Philosophy – Page 7 – Student of Astrology

Velveteen Rabbit Revisited

I am writing this while Mercury is Retrograde, and I am going to use the opportunity to re-publish a piece I wrote a couple of years ago, and add some comments on how it relates to the ongoing theme of Saturn as feminine and Old Crone.

The name of the original post was,

Second Saturn Return and the Velveteen Rabbit.

I just had my Solar Return last month; I turned 63. I am just starting to seriously move into the part of my life where I increasingly deal with the reality of aging, decline, and eventual death.

This is a post-second-Saturn-Return kind of process.

Our youth-oriented culture has very few or no good role models for navigating this part of life well. Too often aging is a dirty secret that is denied, kept hidden or unspoken for as long as possible. Old people become increasingly invisible – I can see and feel that already. And death… people don’t die anymore, they make their transition, or go home, reunite with God or the Soul – anything to avoid admitting the stark reality of the cold, dead body lying there in the bed.

I think I found a useful metaphor for a graceful aging and death. It is from a children’s book called, The Velveteen Rabbit.

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Hall of Mirrors

Astrology and Reality

This post is going to be about astrology, and about reality, and about how the human mind works. I am going to be using astrology to question the validity of astrology.

Hopefully, by the time I am done with this meditation, reality will seem just a bit weirder, a bit less absolute, a bit more tentative.

You are about to enter a Hall of Mirrors – or rather, you about to realize that you are always living in a Hall of Mirrors whether you notice it or not.

Are you ready for a strange ride? Hang on to your hats and let us proceed.

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Jeffrey Dahmer – Dignity Gone Bad

The idea for this post was triggered by a very fine essay from the Seven Stars Astrology blog – it is titled, The Curious Case of Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Turner.

That essay begins with this sentence and opening paragraph.

‘The truth is that essential dignity tells you quite little about the “essential dignity” of a planet.

In a subsequent post (available here), I will explore in greater depth the obsession with dignity pointing, almutens, and sign-based indications of fortune/misfortune, which has done more to harm today’s practice of traditional astrology than anything else.’

To make his point, he uses two charts – that of the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, which has four planets with major dignity, and the billionaire media tycoon Ted Turner, that has no major dignity but several planets in debility.

I teach a class at Kepler College on using the traditional system of planetary dignities to evaluate the condition and action of the planets in a chart, and I spend a lot of time and emphasis on the essential dignities. I use every one of the indications he mentions – dignity pointing, almutens and so on – and I find them very useful. However, as he points out, if I am going to use those indicators, I need to be able to make sense of those charts.

My position is this – essential dignity is useful, but it was never intended to be used in isolation. It is part of a larger system of conditions for weighing up a chart that include what are called essential and accidental dignities, and all of them together are very useful for weighing up the condition and action of planets.

I use a weighted point system for evaluating planets, based on William Lilly’s system of dignities and debilities – in my class I nickname it, William Lilly’s Cheate Sheete. I am convinced that is largely useful as a training tool, a set of training wheels, teaching an astrologer the important indicators to scan for in the chart.

If you are going to work with the system of dignities, you need to be able to make sense of Jeffrey Dahmer’s chart. That is what we will do here.

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What Went Wrong

“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” – Yogi Berra

I’m writing this Sunday morning, November 13, 2016, the weekend after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States.

The title of this post isn’t about What Went Wrong to allow Trump to win. I’m not ready to touch that topic, and that would take me too far afield from the subject of this website.

What Went Wrong with the astrology predictions?

The majority of astrologers I know of predicted a Clinton victory. That was also my conclusion after looking at Trump’s chart, although I did not publicly post it. I still wonder about that.

There is one predictive technique that has me particularly puzzled here, and I want to look at it precisely because it makes no sense to me.

There’s a hellenistic predictive technique called Zodiacal Releasing, which is supposed to predict peak periods of activity. Chris Brennan has done a lot of very good work to revive that technique. In that system, Trump’s most recent peak period was roughly October 2015 to June 2016.

In other words, according to Zodiacal Releasing, Donald Trump’s peak period is past now.

I do not see any way I can square that with Trump reigning as President for the next four years. In what conceivable way can the period of the Republican primaries be his peak activity, while the Presidency itself is past peak?

There are different ways to answer that, and most of the ones I have seen feel more like ducking the question. Maybe he was born a little bit later than the recorded time, so his Ascendant is different. Maybe there are other astrological factors in play that “trump” this particular technique and over-ride it. Maybe there are more negative factors at play in Hilary Clinton’s chart – but we don’t have her chart, or rather, we have too many charts since there are at least 4 birth times out there. Maybe we shouldn’t have tried to predict this particular election since the charts we have are so iffy. Maybe…

I want to ask a more fundamental question here:

Is there something about the nature of astrology itself that makes predicting things like the outcome of an election a dicey procedure at best?

I think there is.

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Fate and Karma

If you are a serious student of astrology, sooner or later you have to deal with the uncomfortable fact that, if astrology works, it demonstrates that there are a lot of aspects of our lives that are beyond our ability to influence or control, and that may be pre-destined to a greater or lesser extent.

I am writing this in mid October 2016, shortly after the ISAR astrology conference where a panel of astrologers used their tools to attempt to predict the outcome of the presidential election.

If you had an accurate ephemeris, you could have drawn up the necessary charts a thousand years ago. If the predictive techniques have validity then the outcome of the election is indeed written in the stars, and has been written there for a very long time. (I picture a medieval astrologer drawing back from his charts with a look of horror on his face, as he divines the ascent of a weird hulking beast with a shock of bright orange blonde hair…)

Most of the astrologers that I know insist, strongly and loudly, that they believe in free will. Nothing in our lives is fated, our natal charts are nothing but potential, and it is up to us what we do with it. The whole notion that there might be circumstances or events that are predicted in your natal chart that are out of your control, is just not acceptable.

So they insist that we have free will – just a bit too loudly, and a bit too often.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Think about it – if it was so very certain that we have free will and can choose how we want our lives to go, why do so many modern astrologers spend so much time and energy insisting on our free will? If free will really was that much of a given then you wouldn’t need to keep insisting on it over and over.

On the other hand, most of the modern astrologers I know who recoil in horror at the notion of fate, have no problem with the concept of karma. The same astrologers who vehemently deny the notion of fate and insist on free will seem to have no problem with turning around and saying that, if something negative happened to you, it must have been your karma.

Let’s look a bit closer at that.

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Saturn and Qabalah

The difficulty with exploring Saturn being feminine as a possible earlier and alternate form of astrology tradition lies precisely in the fact that it is earlier and alternate, and hence we have very few surviving written references. Like the work that has been done by feminist theologians in recovering a tradition of the feminine as divine, much of the work is as much reconstruction as it is recovery.

There are very few traditional astrology texts that refer to Saturn as feminine. Besides that one sentence in Dorotheus that I talked about in my first post on the subject of Saturn as feminine, there are another handful of sentences that I am aware of, scattered here and there through the hundreds of traditional texts that have come down to us.

As far as I can tell, if you rely solely on traditional astrology texts, the traditional support for viewing Saturn as feminine is very slight. Let’s acknowledge that up front.

The historical case for Saturn as feminine is greatly strengthened if there is evidence of a spiritual tradition alive in the West that consistently associates the planet Saturn with feminine symbols, . As it turns out, there is such a spiritual tradition, related to astrology, and passed down to us along similar lines, that has a strong history of associating Saturn with feminine meanings and imagery, and we will examine just a little bit of that tradition here.

It is known as Qabalah.
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Dignity of Face

Traditional astrology uses a system of 5 levels of dignity or rulership. Modern astrology has kept only the two major dignities, rulership and exaltation, neither is emphasized very much, and both have lost much of their original significance.

The use of the minor dignities has pretty much been lost to modern astrology. Even those traditional astrologers who do use them often consider them only as having a small point value or as keeping a planet from being peregrine. The sense of the different dignities each having a distinct meaning has been pretty much lost.

I have been working extensively with the full system of major and minor dignities, and I find that even the different minor dignities each have a specific sort of nuance of meaning in terms of the role or position in society of the planet in question.

In this essay I want to look at the least of the minor dignities, that of face. I want to consider how the minor dignity of face can be interpreted in the context of a chart.

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How Canterbury would Die

Horary is the branch of astrology that deals with answering specific questions. If you do practice horary, there are different methods historically of choosing what planet represents the subject of the question being asked. That planet is called the significator.

If you follow William Lilly, the significator is the ruler of the house which matches the topic of the question- so, for instance, a question about money or possessions would be given to the 2nd house and its lord.

This approach doesn’t necessarily pay much attention to the chart as a whole, and the Ascendant and its lord has no necessary connection to the question.

Another approach would be to look at the natural significator of the topic – so for instance, in a question about a person’s mother you might consider either Venus or the Moon along with the appropriate house.

There is yet another approach that takes the Ascendant and its Lord to indicate the subject of the question regardless of topic. (Ben Dykes points out that this approach is used in Al-Kindi’s influential textbook on horary, Forty Chapters.) Since the chart represents the question then the whole chart, focusing especially on the ascendant, is the focus of the question.

I want to look at an example of a chart from William Lilly’s Christian Astrology, where Lilly read the chart one way, but you could read the chart using other approaches and find the same result. It is a lovely example of multiple markers pointing to the same answer.

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Geometry and Polarity

Antagonistic or Complementary Opposites

This post is a sequel to one I did earlier this year, called The Shape of Our Thinking. I examined how the geometry of our thought affects how we view the world, how we think and act.

Since the argument of this post builds on that one I will very briefly summarize it here.

Sine wave with straight line Astrology conceives of reality in terms of repeating cycles of growth and change – alternating opposites like light and dark, summer and winter and so on – and of ongoing cycles through time, of birth, growth, flourishing, decline, death and decay, followed in a collective sense by a rebirth, and so on. that is represented by the sine wave.

The straight line is our modern view of reality as conforming to Progress, where we just keep going up and up, getting better and better, always moving forward. The straight line and the wave are pretty much in sync on the upward slope, but on the downward slope they increasingly diverge. They are profoundly different models of the world, so they shape our thoughts and actions in very different ways.

Both of these two systems have various kinds of opposite concepts that structure the model – for instance,
– light / darkness
– day / night
– summer / winter
– heat / cold
– growth / decline
– youth / age
– masculine / feminine

and so on. There are other pairs of opposites, like good and evil, that have an ethical or judgemental quality.

So how do we deal with opposites? I think it largely depends on the shape of our thinking, and in this essay I want to examine the different ways of dealing with polar opposites that go with the two shapes.

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Saturn and Pluto

by Charlie Obert

Introducing the 3 modern planets, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, to the system of astrology, did much more than just adding 3 new members to the family. It also drastically changed the meanings of the traditional 7 planets.

The outer planets have taken some of their meanings away from the traditional Sacred Seven planets. In the process, the meanings of the traditional 7 have become less rich and complex, thinned down, less multi-dimensional.

Part of this thinning down of meaning comes from a modern tendency to want to streamline and conceptualize the meanings of the planets. You often see that each planet is given a single core keyword or concept as a way to grasp its meaning. This is done even by some teachers of traditional astrology.

However, if you read the older texts, the meanings of the planets are broader, more concrete, and much, much messier – I’m tempted to call them anecdotal. For instance, instead of saying that Saturn signifies where you have fear, a traditional text would explain how Saturn is associated with graveyards, dark places, underground, the skin, the bones and teeth, old people, diseases like arthritis, the color black, winter, and so on. The meaning of Saturn is given as a set of concrete associations or specific contextual meaning, and you have to feel your way into how these different items all fit together.

Starting with concepts rather than concrete associations tends to thin out the process and the meaning.

Returning to my original point – in addition to becoming more abstract and one-dimensional, some of the meanings originally associated with the traditional planets were transferred to the modern outer planets – which led to a loss of richness of meaning.

To illustrate this, I want to look at how many of the meanings now associated with Pluto were associated with a traditional planet we don’t normally think of as similar to Pluto.

That is – Saturn.

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