regarding that – the more items you add to a set, the less attention, meaning and complexity you can give to any member of the set. An increase in complexity in one way is balanced by a simplification in another way.

I want to use the rest of this essay unpacking this principle and examining its implications in our lives, especially in our astrology. Continue reading “A Change in Meaning – Complexity in Astrology”