ASTROTABLETALK: CHRISTMAS

Looking for Xmas presents? You need to look no further than my books Surfing the Galactic Highways

and The Medicine Wheel.

 

They are very readable, and I defy you to read the reviews on Amazon and not purchase them 💥 And a treat for yourself during Christmas week: my recently released video course on the Medicine Wheel (6 hours), available here at Watkins Wisdom Academy.

 

VENUS IN SCORPIO

Venus has entered Scorpio. It is all very well putting others first, seeing from their perspective, as Venus in Libra does. But that can also be a cover for people-pleasing. Scorpio demands that you be true to yourself - that you do not lie on any level - in all your relationships. Do not sacrifice truth on the altar of a superficial harmony. 

 

This transit also pushes us to be realistic about our friends: which ones have the no-go areas that limit how close we can be? Maybe even that person we've been getting involved with, are they really a match, or do we just want them to be? Be honest at all times with yourself and with others, and you will live well.

 

 

INTIMACY and ANGUISH

 

 

As a young man you'll marry a pretty face. Then you get older and Venus calls you to pay attention to your feelings. Your head still gets turned in that disconnected Mars way, but you walk away regretfully because your personalities don't match: you know the nightmare that can eventually ensue. The place we merge, the 8th House, is both intimacy and anguish.

 

 ---------------------------------------

 

 

The idea that we are blank slates at birth is not only contradicted by everyday observation of the personalities of young children, it is also the product of a materialist view of the universe. It lies behind the wrong-headed idea that parents are fundamental in shaping who we are, that underlies the psychotherapeutic paradigm. It is a harmful mythology. The astrology chart shows the rich, mysterious inheritance that we bring in with us.

 

 

ASTROLOGY, FATE and PSYCHOTHERAPY

Each of us has a unique blueprint to live out, a Fate that calls from the future, as described by the astrological chart. Our traumas and tribulations are best seen as opportunities "for which the child has been patiently waiting... in order to find a necessity and a direction for its existence, in order that life may become a serious matter." (WH Auden)

 

What a contrast to the scientific paradigm, which sees the human as a result, not a cause: the result of genes and environment and upbringing. A statistic. And how it turns the psychotherapeutic paradigm on its head, seeing childhood traumas as the necessary engines of Fate, rather than as mistakes to be resolved. In this sense I think astrology is a challenge to psychotherapy, rather than a complement.

 

 

THE CENTRE OF THE CHART

The astrological chart consists of cycles of time surrounding a centre that is outside of time. Time, like space, is not an attribute of the universe, but something we add on to order our experience. Then we take some LSD, and time and space dissolve and we are left, awestruck and maybe terrified, at the centre.

The chart is not taking us anywhere except to an alignment with its mysterious, apparently hollow, centre. It is empty because whatever you think it is, it's not that. The planets are 10 gods and goddesses continually calling us, and if we answer their calls, we shall feel that alignment. Maybe the IC is the closest point in the chart to that, for it is there that we feel on solid ground, with roots that plunge down forever: it is here that we can move outside of space. So how does the sign on your IC connect with infinity? For myself, with Jupiter-ruled Sagittarius on the IC, Mount Olympus is the obvious place to go.

Time is not linear, though we easily think of it like that. Everything is cycles, for everything eventually dies and starts over. The biggest cycle is the universe itself. The cycle closest to us, perhaps, is our own life and its mysterious dissolution in death. We have the shorter cycles of the day and the seasons to continually remind us of the cycle that is our life.

The human tendency is to take the ability to order experience too far, to mistake it for reality, to think that time and space belong to the universe and not to ourselves. That is why we need to keep coming back to simple astrology. Complexity provides further explanation and nuance and synthesis, but the gods easily walk away from that, bored. They don’t like being reduced to marks on bits of paper. 

 

That is also why it is a mistake to interpret the Nodes as providing some kind of evolutionary direction. There is no direction. There is just the attempt to embody the North Node, difficult as it might be, in the moment. And all the other planets. That is what makes life feel meaningful, that we are living the life that we are meant to be living. It doesn't have to be exciting. It is about carrying that inner sense of alignment with us, that deepens over time, in everything we do. And the planets show us how to do that.