Journal

This is my first blog post since back in March, when I decided to take a couple of months off from writing about astrology. My birthday is in early March; in astrology terms, this year I have transiting Pluto conjunct my natal Ascendant in my Solar Return chart, and that will continue for the next couple of years.

Pluto, the Cosmic Roto-Rooter – major change, major cleanout, major transformation – it kind of feels like the psychic equivalent of having one of those drain cleaner thingies shoved up my butt. I think of myself as being Closed for Renovations this year. Along with some major shifts in diet and lifestyle, this includes my needing to re-think my attitude towards astrology, how it works, and how it fits in the world today, in this period of global instability and national decline.

Putting in bluntly – why bother studying and practicing astrology in the first place? How do I make sense of astrology in a 21st century world, and what good does it do?

I have don’t the answers down yet, but I do have a sense of direction and where to look, and I have a sense that I am being guided in my search.

In this post I want to start to define the questions, and give you an idea of where I am looking for the answers.

Continue reading “Return to the Source”

“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”
– Werner Heisenberg

Is astrology a science? The short and simple answer is, No. (Sounds of people rushing for the door.)

Is anybody still here? Okay, let’s chat.

The slightly longer, slightly more inclusive answer, goes something like this:

Science is able to map part of the order of the Universe. It is not sufficient to map all of it. There are other forms of valid order besides the scientific. Another way of stating that – the current scientific model is too small to contain all of the Universe, which includes ALL of human experience. The scientific model has its limitations and its problems, and a model that makes sense of astrology can address some of those problems.

Let me underscore that point – the current scientific model does not include all of human experience, and some of the most important dimensions are left out.

Astrology works, it is valid, and I think it is demonstrable to anyone with a reasonably open mind. Astrology works, but it does not work the same way that Science does. It is pointing at a different kind of order that is bigger, weirder, stranger.

I’m going to paraphrase the quote by the scientist Werner Heisenberg that I used to start this piece.

Not only is Astrology stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.

Continue reading “Astrology (Not) A Science”

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.

Continue reading “Velveteen Rabbit Revisited”

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.

Continue reading “Hall of Mirrors”

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.

Continue reading “Jeffrey Dahmer – Dignity Gone Bad”

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.
Continue reading “Saturn and Qabalah”