RELIGION, RENEWAL and JORDAN PETERSON

I'm going to talk about Jordan Peterson, and topics that spin out from that. I won't give you a blow by blow account of his chart. I don't often read chart interpretations of public figures, because I get bored. What is it that I want to do when I pull up a chart? I want to seize one or two features that grab me, and shake them like a dog tearing meat from a carcass. And digress as I will. So long as I stay interested, my reader probably will too. 

If you haven't seen Jordan Peterson, look up him on youtube. I watch him interviewing people for several hours every week. He is the great scourge of wokeness. His position as a psychology professor in Canada became untenable some years ago when he opposed a directive about what pronouns he should use when addressing people. He was not going to have his speech legislated for, though on an individual level he is always respectful and compassionate. But still a fierce arguer, exceptionally sharp, with decades of psychological research at his fingertips. He is deeply interested in people, which makes him a good interviewer. He isn't trying to trip them up, in contrast to what we have become used to.

You can see the Sun-Mercury-Moon-Saturn Grand Trine in Air in his chart. The realm of ideas comes very naturally to him, it is his gift. With Mercury also square to Pluto, there is a dynamic depth to his thinking. Moon in Libra gives him empathy, the ability to see from the other person's point of view, which stands out in his interviews. But it is an airy empathy, he stays objective.

Earthy Taurus Rising makes him practical. He is not interested in ideologies, but rather with what works. His main personal Water is Venus in Cancer, hidden away on the IC and unaspected. I think this is why he gets emotional so easily. The emphasis in his personality is intellect, so emotion creeps up on him and takes him over. It is people and their suffering and the ability to help them that moves him to tears.

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What prompted this post was Peterson and Religion, specifically his attempts to rehabilitate Christianity. I can go with that, but what I can't go with is his attempts to make it all OK, his apologetics. He doesn't critique it, and I think that is revealing. For example, putting the figure of a man being tortured to death as the central image of a spiritual tradition is really not OK. Sure, Jordan draws down lessons around suffering and the shadow, which are valid. But still. What, for example, are children supposed to make of that image, what is it telling them about the nature of the world? What has it done to our culture as a whole to have that gruesome image at its centre for so long? It is not surprising, perhaps, that we now have so prominently a nihilist materialism, a universe that has no point to it. That image has the knocked the life, the joie de vivre, the reason for living out of us.

So, Religion. The 9th House. He has Capricorn on the Cusp. That is why he wants a tradition. Someone with Pisces there just wants the direct experience of God, who they experience to be everywhere. The ruler of Peterson's 9th, Saturn, is in the 10th in Aquarius, retrograde and part of his Airy Grand Trine.

Saturn on its own has required Peterson to make his mark (Saturn) on the world (10th) in a way that renews the status quo (Aquarius). We can learn a lot about signs from the one that comes before, which they grow out of when they are functioning well. Aquarius grows out of Capricorn, suggesting to me that Aquarius needs to earn the right to break the rules, by learning them and living them (Capricorn) first. Otherwise it can be a mindless rebellion, albeit maybe necessary for a while.

We live in a culture where the traditions have largely died out. I have spent a lot of time on that edge of appreciating and wanting tradition, yet enjoying the freedom to reinvent that that lack gives me. I wrote a piece to coincide with the publication of my book The Medicine Wheel that has that sort of contemplation in it. You can find it here. 

We astrologers, of course, each have our own relationship with the astrological tradition. It is a tradition that has had to be resurrected, but it seems to have brought with it plenty of egregore, the energy that comes from centuries of collective practice. That is why it works so well. Not for any scientific reason: astrology soon becomes a nonsense when approached like that. It works because of the divinatory capacities of the individual astrologer allied to the stage 4 rocket booster of the egregore around the tradition. We can be grateful to the astrologers of the past for building the energy field that we both draw on, and renew in the act of drawing on it.

Maybe psychotherapy has an egregore too, coming from all those therapists since Freud? Maybe it is gaining in power? It is a ceremony, after all.

So tradition can be a good thing, a powerful thing. Intricate layers of symbolic meaning build up over the centuries. If you've been in a traditional sweatlodge, you'll know that everything, down to the smallest detail, carries meaning in that ceremony. And those meanings have a power that comes from all the people in the past who have done sweatlodges from whatever tradition.

But we can't be part of those traditions, not really. We have to reinvent our sweatlodges. And our astrology. There is an edge in this that I think is very important. An edge that I think can only really come from having lived through major outer planet transits, and the deeper alignment with who we really are that they bring about, if we allow it. I think that gives us the right to break the rules and reinvent. How can you, for example, bring forward our understanding of Pluto transits unless you have lived through some, and know their nature on your pulses, deep within yourself? 

Traditions have the bad habit of setting themselves in stone, because people want that kind of certainty. Astrology is as guilty of this as any tradition, but I am not railing against it, for I think it is inevitable and even necessary for maybe most of us at certain points in our lives.But it is those who want it set in stone who will resist those who want to keep renewing the tradition (which is an ongoing thing).

So, back to Jordan Peterson. He wants a spiritual tradition (Capricorn on the 9th House Cusp). But he also wants to renew it (the ruler Saturn in Aquarius). And he wants also to impact the world with this renewal (Saturn in the 10th). Saturn is retrograde. I'm never quite sure what to say about retrograde planets. They are going backwards, and Peterson is reaching back into the past as far as he can go, which is to the Old Testament, on which he has given a series of lectures, available on Youtube.

So he is starting from first principles in his attempts to renew Christianity, which I think is the right place to start. But, as I said earlier, he wants to make it all OK. Maybe he will find a way of making the OT injunction to stone gays to death OK, I don't know. Traditions make mistakes, they get things wrong. Maybe the worst kinds of mistakes are the oldest ones, because they become such articles of faith. If you're going to renew a tradition, you need to be able to say where you think it has gone astray. After all, Christianity for most people in the UK, at any rate, has pretty much died out. That doesn't happen if it continues to nourish people. So you have to look at where it went wrong. 

I am not personally Christian, my inclinations are more pagan/shamanic/old gods.  But I can appreciate that there is a powerful spirit in Christianity, in Christ in particular, that has built up over two millennia. You can't ignore that. It is something that speaks to all of us, is part of all of us, just by the fact of our living in this culture. I think maybe the best approach is to allow Jesus to be there as a spirit, but don't allow the special, totalitarian claims that have historically come with that. As astrologers, we have lots of gods living side by side. That pluralism is a guard against fundamentalism, the idea that there is only one reality.

Peterson is drawn to tradition for reasons given, and Christianity is our tradition. But it's not just that. He also has a Jupiter-Chiron conjunction in Pisces, square to his Mercury. This speaks strongly of suffering, sacrifice and redemption. In other words, Christ. Maybe you could say it is his Cap 9th that is drawn to the Old Testament, and his Jupiter-Chiron that is drawn to Christ/the New Testament.

Peterson's Jupiter-Chiron is opposite Pluto in Virgo. There is the death and renewal/resurrection. There is nothing wrong with all these attributes of Christ, for they are part of any spiritual tradition. I think the problem is that they have been made the whole instead of the part, and therein lies the imbalance. Making a part the whole is  one way that fundamentalism arises, and when you have a state religion, as Christianity became, that is always a possibility. We want simple rules and certainties, and that was what Christianity provided.

Peterson has North Node in Leo in the 4th. He sees the valuing of the worth of the individual as a remarkable achievement of western culture, with its roots in Christianity. He uses the western abolition of slavery, which has been a human universal, as an example of this valuing.

So back to my reason for writing this piece: Peterson's social and religious conservatism (Cap 9th and 10th, prominent Saturn), which I can go with, for tradition is a necessary thing, but his reluctance to criticise Christianity, which I cannot go with. 

The Houses are where we incarnate the planets. The 9th is the type of religious practices and institutions we seek. But Jupiter is the planet of spirituality/religion. It is how we are inwardly. There is an inner/outer distinction between planets and houses that is not absolute. Peterson has Jupiter in Pisces. For all his lengthy exegeses on the Bible, Peterson longs inwardly just to surrender to God. This also describes his openness to psilocybin and other psychoactive susbstances.

But Saturn is much stronger in the chart. So at the end of the day, the tradition about God wins out over the direct experience of Him. Peterson has a tight Mercury-Jupiter square, and a wide Sun-Jupiter square. He is challenged to open himself to God. The same may be said of his 12th House Mars, which is square Saturn and opposite Neptune. I would argue that this issue describes the principle challenge in his chart and therefore in his life.

It is an incremental thing, as I know from my own life. Peterson doesn't exactly lack in self-confidence, in trusting his inner guidance and knowing. But it begins with observation, he is a scientist. Earthy Taurus Rising and strong Saturn. His starting point is not the inner, which is that of the mystic. He is doing the opposite journey. When it comes to that complete surrender, he cannot fully let go. He takes refuge in tradition, in the Word, and trying to resuscitate it. That is why he does not critique Christianity as he should: he cannot afford to.

I was prompted to these considerations by Peterson's description of his home, in which every area has been deliberated on. I could not do that, even though I appreciate the aesthetic sensibility behind Peterson's efforts. There has to be room for chaos, room for areas of the house that are for the spirits. That seems like basic respect to me. Peterson is big on what he would call trait orderliness. My observation of him over the last few years has been of him becoming increasingly open to the spirit dimension. He is emerging from a Neptune-Sun square, which has that kind of effect. But his intellect may in the long run be too powerful for his own good, he may be too brilliant and prolific in his biblical apologetics to be able to stand back from that in the way that is needed to give Jupiter in Pisces full rein. Who knows?

How Astrology Works Part 1: Making Room for Astrology

There’s a joke about Wikipedia, which says that the problem is that it only works in practice. The same may be said about astrology. Every astrologer probably has their own theory, if they have one at all, about how it works. What we do know is that astrology is not a science, not in the modern meaning of the word. If you try and pin it down in that sort of way, it’ll probably stop working, offended at what you are trying to do with it.

Astrologers can provide stories rather than mechanisms about how their craft works. Much like things were 1000 years ago, when if you were asked how the world came into existence, you’d have said well God made it of course. And that was enough for people, and why shouldn’t it be? Why shouldn’t a story that is imaginatively appealing be enough? Even today, with our modern explanation of how it all came about – the Big Bang – at the heart of it you have something coming out of nothing. That isn’t a mechanism, that is a story, it has magic in it. Something out of nothing, who would have thought it?

Eurynome

A couple of the ancient Greek Creation Myths have a similar starting point. In their cases it was Chaos. In one story we read: “In the beginning Eurynome, the Goddess of all things, rose naked from Chaos.  She found nothing substantial to rest her feet upon, so she divided the sea from the sky, dancing lonely upon its waves. She danced to the south, and the wind set in motion behind her seemed something new and apart with which to begin a work of creation.”

Now I find that more imaginatively appealing than the Big Bang story, because from the beginning the universe is alive. It is not just a bunch of hot particles that have to wait billions of years for that incidental phenomenon, life, to appear. No, life is there from the word go in the form of the goddess of all things, Eurynome. And that, in my view, makes it closer to the reality of things than the Big Bang story.

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As an astrologer, you experience all the time the intermingling of inner and outer, above and below, life and matter. On the final day of Uranus’ transit through Pisces, on 11 March 2011, there was a tsunami in Japan. The next day, with Uranus on its first day in Aries, a nuclear power plant exploded in Japan as a result of the tsunami.

I don’t think I need to unwrap the symbolism. It was one of those times when astrology describes events in the world with a raw, literal power. Awful as the events were for the Japanese people, for the astrologer they were a striking demonstration of the connections between heaven and earth. And people: at the moment of the explosion, Uranus was ½ a degree off an exact square to the Japanese Ascendant.

The ancient Greek Creation story continues, until we read: “Next, the goddess created the seven planetary powers, setting a Titan and Titaness over each…”

So there we have it. How does astrology work? It works due to the powers invested in the planets in ancient times by Eurynome, the goddess of all things. The planets have the names of Roman gods, but they were taken from the Greek – where for example, Hermes becomes Mercury. And, of course, modern western astrology has its roots in ancient Greek astrology.

As I said, every astrologer probably has their own theory/story about how astrology works. The above is just one story.

Traditional societies often have a number of Creation stories. The opening chapters of Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths are devoted to several of them.

I once asked a Chippewa Cree friend who is a story-teller if his people ever got fundamentalist about their Creation Myth, thinking of it as the way the world began, and he said no, that is because we have a number of stories, and they often conflict with one another!

So that is a very different mind-set to the one that, in the West, we have been used to for over one thousand years. A mind-set that says there is only one way that things are, and only one way that things began. That is a definition of fundamentalism, that there is only one reality.

Firstly we had it with Christianity, and now we have it with Science. That is not to say that all scientists are closed-minded and fundamentalist. Or indeed that all Christians are. Far from it. But built into the scientific method is the idea that things are only one way. If you have 2 theories – stories – then they are seen as competing, and sooner or later one of them must prevail. You can’t, for example, subscribe to both the steady state and the big bang stories of the origins of the universe. They are conflicting, and you can’t have that. I think well why not, they are both telling us different things about the cosmos, so let's have both.

I think there is something to be said for the American schools where they are required to teach both Creationism and Evolution. Let’s not get too hot under the collar about one of these being ‘nonsense’. If you’re reading this, you may well think that Creationism is nonsense. If you read Richard Milton’s Shattering the Myths of Darwinism, you will see how full of holes the theory of, and evidence for Evolution is. But that is not the point. In these schools, children are being taught two contradictory Creation myths, and in my opinion that can be very good for producing open-minded adults, who are able to consider alternative ways of seeing the world. Out of 2 closed systems has arisen something that, potentially at least, could be a good thing, and probably not what either of them intended.

So in this consideration of how astrology works, I want to get away from the mindset that says there is only one explanation for everything. We are deeply conditioned to think like that – previous generations, after all, have been trained that way for over one thousand years.

Once you think there is only one explanation, then the stories stop being stories and become literal events, set in stone, with little for the imagination to play on.

To insist on one explanation implies that the human mind is capable of grasping the whole truth. The universe is so large and complex, our brains are so small in comparison, how could this be possible? And even that which we do see and know is an interpretation provided by our brains at a very fundamental, deep-structure level. Up and down, me and you, time, left and right – all these structures we have for interpreting reality are contingent, they are created by the brain. They are useful, they work, but it means we need to put inverted commas around absolutely everything!

Three decades ago I read Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Sacks is a neurologist who had patients with brain disorders/injuries that affected their perception. You’d get patients, for example, who could tell you generally what something was – a playing card for example – but not that it was the Jack of Hearts. And you’d get patients with the reverse problem. Or ones who had lost the sense of left. So they’d do everything with the right hand side of their body. They would even eat the right hand half of what was on the plate, unaware of the left half, and then pull the plate round to the right and eat the right half of what was there. And so on.

Reading this book was a philosophically powerful experience, much more powerful for me than studying philosophical idealism, which posits that reality is mentally constructed. This book gave me an experience, as opposed to a mere mental awareness, of that philosophical position.

Of course, if we do see reality as just one way and as literal, then it provides a measure of certainty in an uncertain universe. And that is probably a perennial human tendency. It makes the big questions a whole lot easier, but also a whole lot less interesting. After you die you go to heaven or hell. After you die you are extinguished. These are both the same answer, in that they are providing certainty to a question that has no certain answers.

If you can live with metaphysical uncertainty, then the universe opens up. There is the sense of awe at just how mysterious place the cosmos is. As the biologist JBS Haldane said: “My own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” And it leaves room for the Imagination to take seriously and delight in, for example, the story of Eurynome creating the world.

And it leaves room for astrology.

Cherie Blair versus the National Secular Society

Cherie Blair, the barrister wife of Tony Blair, has come under fire from the National Secular Society. Sitting as a judge in a case where one Muslim broke another’s jaw in a fight over a place in a bank queue, she decided to suspend the man’s sentence because he was a religious person and had not been in trouble before. She added: "You are a religious man and you know this is not acceptable behaviour."

The National Secular Society has complained to the Office for Judicial Complaints that her attitude was discriminatory and unjust, and suggests she might have treated a non-religious person less leniently.

I fully agree. Cherie Blair should not be let away with this. No doubt in her own head she is being liberal and open-minded, because the guy is a Muslim, whereas she is a Catholic. But actually she is putting religious people above those who are not, and this is prejudice and intolerance. (Maybe also it's a case of 'Nice Lion', the Blairs being a prime target for muslim extremists).

If anything, I would argue the case the other way around: many people take to religion because they can't handle living in an uncertain universe. With the false certainty that religion provides comes a sense of rightness and superiority that can be used to justify unethical actions. So if I were in Cherie Blair’s position, I would be asking how much this guy’s religion justified the violence that occurred when the other person ‘sinned’ by shoving in front of him in the queue.

Christianity and Islam both have a long history of righteous violence. The recent/current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are a testament to this. In the case of Christianity, there is on the one hand the teaching of Christ, but there is the Old Testament as well, which Islam also accepts, with its eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth teaching.

So I find it ridiculous that Cherie Blair should raise religious people above secular people in this way. Islam, I guess, is her enemy’s enemy (secularism), so for now it is her friend.


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I don’t know much about what Cherie Blair is like, but her chart reveals a Virgo Sun and Leo Rising and Moon. The Virgo Sun gives her the analytical, flexible mind that a lawyer needs, and the Leo gives her the ability to perform that a barrister needs (her father was an actor). Pluto squared her Sun in the last few years, and part of the meaning of this must surely have been the more independent identity that was possible when her husband stepped down from being Prime Minister.

Jupiter is near the Ascendant (also square to Mercury and Neptune), and this gives her religion, but with Uranus also there, I am surprised her religion is so conventional. What I have noticed with the 1955 Jupiter-Uranus bunch is that while on the one hand they are often forward thinking, they also tend towards fanaticism and intolerance – a bit like Aquarians, who are Uranus-ruled. If you mix this in with the sense of rightness that a double fire sign gives, as well as the conservatism of Leo, then I think you have Cherie Blair. She also has a liberalism (Jupiter-Uranus) to her – she is, after all, the wife of an ex-Labour PM, and is famous for saying in reference to Palestinian suicide bombers: "As long as young people feel they have no hope but to blow themselves up, we're never going to make progress, are we?"

Pluto is squaring, and Saturn opposing, her MC this year, so I would expect her career to move forward significantly. She’ll probably be appointed as a full-time judge.

Pluto in Capricorn and the rise of Christianity

I’m away at the Sunrise Celebration in the South of England, so I’ve pre-published one or two blogs. I’m doing Astrology and Tarot readings. It’s the first time for about 5 years that I’ve been to Festivals, having been needed for some years to take Vajramala out to her horses every day. But I’m free of that now, and in a few weeks I’m off to Glastonbury Festival as well.

So here is a piece by Ed Tamplin that gives us historical perspective on Pluto in Capricorn:

When Pluto moved through Capricorn from the first century 42 AD, St. Paul had experienced his own “plutonic transformation” on the road to Damascus. It set him on a new path of missionary zeal. Meanwhile the Romans at the height of their empire began building Londinium. But their pagan gods were about to fall. Over the next millennium the face of Europe changed under the new banner of the cross. Each time Pluto accessed Capricorn the rate of Christian influence multiplied.

Christianity was a perfect vehicle for Pluto. Here was a religion whose foundations were built on death and resurrection. Jesus taught the resurrection as a Doctrine of Rebirth. One must be willing to die to their former selves to access the true kingdom of heaven. And the martyrdom of the early saints was a physical embodiment of the same principle.

The Roman hierarchy’s suppression of the seeds of change greatly empowered the process. During Pluto’s return to Capricorn in 287 AD, Emperor Diocletian, presiding over a then divided empire, instituted mass Christian executions to stem the religious tide. These mass killings were famous for their failure, and during the same period Constantine the Great was declared the new Emperor. Constantine’s baptism into the new faith would elevate Christianity to the religion of the state, and assist him to reunite the empire.

The following entry of Pluto into Capricorn witnessed the material phase—temple building. It came in the form of the grandiose reconstruction of the most famous church outside the Vatican—the magnificent Hagia Sophia of Byzantium. Dedicating the new building, (which utilized columns from the wondrous Temple of Artemis), Emperor Justinian declared, “Solomon I have exceeded thee.” By Pluto’s fourth and final cycle of the first millennium the devout Frankish King Charlemagne had subjugated the Saxons to Catholicism, in establishing his vast European Empire. The religion and the state were now united across the majority of mediaeval Europe and Eurasia.

The universal church had grown from the true believers to an institution, with its attendant hierarchal corruptions. In doing so it had inadvertently made itself a target for Pluto’s major charter of Reformation midway through the following millennium. On 31 October 1517, with Pluto back in Capricorn, Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church. It led to a new divided Christianity rising like a Phoenix from the old. (more…)

CHRISTIANITY VS ISLAM

It is possible to get some sort of chart for both Christianity and Islam by using the start dates for the Christian and Muslim Calendars respectively. (See Nick Campion's 'Book of World Horoscopes')

The Christian Calendar can be set up for 12am 1st Jan 0001 AD. (Click for larger image).



With Jupiter on the ASC opposite Mars in Aries on the DESC (‘open enemies’) square to the Sun, the expansive (Jupiter) and crusading (Mars) nature of Christianity seems to be clear. Islam has also spread widely, but it is not worldwide in the way that Christianity is.

The Muslim Calendar can be set up for July 16 622 AD at 6.45pm in Medina, Saudi Arabia: this is the traditional date of Mohammed’s arrival (at sunset) in Medina. These are both symbolic rather than literal charts, but so is the US Sibly chart! And astrology itself is symbolic.


Islam is much more identified with its place of origin, the Middle East, than is Christianity, and I think we can see this from its Sun in Cancer on the DESC conjunct Saturn: it is concerned to defend (Saturn) the homeland (Cancer) from its enemies (DESC). The Moon (Home) in the 7th House (enemies) seems to reinforce this point. With most of the chart in the 7th, opposition and enemies would seem to be central to Islam, it’s as though it wouldn’t know itself without them. Like an old friend of ours who also has Sun in Cancer and unaspected Mars in Virgo, George W Bush.

If you Progress the Christian Chart to 1095 AD, the date of the first Crusade to the Holy Land, you find Pluto stationary Retrograde. The Progressed Chart for 1271, the year of the final Crusade, has Pluto stationary Direct. So the Medieval Crusades involved a whole Progressed Pluto cycle for Christianity. If we fast forward to 11th Sept 2001, what do we find? Progressed Pluto stationary Direct! The start of a whole new cycle of aggression against Islam.


That this new cycle is not just a one-way process is confirmed by Progressing the Islamic Chart to 11th Sept 2001, and setting it for New York. What we find is progressed Pluto at 25.02 Aries, within 5 minutes of the MC at 24.57 Aries.

As I have written elsewhere, the War on Terror (using the 9/11 chart for its beginning) had a progressed New Moon in August 2007, heralding a major new phase in the conflict, whose nature will take time to become clear. The chart for Islam had a progressed New Moon 4 weeks earlier in July 2007, which is extraordinary, and confirms the point.


The Composite Chart for Islam and Christianity has Mars at 0.39 Cancer conjunct Saturn and Pluto in Cancer, which is about as heavy as it gets. Pluto will oppose this Mars by transit in Feb 2008, again indicative of a new phase in the conflict between the Christian West and Muslim Middle East.

When Benazir Bhutto was assassinated a few days ago, Mars was very close to this Christian-Muslim composite Mars, and so is descriptive of the tensions between the pro-western Bhutto and ther Pakistani Islamists that led to her murder.

As Pluto moves to oppose the composite Saturn and Pluto in the coming years, Uranus will also square them, at the same time as the Uranus-Pluto square transits the charts of most of the major western powers. This suggests that the development of the conflict between the west and the Muslim world will be an important part of the Uranus-Pluto square, which is the big astrological configuration coming our way. You never know, some sort of accommodation might eventually be reached, it might not be all doom and gloom.