Astrology as the Art of Bullshit

From Astrology as the Art of Bullshit by Eric Francis (of Planet Waves):

"I have a client who has repeatedly commented to me that when she is having serious problems, she comes to see me rather than her therapist because I don't have a button on my desk--the one that he could push for the guys in white to cart her off to the locked ward upstairs. That is not therapy, that's death. But modern astrologers are not so far from this.


Crudely put, when we use dead astrology from dead eras and dead myths, our minds turn to bullshit. Astrology ends up being static and stuck and theoretical rather than being alive and creative, growing and changing and experimental. We might as well have a button on our desks. When we explore astrology creatively, from within our present context and knowledge, and from what our senses and intuition are telling us, we create a new world view based on the circumstances and events of our reality as we experience them. This is a creative process.

Anything else is dead.

The astrological charts we use, for example, abound with lies: The planets move in ellipses, not circles. Everyone knows this, yet the chart is drawn in a circle. Because the Sun is moving around the galaxy, the planets actually move in elliptical spirals through space and time. You would never know this from an astrological chart. On a typical chart, it appears that Saturn comes back to the same place every 29 years, but it really does no such thing. Because the Sun is moving and Saturn is following it, Saturn might show up at the same point in seven or 27 or 3,000 galactic years--calculated at about 250,000,000 Earth years each.

We still use a geocentric model almost exclusively, and rarely do we ever dare to look at a heliocentric chart. Yet, word got out in 1609 that the Sun is actually at the center of the solar system, and old Copernicus and Galileo and a lot of other people have been hassled immensely for showing us this. They did good work, but we have ignored them. Perhaps we should all join the Flat Earth Society, an actual group that believes the Earth is flat.

And then there is the small question of the Milky Way galaxy. Oh, that thing. Can anyone point to the galactic center on their natal chart? Have you ever considered its meaning? What about the black hole at its center--that's really wild. When I was a kid, black holes were a theory. Now we have one as our neighbor, the central Sun. Why isn't the galaxy a factor, a major factor, in our astrological considerations? I've only seen it listed in one ephemeris and the only person to mention it who stands out in my memory was Barbara Hand Clow. Like Trudeau's Boopsie, she's never afraid to get cosmic.

Then, after already having been grossly distorted beyond recognition, except to the most abstract thinkers, our whole cosmos gets smashed onto a sheet of paper by a computer printer. Ouch. The planets in space are three-dimensional, colorful, extremely strange and positively magnificent, not boring and flat, black and white.

And then, for the grand finale, we assume that this 89th degree abstraction actually says something about us, and with this as our most trusted tool, we set about practicing psychic surgery on our friends, neighbors, children, pets, clients, and ourselves. The funny thing is, it often somewhat works--though I think we can work a lot better."

And while you're about it, it's worth visiting Eric Francis' Book of Blue. Here's an interesting use he says we can make of mirrors:

"A friend recently sent this to me, describing her experience of witnessing her core-self:

As my orgasm started, it was just me on my own, looking into my eyes, fully present in the moment. My orgasm was so deep and strong that I started groaning out loud. My eyes were deep wells with an animal look in them. I leaned forward, my face right close to the mirror; I kept looking into my face and my eyes, noticing that I had the paradoxical nymph look of innocence and deep knowing with an earthy sexuality on my face, and I kept looking until it faded away and I saw the face again that everyone else sees.

Without going into too much theory, I would propose that most of us live in erotic prisons that are built of walls consisting of the ways we refuse to allow others to see our real selves. The walls can be turned transparent and eventually tumble, if we’re willing to allow that real self into our relationships.

That real self has a relationship with itself; like any other relationship, it involves mixed feelings. The people we are intimate with, I believe, need to allow us to exist within those mixed feelings, nd be present as we integrate ourselves – and we need to do the same for them.

VESTA holds space for this experience. The mirror-bearer is creating space and embodying as a kind of psychic light, akin to being near a fire. The presence of another person reaches into the darkness of shame and the light of one mind can reach into another."