So What Is Astrology For?

My response to the news item in the The Times reporting that astrologers had to label their art ‘entertainment’

Entertainment only?

The cider bus man at Glastonbury Festival  looked pretty entertained last June as he greeted me on my first evening with a broad grin and the words, ‘Got your notice up then, have you? Entertainment Only?’

‘What? Ah, I see, you’re ridiculing what I do, jolly good,’  I rejoined cheerily (wearily used to it).

‘No, it’s the law of the land now, didn’t you know?’

I didn’t know, and as I  retreated to the Wheel of Astrologers’ encampment in the Green Fields,  it wasn’t fun speculating that Richard Dawkins was finally going to get his way and astrologers were going to be jailed for practising our art.  Fortunately a colleague had done a little legal reconnaissance. It emerged that the new law passed last March, reported in The Times as insisting that astrologers, effectively, wear a badge declaring  that no-one should take us seriously, makes no such reference to astrology.  There have yet to be test cases in the courts but it looks as if we just have to be careful not to make false claims about astrology’s acceptance in the scientific world, ability to make precise, concrete predictions, etc. That’s fine; we don’t. This article explores some of the value – and mystery – of what we do.

How do you use astrology?

While Mr and Ms Times Reader no doubt had a good chortle about astrology being legally relegated to the same division as Mickey Mouse, Shakespeare and any other cultural manifestation that has the cheek to present itself without its scientific papers in order, the question remains: what do you use astrology for? Whichever way you’ve just read that question, I’m asking it with the emphasis on the ‘you’, inviting you to think with me, not trying to outdo Her Majesty’s Government by laying down the law, but presenting some thoughts for your reflection, and suggesting that your response may have a lot to do with who you are.

Fulfil your every fantasy?

If you go with modern life’s first research reflex and  Google ‘use astrology’, pages of wonders appear. Far from being just a bit of a giggle, astrology can fulfil your every fantasy, if you believe all you read.  Want to play the market? Pick the soccer results? Plan that perfect wedding?  Astrology can make it happen for you, it appears. Astrology has long been credited with the power to look into the past and foresee the future, but alongside this traditional claim there are sites offering astrological aid to boost your libido, manipulate your boss, become a billionaire – oh, yes! JP Morgan’s words, ‘Millionaires don’t use astrology, billionaires do,’ recur many times. Astrology is seductive, and if you don’t see your personal fantasy in this parade of promises, it will probably find you if you do your own perusing.

To muffle this siren-song, many people, especially men, plug their ears and emit the intellectual equivalent of ‘la-la-la’, valuing astrology’s offer of benefits at about the same price as  a current shampoo ad’s invitation to ‘enter a whole new world’. I understand that response but have learnt more respect for astrology from experience. And, in affairs of the heart, soul and spirit, I also have more respect for seduction.

Seduced into astrology

I should. I was seduced into a lifelong study of astrology when a young man I fancied flipped through his ephemeris during a phone chat and uttered the fatal words, ‘Oh, you’ve got Mars in Scorpio – that means you can get anything you want’.  Reader, it doesn’t. The power of Mars in Scorpio to stop at nothing until the goal is attained is well documented in astrology writing, but having it in one’s chart doesn’t guarantee the least  victory – you’ve got to learn how to recognise, accept and direct it, as best you can in one short lifetime. I, in common with many people I know with this placing, have experienced this inner Ghengis Khan in projection on vile-seeming others, in deadly struggle with myself, in ghastly masochistic hanging on, in awful things I’ve done to people completely unconsciously, and in horror at the carnage caused by those who wield his axe heedlessly for their own ends. Trust me,  you can hop on a tiger’s back for a joyride far easier than you can use Mars in Scorpio to gratify your every whim. Oh, I love him now, my iron-in-the-soul-mate, couldn’t manage without him, use him to defuse others’ aggression and delight to find him in the face of my life-partner, but it’s been a long and bloody battle to accept this grim-faced gift from the gods.

Now I’m going to add something that may strike you as strange. It’s also been a long and bloody struggle for my Mars, whose avatar pronounced the magic spell that so entranced my young, disempowered self those decades ago, to recruit me to the ranks of those who trust their inner experience to the extent of transforming the world-view they inherited and putting soul on the bottom line. Notice your seducing fantasy about astrology, and how it relates to your chart; you may learn a lot.

Transit anxiety

Astrology speaks to our desires and, just as persuasively, to our fears: ‘What’s going to happen to me? In Tchenka’s article this quarter you can read about using astrology for prediction and get an idea of how the thing is done, and what you can and can’t tell about the future from studying your chart’s transits and progressions. One daft game most of us can’t help playing is to look at a potentially difficult transit or progression that we can see looming on the horizon and try to second-guess what it will bring.  ‘Ooh, what’s going to happen to me when Pluto squares my Sun? Will I survive?  When Uranus conjuncts my Saturn  will my house fall down?  When Neptune opposes my Mercury will I lose my marbles?’  Well…. possibly!  One theory says that if you use planetary energies positively you don’t have to suffer their negative effects, and I’ll testify that ‘going with’ a transit or progression works far better than resisting it. However, as Greek tragedy tells us, no desperate bargaining with the gods to ward off ill fortune is going to alter the human condition.  We are mortal, vulnerable, and fallible and we can’t stop nasty things happening to us sometimes, neither can we make ourselves so irreproachably nice that we always deserve good fortune, whether or not we believe that what goes around comes around. So what use is astrology to human terror in the face of its fate?

Cosmic Belly-Laugh

Three astrologers sitting together in late February sunshine, Tchenka Sunderland, Heike Robertson and myself,  recently compared notes on this apprehensive looking-forward. Tchenka, with her long professional experience of forecasting, can claim a decent hit-rate with clients, but she and I agreed  that in relation to our own charts we knew from experience that whatever  we expected – it would be something different! Hooray!! The universe duly fulfils its symbolic destiny but, joyfully playing with the boundless energy of symbols, comes up with the perfect manifestation we didn’t expect. Respect to Uranus, endlessly inventive widener of our mental horizons, and to Mercury, the trickster of the mind who takes us deeper towards our core selves. Heike is probably a bit psychic – a whole different ball-game – and said she did see the way things would go in her peripheral vision, but preferred not to look directly.  What we all agreed on is the humour of the way life riffs on our hopes and fears, coming up with tangents and twists to, reversals and mirror-images of,  satirical skits and downright sarcastic comments on, our anxious expectations. This is the source of the laughter that restores us to ourselves in the moment as we share the joke. Being in on a cosmic belly-laugh does wonders for your sense of proportion.

From Control to Contemplation

So, if you can agree that astrology may help desire for ego gratification to lead to a soul marriage, and mortal fear to dissolve in laughter – so far so good. It’s not exactly like having the power and control that we imagine would come through knowing the future absolutely, though, is it? One of scientists’ many gripes about astrology is that it cannot be used to make precise predictions. Personally, I thank the Powers that Be from my heart and soul that it cannot.  Fantasies of omniscience and omnipotence tantalise us through both science and astrology, and, while it’s wonderful what both can reveal and enable, we need to respect human limitations.  Cultural wisdom, from Oedipus Rex to Macbeth, repeats that trying to use knowledge of the future in the service of fears and desires will turn against the user. Astrology is better used as a lens for contemplating life, not as an instrument for controlling it.

Acceptance

If your aim is contemplation and not control, there’s only one way I know how to do that and it’s through acceptance.  ‘Astrology’s about recognising and accepting ourselves’ said my teacher when I was learning with the Huber School, now API(UK).

‘No, surely it’s about recognising and changing ourselves!’ retorted my restless, driven young self.  And the only way I have changed significantly in the last twenty-odd years has been – through the self-acceptance I’ve found in knowing myself through my birthchart.

The Heaven or Hell of Other People

Just as good as the sheer relief of accepting yourself can be the pleasure of accepting other people.  Have you ever thought, ‘Why does she have to be like that? Why does he always take that attitude?’  Hell can indeed be other people, as Sartre suggested in ‘Huis Clos’, but flashing the infernal other’s chart before your eyes can open up that blissful space where you say, ‘OK, she’s being her.  I don’t have to take this personally, batter myself against it, get tangled up with it.’  Or perhaps, ‘I don’t like his attitude but I see where it comes from.  I don’t have to try to kill it, I can dance with it’.  A cantankerous old bat like me (remember that Mars) might well have no partner, no close friends, no children on speaking terms and no idea how to live with herself a minute longer without the balm of the birthchart that dissolves the exasperated, rhetorical ‘WHY??’ into a much quieter ‘That’s the way it is’.

Playing with paradox

The magic is in the objective value of the chart, distancing us in a way that short-circuits reaction and, paradoxically, allows us to be with what is more intimately, with less resistance. But of course, once objectivity is mentioned in relation to astrology the scientists get understandably stroppy, not just on account of astrology’s basis in pre-scientific-age cosmology but because reading a birthchart, rendering symbols into words, can never be objective. ‘This is not the truth’, my teacher used to write in a little heart on the whiteboard at the start of each session.  Faintly scandalised at first, I came to appreciate the love, courage and honesty represented in that motto. I see what I see through my lens from where I’m standing when I see it, not the eternal truth, which is, in TS Eliot’s phrase, ‘probably quite ineffable’.

Your worldview in your chart

At this point things can feel pretty weird, and how much you like that depends on how you’re wired (your birthchart will have some revealing clues). My experience with astrology leads me, without pretending  that it’s a new thought, to conclude that the way we see the world as well as the way we see ourselves and each other, is reflected in our charts.  Thus, when Tchenka says she values astrology as way of learning to live in accordance with the laws of the universe, she is well aware that authority is hugely important in her chart and that this way of seeing things reflects what she’s been working with all her life. Heike, she with the touch of psychism  – and the transpersonal planets Uranus and Pluto on the ascendant – said she valued astrology as a way of ‘naming angels and monsters’, whereas my partner maintains sternly from his Saturn-Mars conjunction in information-loving Gemini that no-one should take astrology seriously until its validity has been scientifically established (Mars in Scorpio can enjoy sleeping with the enemy!).

The spark of the moment

So how the planets may shape and inform your worldview is something for you to consider, not for me to prescribe. Get to know your chart and listen for what it can tell you.  For some the observer state, symbolised in Huber charts by the blank space in the middle of the chart, is ‘the real me’ and beyond the influence of any planetary configuration. I, with Saturn conjunct Mercury in Virgo and no personal planets in air signs, respect this view but identify myself as grounded in my individual position, looking at the view from here. And for my fiery fifth-house Sun, astrology comes alive in the spark of the moment, in the shock of recognition when a planetary energy, evoked by apt words, answers to its name and appears in the eyes before me, glistening, glinting or gleaming with fresh life.  It lives also in the ‘intersection of the timeless with time’ (T.S Eliot again) when I talk with someone about their chart and we recognise, with hairs prickling on our arms, that although we have no idea how, this conversation is also with the world around us and the planets beyond.  Astrology is an adventure in consciousness – that’s entertainment!