DIVINATORY ASTROLOGY

I run a group on Facebook that used to be called UK Astrologers. I have recently changed the name to Divinatory Astrology, and opened it up to anyone to join. Here is how I introduce the group: 

Welcome to Divinatory Astrology. Divination, I think, is the real nature of our craft. We are vehicles for the intuition, for the sky spirits, for the gods. The tradition itself, valuable as it is, is a launch pad, an orientation, an egregore: it has its own power that has built through the millennia. But eventually we need to move from Capricorn – mastery of what has come before – to Aquarius, where we earn the right to reinvent the tradition, to create the future. Without this constant reinvention, a tradition dies. It often requires courage, and it usually requires years of getting to know the gods – and our demons.

 Astrology is a different kind of knowledge to science: it is knowledge of consciousness, essentially, rather than knowledge of things. Our craft makes no sense from the point of view of the specialised remit of science. We use all 4 Elements – Fire, Earth, Air and Water – to gain knowledge. Science, by contrast, emphasises just Earth (data) and Air (theory). We are therefore part of a broader tradition of gnosis, within which science finds its place. Nor do we need to feel over-beholden to the astrological tradition itself: it needs to be worn lightly, so that the gods have room to speak.

 

So please come along and join. Meanwhile, here are my recent short pieces from the group (and from Twitter):

 

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I have a Pluto conjunct Venus (at 1 Aquarius) transit this year and next. The emerging deep theme seems to be the surrender of Mars to the Divine Feminine.

 

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I learnt astrology by talking with a friend, then doing readings. How you learn is revealed by your Mercury placement. Mine is in Aquarius opposite Uranus. I have to find my own way in, then I can hang the received learning on that. Astrology shows us why we are not stupid, but each have our own ways of learning. A watery Mercury may have to feel the idea, a fiery Mercury will need their imagination sparked, an airy Mercury will need to see its connections with other ideas, and an earthy Mercury will need to see its practical applications.

 

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The BBC News presenter Huw Edwards has natal Sun at 25 Leo. Uranus is in the early stages of squaring it. So his life goals are due for some major shifts. What has been happening with the young woman from the dating site has a self-inflicted, trickster feel around it, and looks set to end his career as he knows it. This is how Uranus sometimes upsets the apple-cart to get us to change. Edwards has natal Sun conjunct Uranus: he is a deeply unconventional (Uranus) and individual (Leo) person, yet he has been doing this staid job all his life. No wonder, in a sense, that this has happened.

 

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The Sun is afflicted in Aquarius because we tend to identify with changing the world, at the expense of that thing deep within us, that we are primarily here to take care of. Leo, the opposite sign, knows about this, and is the remedy, the balancing point.

 

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Sex, death and money. Mars, Pluto and Venus. The 3 things people don't want to talk about. But which are part of my job description as an astrologer. If not me, then who?

 

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James Webb telescope, 1st anniversary picture. From the constellation Ophiuchus, which are also the stars of the notorious and nonsensical 13th sign of the zodiac. Which has the perverse characteristic of actually working, thus demonstrating the divinatory nature of astrology. Here's what I wrote about it some years ago.  It is also a chapter from my book 'Surfing the Galactic Highways', for which you get a free reading if you buy it and leave a genuine rating on Amazon. 

 

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The IC - the bottom of the chart - denotes the end of life. It also describes home. Put together, it suggests death to be a homecoming. Jupiter is associated with death: the king of the gods welcoming you back to his realm. Jupiter is also good fortune, suggesting that death has that attribute too. In the Middle Ages, death was perfectly normal; it only became an event to be feared later.

 

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12th July:  Volcanic eruption in Iceland as the Moon in Taurus conjoins Jupiter and then Uranus.

 

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We are in retrograde season: Saturn, Neptune and Pluto. Uranus and Jupiter will join them at the start of Sept. It is 4 of Swords time: waiting and cooking. And the Moon card: listen to your deeper instincts, rather than where you think you would like your life to be going.

 

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Saturn is the planet of incarnating, of responsibility. The first Saturn Return usually sees us taking some new level of responsibility in the world. I think at the second Saturn Return, the responsibility shifts towards the Spirit. We have done the worldly bit. And it is when we can do our most significant work.

 

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Watching the series Vikings gave me an appreciation of the rationale behind human sacrifice, the genuine power it could have, and prompted me to write an astrological piece: Astrology, Death and Human Sacrifice 

 

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Mercury rules my MC and ASC. When Saturn conjoined my Aq Mercury in 2021, I wrote my first 2 books, after 15 years blogging. It was kind of easy, and earned. When he conjoined my Aq Sun last year, a wolf showed up and nudged me to write my first fiction. A Shamanic fantasy novel. That was much harder. It is good to have something that is difficult. Here is the blurb I have written for the back of the book in my Shamanic blog. Would you want to read it?

 

 

The Geography of the Underworld: Part 3 of 4

You can find the first 2 parts of this blog here and here.

River Styx, Kentucky

Finally, there are the rivers of Hades – Styx, Acheron, Lethe, Phlegethon and Cocytus – associated with hatred, pain, oblivion, fire and wailing respectively. The rivers appear in both this world and the Underworld.

“Their names were meant to reflect the emotions associated with death” (Wiki). Presumably that means the emotions associated with dying rather than being dead, for otherwise there wouldn’t be the Elysian Fields. Psychologically, they partly seem to describe the painful emotions associated with a Pluto transit that is being resisted – and that is often an unconscious thing. It even happens to us good guys who think we are up for change (ha ha! Pluto soon shows us where we are not.)

And the rivers are also unacknowledged pain that gets dredged up by Pluto. Rivers of pain: that is the metaphor that the Greek Underworld presents us with. Rivers that flow through us, and we need to go with them downstream to the ocean, to the bigger identity that Pluto is pushing for. Pluto is never just helping us sort our psychological difficulties in a narrow sense. There is always a bigger agenda, a new perspective on ourselves and on existence that is the real meaning of the transit. The Underworld is the place from which we move on to the next stage of life, and our psychological difficulties are a gateway to that. They are like fissures under the earth, represented by Pluto’s brother Chiron, through which the molten lava of the outer planets, of life, can break through. Their father Saturn is the guy who has the responsibility for giving shape to the results of all this seismic activity. In this way Saturn and Chiron are each in their own way bridges to the outer planets, as their places in the solar system, on the borders between the inner and outer planets, suggest.

Rodin: The Three Shades

Hatred, pain, oblivion, fire and wailing. A graphic quintet of suffering through which we pass into the Underworld. Oblivion is the forgetting of our previous earthly existence that occurs when we drink from the river Lethe, a requirement for the shades who have entered the Underworld. “Shades”: that is, in a sense, what we can become under a life changing transit, at least for a while. We may go through the motions of day-to-day existence, but our energy has been taken elsewhere for transformation. That is what I often suggest people try to tune into at these difficult times when ‘normal’ life no longer seems to work. It is as though the energy has all gone into a crucible deep within us, and if you can tune into that, you’ll see that life is there just as strongly as it was before, but in a different form, a natural form that we are not used to, but which constitutes winter in the myth of Persephone. Like the bulb of a tulip or daffodil, or the chrysalis of a butterfly.

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And the Oblivion, the Forgetting, is part of this. You may notice, as a Pluto transit begins, that some activity that was very important to you starts to lose its appeal. The energy and interest that were there have leached away, almost without you noticing. This can be very painful if, for example, your sense of who you are, or your livelihood, or your marriage, are involved. But the ‘old you’ has gone, you have forgotten him/her. And this is necessary in order for the new eventually to be born.

Gustave Dore: Matelda immerses Dante in Lethe

This is always an interesting period – when we are a Shade – because we often can’t define ourselves in the usual way. The standard props that make us ‘normal’ – career, marriage, earnings, reputation – may fall away, and in a way we are dead to the world. So how do we define ourselves in this period, how do we value ourselves when we have nothing to show? Pluto humbles us, and we have to look within for a source of value. He is the destroyer of Saturn the worldly taskmaster, who says you are only what you earn, your social standing, that which can be measured. Painful as it is, we can emerge from the Underworld with a looser and more open sense of who we are, with less of a need to define ourselves, and more open therefore to the outer planets, to the gods.

The Pluto transit can also reveal a forgetting. For whatever reason – self-doubt, perceived expectations of others, lack of courage, unbalanced sense of values – Pluto’s riches, our gifts and talents, can be put to one side, dismissed as nugatory. This can go on right through life. And it seems to apply particularly to talents that are very particular and personal to us, for which there are no recognised certificates to re-assure us that we are indeed competent. You and you alone have to be the judge of that, you have to find a confidence that is independent of others. And I get this issue regularly in readings, for it is often a stopping point for people, they can go no further unless they go through the fires of self-doubt, which may last for years: that sort of fire almost seems to be part of the initiation into one’s own gifts. And into one’s individuality, another of Pluto’s gifts: that which makes us distinct from the collective, which pursued far enough makes us distinguished, like the beings in the Elysian Fields.

Gold Mine

So in this sense the function of the transit is to get us to remember that which we have forgotten. Not usually entirely forgotten: sometimes it is like a niggle that we have put to one side, maybe for years or decades, that can seem like a small part of us. But then that niggle turns out to be something much bigger than we ever thought under a Pluto transit. All we saw was Chiron, the fissure, and not the molten Plutonian lava underneath. And this ignoring can be a like a deep pain that we are sometimes aware of, Tartarus, repressed aspects of ourselves; and the river out of Tartarus is Phlegethon, the river of fire that we may need to go through in claiming our gifts.

There can be a make-or-break quality to this encounter with Tartarus. In the words of saying No 70 of the Gospel of St Thomas: "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." 

TRADE SECRETS

I haven’t properly written a blog for about 6 weeks, probably my longest gap in 7 years. Much of it due to being in Canada and USA doing astro readings. Many thanks to all my hosts in Vancouver Island, Vancouver, Shelton, Seattle and Portland. It seems like did that really happen? But I also had a great time. 

I noticed that the latest edition of Mountain Astrologer has a theme of Chart Interpretation - ‘Tips and Techniques from the Pros’ -  guest edited by Frank Clifford. And I thought well how do I interpret a chart? I tend to think there’s nothing particular about the way I do it, but there probably is, and writing this piece is how I’m going to find out. Thinking out loud.

First of all, I’m not systematic. I like to wander round the chart until eventually everything gets covered. Sometimes I’ll say how did we get an hour into the reading without mentioning the ascendant? I don’t think it matters too much where we start, sometimes I’ll go with whatever I first look at. I like to do that occasionally, just to shake things up, maybe start with Mercury or something. I think there’s an important point here, in that the intuition can need this sort of space to function.

In fact, the whole reading and its setting need space. A bit of informality and ease at the start, get it all on an equal basis, like you’re friends, bring yourself in personally, rather than you’re a ‘professional’ that the ‘client’ is coming to see. This is more important than interpretative technique. And flexibility around time – I like to work with a maximum charge and let the reading take as long as it takes. And you are doing a reading for the person who shows up, how they are now, rather than all the issues they have maybe mentioned in advance. More often than not, I’d say, the reading is about something different to what the person coming along thought it was.

The astrologer is a healer, someone who through his or her craft gains insight into what the other person needs, what is really going on, and addresses that. It doesn’t make the astrologer ‘superior’ in any way, because the same applies to ourselves. It is very difficult to see ourselves clearly, and we astrologers need that sort of feedback just as much as anyone.

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And the reading is a dialogue. I’ll start out, however, telling the other person that the less I know about them the better, just for now, and I launch into the chart and hit a few nails on the head

and wow, how could the astrologer have known that? And this is important, it’s not just showmanship, it’s a process of enchantment, the creation of a ritual space in which magic happens, a universe that knows things about you, in many ways knows you better than you know yourself. Wow! The reading itself is a kind of ceremony, an archetypal invocation, and it can be worth travelling hundreds of miles for, the journey itself becomes part of the process.

But after that I need to know about the person so that I can be more specific about what I have to say. Occasionally -  if they are astrologers! - it can feel a bit like they are waiting for me to come out with my ‘take’ on the chart. But I can’t really work that way, not at any rate till well into the reading and after plenty of

dialogue: I’ll be circling round some planets and some issues, coming back to the same place again and again and then suddenly I get it, wow where did that come from, yes I think I’ve got to the heart of it.

And sometimes I can be wandering around a chart saying this and saying that, and it’s largely true, but so what? And at that point I have to trust, because eventually we do always get there, we hit on the issues that need addressing, and at that point I feel the reading is really happening and that I’ll be able to say things that help the other person.

And when I’m doing a reading, I’m always checking – if I need to – that what I’m saying makes sense to the other person in terms of their own experience. Too many people are willing to say that years ago a psychic or a tarot reader or an astrologer told them they’re like this or that, that they maybe have a gift for something, and they hang onto it like it’s a separate piece of knowledge disconnected from what they know about themselves, but which makes them feel good about themselves. And what I aim to do is the OPPOSITE of that. Of course, I also want people to feel good about themselves, we are far too good at feeling bad about ourselves, but I don’t want anyone accepting anything I say unless they know it for themselves. A reading should confirm and add to self-knowledge rather than in any way be a substitute for it. That is where prediction, which has its place, can be a bit tricky, because it can easily be disconnected from where we are now.

Time to wander onto technique for a while. If somebody is not an astrologer – which of course is nearly always the case – then I like them to have at least a vague idea of why I’m saying what I’m saying in terms of the symbols, so if it’s a skype reading then I make sure they have their own copy of the chart and I give them a brief intro as to how it works.

And I hang the chart around the Sun and the Moon. Together they are like a tree that describes the main part of the personality. The Sun is the branches, reaching up towards self-knowledge and self-consciousness. The Moon is the roots, our past, our foundation, our emotions and instincts, our source of basic nourishment. But it’s not a hard and fast distinction: it’s not always easy to tell the difference, for example, between someone with a Sagittarian Moon or Sun. The Sun is the masculine principle, the Moon is the feminine principle, and they need to be given equal weight. You are as much your Moon sign as your Sun sign. The popular emphasis on Sun signs points to a cultural imbalance, an undervaluing of feeling.

With planets in signs, the emphasis is on the ‘inner’, and with planets in Houses (based on the Asc and MC), the emphasis is on ‘outer’, our connection to the world. But it is not an absolute distinction, there is a plenty of overlap. It is ultimately an artificial distinction, which we need to live on the planet, but which is created by our brains. There is, if you like, a unity of Soul behind appearances. The fact that the planets reflect, or even cause, inner events, shows this unity.

And if I go into the Sun and Moon by both Sign and House, and synthesise where I can, then you have a pretty full picture of the person in a basic kind of way. Though quite often I don’t seem to get that far, because there is so much in a chart, and so much going on in a person’s life, that I let the current of the interchange take me to the issues that need addressing, to ensure there is proper time for that, and then I will keep referring back to the planets and how they work for that person when we are trying to sort out whatever it is that needs sorting or clarifying.

I particularly focus on the hard aspects from the Sun and Moon to Saturn and the Outer Planets. These are the main challenges, the main growth points in the chart and in someone's life. You could say that is what they most need to know about. But I’ll also look at the hard angles between the other planets, angles and the outer planets. And particularly so if the only hard aspect is say to Venus, then you know one of the main learning points for that person is probably how they are in relationships.

With Saturn, the emphasis is on the need to master what you do over a long period, to make your mark, your contribution, to be recognised by your peers for what you do, to develop the practical wisdom of experience. And because it is a hard aspect, there is also the downside of Saturn to look out for: never feeling what you do is good enough, self-doubt, unable to stop and be still and value what you are as much as what you do. Using Saturn to build, rather than deny, an inner life. That’s a big one in our culture.

With Uranus, creativity – or the spark of life - is the keyword. That is why there is often an apparently misfit or unconventional nature. But as long as you are creative, in the sense of new ideas and ways of being that aren’t just re-arrangements of the old, and you don’t settle down, you’ll do OK. The trouble comes when you want to be like everyone else and play safe. That is when Uranus gets disruptive and even destructive.

With Neptune, Imagination is the keyword. Neptune reminds us that the world isn’t divided up like we think into self and other, inner and outer etc. Neptune presents the world to us like that, but also takes us to what is behind appearances. We are connected to each other and everything and with Neptune we need to feel that as part of our everyday experience. It is very much a feeling thing. If we shut that out and keep our reality in boxes, then we will look for that feeling in other ways – addiction, madness, fantasy. With Neptune, you lose contact with reality unless you include non-ordinary reality in your life. To know who you are, you have to give up trying to define yourself in narrow, box-like ways.

With Pluto, Power is the keyword. The power to live, to keep living and keep unfolding, like life does spontaneously wherever you look. And doing this by being true to yourself, the whole of yourself, not editing yourself into acceptable and unacceptable pieces. Life doesn’t think like that. With Pluto, we need to take Nature as our guide. Pluto is associated with depth psychology and the acceptance of ‘demons’ because of this natural movement of our being towards wholeness. There is a kind of authenticity, a strong presence, a power to

someone who is true to themselves in this way. It is not just demons we need to be true to, or what appear as demons, far from it, it is talents as well, becoming good at something can also be a threat to our sense of who we are. And as the Gospel of St Thomas says, if you bring forth that which is within you to bring forth, it will save you. If you don’t, it will destroy you. Until, that is, you can’t bear it any longer and you square with Pluto!

So that for me is often the focus of a natal chart reading: the various ways in which the outer planets are trying to get in on our lives and make us more than we are, and the ways we resist that.

But almost invariably, the reason someone will want a reading is because they are going through a period of change that is more intense than usual, and they want to make sense of it.

And that comes down to hard outer planet transits. Quite often if you point out that say Neptune is squaring someone’s Sun and they are having a really hard time of it, they will want to know when it’s going to be over, with the unspoken idea of hanging on grimly until that time and then going back to as they were before. In a way, that’s quite natural.

So my job is to show someone how to BE in that transit. For now, their life to a large extent IS that transit and they need to live it.

Saturn transits have a different quality to outer planet transits. Saturn is a planet we can see with the naked eye, he is conscious, we can work with him. With Saturn transits, we need to think about things, clarify them, get things to happen, move things on, work hard. If Saturn is e.g. crossing the top of your chart, then it is time to take your career/vocation to a new stage, a deeper stage, which may or may not mean doing something different, and it may only quantitatively be a small part of your life, but it holds the most meaning for you (remember Saturn is moving from the end of the 9^th into the 10^th), and it is time to put that into the world to a degree that you haven’t previously. It’s about setting practical goals, in a spacious kind of way, so that you can express in the world whatever has meaning for you.

With the 3 outer planets, you don’t have the same control as you do with Saturn. Saturn is about taking charge, taking control of your life, whereas Uranus, Neptune and Pluto require a degree of surrender to a wisdom that knows us better than we do ourselves.

That’s the thing these transits show us, that we may have one idea about our life, but life itself often has another idea. It’s like some blueprint for what we could be that is kicking in, and of which we only have glimpses. The course of our own lives and the way we lose control at times of major change shows us that life is NOT the blind chance that the Darwinists would have us believe, life has its own designs, but understanding those designs is forever beyond us.

So these outer planet transits are highly unpredictable in their outcomes, because they are taking us to places we have not yet experienced. So my job is not to tell you about the port to which your ship is headed – I cannot know that – but how to steer your ship, what type of storm or heavy seas you are encountering. And not to drop anchor and try to sit out the storm, that won’t work. If it is a storm. It may not be, you may just be going from strength to strength, but then you probably wouldn’t have come to see me the astrologer!

And if you’re honest with yourself, you know that the old you, the old way of life no longer feels right, and that you’re not yet ready for the next stage, and that is the way I take the transits from something as it were external, to something you know for yourself.

Relationships are a classic one here. You’ve got a major transit to your Venus and you want to know when it’ll be over because you want a relationship and you’re maybe in your 40s and worried that you’re going to get left on the shelf (Nonsense, people of the same age continue to fancy each other!). Or rather, you think you want a relationship. Because the transit is changing you in that area, and as I say, if the right person walked through the door now, you wouldn’t recognise them, because you are not the you that you will be when the transit is over! And if you are honest, though you may feel lonely right now, you know that you don’t feel ready for a relationship. And usually people seem to agree with this when they stop and think.

With Uranus transits, you need to live with a certain amount of instability. It is not a time for putting down roots or trying to make things last. It is about welcoming in new elements, seeing things in new ways, treat it as an adventure, in which what is new in your life may or may not last. Like all the outer planets transits, it can be quite uncomfortable, unless you are used to having that planet in your life anyway through the natal chart. You can have major parts of your life suddenly taken away from you, and that can be very painful. But even if it seems to come at you from the outside, so to speak, and to have had nothing to do with anything you have done, there is always this mysterious synchronicity between inner and outer, that provides an inner meaning to the unwelcome outer event. And it may be years before you can look back and see the necessity of that disruption in terms of your life moving on, it may just seem pointless and like it has removed all the meaning from your life. But under Uranus, it’s kind of guaranteed that you’ll also be waking up in certain ways, new abilities, new opportunities that weren’t there before coming your way.

Neptune transits often involve learning to trust. Neptune is the planet that shows us that we are looked after, that there is a benign aspect to the universe, and that yes change can be difficult and confusing, but there is some kind of gift, some kind of soulfulness in store for us as we progress through the transit and stop trying to control our lives. I often notice a battle with Saturn here. Saturn is very good at trying to boss Neptune around, and because Neptune isn’t very tangible, it can seem like the right thing to do. Keeping it all together (Saturn) while inwardly you are longing just to give it all up (Neptune) and go where the spirit takes you, but can you trust that? Sensible, right-thinking people say no, just keep it together, you’re doing proper work, earning proper money, you are busy, don’t give in to this weakness! And sometimes with Neptune you can be a bit maddened, you don’t know what is real any more, but as with all the outer planets, a big part of the change is letting yourself be taken over, letting yourself if you like be prompted from deep within and trusting that, going with that. And that can take a lot of courage, but it gives you your soul, and that is perhaps what Neptune is about more than anything, living from the spirit: waking up in the morning and going with its promptings, which aren’t necessarily anything deep and mystical that you have to fish around for, but simply what you are feeling here and now, and if you go with that, then over time it will deepen and become a sure guide.

Pluto and Neptune are probably the 2 deepest transformers. I can’t always tell the difference between them. My own experience of Pluto in the 90s was that the life-force, the ability to get up in the morning and do my day, had been switched off, and it made me realise that it wasn’t mine, I wasn’t calling the shots like I thought I was, and I needed to go about things in a very different way if I wanted that life-force back. I think Pluto brings you back to what is most basic. He takes apart the civilised veneer, and shows you what is really driving you. It is a time when bits of you that have been left out, maybe since childhood, reveal themselves, having of course been there all along but without you knowing it, beyond a sense of something not being quite right, something missing.

So I think the way through a Pluto transit is to be true to yourself, true to whatever is going on, and be prepared to start your life all over again on the new foundation that is slowly slowly being built.

These periods can last for years. There is a crucible of which you are only half aware in which much of you is bubbling away, like a chrysalis which as a horrible child if you ever pulled one apart, you would have seen to be full of green liquid, looking nothing like the butterfly it was eventually to become. And during these periods it can feel like you are treading water with your life, nothing comes of anything new that you try to bring into your life, and you can want to tear your hair out, and like with the other transits, particularly

Neptune, you start to feel inadequate and like a loser because you can’t just get on with life like you’re ‘supposed’ to. You are wandering on the plains of Hades. You are deeply internal, your gaze is directed inwards, and if you can recognise this and value this and be true to whatever you are feeling and not try to put it all into words, then you will be helping instead of hindering the transit.

Part of the problem we have with transits is cultural. In ancient Greece and India, the highest form of activity was contemplation. In ours, the highest form of activity is being busy. If we’re not busy, then we feel bad about ourselves. If we are busy, even if the activity really bores us, we feel a sense of virtue, we are a ‘good’ person.

So you can see why this attitude, which is deeply ingrained, creates a problem with how to be during a major transit, when we are needing to let the old fall apart and remain in a state of uncertainty until the new arises. I think this state of uncertainty and inwardness is good for the soul, it forces us to find a way of valuing ourselves that is not based on being busy.

And because of the way our culture is, getting a take on being ‘busy’ is often a major part of the transformational process, whatever the transit, assuming it’s big enough to kybosh our old way of living.