Charlie Obert
I want to talk about astrology as a spiritual practice. In particular, there is a meditative discipline that I have been doing every morning for the past few years, that is the core of my work with astrology.
I call it, Consulting with the Gods.
But first, a bit of background.
This post was triggered by an incident a friend of mine told me. (*Please see the note at the end of this post.) She had a sense of foreboding and ill fortune, and visited an astrologer. She found out that the transit going on was Pluto opposition Sun, and the astrologer told her, Don’t worry, you’re just having a spiritual transformation.
It turns out that “spiritual transformation” was a diagnosis of stage 2 breast cancer.
The point I wish to make here is that the astrologer was correct in what my friend ended up experiencing, and completely false and misleading in the statement she was trying to make.
What the astrologer meant was something like – oh, don’t worry, nothing bad is going to happen to you, this is just a Spiritual Experience.
She meant Spiritual as opposed to something real or physical. No threat there.
This post is about the traditional astrology concept of aversion, and how it plays out in interpreting a chart. I used this example in the webinar I did for Kepler on October 24 of this year, and it intrigued me enough that I want to study it a bit more closely here.
In traditional astrology aspects are primarily by whole sign, and the only aspects that are used are the classical Ptolemaic aspects – sextile, square, trine, opposition.
Signs that are not in a classical aspect with each other – either 30 degrees or 150 degrees – are said to be in aversion, meaning they are turned away from each other, out of the line of vision and hence out of contact.
Aversion as an interpretive concept can play out in some interesting and significant ways, and here we are going to look at the chart of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.
My practice of astrology today is based on what I learned during a period of several years in which I confined myself to rules and techniques from traditional astrology. As part of that, I eliminated the 3 modern outer planets from my practice. Obviously this also means that I used only the traditional rulerships, where Mars rules Scorpio, Saturn rules Aquarius, and Jupiter rules Pisces. There is a beauty, symmetry and power to the traditional rulership system, with the planets arranged in pairs around the two lights, Sun and Moon, in the order of their distance from the Sun.
During the past year I have been exploring, and re-discovering, some of the techniques and viewpoints of modern western astrology. Along with that study, I now place a very high priority on having the different approaches to astrology all respect and learn from each other. While at one point I was convinced that traditional astrology was superior, I now think that was arrogance on my part, and that the different astrology systems are each different points of view, and have their own respective strengths and weaknesses.
So, as a (mostly) traditional astrologer, I want to be able to dialog with modern astrologers, speak their language, and use the best of their techniques and insights.
That means coming to terms with the modern planetary rulerships, where Scorpio is now ruled by Pluto, Aquarius is ruled by Uranus, and Pisces is ruled by Neptune. That is the system used by most of the astrologers I know. The problem is, introducing those new rulers disturbs the symmetry and integrity of the traditional system, and that is far more important than you might think if you don’t have experience in traditional astrology.
However, if I am going to dialog with modern astrologers, I need to be able to speak the language of modern rulerships, so I always have my eye out for a framework in which I can make sense of modern rulerships while still keeping the symmetry of the original system intact.
I think I have found an interesting and possibly fruitful approach, and I want to examine it here.
I was a philosophy and religion major in college, and that shaped my perspective on the world. Whenever I examine any subject at all, there is always a part of my mind that is standing back, observing and asking all kinds of questions.
What kind of worldview does this imply? What kind of ethical values does it hold up as desirable, and what is considered undesirable?
In working with astrology I am fascinated by asking the same kinds of questions of our astrology tools and language. We use sets of words and concepts here – what kind of value system do those words imply?
It is very, very important to me to attempt to become aware of the assumptions and implications of the language I use. I want to make sure that the message I am giving really matches the kinds of values I hold.
The tools we use in our astrology imply a worldview, and that changes as our tools change. For instance, when the three outer planets, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, were added to the pantheon of the Sacred Seven, this was more than just the addition of three new rulers to divide up among the sign rulerships.
This is a whole new world, a whole different cosmology – and, a whole different set of values.
Continue reading “A Change in the Cosmos”
This is the fourth in a series of posts, in which I am examining the implicit mind/body dualism in our modern world, and ways to move towards a more consciously integrated set of values that affirms the worth of our mortal selves.
Last week I talked about reclaiming the spiritual value of the body along with the mind, matter along with spirit, emotions and desires along with the detached and dispassionate parts of our minds.
That was framed mostly in terms of being alive – the incarnation, the feelings, the passions, the movement.
This week I need to consider the necessary other half of the process. When we reclaim our connections with our bodies, desires and emotions, we need to recognize and reclaim our experience of sickness, decay, decline, mortality, and death.
Continue reading “Reclaiming Mortality”
In the two previous posts in this series I have examined the way that our astrology has inherited a value system based on a mind/body, spirit/matter dualism. The purpose is to become aware of the language that we have inherited, and the values that it assumes.
In this post I want to look at places that we can see the development of a different, body-affirmative kind of approach to spirituality and values, and how that affects the language we use in doing astrology.
Over about the past half century I think we can see the seeds and roots of a new point of view that re-integrates the sacredness of the body, of our emotions and desires, and of the earth. I see evidence of this new worldview in a couple of different areas.
In my previous post, I looked at the implicit mind-body split that is assumed in much of our modern culture, and in our astrology.
This post is about the influence of the Theosophy movement on modern astrology, and how that movement shaped the value system implicit in our modern astrology.
The roots of twentieth century psychological astrology, with its emphasis on character rather than prediction, can be traced back to the overwhelming influence of a single man, Alan Leo. Leo is responsible for asserting that Character determines Destiny, and that the stars Impel, they do not Compel.
It is really interesting – if you look at astrology books published prior to Alan Leo, and then after his work, there is a very marked difference. It is a completely different world, and books prior to Leo feel antique.
Leo was British, and a member of the Theosophical Society when it was at the height of its influence. The language and values of Theosophy, which drew heavily on Hindu and other Indian sources, became part of the language of modern astrology through Leo and his many influential books, which are still mostly in print today. Thanks to Leo, our modern astrology looks mainly to Asian sources for its spiritual underpinning, rather than to our own Western spiritual tradition.
Continue reading “Leaving the Body Behind”
This will be the first of a series of posts. I want to examine some of the ways that our western astrology mirrors some fundamental splits in human consciousness today, and think about ways we can become aware of them, and move our minds more towards wholeness.
If we go back to the era of the birth time of western astrology in the Hellenistic empire, we have a kind of beautiful and precarious balancing and mingling of different threads of consciousness. On the one hand there is the still vital connection to the Gods, what we in the west tend to label the “mythical” side, but without the reductionist connotations of that term that we have in the modern world.
Along with that we have a beautiful flowering of the Greek development of the mind, the reason, and of geometry, mathematics, philosophy – and of course astrology, which feels like the system that ties it all together into a living whole.
However, also during that era, I think that we have the beginnings of a series of splits in consciousness taking place, where we were distanced from our bodies, our emotions, our desires – and from the Gods.
continue reading…
This is a sequel to my previous post on Comforting Fate, where I talked about a situation where the concept of fate, a larger order outside of my control, could be very positive, comforting and supportive.
In this post I want to examine the complementary position, thinking in terms of free will and the power of choice and attitude to shape our experience.
This is an issue that I’ve been wrestling with for a very long time. Sometimes the traditional stoic attitude of accepting fate makes the most sense, and sometimes the whole modern astrology attitude of consciously working with intent to cooperate with it, as a way to shape it to manifest in the best way, makes the most sense.
I’ve experienced both.