FATE and the RELATIONAL SELF/ THE ASTROLOGY OF CREATION

FATE and the RELATIONAL SELF

For indigenous peoples worldwide, the self is seen as relational rather than as autonomous, which is how we tend to see ourselves in the modern world. Hence the right way to live is by finding balance between oneself and the world, for they are not separate.

This perspective was held - or should I say experienced, for it was a reality for those people - by the creators of horoscopic astrology. ChatGPT is very definite about this! It also makes the point that astrology "is inherently relational, as it posits that human beings are connected to the larger cosmos and are influenced by cosmic forces." Well said Chat GPT!

Of course we do our best to cram astrology into a free will/autonomous/psychological model, because for us that is reality. Given the choice, I always go with the universal outlooks of early peoples. That is why I am also Shamanic. I have faith in those ideas.

So we distort the foundations of astrology when we emphasise free will and choice. It is Fate that needs to be emphasised, in the sense of that which is writ in the stars, the reading of which is our job as astrologers. Fate in this sense is magical rather than deterministic. It says "the universe knows you", and that is a moment of enchantment for the client. You don't, in a sense, need to tell them anything about themselves they don't know already. Just the fact you are able to say things about them they consider to be true enchants them, and that is sufficient. And it shifts them from being isolated and autonomous - which one could view as a modern disease rather than as a valid alternative - to being relational. And we breathe a big sigh when we experience that connection with the universe.

The Fates were living presences for the ancients

In this way astrologers are healers. As well as teachers and goads: showing people their callings, why it is the universe wants them here (our callings are not personal), and nudging them to have the courage to live them.

Free will is doing gladly and freely that which one must do (CG Jung).

So where does that leave the planets? Are they different bits of us, as I admit I usually say in readings? No, they are not, and I must change that. They are gods and goddesses, forces at large in the universe, and the chart shows the pattern of callings that they make upon us. It is not ours to question why we have been given that pattern or - reductively and I think falsely - reduce that pattern to our childhood experiences.

Our demons are in the chart, they have been given to us, and it is our job to come into relationship with them and let meaning and perspective reveal themselves over time.

You have your own unique chart. But Mars is not 'your' Mars. He is much bigger than that, he is vast, and if you honour him, he will work well for you.

So I would see the real purpose of the chart to be religious rather than psychological. It is not so much about understanding yourself in a narrow sense (though that has its place) as it is learning to honour the gods that call upon you. They are your friends, your allies, your sky spirits, and an element of awe is always required if our approach to them is to be balanced.

The self which we cling on to so tightly is, from this point of view, a necessary but illusory prop in a much bigger cosmic drama. As any decent mystical tradition will tell you.

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URANUS TRINES PLUTO

Uranus is starting to trine Pluto, the latest unfoldment in a long cycle that began with the conjunction in Virgo in the 1960s. The power (Pluto) of technological (Virgo) inventiveness (Uranus). The trine, which won't be exact for 3 years, could be seen as the natural outcome of past efforts, catalysed by the square of 10 or so years ago.

In recent years an enormous amount has gone into areas such as sub-atomic research, nuclear fusion, renewable energy, AI, space telescopes, quantum computing, DNA technologies and theories of everything. We could be entering a golden era of scientific and technological advance. When the trine is exact, it will have moved from Cap-Taurus to Aquarius-Gemini. Pluto in Aquarius especially suggests powerful new inventions.

 

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THE ASTROLOGY OF CREATION

Creation myths sit at the foundation of who we are. And we are probably the first peoples in history for whom our primary creation myths do not have magical or miraculous elements. For the material universe, we have one story: the Big Bang. And for life we have another story: Evolution.

I once asked a Native Canadian guy if his people (the Chippewa-Cree) got fundamentalist about their Creation Myth, and he said no, because they had more than one story, and they contradicted each other. Which I thought was a great answer.

We don't just have a story. We have a 'fact', what 'actually' occurred, leaving room for no other stories, and creating rigid minds. The tyranny of facticity, that is what I call it. As if everything is not the Great Mystery, in the last analysis. IMO, it is better to believe in both the Big Bang/Evolution AND the Biblical Creation rather than just one of them.

The Biblical Creation

Preamble done, I thought it could be interesting to try to generate some astrology around our 2 creation stories.

Evolution came first as a theory. Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species was published on 24th November 1859. We don’t know the time of day, so I have done a midday chart. What is immediately striking is the New Moon at the beginning of Sagittarius. Both the New Moon and the early degree suggest the start of something. The mutability suggests the new start comes out of the dissolution of something rigid (the sign before – Scorpio). The Moon may still have just been in Scorpio, we do not know, but it was about to leave, at any rate.

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Sagittarius declares loud and clear that Darwin’s book is a religious narrative. Which it is, for it tells us where we came from. The Sun is opposite Uranus: that is perfect too, for it was a deeply disruptive and controversial thesis. No prizes for guessing that Darwin was an Aquarian. He most likely had Moon in Capricorn – one foot in the past, straddling 2 ages. And a Mercury-Pluto-Jupiter stellium in Pisces: a mind (Mercury) that delved to the root of things (Pluto) in the sea of life (Pisces) and found a new meaning/story (Jupiter).

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The Big Bang was first proposed in 1931 by George Lemaitre, a Belgian Catholic priest. He said that the universe began with a ‘primeval atom’. We do not have a date of publication of his paper, so I will have to make do with the year itself, through the whole of which there was a t-square between Saturn in Capricorn, Uranus in Aries and Pluto in Cancer. As a divinatory astrologer, I trust in the fact that I have just been given a year, forcing me to focus on the outer planets.

Lemaitre claimed that his theory had nothing to do with religion, and as a scientific theory, I am willing to accept that. But emotionally/intuitively/metaphysically, I think it had everything to do with religion. How could it not? Religion comes from a root meaning to bind together, and that is exactly what creation myths do: they give a point of reference, a foundation, for the whole people.

To digress, one could argue more widely that the scientific quest with its particular kind of truth is itself an essentially religious quest, with its origins in Christianity. “The truth shall set you free”: that is the religious belief behind the scientific endeavour.

So, the Big Bang and Saturn, Uranus and Pluto. Start with the outermost and most powerful planet as overall meaning and context for the others: Pluto in Cancer. Cancer is the mother, the womb of life. That is why Cancer is a cardinal sign, which begins things. And Pluto is the tiny but immensely powerful seed out of which the universe grew. Jupiter was conjunct Pluto until July 1931. Jupiter is exalted in Cancer, and arguably declares this to be a religious event.

Uranus in Aries was the divine spark that began this process. We take the universe for granted, it is just what is there. But if it wasn’t there, who could have imagined it? That is the genius of Uranus. And, being in Aries, maybe this is the first time a universe has happened? That is what Christianity would have us think, at any rate. Maybe it is indeed the case.

And then Saturn in Capricorn. Saturn is the planet that makes stuff happen. Until he intervenes, you just have the outer planets doing their profound cooking in the alembic. Saturn is in his rulership in Capricorn, so it was easy for him to let the energies of Pluto and Uranus flow through him and to create a universe.

Scientifically, the Big Bang was a purely material event. But as Terence McKenna said (paraphrase), “Everything suddenly coming out of nothing? If that isn’t a miracle, I don’t know what is. Science’s attitude is give us one free miracle, and we’ll explain the rest.”

Lemaitre was born 17 July 1894. He had a Cardinal t-square (and probably Grand cross, if you include the Moon in Capricorn) that overlaid closely the t-square of the Big Bang. It was like he was born to do it, the universe was using him to give us a new story about itself.

You could argue that, by showing that astrology applies to the Big Bang and to Evolution, magic has been introduced into those theories 😊 Certainly neither of them are very provable in the usual scientific way. Maybe they get a bit of a free pass because they are Creation stories.

The Depth Psychology of Shamanism

I have a strong interest in both astrology and shamanism. And at the moment it's the latter that I'm writing more about. And I have a shamanic blog that's been on a bit of a backburner, but now I've started putting a lot more on it and building a (free) subscriber list. So if you are interested, go to www.shamanicfreestate.blogspot.com and you can sign up at the top right of the page. Meanwhile, here is one of the articles from that blog:



In 1997, I was organising some shamanic journeying at a small festival in the UK, and the space was packed for each session, like 70-80 people. The word shamanism had a buzz to it, and I think it still does, even though it can also be a cliché.

But the buzz was genuine, and I think it was about people wanting a taste of the Otherworld, something which has almost become a race memory, because it has been so squeezed out by religion and then science. But it is still there in us, this desire for an untrammelled experience of Spirit, that feels ancient, and that is not hedged around by dogmas of what is and is not possible.

It is Spirit that ultimately teaches us about Reality, not humans and their books. Shamanism – a recent, western phenomenon – is about that return to a direct experience of Spirit, that connects us to a universe that is so much more than the literal, material universe of modern science.

That taste of the Otherworld is, for some, enough as an accompaniment to their regular existence. For others, it is not enough. Or we may think it is enough, but the spirits have other ideas!

And this is where the idea of the 'shaman' comes in. A slightly problematic word, as it carries connotations of spiritual stature, which ain't a good thing to claim. And a shaman is technically also a healer and diviner, a spirit consultant.

But the spirits can drag us kicking through that initiatory journey without the end result being a healer. You may end up as a counsellor, or an artist, or a stand-up comic - or as Mozart: what was it that spoke through him if it wasn't the Otherworld? Or you may be nothing in particular that you can put a name to! You just have that look in your eye that says I've been somewhere else.

As Leonardo da Vinci said: “Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.”

Or as the Ancient Mariner said:

 

"I pass, like night, from land to land;

I have strange power of speech;

That moment that his face I see,

I know the man that must hear me:

To him my tale I teach."

The Ancient Mariner

The archetypal event has become, for us, the shaman's illness, which will often bring him or her to the gates of death or madness, and once she has accepted the wishes of the spirits to be a vehicle for them, he recovers.

And I think this illness, this trial, this ordeal, needs to be interpreted broadly within our shamanism, even though the original definition was quite specific. And I think we need to be quite broad too about 'the spirits'. Yes, some of us will have guys upstairs that tell us stuff, or who work through us. For others, it may just be this other place in us, and when we speak or act from it, there is some kind of deeper wisdom or insight there, that may not even make sense to us at the time, but we learn to trust it. The so-called 'mid-life crisis' (which can go on and on - see The Middle Passage by James Hollis) has a resonance of this type of ordeal.

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As an astrologer, I encounter these trials in the form of Neptune and Pluto acting on people's charts. I had my own experience of Pluto for much of the 90s: after 10 years running Buddhist institutions, I was unable to do anything for several years. Anything I tried to do wouldn't work. And it was like the plug on my life-force had been pulled. I realised that it is not 'I' who lives, it is something from deeper within that calls the shots, and it was saying we're not going to let you carry on in that wilful way, we're going to fuck with you until you listen to us. And there was this deep, magical pull towards that other voice. 

Abdominal Surgery

At the same time, I felt like I’d had major abdominal surgery, and that I’d been brought about as low as I could be, to this faraway place. And after a few years I had a dream telling me to pursue shamanism - as well as something else, which was a trick dream that catapulted me out of my old life.

And since then there has always been this place within me that is a kind of dark wisdom, that I can forget about sometimes, but when I'm coming from there I am aligned with my life. It is the glittering eye of the ancient mariner. And in the last few years it's been happening all over again, but under Neptune's rule, and I'm still in the thick of it, so I can't say too much. But it's been like this overwhelming call that I haven't quite known what to do with.

Pluto with his hellhound

The classic story behind Pluto, who is Lord of the Underworld, is that one day he abducted Persephone, daughter of the nature goddess Ceres, who went into mourning and the earth went into permanent winter. Eventually it got sorted, but Persephone was by now Pluto's wife, and spent half her time in the underworld.

So this is a good way of understanding the shaman's illness. There is another side to life, beyond what is presented to us by society, and you can be taken there forcibly by the demands of the spirit, which has no regard for conventional niceties and sanities. And in a deeper kind of way, you grow up, move on to the next stage - as did Persephone, in becoming Pluto's wife.

A traditional society understands this ruthless dimension to Spirit. As Holger Kalweit writes in Shamans, Healers and Medicine Men: 

“The suffering and exhaustion that accompany a vision quest do not correspond to the mild and gentle style of modern psychotherapy. Westerners do not want to have to exert themselves to solve their problems.” (p102)

And Goethe understood what happens if you resist the call:

“And so long as you haven't experienced this: to die and so to grow, you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.”

So this initiatory journey that the shaman undergoes isn't just about acquiring magical powers under duress. I don't think it is like that. The main emphasis is on the development of psychological depth, in the sense of moving beyond the narrow, conventional self that tells us how to live, and whose rules are shared by the other members of society. That kind of living is 'normal', it gives a kind of psychological security to many people, and it is necessary for the stability of society.

But that ain't what the shaman lives by. No, he/she has another loyalty, a deeper loyalty, that is not to the rules and 'shoulds' of the tribe, but to the spirits, to the daimon, to the Otherworld, to the Jungian Self. And that other place to which we have our loyalty is more real, for it recognises that the world isn't what it seems, it is not to be taken at face value, for it is only one pole of existence, the other being the spirit world, and these 2 poles are profoundly interconnected. The world is not an absolute, it is fluid.

So it is this loyalty to the Otherworld that is the real qualification to be a healer - or whatever. It is the shaman's wholehearted response to the imperatives of the Otherworld and its values that make him/her a shaman. Once you have that new basis to your life - that look in your eye - then the spirits will allow you to be a healer, or require you to be.

Of course, this is a kind of ideal scenario, because we are human, and we fuck up, and sometimes people have real healing abilities who seem in other respects to be such messes.

But the principle remains, and it is the 'depth psychology' of shamanism referred to in the title. It involves a radical turning about, so that the guiding principle of our lives becomes not what society expects, nor is it based on our personal desires, but on a commitment to something beyond us, that also is us, and that is more real than a purely conventional notion of existence ever can be.

It is a completely different basis for living, and that is why the shaman's illness can take him/her to death's door: the conventional, which is so deep-rooted, has to die. It can almost be like I cannot continue to live like I have been, so how can I live? And the answer is there within, and always has been.

Saturn-Neptune: 'The Renewal of the Living Spirit'

Saturn dominates Neptune

Saturn and Neptune will be squaring each other over the next year. These 2 planets are opposites: Saturn promotes form, Neptune formlessness. And in a contest (which hard aspects can seem to be like), if Saturn wins, imposing his will on floppy Neptune, you get a dictatorship. And if Neptune wins (in his indirect way), you get a swamp. 

Of course, we don't really want a contest between the two, we want them to work together to create a heavenly symphony. And to do that you need to be able to both listen to the angelic voices (Neptune) while putting in the years it takes to learn your craft (Saturn).

When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, it not only did so with the Sun

and Asc in Pisces (ruled by Neptune) but with the prospect of a Saturn-Neptune opposition 3 years down the line: and it indeed

Neptune dominates Saturn

became a swamp that continued for years. The US eventually largely withdrew with no clear victory. And it has withdrawn with the prospect of a Saturn-Neptune square that begins in a couple of weeks, as Saturn changes direction, and moves forward to make the first of 3 exact squares over the next year or so. And that tells us the flavour of the new war they have out there, against IS: it is already a swamp, with no clear way forward, and is set to continue that way for a while.

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The above concerns the mundane Saturn-Neptune, the 2 planets operating in the world. The world, acting in the collective way it does, tends not to very conscious, the choices are very limited: that was why Germany pulverised Greece last week, forcing it into an impossible situation.

Mundane astrology and the events associated with it can be therefore quite illustrative of what happens to us on a personal level if we don't think we have choices under these transits: we become a mess with a Plutonian, Neptunian or Uranian flavour. (Greece is a Uranus-Pluto mess).

This Saturn-Neptune square particularly concerns you if you have Sun, Moon or an Angle between about 5 and 15 degrees of a mutable sign - Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces.

If you are at the earlier end of that range, then Neptune will have been hard-aspecting you for maybe a few years by now.

Neptune and Pluto are the 2 big transformers: I'm not sure how much difference there is between them. They each tend to drag you through an underworld - one earthy, the other watery - and pull you apart then put you back together again, renewed: if that is what you want, of course.

Neptune Transit

You could say that with Pluto the emphasis is on becoming more real, more authentic. While with Neptune the emphasis is on ensoulment and redemption from suffering. There is a different feel to them, but maybe they still amount to the same thing. All astrology is doing, in a way, is providing appropriate myths at different points in our lives. And myths need not to be taken literally: they are stories that we intertwine with our lives to make sense of them.

So if you have been under Neptune's influence for the last few years, then the theme of your own suffering, and the need for redemption from it, may be writ large. Neptune dissolves. He dissolves the thick skin we often create just to survive: this is an unconscious process that occurs early in life. Unless you are lucky enough to have a functional upbringing!

And that thick skin turns into a habit, long after it has served its purpose. It is like a dog that guards us, he means well, but we no longer need to him to chase away visitors.

So Neptune slowly dissolves the skin that has, to a greater or lesser extent, become who we are, leaving us adrift, not knowing who we are any more, but open and porous to other influences - open, if you like, to the soul, in both a personal and transpersonal way. A Neptune transit is a time of messiness and hopelessness but also emotion and ecstasy.

Into this crucible steps Saturn. It is still a time to dream and wallow, but it is also a time to give form to those wallowings. If it was Saturn on his own, it would probably be time to find those forms, to sit down and work it all out and take action. But because Neptune is involved, there is also a strong element of opportunities presenting themselves, of the work you have always been 'meant' to do appearing.

The living spirit grows and even outgrows its earlier forms of expression; it freely chooses the men and women in whom it lives and who proclaim it. The living spirit is eternally renewed and pursues its goal in manfold and inconceivable ways throughout the history of mankind. Measured against it, the names and forms which men have given it mean little enough; they are only the changing leaves and blossoms on the stem of the eternal tree.
Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul.

So this is the wider meaning, the wider context of Saturn-Neptune. Your problems have become problems - which they need not do, you see many people carrying on happily in the same old misery for their whole lives. And those problems can heal under Neptune, but also be the gateway to the transpersonal dimension that Jung describes.

Which makes me wonder, is there such a thing as healing without the 'transpersonal' dimension being involved? Neptune and the other outer planets would say no, you don't get healed without us, and that's because you are us, humans are transpersonal beings. And that dimension beyond the personal is the matrix that we become from, which is Neptune again. I meant to say 'come from', but the accidental 'become from' hits the nail on the head.

Problems, symptoms are more than just bits to be fixed so we can normalise. They are also calls from the depths of the psyche. A course of 6 sessions of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy on the NHS may well produce some temporary results (though the evidence is that it is becoming less effective), but the deeper turning about that is the real meaning of misery is a much longer process. 

And this is reflected in the length of time that outer planet transits take. Yes, they may be most obvious when they are within a few degrees. But they begin a long time before that, maybe 15 degrees before the exact aspect. Deep transformations are slow and take many years, and you may not know you have been in one until you look back afterwards.

As human beings we have this capacity for deep change, if we are interested in it - or if it calls us, and leaves us with no choice. And it often begins with the wonky bits that may have tormented us all our lives. And for them to sort, we need to leave the duckpond in which we have grown comfortable and let ourselves be carried downstream to the sea. This is the soul journey of Neptune. 

And as Saturn approaches a square to Neptune, that journey starts to take shape in the world, it unites inner and outer in a synchronistic manner. The separation into subject and object, self and world, is basic to everyday, coping consciousness. But under Saturn-Neptune we get glimpses of an underlying unity, "the vison of a living, intelligent, conscious Cosmos in which all aspects of life are related to each other." (The Dream of the Cosmos by Anne Baring).

The IC, the Shadow and Fate

The 4 Angles of the Chart – the Top, the Bottom, the Left and the Right – are our 4 main points of connection to the world. The MC, the IC, the Ascendant and the Descendant respectively. If someone has major transits to all 4 them, you often see their whole life change.

And I think the IC particularly can get overlooked compared to its more glamorous counterpart, the MC: career, vocation, how the world sees us, our place in the world.

The IC is hidden, it is the sign directly below our feet at the moment we are born, and is therefore invisible. (Imum Coeli means 'Bottom of the Sky'.) If any point can lay claim to the personal unconscious, it is surely the IC (Just as the Moon, the natural ruler of the IC, is the planet associated with the personal unconscious).

Planets and Angles are different things: the emphasis with planets is on what is within, whereas the emphasis with Angles and the other house cusps is that which is without, our connection to the world. The distinction, though, is not rigid. So the IC becomes those aspects of our behaviour which are invisible to us – unconscious - but often visible to others.

We’re on shadow territory here. The things your friends think about you but tell you at their peril. The way it comes out of course also involves the Asc/Desc axis, but I'm proposing it starts here, in the hidden recesses of the personality. 

With Aries on the IC, are you a pushover, underneath your reasonable front? With Taurus, do you put your own comfort before emotional commitments (as Mr Obama is alleged to do)? Gemini: do you see the world in black and white terms and polarise around that? Cancer: are you, like Tony Blair, secretly narrow and partisan in your outlook? And Leo, do other people feel life has to revolve around you and your needs? Virgo: are you secretly judgemental of others? Libra: do you, like George W Bush, present a decisive front to compensate for an inner uncertainty? With Scorpio, are you quick to take offence, and less reasonable than you like to think? Sagittarius: Do you wander from teacher to teacher, unable to find your own sense of meaning within? With Capricorn on the IC, do your friends find you rigidly attached to the ‘proper’ way of doing things? Aquarius: have you really thought about those groups you’re involved in and whether they’re doing more harm than good? Pisces: do you put up a sign saying 'do not disturb' and project your aggression onto those who break your rules?

There are any number of ways the shadows of these signs could be put, this what I have ‘divined’ for now, maybe you’ll find they apply!

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But the IC isn’t just the personal shadow, it is much more than that. It is the foundation out of which a healthy MC can grow. It is childhood, it is family. It is where we are private and personal. It is the place where we regroup, 'downtime'. (It is not the solitude of the 12^th House, which has a more collective and imaginative emphasis.)

The MC-IC axis is like a tree, with the IC as the roots and the MC (Medium Coeli: the Middle of the Sky) the branches. If you like, it is the World Tree of Norse tradition, Ygdrassil, on which we each have our place; or rather, among whose 9 worlds we are spread. At the top is the eagle, with his broad vision of the world. And underneath, among the roots, is a dragon, a symbol of the hidden power of strong foundations.

At the base of the tree are the Norns, the Fates who water Ygdrassil from the Well of Wyrd and who allot each child his or her future. The Norns are therefore associated more with the roots of the tree, with the foundations and the beginning of life, than they are with the branches.

Norns

So maybe in that hard-to-know place within, the Fates are at work, the pattern of our life is woven, and the MC is the expression of that pre-existing weave. The IC is in one sense our Fate in a psychological sense: often that which seems to ‘happen’ to us is a consequence of that which is within, but unexamined. As Jung said, Character is Fate. But the roots of Ygdrassil are very deep, they are not just ‘personal’. The IC takes us way back to a place we can only think about mythologically: past lives, timeless patterns, the Mind of the Creator – powerful archetypal images that we can connect with more consciously through the solitude of the 12^th House. And the idea of Fate has these sort of resonances. Who knows what the gods have dreamed up for us? For Fate is also a dream, with all its multi layers and fluidity, and always with a mystery at its heart.

So encountering the IC is a matter of how deep do you want to go?

Moirai: the Greek Fates

I don’t want to get into a discussion of Fate and Free Will here. But I think Fate is best considered as an image rather than as an idea on its own. Those Norns are a very powerful image, and they suggest Fate as something living and human rather than dry and deterministic, which is something most of us reject. They suggest some bigger pattern that we are all part of. It is outside of time, and therefore in a sense ongoing, rather than set in stone at birth. Free Will doesn’t seem to have the same powerful imagery around it (try googling an image of it!), maybe because it is a more recent idea, and maybe because it suggests an autonomous humanity, freed from the ‘deterministic’ shackles of the gods who we imagine we have become, and who are the source of such powerful, archetypal imagery.

A transit to the MC is also a transit to the IC. In a way, the transit to the IC needs to be considered first, for any growth in the MC will emerge from the heightened self-knowledge that the transit to the IC will bring.

And a starting point with the IC is, like the Moon, an awareness of what it is that nourishes us, and the gaps we have that tend not to get nourished. This can be looked at not just through the sign on the IC, but through the condition of its ruler, the natal planets aspecting the IC and any planets in the 4^th House.

But with the IC there is more emphasis on connection to the world than there is with the Moon: so it is not just about exploring feelings, it is about looking at home and family and the way that is an expression of what is most personal and close within ourselves.

The IC is much harder to ‘get hold of’ than the MC, but in a way it is more important, in that the MC flows naturally out of the foundation of the IC. The MC as career is one thing, and it is usually tied in with the necessity of earning a living. But the MC as vocation is another, and I think the MC in this sense is not something to worry about, to scratch your head over its absence and feel somehow inadequate for not knowing what it is. 

That fretting itself is a sign of gaps and holes in the IC, along with modern notions that we need to be able to define our life and have a direction to it. That is the shadow side of Saturn, the natural ruler of the MC. Why not just live? say the IC and the Moon. Who says we need a ‘vocation’? 

Who are we to judge that our lives are inadequate if ‘all’ we do is muddle along reasonably happily?

On the Norse World Tree a squirrel scurries between the Eagle and the Dragon, carrying malicious messages. Maybe there is an inherent tension in human beings between the MC and the IC, between the things we can imagine doing and what, if we consult ourselves, is the right thing to do. Through the MC we can do amazing things, but we forget the foundations. For the Greeks, this was hubris, and nemesis was the gods' way of restoring the balance.

In a way the MC and IC are not separable. The source of the IC is ultimately timeless, and the MC reaches to that same place, but in a way that has been lived. If we pay attention to that hard-to-know IC place with a wide, mythological perspective, what to do with our lives will tend to present itself to us.

Jung on Death

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-Ab3tlpvYA&feature=related

Jung's Psychological Types and the Astrological Elements

Jung’s Psychological Types can be a good way of understanding people. He divides consciousness into 4 functions: Thinking and Feeling, Intuition and Sensation. The first pair are evaluating functions, the second are perceiving functions. Our weakest faculty will tend to be paired with the strongest. I have several friends who never seem to get things done, are always losing things, always late etc. It can sometimes drive me to distraction, and then yesterday it occurred to me that they all have a strong Intuition function, that is part of what draws me to them, so of course they are going to be weak on Sensation. Now I can forgive them! And my Sensation function being stronger is probably part of what they (secretly) like about me. That doesn’t, however, make me hopelessly unintuitive, for I think I am reasonably balanced among the functions: a bit more inclined towards thinking over feeling, and probably fairly balanced between intuition and sensation. The system is a bit more complex than this, and you can also add in extravert and introvert. I think on balance I am an introvert who has spent much of his life trying to be an extravert! But if you’re going to write a blog, it helps to be an introverted thinking type!

Incidentally, Jung classified himself as an Intuitive-Thinking type (there is usually a 2nd function from the other pair that we are also strong in, though not quite so much.) He freely acknowledged that when younger, he wasn’t very aware of the reality around him (Sensation)!

Jung’s functions correspond to the elements in astrology: Fire-Intuition; Earth-Sensation; Air-Thinking; and Water-Feeling. But you can’t just read off the psychological type from the birth chart. I know someone with Sun conjunct Saturn in Capricorn who is weak on Sensation, which isn’t what you’d expect. And I know someone else with Sun conjunct Saturn in Capricorn who is over-identified with his Sensation function. In both cases you could read it as Saturn, inhibiting in the first case, and making the person over-identified with material things in the second. So we know that Earth/Sensation is important from the Sun-Sat-Cap, but Saturn also tells us that there is likely to be an issue there.

In astrology we find the elements in the sequence Fire-Earth-Air-Water, which then repeat twice, corresponding to Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer etc, as well as the Houses in their numerical order. So the journey of development through the signs from Aries to Pisces is also a journey through the elements.

Fire is Intuition because it has a vision, it can see what is possible, it knows what is possible beyond what the senses are telling us. The other elements are more obvious.

So we begin with Aries, the vision of something new, with birth, with a sense of ‘me’. Then with Taurus we have a sense of the material world we have landed in and a sense of ‘mine’, ‘my body’. Then with the Air function of Gemini we are able to separate ourselves out, to get a sense of ‘me’ as discrete from what is other. With Cancer, we develop a feeling relationship, a sense of belonging with others around us.

The first cycle is now complete, and there is a complete individual present who has something unique about him/her, and which is given expression to through play/creativity. This seed of something unique brings us back to Fire and to Leo. This creative spark is then grounded, given form, it becomes part of our everyday life, through Earthy Virgo.

In recognising our own uniqueness and putting it ‘out there’ we come up against other people, and we recognise that like us, they have their own individuality. This is a standing back and looking quality, an Air quality, and it is about relating, so it is Libra. We have moved from self development and self expression to realising that there are others out there to be taken into account. And we engage with them, we get to know them, we get a feel for them – watery Scorpio.

So there is a pattern here, in that the fullness of each stage is water: once our vision (Fire), our manifestation (Earth) and our Insight (Air) have reached down into the watery depths, then there is completion, we have fully embodied the process.

Then there is the final round of the elements, as we move from Sagittarius/9th House to Pisces/12th House. Again, the spark happens with Fire, the move into something essentially new. This time, out of firstly the fullness of self-knowledge (Cancer) and then knowledge of others (Scorpio) there is a push towards more universal knowledge, towards understanding our place in the wider scheme of things; and also the beginnings of a desire to give back what we have learnt, to contribute to the wider society. This spark is Sagittarius/9th House. And then we take our place in that wider society (Capricorn/Earth).

But to take that place of responsibility, thought is needed, an awareness of all the different sections of society, some of which may be quite alien to us, is needed, and this is Aquarius/Air. Again, this awareness has to be taken from the head to the heart, from Air to Water, if it is to be real, and so we arrive at Pisces, the place of Empathy and Compassion for all, and where engagement with wider concerns have changed us into a vehicle for the transformation of the collective; the individuality that took us so much trouble to develop earlier in the journey has on the one hand given us the integrity to lead others, but it has also become a limitation, it has now been discarded as another, wider, difficult-to-describe consciousness emerges. It is difficult to describe because generally we are not it except in flashes. But because the self and its needs are temporarily put to one side, a lot more dimensions of consciousness are open to us, as the situation requires. A bit like if you are doing an astrology reading, and you’re right in it, right in the other person’s world, then insights flow, you go where did that come from? Anything that is done disinterestedly has this sort of possibility in it.

Going back to Jung and his psychic functions, what we see in the astrological elements is a process of Intuition (Fire), Sensation (Earth), Thinking (Air) then Feeling (Water). But Jung also made a distinction between perceptive and evaluative functions. So this suggests that the first 2 elements in each cycle of development, Fire and Earth, are sort of givens, they come to us, we perceive them – the vision (fire) and its possible relationship to the world around us (earth); whereas the second 2 elements are evaluative – through thought (air) and feeling (water) we then weigh up and process what life has put our way. And I think life is often like this. It sort of moves on of its own accord, new situations and possibilities present themselves, but then we have to work it through, we have to work out whether to go there and what the consequences are likely to be, and we also judge it on a feeling and ethical level.

I don’t think Jung intended his functions to be used this way, but in creating them he was clearly giving a new twist on the ancient idea of the elements. Returning to my starting point, I think both Jung’s types and astrology can give us a more sympathetic, genuinely understanding view of people. You can see what appear to you as people’s faults more as a natural consequence of the way those people are constructed; and you can also see the inherent strengths of that construction, that can be obscured by the judgements that we, and society, are liable to make.

The Fate of the Universe

The latest astronomical research shows that the universe will grow forever. So far, so good. It’s quite an interesting, even exciting idea. But then comes the sting. The researchers add that the universe will as a result become a ‘cold, dead wasteland.’ This got me down for a few days, until I realised that ‘cold, dead wasteland’ was a value judgement, masquerading as a fact, that the researchers had tagged on to their findings.

The research was conducted by measuring the bending of light around a vast cluster of galaxies in the constellation Virgo. There you have it. It would be Virgo, a sign known for its powers of mental analysis, but also for a tendency to be cold.

Describing something as cold and dead is an attribute we apply when our imaginations are not stirred. For a scientist, Mars or the Moon may be cold, dead places. For an astrologer, not so. We are imaginatively connected to these places, and we can sense their influence on our pulses.

It is the same with an infinitely expanding universe, populated by a sprinkling of matter. Is this not a return to some sort of primordial, cosmic consciousness, after the long experiment of life as we know it?

Uranus is currently conjoining Jupiter, an aspect that occurs every 13 or 14 years, and which is associated with major scientific advances. Knowing the fate of the universe is a major advance. But describing it as cold and dead is a symptom of the pathological left-brainedness of our culture, of Uranus at its worst.


As is the dismissal of astrology. I’ve sometimes said that I am sympathetic to those who dismiss astrology and the other divinatory arts, because there is no reason they should work. I’ve decided that I’m not sympathetic. Or at least, I’m only sympathetic in the way that I would be to the fantasies of someone who is mentally ill and who I am trying to help.

The human mind has a capacity to function symbolically and intuitively, that takes us to a place of deep connectedness to life. The left-brain, rational function does not give us knowledge, only theories. The right brain gives us knowledge, it gives us power as individual human beings.

Astrology calls forth this side of us. It is not based on evidence, it is about knowing, and it takes us to the knowing place, to the enchanted place. Our culture has forgotten this ancient and essential way of being human. That is why our culture is sick, and that is why those who dismiss astrology are merely exhibiting the symptoms of a collective illness.

It can seem extreme and contrary to talk about our culture in this way, but it is the case. And it includes those intelligent, reasonable, compassionate people who are yet brainwashed by the claims of scientific materialism.

I was watching an interview with CG Jung last night. It is part of a documentary on him called Matter of Heart which I’d highly recommend. It’s pricey, but the sort of thing you’ll watch again and again. Anyway, he was asked about what happens after death, and he said he didn’t know what happens, but that he had treated many elderly patients, and their unconscious, their dream life behaved as if death was not an end point, it behaved as though life was going to continue. This doesn’t prove that life continues after death, but what he said was that to live properly, you need to think along the lines of nature. So therefore as you get old you need to continue to treat life as an adventure that is going to continue forever, because that is how life itself behaves. Otherwise you will petrify.

Gaia, the End of the World, and Jung

I’ve just been away for a week in West Wales, and the weather has been great for the first time since last September. We started getting heat waves in England a few years ago, and it seemed like global warming was for real. But the last two summers have been crap, and we have had 2 cold winters, so I’m not so sure any more.

What we do know is that the ice-caps are melting, and that the earth generally is warming up. It’s hard to know how much of that is man-made, and how much is a natural process. It certainly has a momentum of its own now, however, because the more ice-free ocean there is, the more sunlight gets trapped instead of reflected back by the ice. This is why James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis, is now so dire in his warnings. He reckons the earth is going to get very hot through this positive feedback cycle, that most of the world’s population will die, and that there is nothing we can do about it any more.

I often say that Mars in Cancer is a good place for an environmentalist, and that is what we find in the chart of James Lovelock, who was born on 26/7/1919 in the UK. A challenged Mars – in Cancer, or square Saturn – can be tedious in a man, because deep down they aren’t very sure of their Mars, so they’re always trying to show just how manly they are. But Lovelock isn’t like this at all. I saw him on BBC4 the other night. I hadn’t had a very favourable opinion of him, because of his doom-mongering, and because the Gaia hypothesis seemed a bit flabby and mystical.

In fact he is highly intelligent and down to earth. He has the originality and poetry of a Sun in Leo conjunct Neptune, and the concern for the planet of Moon, Jupiter, Mars and Pluto all in Cancer. As a teenager, he had the intellectual precocity of Mercury conjunct Saturn, and the willingness to stand up for his ideas of Mercury opposite Uranus. I’d say it is his Mars conjunct Pluto in Cancer, square to Chiron, that reflects his fight (Mars) for the survival (Pluto) not just of mankind but of life due to the irretrievable damage (Chiron) we have done to the planet (Cancer).

In a way it all came out of the planet Mars, because in the 1960s Lovelock was part of a project by NASA involving methods for detecting life on Mars. Lovelock came up with the idea that if there is life on Mars, you would be able to detect it in the atmosphere, because life would both use the atmosphere for raw materials, and deposit its waste products there. What they found using spectroscopy was that Mars’ atmosphere had carbon dioxide and very little else, so Lovelock concluded there was no life on Mars.

This perspective from Mars got him thinking about the earth from outside of it, so to speak, and he began to see the earth’s atmosphere itself as a product of life on earth, and regulated within a narrow band that makes life possible. So well-regulated by life is our atmosphere that it has been stable within this band for a billion years or more.

It is not just the atmosphere, but many of the conditions on earth that are regulated by life, so that the earth itself is like this self-regulating organism. This made immediate sense to me. Of course it would be part of the evolutionary process for organisms to regulate their environment to their advantage, because those that could do so would have a selective advantage. An early example Lovelock gave was of a sea algae that needs warmth, but not too much, so it releases Sulphur Dioxide, which causes clouds to form, which blocks out the sunlight. So you can see the regulating mechanism here: lots of sunlight leads to expansion in the numbers of algae, leading to release of lots of SO2, which stops the water getting any hotter and in fact probably cools it and keeps numbers of algae down.

Of course, for Gaia to work you need a much more complex interactive system than this involving thousands of species, and this has been one of the arguments against it: that there is no way such a complex system could have arisen through natural selection. My argument against this is two-fold: the self-regulating systems that have arisen within our bodies through natural selection are at least as complex as those in the environment; and secondly we do not understand evolution yet, if we ever will. I can’t see how the slow process of natural selection and random mutation could have produced the life-forms we have in the time available. I don’t dispute the fact of evolution, just the limited mechanisms we have for it. It’s too much like a monkey at a typewriter. That’s why I like Lamarckian ideas, for example, with their notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

In understanding Evolution, I think it is also important to realise that the idea originated and has been developed within a society that is highly competitive and makes a virtue of that sense of competition. So quite naturally the mechanism for Evolution has been seen in fundamentally competitive terms. I think this is a large part of the reason that our understanding of Evolution is so limited. The idea of Evolution as co-operation is staring us in the face through Gaia. And not just co-operation as enlightened self-interest (as in symbiosis), which brings us back to competition again as the root motive. I mean co-operation for its own sake, because it is in the nature of life to promote itself, even between species. Just as Lovelock had to stand outside the earth to undertand it, so we need to stand outside our competitive society to acquire a broader understanding of Evolution.

Anyway, the Gaia hypothesis is an entirely scientific idea that to me makes complete sense. It has a ‘Eureka that’s obvious’ quality to it. It also has a beauty and a poetry to it, reflected in the name (which William Golding came up with). Lovelock was tolerant of what religions did with the idea, who saw it as reflecting their understanding of God. But he was appalled at what the New Age did with it (see picture on left!), and I think it was probably exposure to that which has put me off Gaia for so long.

Back to his doom-mongering. What in a way makes it worse is that there is no sense of fanaticism around it. He is just putting forward the quite reasonable idea that there is a positive feedback process when it comes to global warming and the melting of the ice-caps, and the earth is therefore going to get a lot hotter for a while and this will make large parts of the earth uninhabitable by people. I’m not quite sure what to make of it. I don’t feel it’s going to be as bad as Lovelock makes out, but I can’t justify that. I suppose I tend to think that the earth is quicker to self-regulate than we may think, that life is quicker to respond to changes in its environment than we think. There is one natural process, for example, which is that if the oceans heat up, more water will vaporise, creating clouds that block out the sun, and thereby cooling the earth.

I suppose I’m back to my original observation: the earth is warming up, and the consequence for English weather for the last 2 years has been wet summers and cold winters. It’s so important in life to take account of your own immediate experience, whatever the priests/scientists say, and my experience tells me that we don’t know what the consequence of warming will be. The positive feedback loop around the melting of the polar ice-caps is of course worrying, but I don’t think we can be as certain of the outcome as Lovelock thinks.

I watched a documentary of another great man recently, CG Jung. It was a DVD I bought called Matter of Heart, which I’d recommend highly to anyone. I’d seen it twice before over the last 25 years, but I keep coming back to it. It’s pricey, but well worth it. One of the special features is a ½ hour interview Jung gave to the BBC 18 months before he died. In this he is asked about survival after death, and a point he makes is that whatever our conscious attitude may be, his work with old people had shown him that the Unconscious behaves as though life is going to continue. I thought this was fascinating.

I think another word for the Unconscious, whether in its personal or collective forms, is simply ‘life’. It’s as though life over billions of years has become this huge reserve, this huge resource and we have this fragile consciousness that floats on the surface of it, so fragile that it is extinguished for 8 hours in 24 while it recovers its ability to exist. Of course this fragile consciousness goes into some sort of abeyance at death, but the great river of life itself that flows through us, ‘the Unconscious’, is in no doubt that it will itself continue.

This is something I always take away from Jung, this sense of being part of a much bigger and richer current of life. And it removes that sense of anxious isolation that the ego often feels, its desperate sense that its own death – which after all occurs for 8 hours in 24! – is the end of everything.

The Collective Unconscious doesn't just contain human history, it contains the whole of evolution (in the same way that physically we have the principle of 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny' in embryonic development). We don't belong just to the human species, we are also amoebae, we are crocodiles, we are plants, we are apes... we belong to life. This again brings us back to the idea of evolution as co-operation rather than competition. It is life that is the project, not the individual species, which is ephemeral and not as clear-cut as one might think. They keep finding new species of human, for example, and in its current form (us) hasn't been around very long at all.


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It is not immediately obvious from Jung’s chart why he should have been such a great explorer of the Unconscious. Certainly you can see the analyst in him through his Sun on the Descendant, the point of ‘Other’, and the healer in the square from the Sun to Neptune and Chiron. You see his willingness to break with psychoanalytic tradition through his Aquarius Rising, its ruler Uranus in the 7th, as well as the Sun in Leo. (Leo-Aquarius is the axis of individuality and originality and coming to terms with the collective resistance to that.)

The only way we can explain his connection to the unconscious depths is through 2 wide aspects: Moon conjunct Pluto (8 degrees) and Pluto conjunct IC (8 degrees, out of sign). The Moon and the IC describe the personal unconscious, Pluto describes the necessity for facing and transforming it, as well as the connection through to the Collective Unconscious. In this sense, another word for Pluto is also ‘life’: it is only our resistance to life, unique in the animal kingdom, which makes it appear as a dark god, which is how we usually know Pluto.

Jung’s chart is an example of why I don’t treat wide aspects as necessarily weak. In Jung’s case, they were about as powerful as they come. I think wideness and out-of-sign-ness can bring space and therefore perspective and consciousness to these aspects. I’ve seen it in myself with my wide, out of sign Sun opposite Pluto. It has always been very operative, demanding that I find authenticity within myself. But the wideness has made me sensitive to the negative aspect of Pluto, which is the misuse of power, the need to dominate others, which you can often see going on unconsciously in the tighter aspects of Sun to Pluto.

Back to the Leo-Aquarius axis. I think these types can start out life very uncomfortable with themselves, because they don’t fit in. Life makes this constant demand on them to be true to themselves, rather than true to the values and expectations they see around them. But when they get older, after a lifetime of learning to trust who they uniquely are, they can be unusually comfortable in their own skins, because their base is real, it is not dependent on others. You see this in Jung, this old man who is deeply who he is, and part of that process was living with the scorn of others, whether it was from the king of the psychological establishment, Freud, or the wider dismissal of him as unscientific and mystical. Lovelock also, as a Leo, has spent much of his life at odds with the establishment.

Jung, incidentally, wasn't very optimistic about the future of mankind, thinking that we might just about 'make it round the corner'. In a sense this isn't that different to Lovelock, though I think Jung was thinking more in terms of nuclear weapons, as his last years coincided with the height of the Cold War.